^I'm not referring to a solution that includes an "OK" button or any other easy means to do away with the notice, but rather a solution that keeps the notice there unless the user actually does what you ask; the "mean solution" just makes the website not work unless the requested action is done.
Also, those solutions don't refer to going back to any company, they're all on your end; the only thing that does refer to going to any company is getting your site on the whitelist mentioned here, which would only work for users of Adblock Plus for Firefox (and soon for Chrome), an opt-out whitelist for non-intrusive advertising as described here:
https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads#infoJax2 wrote:I do not know, and I won't assume one way or the other, if you are, or are in anyway involved with, a web designer or not.
I currently maintain a couple e-commerce websites that themselves do not contain third-party ads, but do run trackers for Adwords and Google Analytics and are also the subjects of Adwords campaigns; I suspect that my particular audience is less well-versed in the ways of content-blocking, because we do get plenty of clicks and end up spending plenty of money on our campaigns. I also run a small website devoted to, among other things, hosting experimental Tracking Protection Lists based on the popular Adblock Plus lists; I currently spend a small amount of money per month to host the site, and although I don't run ads, I do run Google Analytics, and plenty of visitors haven't blocked it. Basically, I am a Webmaster of sorts (not on a large scale, and I only did a small amount of design on my own site and one of the e-commerce sites), but I do not rely on ads; however, I understand the needs of people who go that route.
Jax2 wrote:however, I will tell you this: I have been reading very many horror stories on the adsense forums as well as other places, from webmasters of small websites who have, like me, been counting on the money that is generated by ads. Perhaps the creator of the concept you pointed to (Ads do not make money) had a bad experience? I do not know, and to be honest, I have not read the link yet, but I can assure you, they do make money. It is not enough to live on by any means unless you're incredibly lucky enough to have a massive following on your website, but it is enough to help offset the costs, at least some of them in any case.
This is the heart of that blog post:
Wladimir Palant wrote:There is no rich Uncle Goo who gives everybody a penny for each ad just for the fun of it. The money comes from somewhere else and it is important to keep this in mind.
So, where does the money come from? Basically, there are two possibilities. One is purchases done on the Internet. The other is investments by companies who usually hope that these investments will help their products sell better.
Jax2 wrote:Many of these stories I have read all sound the same: I still have all my visitors, but instead of making 5 dollars a day, I'm now making 50 cents.
People may laugh when they hear that figure: $5.00 a day, and say oh, what a loss, but to many people, especially owners of small websites that do not generate income from other sources, that $5.00 a day is very important. It may, in fact, even determine if that person continues to blog, or to update their content, or whether or not they even keep the site active anymore.
That's actually a major figure: For small websites, that more than covers the hosting costs; I am interested in the time-frame over which this happens, the demographics of the visitors, and the usage of annoying animated "Ads by Gooooooogle" rather than
text-based AdSense ads.
Jax2 wrote:Sorry, I will not agree that people who block ads wouldn't click anyhow. That is an excuse to not have to take responsibility for taking money out of the pockets of webmasters.
So all visitors must pay tribute? This depressingly common mentality may lead to the rise of micropayments, which I have been warning about on this very forum whenever the ad-blocking hardliners have complained about Palant's Acceptable Ads initiative (I can send you some forum links to lol about).
Jax2 wrote:I fully agree with you on the point of malware and other nasties being transmitted over advertising. REPUTABLE advertising agencies, again, such as adsense, do not have this problem. It is when webmasters decide to go with companies of a lesser caliber. Translation: Webmasters need to be aware of what is on their page and who is providing the content. There is a definite need to make webmasters aware of these problems, point out what companies are allowing malicious ads to go live, and put them out of business. Simply blocking ALL ads is not the way to do it.
It's not always the scummier sites and advertising agencies; look below at notable examples of major sites infected with malvertising...
March 2007, rogue antivirus was reported to be spread via malicious advertisement:
http://www.mikeonads.com/what-is-errors ... e-stop-it/December 2007, such malvertising was reported in a series of ads claiming to come from eMusic:
http://msmvps.com/blogs/spywaresucks/ar ... 83504.aspxSeptember 2009, cybercriminals posed as a provider of ad content for Vonage to the New York Times, actually ran safe content for a couple weeks, then swapped it with content that caused a popup for rogue antivirus to appear:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10351460-83.htmlBased on that scare and similar events, Microsoft filed suit that month against similar cybercriminals:
https://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_o ... ected=trueMarch 2010, malvertising sneaked onto ValueClick Fastclick, Google DoubleClick, and YieldManager, leading to such above-board sites as the Drudge Report (for the second time) and whitepages.com to inadvertently serve malware to visitors, notably hitting computers used by the United States Senate:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10466044-245.htmlTech Crunch was also hit around then, and malvertising also ended up on the Fimserve network of Fox Audience Network (now part of Rubicon):
http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20000898-245.htmlFebruary 2011, the LSE was hit by malvertising:
http://www.highseverity.com/2011/02/lon ... lware.htmlLater that month, AutoTrader UK and MyVue were hit by malvertising:
http://community.websense.com/blogs/sec ... izing.aspxMarch 2011, Mary Landesman from ScanSafe/Cisco notes the substantial number of domains that had been hit in recent years:
http://www.darkreading.com/blog/2293007 ... ising.htmlLater that month, a malvertiser made it inside the Spotify Free client, which uses Webkit components and can therefore render Web content; because Spotify has no mechanism for content-blocking, only a well-constructed HOSTS file or filtering proxy could have prevented the load, but more likely the user had to count on the virus-scanner catching the payload of the Blackhole Exploit Kit:
http://community.websense.com/blogs/sec ... s-ads.aspxFacebook (which you need an account on in order to use Spotify) was also hit:
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/03 ... -facebook/Notably, most of the domains from which the malicious content was eventually loaded were subdomains of co.cc and cz.cc (which are actual websites and not mere domain suffixes in the sense that co.uk is a suffix), which later that year were removed entirely from Google's index because of the related problem of malicious SEO.
