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AdblockAdblockPosted Aug 11, 2010 18:30 UTC (Wed) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266)Parent article: The LinuxCon media panel
I predict more people will comment on the Adblock bit than on anything else in this article.
I hope the ensuing discussion stays civil.
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Adblock Posted Aug 11, 2010 19:15 UTC (Wed) by fuhchee (subscriber, #40059) [Link]
No it won't, dimwit. :-)
Adblock Posted Aug 11, 2010 22:27 UTC (Wed) by xyzzy (subscriber, #1984) [Link]
Ah, adblock.
I have little clue how much advertising revenue a page impression generates these days but I'm betting it's pretty small. I'd rather use some micropayment system to pay something approximating that small amount than see ads.
Of course the more likely someone is to want to pay to hide advertising, the more valuable they're likely to be to advertisers...
Adblock Posted Aug 11, 2010 22:50 UTC (Wed) by jake (editor, #205) [Link]
> Of course the more likely someone is to want to pay to hide advertising,
> the more valuable they're likely to be to advertisers...
I actually tend to disagree. The small minority of folks who use AdBlock or NoScript to block ads are much more likely to get annoyed with an advertiser and actively avoid their products. Advertisers *should* want to get their ads in front of people who are likely to be ad-friendly or at worst ad-agnostic -- getting them in front of those that are ad-antagonistic is likely to backfire.
I am skeptical that the minute reduction in traffic due to AdBlock and the like is making any real impact on ad revenues either. Certainly it's worse for sites with tech-savvy readers (more likely to use blockers presumably), but makes very little impact on mainstream web advertising, I suspect.
jake
Adblock Posted Aug 11, 2010 23:04 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
in the context of linux reporting specifically.... If the relatively small set of people interesting in solid linux reporting overlap significantly with the small group of people who use adblock..then that's a real problem for the future of linux news reporting. If the lost revenue from adblock users is just noise, then the added revenue from users interested in linux could be in the noise as well. And I would daresay that our little niche microculture is more prone to using adblock than other niche groups (like for example pet llama owners) making our little revenue contribution even less influential or noteworthy.
If the vast majority of people who don't use adblock are far more interested in celebrity gossip than solid technology reporting then the economics dictate that we are going to see vastly more celebrity gossip news and vanishingly little solid technology reporting. Until we find a way to get Brad Pitt to use an Android phone and our interests crossover with mainstream interests.
-jef
Adblock Posted Aug 12, 2010 7:10 UTC (Thu) by PaulWay (✭ supporter ✭, #45600) [Link]
> I actually tend to disagree. The small minority of folks who use AdBlock
> or NoScript to block ads are much more likely to get annoyed with an > advertiser and actively avoid their products. Advertisers *should* want to > get their ads in front of people who are likely to be ad-friendly or at > worst ad-agnostic -- getting them in front of those that are > ad-antagonistic is likely to backfire.
I think the original poster's thinking is that if you can somehow get an editorial in front of those AdBlock users that is favourable to a particular product, they are more likely to take that seriously. I.e. once you've convinced them it isn't advertising, they'll believe it. I don't really believe that either, because I think that turning ads off is far more of a statement about being highly selective of the information one chooses to believe than just about not getting bouncing GIFs and monkeys to punch.
From my point of view, if turning AdBlock on is killing publishing, then it deserves to die. I subscribe to LWN not because paying turns off the ads but because it has genuinely good, useful and in-depth content. I would stop my subscription if I believed that the stories were becoming merely promotional material from vendors.
The whole news industry is struggling with this, with paywalls and advertising and free content and subscriptions all stewed together, sometimes seemingly randomly. The one underlying factor is trust and brand loyalty - people would rather read a source they trust, and converting that into a dollar value is the hard part. When journalists tell us that they don't report news because it's not in the advertisers interests, they've immediately shown where their true loyalties lie - and it's not to their readers.
Have fun,
Paul
Adblock Posted Aug 12, 2010 12:34 UTC (Thu) by SEJeff (subscriber, #51588) [Link]
You couldn't have said that better. Those are my thoughts as well.
