Non-intrusive ads: getting the community involved

This is the place to discuss issues with the acceptable ads list like a website no longer complying with the criteria.
denzaltrueman
Posts: 1
Joined: Wed Jan 23, 2013 10:58 am

Re: Non-intrusive ads: getting the community involved

Post by denzaltrueman »

I wouldn't like to but that doesn't issue - we are not to perform gatekeeper here, it should be the same guidelines for everybody. An "evil" organization is something that the law should cope with, or the customers. It's not up to us to choose who is "credible" enough to join.
Princess_Frosty
Posts: 4
Joined: Tue May 19, 2009 3:48 pm

Re: Non-intrusive ads: getting the community involved

Post by Princess_Frosty »

Not sure if it's appropriate to discuss this here but I'm interested in what sort of possible advertising future this will lead to, I think it's worth discussing somewhere.

It seems to me that what people are essentially saying is that they'll tolerate ads if they're not intrusive or distracting, but surely that's the whole point of adverts, to catch your attention and divert it away from the website towards a product or service, if the adverts aren't increasing the advertisers revenue somehow they're failing and become pointless, even detrimental. This idea seems fine for the users and the website owners but the people paying for all of this at the end of the day are the advertisers themselves, and it seems to me they're getting the worst of all possible deals here, if that's the case how sustainable is that in the long run?

Think of it from their perspective, If I was paying someone to serve ads to users, I'd be of the opinion that adblock is a good thing for me, some people categorically DO NOT want to see my adverts, it may even create a sort of negative brand association where they consider my adverts a blight on their user experience. Remember that adblockers don't count as views for the advert, so advertisers do not feel the effect of adblocking they pay for 1 million views and either way they get 1 million views. In fact I'd argue that with adblockers in place advertisers get better quality "leads" because in some sense your adverts are more targeted to users less bothered by ads.

Honestly this doesn't really differ too much from the idea of having an adblocker which downloads the advert and counts as a "hit" but then never displays it to the user, this idea has been discussed in the past and disregarded because overall as a long term solution it's not fair, you're cheating advertisers out of views. I honestly don't see this as that much different...what users are essentially saying is "I'm prepared to have adverts on the webpage but only if I don't notice them", how is that good value for the advertiser?

I think this is a false economy and can't last as solution to an inherently problematic business model. I'd wager money on the stats from these "unobtrusive" ads leading to click throughs and additional revenue when displayed to adblock users is going to decrease because of this, how is the advertising world going to cope with this? I'm guessing at the very least these types of adverts will simply reduce in value, surely they have to? There is an obvious correlation between how intrusive the ad is and the likelihood of clicks to susceptible users, hence more intrusive ads have an inherently higher value and vice versa. This has to be true otherwise we wouldn't have fallen into this problem of ubiquitous intrusive ads in the first place, they got out of hand because they worked!

If the value of un-intrusive ads drop so does the ad revenue for those people hosting them, in the worst case scenario I can foresee adverts being "classified" by not only adblock users but by affiliate marketing businesses, and then graded by value. If the websites have no way to serve unintrusive ads to adblock users and intrusive ads to non-adblock users then their overall revenue may suffer more for sticking to unobtrusive ads, In some cases maybe forcing them to abandon unintrusive ads and adopt more intrusive ones for greater revenue.

Generalized as a theory, I would say the advertising business model relies on serving ads in an environment the user had little control over, slowly control has been handed to the users so the total amount of revenue in this space is decreasing as a function of increasing adblocking usage, there's no way to get that revenue back unless technical measures are taken to remove control from the users. The users lowered revenue for the websites and now we're just working together (users+website) to pass that loss on to the advertisers, it might work for a few years but I don't think that'll be sustainable. It'll be a shift in technology and loss in control for end users that will genuinely bring back revenue (I'm thinking servers rendering pages server side and simply sending flat images back to the users where adverts are baked into content, then we're all screwed!)
slash7782
Posts: 1
Joined: Thu Apr 25, 2013 12:37 pm

