Luthair wrote:Should Television stations also be able to require viewers watch and listen to commercials?
This is an entirely different story. Firstly, ad revenue is not directly paid to content makers on TV, they are paid to the network. The content makers recieve their agreed-upon stipend despite ad revenue. (sure, the agreed upon stipend may increase with the popularity of the content, but then you're confusing cause and effect.)
Secondly, ad revenues on tv are not based on number of times the specific ad is watched, or the number of times the ad is responded to like it is on the new. revenues are pre-decided. So even if no body watches a specific show at some point, or if every one watches it with ad-evading techniques, no one is deprived any revenue (except maybe for advertisers, but they're not paying for views, they're paying for airtime).
I do not agree that the content provider / webmaster doesn't have the ability to say "No" to people who don't view ads.
mrbene wrote:An easy solution is to require log-in, and have server side code that validates that some portion of the ad code is delivered along with pages to the users. If they don't view the ads but do view the content, give them a warning, or take whatever action is desired.
Technically this could be done against IP + User Agent combination, but that would have a (small) chance of collision.
The way the internet works means that an HTML file that is not protected by authentication is available to anyone. Authentication can be by username/password, or could be by web browser type, or other aspect. But if none of that is done, then the expectation should be that it will be accessed without the ads at least some of the time.
While I agree this is a good suggestion, I don't feel that it fully answers the concern. This doesn't give the webmaster to power to deny a user at access-time in the same way that ABP gives the user the means to deny content at access-time. Being able to go back and "punish" users, while a start, is not quite as effective or "equal" of a solution as I was looking for.
p2u wrote:@ flashstorm
And what if you look at the issue from another angle? Webmasters want to make money; that's all right. BUT: most of the time, they don't even check server permissions. Besides, they implement client application usage on the web that is inherently unsafe. When you get infected online, it is 99,9% through 'ad channels', coming from third parties. Blocking scripts and ads is not just a matter of trying to take away a webmasters earnings, you know. There is surely a security factor involved in all this. And NOBODY will guarantee our safety online. As long as that is the case, I have a right to do what's best for my computer. What do you say to that?
Paul
While I contest the accuracy of your stated statistic, it is irrelevant to my point so I am not going to directly respond to it. In no way am I justifying that a webmaster should be able to infect a users computer with malware, forcibly or otherwise, knowingly or otherwise. The "access denied" page would be locally stored, and safe. Users will still be allowed to surf with ad-blockers, and if a webmaster wants to allow a user with such software to access the rest of their content, they're perfectly free to do so. The only concern I have is that there is currently no reasonably-practical, efficient, safe, and accurate way for a webmaster to deny someone from using their content without generating the revenue that they intended to generate, and that the responsibility to provide this should belong with the ad-blockers.
I believe that the suggestion in the above link you provided is exactly what I'm thinking. However, I disagree that it should be the user's final decision if this decision is to violate the wishes of the webmaster. (not that we can stop a user from blocking ads if they really wanted to, but a compromise as suggested above I'm sure would be enough to satisfy most users).
@Lyx: Your post doesn't really deal with user's ability to deny ads vs. webmaster's non-ability to deny users.
LorenzoC wrote:If one day ADBlock can't block ads, I would switch to one of the other ways to get the same result, which usually involve the use of a local proxy.
ADBlock will always be able to block ads. Users just wont be able to view some sites if they choose to block ads.
@Discussion concerning setting up a different filter set for ads: How does this solve the issue? It's still possible for a user to click "block all ads", even if it isn't default, and we run into the same problem.