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Greylist Idea

Posted: Wed Jan 27, 2010 12:28 am
by SierraSonic
If your like me, there are some sites you would like to support, but they way their ads are handled aren't your cup of tea. Websites make money based these ads, but as a user you're never going to click them, but are happy to keep them visible. Now, what I am thinking, is allow a "greylist" option, which doesn't so much block the ads as it hides them. This way, you are supporting the website like you normally would, without harming the websites revenue in order to stay afloat.

This way we can have the option of either blacklisting, greylisting, or whitelisting websites we frequent. This 3 level setup would offer a compromise between websites that block users that block ads, and users ability to view neat clean webpages while still supporting the hosts.

Re: Greylist Idea

Posted: Wed Jan 27, 2010 3:13 am
by Neobond
I agree.

Re: Greylist Idea

Posted: Wed Jan 27, 2010 6:53 am
by wondersz1
Sounds like a good option for fair ad blocking initiative.

Re: Greylist Idea

Posted: Wed Jan 27, 2010 7:01 am
by fanboy
hides them like in css? that's already supported.

Re: Greylist Idea

Posted: Wed Jan 27, 2010 7:37 am
by wondersz1
You mean Element Hiding Helper? Then you'd have to manually select all the elements that should be hidden within this domain, which is a pretty bit of work. Having a greylist would let you automatically switch from blocking to simply hiding all advertising within a particular domain.

Re: Greylist Idea

Posted: Wed Jan 27, 2010 9:59 am
by Wladimir Palant
As discussed many times before - this isn't going to help anyone. There is no money in ads that nobody sees. Even if the website is paid for views rather than clicks (most are not), advertisers want to achieve something with their advertisements. They aren't stupid, they won't continue paying money for nothing - if they notice that a large proportion of views doesn't result in anything the website will be paid less (or even kicked out of the program entirely, keyword: fraud). In other words: you cannot help your favorite website "for free". Either whitelist it and accept the ads or look for a different way to give it money.

Re: Greylist Idea

Posted: Wed Jan 27, 2010 9:02 pm
by SierraSonic
Most people don't click the ads anyway! This doesn't concern the hosts, or the advertisers, it's the users choice. I'm fairly certain the ads cannot detect if they were hidden, only if they were blocked, as this only happens client side, not server side. They cannot cancel a contract with the hosts because users are blocking or hiding ads, as long as the hosts aren't telling users to greylist. Hosts wont receive money for clicks either way, but views will still count.

Re: Greylist Idea

Posted: Thu Jan 28, 2010 1:09 am
by ziutek
It is actually the opposite: an ad can detect if it is hidden, but not if it is blocked.

Re: Greylist Idea

Posted: Thu Jan 28, 2010 5:58 am
by SierraSonic
How could they tell if they are hidden? The page is done loading, the view is counted, then it is hidden afterwards. I don't see how...

Re: Greylist Idea

Posted: Mon Mar 29, 2010 4:36 pm
by Wladimir Palant
Unrelated questions by TomaszK1 moved to a separate topic: forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=5363

Re: Greylist Idea

Posted: Fri Dec 17, 2010 5:16 am
by dazweeja
Wladimir Palant wrote:As discussed many times before - this isn't going to help anyone. There is no money in ads that nobody sees. Even if the website is paid for views rather than clicks (most are not), advertisers want to achieve something with their advertisements. They aren't stupid, they won't continue paying money for nothing - if they notice that a large proportion of views doesn't result in anything the website will be paid less (or even kicked out of the program entirely, keyword: fraud). In other words: you cannot help your favorite website "for free". Either whitelist it and accept the ads or look for a different way to give it money.
I respectfully disagree with the logic here. If I whitelist a website and never click on an ad, the click rate is *exactly the same* as if it's downloaded and I never see it. The only time that click rates would change is if people who might normally click on ads started using a feature like this. Is that your typical ADP user? I'd argue that your typical user never clicks on ads. Even if I'm wrong you would need a very large proportion of your sites' visitors using this feature to make any noticeable difference at all to click rates as they are typically around 0.3%. And there is a trend in advertising towards paying for ad impressions that boost brand recognition.

You're the developer and I respect that (and am grateful for your work) but I do disagree with you on this one and believe that such a feature would be useful for those sites paid for by impressions with very little chance of negative repercussions. Ideally, I'd like to see an option where URLs of blocked content could be queued and then the queue would be downloaded when the internet connection was idle.

Re: Greylist Idea

Posted: Tue Jan 04, 2011 12:12 am
by dewarfff
As far as I am concerned, if blocking ads makes sites go away that use the
free-with-ads approach, excellent! I would far rather pay for a site with
no ads than have ads around. I prefer to pay for television shows with
no ads for example, than to watch them from some idiot site that insists
I watch ads (and that includes watching television live!)

Re: Greylist Idea

Posted: Tue May 31, 2011 4:49 pm
by Nihonslang
All ads are a nuisance. It is a flawed business model.

Re: Greylist Idea

Posted: Sun Nov 03, 2013 4:39 pm
by zimon
I have a feature request: "Stealth mode"

ABP Stealth mode, or similar, where the ads would be downloaded normally like there wouldn't be ABP in effect at all, but then just do not render and show the ads on the page.

In this way, it would be much harder anyone to tell if the ads are really showing or not. Of course still if they have script-based ads, they would not work and they would notice they have been blocked. But for the most common normal ads, noone could tell and the site wouldn't have to tell his advertisers many or most of the visitors never see the ads.

The setting could be an option per site, as other ABP options.

I'd like to "support" some sites which now tell "please disable ABP we see you are using", but still would like to block ads from showing. Download normally, but do not show ads.

Of course one of the purpose of ABP, especially in mobile devices, is to save bandwidth and hide from the profilers (like Ghostery). But the other purpose of just blocking annoying ads from showing is the intent which still would be in effect if that "Stealth mode"-toggle would be set on some sites.

Implementing this could be just replacing any normally downloaded ad then with some small icon "ABPSM", if wanted, and one could just click it to see the actual ad.

On menus, if the feature is set on the global settings, there would be all "Allow foobar.com", "Temporarily allow foobar.com", "Stealth allow foobar.com"
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The Greylist, (Redlist, Bluelist) sounds like a better name. When there may become later even more different ways to not show ads, the different colors could be assigned for every method of blocking.

I've asked this also before on Android side. There, with rooted Android device, and using the ABP app, some AdMob apps refuse to work because somehow they notice the ad banners are not actually downloaded from the ad-servers (my friend told the issue, havent tried). Having this kind of Grey-listing would download the ads normally but just replace the ad's graphics with an empty grey empty image in the app's screen.

Google banned ABP app from Google Play, because ....well you know.
But developers of AdMob-enabled apps do get paid just by showing the ads, even if noone is clicking them, I believe?

But I doubt they would start to build AI in the AdMob-API, to start figuring out if the downloaded ads are eventually actually shown on the screen. It would require extra CPU-time and battery. (Actually I am afraid it is the Google's only option eventually.)

Is it really so, that in the web sites which monetize via ads, do not get any revenue if not anyone is clicking the ads on the pages?