Re: Non-intrusive ads: getting the community involved

Post by slash7782 »

Is there a way to create a quick rule like:

Block all images and flashs that are coming from domains which are not the current domain? That would be really helpful
poca
Posts: 1
Joined: Fri May 24, 2013 2:20 pm

Re: Non-intrusive ads: getting the community involved

Post by poca »

I actually find intrusive any advertising on retail websites so offensive (and intrusive) that I won't buy anything from them if I can find a replacement and I certainly don't want them to get any money from me. I had been avoiding the websites of Best Buy and Target but I've recently discovered that Amazon and NewEgg serve advertisements. They are going to be harder to replace but I'm going to keep looking.

I only used AdBlock+ on the Chrome browser; which I use solely as a web media consumption program: Hulu, Newgrounds and some high quality YouTube. The main reason I installed AdBlock+ is because I hate YouTube's pop-up text ads; this is made even worse by the fact that many YouTubers believe this pop-up text form is less obtrusive and use it for shorter clips. By default, I open all links without AdBlock and if the video is interesting I'll look more into the channel it is from. Most YT channels don't strike my fancy but I may be willing to sit through one 15-30 second ad before; YouTube video ads have a SkipAd option so if it is a 50 MINUTE rant from some political\religious nutjob it is simple to skip.

As it is implemented now, the single global list of things for which AdBlock+ grants an exemption is already too inclusive for my taste and the law of feature bloat suggests this will likely just get worse in the future. I've personally already got a gist of the technical details from a look at exceptionrules.txt; thank you for the comments.

To Forrest, intrusive means ads containing porn ads. Yet from this statement alone, I can't figure out which ads would classify as porn because Forrest didn't tell us whose culture we would use as a basis for making that distinction. Some middle eastern cultures believe that if they can see more than a woman's eyes then the image is porn. There are others that are slightly more permissive. Most of Asia and India are fine with seeing Middle Eastern porn: women walking around by themselves in public wearing a skirt; but would think any image with a woman's exposed breasts is porn.

I happen to live in the USA and have paid enough attention to understand that almost every culture is mixed evenly into the whole population. Furthermore the culture of immigrants and their American children may be the the culture they left behind or whatever American sub-culture their personality is currently driving them through. In conclusion, the only people way you can reliably figure out whose cultural definition of porn they would like to use is by asking them.

I think all these problems can be overcome by adding a whole "Non-intrusive" tab to the options menu. I think this options menu needs two parts: a list of user added of exception domains and a (toggleable) list of all the URIs from which AdBlock+ should load exceptionrules.txt.

I think some serious thought should be given to supporting the URI schemes: http[s], javascript, data and file. I also wanted to suggest the syntax for exceptionrules include the ability to meaningfully group expections rules so that groups of execption rules can be deselected in the option menu. I would also like to see that the FF context menu add an option that reads (10x pithier): "Support This Site By Allowing Its Advertisements."
Donated to AdblockPlus

Re: Non-intrusive ads: getting the community involved

Post by Donated to AdblockPlus »

Hello

I was troubled to read about the "whitelisting" concept and practice. To me, no ads simply mean no ads, not even one.
I donated to AdblockPlus in good faith before this practice was implemented. I will not be donating to this organization again.

-I
guest

Re: Non-intrusive ads: getting the community involved

Post by guest »

not quite sure what the problem is, it can be disabled whenever you like and I think it has been communicated pretty well that such a whitelist exists and that it can be disabled
abp_user

Re: Non-intrusive ads: getting the community involved

Post by abp_user »

guest wrote:not quite sure what the problem is, it can be disabled whenever you like and I think it has been communicated pretty well that such a whitelist exists and that it can be disabled
Really?
guest

Re: Non-intrusive ads: getting the community involved

Post by guest »

hm? this doesn't change anything on what I stated before
ThermIt
Posts: 1
Joined: Tue Jul 30, 2013 7:38 am