Last month, Windows Secure Kit 2012 was delivered via Yahoo's Advertising Network:
http://stopmalvertising.com/malvertisem ... twork.htmlThis problem has been known in the information-security community for a while now:
http://www.infosecisland.com/blogview/1 ... lware.htmlThe advertising industry is also taking steps to deal with the problem, including a set of guidelines:
https://otalliance.org/resources/malvertising.htmlThere is also a sort of "advertising background check" that owners of ad networks or other purchasers of ads should rely on:
http://www.anti-malvertising.com/Still, the way I see it, the risks are so great, and the rewards so paltry, that I personally stamp out ads as a rule: Before I learned about malvertising, I just didn't bother blocking ads and malicious domains, although I did wonder why Java and my PDF reader would occasionally pop up with no warning and then my computer would act strange...
Jak2 wrote:As for whitelists, why should webmasters have to ask ANYONE whether or not they can display advertisements on their website? That is simply ridiculous. In order for me to make money now, I need to go to the company that is blocking my ads from showing and ask them to please allow me to show ads to my visitors? What gives them the right to determine what I choose to show my visitors? No, I do understand that I still have the right to show it, but that is meaningless when they're blocked, unless I gain some special form of approval to have them not be. Censorship.
The only time you would need to directly ask anyone is if you want to join Palant's "Acceptable Ads" initiative; the automatic mechanisms to either ask people to turn off their ad-blockers or make your site break unless ads are allowed will instead indirectly lead to the subscription authors whitelisting you, with no interaction between you and them.
Just look around these forums for examples of filters being removed, exceptions carved out from those filters for various sites, and outright whitelist rules being made for certain URL patterns on certain domains; you can also read the contents of the common ABP subscriptions (rules starting with @@ are whitelisting rules, and ~ before a domain means "not on this domain or its subdomains") from EasyList, Fanboy, and Adversity.
Jak2 wrote:So, again, I still feel this is just as bad as I claimed above. I read the stories every day from people who are losing money, and I, too, am one of them. Frankly, I think it's wrong. If I continue to make less than 50 cents a day because my ads are not being displayed, I will take my site down. Sure, maybe only 500 or 600 people will notice it's gone, the point is that it is still gone. What happens when this begins to happen on a regular basis? Only websites with another income source will survive?
Sorry, but that just isn't right.
That is indeed what could happen, which is why Wladimir Palant is deliberately softening the impact of his own extension; he does not want to end the viability of the free, ad-supported Web and see a system of micropayments or similar direct extraction of money from visitors.
I am curious about what your site is; in case you want to see the sites I have something to do with, they are below...
I have a small role in maintaining
http://fabframes.com/ but am mostly waiting for the design and dev team to finish building the new site, and also a separate site at
http://charleyharper.com/ that is currently just a CNAME for fabframes.com
I have a somewhat larger role in maintaining
https://charleyharperartstudio.com/ and actually did a minor redesign about a year ago.
Both of those sites make money by selling products, and as of yet we have not decided to run ads, although many small and large e-commerce sites do run ads.
My personal site is
http://jansal.net/ and I've been lazy about actually building it up.
I actually work for the company behind fabframes.com and notably, in about 3 cases, the computers at various locations had been compromised by malware before I joined, one case involving a malicious Java program that clearly came from a compromised website; after I cleaned them up, I decided to fortify them using the principles of passive security that I would later write about here:
https://code.google.com/p/jansal/wiki/PassiveSecurityThe employees had already practiced safe surfing and safe usage of e-mail (or at least I didn't feel the need to educate them), and I have had no malware issues since then.
In closing, as the author of one article that Wladimir Palant linked to said, adapt, or die:
http://www.serviceassurancedaily.com/20 ... pt-or-die/That article was more about alternative revenue models to using the major ad networks, but the way I interpret it is to join in the cat-and-mouse game by either irritating or punishing users of content-blocking software, because we have very good reasons for blocking ads, and we won't stop any time soon:
http://www.serviceassurancedaily.com/20 ... lock-plus/
There's a buzzin' in my brain I really can't explain; I think about it before they make me go to bed.