Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus

Everything about using Adblock Plus on Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey
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sunny

Re: Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus

Post by sunny »

i don't mind the 'feature' of non intrusive ads , i see its use. it should however not have been opt-in by default! .. on the welcome screen that comes up upon install of 2.01 the choice should be presented with an option , not a "go here , go there, click click" message to turn off what i didn't turn on.

i can see you wanting to make a little cash but you pissed off alot of people ..
Anti-Ad

Re: Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus

Post by Anti-Ad »

Silico wrote:
Guest wrote: As I pointed out above, we're better off if a lot of the smaller sites don't survive.

The ones we want to survive are those written out of passion, not the need to churn out cheap content to make next month's rent.
Great post Guest >> Fri Dec 16, 2011 6:18 pm.

I just wanted to respond to the bit I quoted above.

I don't think it's feasible for news and analysis to be only provided by amateurs. Good work needs time, so amateur work either has to be subsidised by a paying job, or must be copied from professional sources. Almost all paying jobs are dependent on someone selling something, including jobs funded by taxes. Except for a tiny number of businesses who get all the work they want through word-of-mouth and editorial, these companies which generate the jobs must advertise in some way, hopefully using less-intrusive methods like their own websites or targeted direct mail.

It's like free software projects: Except for some big projects which companies and other end-users are willing to support through donations and paid workers, because it's a core piece of software from which everyone benefits, developers of free software need to support themselves. Either they need to sell support services, or they need to be employed by, or attract employment by, a company that sells non-free products, who will usually have to advertise. Then there's companies like Mozilla who are funded by advertising via Google product placement. So even FOSS is heavily dependent on advertising.

So given that we need the professional media, how do we fund it if we want to minimize their dependence on advertising, which both intrudes and spins?

By allowing information to be easily published and copied, the Internet has made it much harder to charge for material up-front, including subscriptions and micro-payments. But more and more often this will be the way we pay for entertainment media, and less by surrounding it with ads that can no longer fund the good stuff because they're being blocked, skipped, and ignored.

For publishers of information I think that some sort of deferred-payment system is needed, where people who found their material helpful are given an easy way of paying for that help, and where companies who sold a product due to the help some professionals provided can reward those professionals. This can be done in a more arms-length way than affiliate links, which turn the media into sellers rather than helpers.
That post was mine; the name didn't save. I have had to drastically shorten cookie lifetimes and set automatic clearing in case a tracking cookie should slip past all my filters.

I wasn't referring to news sites, but rather, content farms, splogs, and other similar types of garbage. The criticism was directed against those who churn out worthless or reprocessed content for the sole purpose of baiting search engines. Nobody will pay for this content. Its only value exists in suckering people into viewing advertising.

The Internet would be better without this pollution.

The Internet suffers from information overload. We need better and easier access to more relevant information, not more raw information.

People will pay for better information, especially if they don't have to spend an hour Googling their way through garbage to save $0.50.

News sites serve an important function and need formal revenue streams. One option is micropayments. Sure, you can get all your news from copy and paste jobs on forums, but is it really worth spending hours trawling for news if a viable cash micropayment system existed for you to subscribe to online news without sharing all your personal billing information with the news site? One of the biggest barriers to sub-dollar micropayments is the traditional paradigm of online billing, which passes along enormous amounts of personal information which is unnecessary for providing the service. A news site doesn't need a name, an address, a phone number, or other such information to provide their service.

Local newspapers can stay competitive by facilitating local marketplaces, such as classified ads, which aren't the same type of ads. A classified section is more of a marketplace (like eBay) where people intentionally visit to transact, which differs from the Internet advertising we're familiar with, being offtopic, out of band noise crammed somewhere it doesn't belong and isn't helpful.

FOSS spreads through community goodwill. It doesn't need to advertise. The best piece of software will benefit from person to person advocacy starting with its userbase. Ironically, this is what the ABP project is losing, because users can no longer recommend it as a good piece of software to nuke all ads by default.
Steve

Re: Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus

Post by Steve »

It's a stupid and suicidal move by the OP...think....you have an excellent product and the ONLY the sustainable way to survive while wanting to be compensated is to have "Donate/Paypal or whatever".... and NOT white-listing or facilitating ads companies.

In no time, someone will have a replacement for Adblock Plus, not to mention HOSTS is more powerful!

I can predict that eventually OP's product will be replaced by something from the Open Source and OP will have a product in "history bin" and a name that be shamed by most FireFox users.
gabranth
Posts: 6
Joined: Sat Dec 17, 2011 12:48 pm

Re: Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus

Post by gabranth »

i like the idea of supporting small websites but this is just going to be abused by advertisers if they wanted people to see ads then they shouldn't of used them to infect people slowing there pc down with ads that don't load and there seizure ads that make people with epilepsy happy ill keep this opstion enabled for now but if i see a single ad using a plugin eg flash (should be obvious why) im using something else
Guest

Re: Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus

Post by Guest »

sunny wrote:i don't mind the 'feature' of non intrusive ads , i see its use. it should however not have been opt-in by default! .. on the welcome screen that comes up upon install of 2.01 the choice should be presented with an option , not a "go here , go there, click click" message to turn off what i didn't turn on.

i can see you wanting to make a little cash but you pissed off alot of people ..
Yeah, while I personally don't like the whole idea of this option, it should at least have been opt-in and not sneaked into the configs of unsuspecting users... Making it opt-out is a bad move.
Rapunzel

Re: Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus

Post by Rapunzel »

gabranth wrote:i like the idea of supporting small websites
This is really funny. Did you have a look to the white-list?