Re: Non-intrusive ads: getting the community involved

Post by ThermIt »

Too much ads are being marked as "Non-intrusive" on some popular sites. There have to be an option to "Disable non-intrusive ads on <site>".
MonztA
ABP Developer
Posts: 3957
Joined: Mon Aug 14, 2006 12:18 am
Location: Germany

Re: Non-intrusive ads: getting the community involved

Post by MonztA »

Are you sure these are part of the acceptable ads whitelist and not just unblocked ads in EasyList?
justaquicksuggestion

Re: Non-intrusive ads: getting the community involved

Post by justaquicksuggestion »

I am one of those who do not mind most adds, I just don't like ads that interfere with browsing. The only ads that I would really like to see removed are those that load over the page and force you to close it down, those that appear as you move your mouse over text, or those that play obnoxious (read, any) sounds or videos without consent. Just about any other ad I am ok with. Static but colorful ads actually breathe a little life into the net, they say "stuff is happening and the world is alive", and I'm not opposed to clicking on interesting looking ones. I like to see anything in the margins of the page that appears to be in a clearly designated ad space left alone, so long as it does not bombard me with irritating noise or music.
skysam
Posts: 7
Joined: Wed Dec 11, 2013 8:54 am

Re: Non-intrusive ads: getting the community involved

Post by skysam »

anonymous74100 wrote:I probably should have used a different word than "reputation", but I couldn't think of one.
The thing I'm interested in is:
Would you do business with (i.e. whitelist ads for) sites/companies whose purpose is to spread hate and discrimination towards other humans? The purpose being a known fact, not rumor, FUD or similar. And irreverently if it reflects in the ads or not.
This would be an extreme example - there are a lot of companies who repuation is not black but grey, or not grey but, grey-black ... and in deciding which is which, is where the problmes begin ...
skysam
Posts: 7
Joined: Wed Dec 11, 2013 8:54 am

Re: Non-intrusive ads: getting the community involved

Post by skysam »

Princess_Frosty wrote:
It seems to me that what people are essentially saying is that they'll tolerate ads if they're not intrusive or distracting, but surely that's the whole point of adverts, to catch your attention and divert it away from the website towards a product or service,
To be honest, as has been said elsewhere on this thread, I think an advert can be distracting, without being intrusive. In that, it can be eye-catching, but not detrimental to your experience on a particular page, getting on with whatever youi are getting on with. It is the video adversts that I think most people have a problem with, and it is them (those that you have to have pause, or mute, or worse yet sit through) that have initlaly fuelled this rush towards ABP.

Moving banners and boxers grab your attention, and as justaquicksuggestion says above,breathe life into the net. Advertises need to stop being aggressive with video advertising, for their sakes as well as ours.

There is an interesting article here, about this. Quite interesting to see OKCupid's response to ABP.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25219922
MDM

Re: Non-intrusive ads: getting the community involved

Post by MDM »

[quote="Princess_Frosty"]The main problems I see are:

1) Agreeing on standards, you're probably not going to get a majority agreement on specific standards by which to classify adverts, I think there needs to be some criteria by which to judge them, such as placement, number on page, size, things like that. Then let the users set controls for personal preference for what is acceptable, this way everyone can tailor their experience.

I would like to see these type of settings, I do not have a problem with ads in general and I would have no problem allowing ads that adhere to certain limits. Currently the white-listed ads and ads I am okay with seeing do not match so I end up just turning off all ads for simplicity. I do want to individually block or report every type of ad that bothers me. I would love setting options that would allow the user to set their own restrictions.
czacha

Re: Non-intrusive ads: getting the community involved

Post by czacha »

Hey,

i really like the non-intrusive ads feature. I think it's a step in the right direction. Advertising is not evil in general.

But i cannot stand animated (blinking) ads at all. It would be great if there was a sub-option like "do not block un-animated ads". I'd like to support websites which creators decided to use un-animated ads.

Best regards,
Christian
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