Adblock did not support small websites, they support domain-grabbing. Nothing else.
gabranth
Posts: 6
Joined: Sat Dec 17, 2011 12:48 pm

Re: Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus

Post by gabranth »

Rapunzel wrote:
gabranth wrote:i like the idea of supporting small websites
This is really funny. Did you have a look to the white-list?

Adblock did not support small websites, they support domain-grabbing. Nothing else.
then the What is this about section would be incorrect but we will see
MonztA
ABP Developer
Posts: 3957
Joined: Mon Aug 14, 2006 12:18 am
Location: Germany

Re: Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus

Post by MonztA »

Steve wrote:In no time, someone will have a replacement for Adblock Plus, not to mention HOSTS is more powerful!
Depends on what you mean by "more powerful".
Anti-Ad

Re: Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus

Post by Anti-Ad »

The hosts file blocks fewer ads and fewer trackers. ABP can block by hostname, path, or CSS element.
anonymous74100
Posts: 213
Joined: Sat Mar 19, 2011 3:45 pm
Contact:

Re: Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus

Post by anonymous74100 »

Anti-Ad wrote:ABP can block by hostname, path, or CSS element.
ABP can hide not block by CSS attribute.
Latvian List maintainer
melikamp

Re: Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus

Post by melikamp »

2 questions: is there a way to disable "acceptable" ads in Firefox Mobile (a.k.a. fennec) on Maemo? Is there a way to see the rules for "acceptable" ads?
james_m
Posts: 5
Joined: Wed Dec 03, 2008 2:53 pm
Location: UK

Re: Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus

Post by james_m »

Anti-Ad wrote:The hosts file blocks fewer ads and fewer trackers. ABP can block by hostname, path, or CSS element.
The hosts file is IMO something to use alongside ABP as an additional layer of defence, not instead of it. Consider how long you need to spend keeping track of new tynt.com subdomains when you could just add the filter "tynt" to ABP - there are definitely going to be a lot of tracking subdomains I've missed in there.

But note that it protects all the browsers on your computer without any of them having to support it or needing it to be imported; handy on the occasions you have to use a browser you don't normally. That's why I use it.
Frank

Re: Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus

Post by Frank »

Hey, I wanna thank you for this feature. I'm a webcomic-owner, I have a project wonderful account and all the ad money I make goes into advertising my webcomic. I think it's a great feature and I'll definitely make use of it myself. I see a lot of people speaking negatively here, but really I think it's probably just a vocal minority.
Guest

Re: Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus

Post by Guest »

Hallo those in fond of the new "feature" and those who are against it,

first thing I want to mention: I didn't take that much time to read all comments written up until now on those 16 pages though I did read some of them.
So if I am annoying to someone because of continual repetition I am sorry for that.

Those who criticized the new "feature", so it seemed to me, argued on the basis that most people who use Adblock Plus do not want to see any ads at all while those in favor of that feature saying that the opposite is true (saying that at least a majority prefer to allow some ads to be shown). I believe that arguing on this basis will get us just nowhere since neither of those arguments can be proven.

However, the initial reason given for this new feature seems to be its necessity of ads in order to keep smaller websites "alive". And that is in my opinion a false assumption!

I rather think that the opposite is true that is that relatively big websites do need some extra money in order to pay their "larger" servers and their greater traffic while smaller websites do not neccessarily need monetary supply by putting ads on their websites since their websites are small, and their traffic not too great, and therefore their expenses not too great to be borne by a single person or a small community. I honestly doubt that any person making his or her website publicly avaiable on the internet is seriously relying on some small ads to make up their expenses.

On the other hand those who have to come up for the expenses their larger websites create will probably not be in need of any ads, too! I would argue that anyone would start with a huge website project which causes great expenses without making sure that his or her project will be popular at all. In other words, I do assume that larger websites do have a larger user-base staying behind them. And as most of us are able to see weekly or daily that larger websites do not need ads to survive (at sites such as wikipedia with its great expenses as anyone who is interested can look up) there seems to be no sensible reason to me why some ads should be allowed per default by AdblockPlus.

Furthermore I would argue that allowing selected ads will not help those small websites but help those who are more popular and therefore (as mentioned above) probably bigger for they get more visitors each day than those smaller websites and consequently more money each day. I therefore suggest to put the new feature off at default or remove it completely and leave that decision of what ads he or she wants to see to the user just like before AdblockPlus 2.0.
dwype

Re: Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus

Post by dwype »

i just wanted to post somewhere that i think allowing simple ads is a great idea, and i found this forum topic so i'm posting my praise here.
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