Adblock Posted Aug 13, 2010 11:06 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
I use adBlock, but I disable it on sanely-run technical sites, where the ads actually will be relevant to me (and not rubbish about "the secret to weight loss"). E.g. LWN. Also, it's my understanding that the adBlock I use still fetches the ads - it just hides them. So the use should be invisible - though it obviously does devalue internet advertising.
I'm also more than happy with the LWN paywall model. It keeps the site interesting even for non-subscribers, and it doesn't prevent subscribers sharing.
Adblock Posted Aug 11, 2010 22:47 UTC (Wed) by shmget (subscriber, #58347) [Link]
Well, in the context of a subscriber-only article. One would be hard-pressed to claim that any reader here using AdBlock could be accused of 'killing' the publishing business.
Us being here is an indication that we are willing to pay for good (add-free) content.
Adblock Posted Aug 12, 2010 3:11 UTC (Thu) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link]
I don't run Adblock the software, but I seldom see ads. I am so tuned to ignoring them that my brain just blanks them out. About the only time I am aware of them is when they are truly obnoxious with blinking or flashing.
I sometimes wonder what would happen if ads were cut back to 1/100 or 1/1000 of the current frequency, if ads were such novel events that I did pay attention to them. From an admaker's point of view, you can't cut them them back so far as to become affordable only to huge corporations. But if I only had a few hundred in view in a single day, counting computers, magazines, billboards, ads on taxis and buses and so on, and there was little repetition, I might just actually be aware of some of them.
Adblock Posted Aug 15, 2010 14:39 UTC (Sun) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link]
I also never used AdBlock, I never really saw the problem. Mind you, I also don't have Flash installed which may have helped.
But then a month ago I was reading a article and halfway down bits starting disappearing from my screen and a fripping animated transformer appeared right over the text I was reading. That killed it for me, I finally spent the few minutes to workout how to installed AdBlock just so I could read the bloody article in peace.
I suppose a lot more gets blocked as collateral damage but I'm not sure whether I care about that...
Adblock Posted Aug 12, 2010 3:27 UTC (Thu) by jhhaller (subscriber, #56103) [Link]
I don't really object to ads as much as I object to slow ads. Staring at a DNS lookup while waiting for content is annoying. People want their computers to be responsive, and the way most of the ads interact with the page make the computer to be slow. Any way to speed the page display while including ads is likely to improve ad acceptance. Unfortunately, most sites do not follow an enlightened display.
Adblock Posted Aug 12, 2010 9:50 UTC (Thu) by k3ninho (subscriber, #50375) [Link]
That's my argument for ad-block: why should I clog the internet with data that I'm going to ignore, and why should I waste CPU, memory and energy on displaying those ads?
The economic model that has an advertiser pay a content producer for my attention is not in my interests as a consumer. It skews the stories that writers can pitch to their editors. It stops freedom-of-the-press reporting and it queers the pitch of public discourse. Perhaps it's time for Linux news to stand up for free-as-in-freedom software reported by free-as-in-the-press news outlets. Free-as-in-beer? Have you had any free beer recently?
Adblock Posted Aug 12, 2010 13:07 UTC (Thu) by DOT (subscriber, #58786) [Link]
This is why I turned on AdBlock after years of avoiding it: DNS lookups were excruciatingly slow. The DNS problem turned out to be a configuration error on my part, but still the performance difference is remarkable. Besides the additional DNS lookup, most ads load loads of Flash and badly written javascript, slowing down rendering of the page. Then there is the fact that ads get loaded asynchronously, causing content to jump around while the page is loading. And I haven't even mentioned the seizure-inducing animated gifs.
I don't mind unobtrusive ads, but the web is infested with bad ads. When ads start being served from the same domain as the original content, without Flash or javascript, so that the page load isn't affected, then I'll turn off AdBlock again. Until then, I maintain a whitelist. It currently has 4 entries.
Adblock Posted Aug 12, 2010 13:43 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
Also the advertisers were (for no obvious reason) among the heaviest users of some obscure whacky DNS software that implements just barely enough of the specification to answer A queries from Windows clients.
If you send such a server pretty much anything else, such as an AAAA query, it either silently discards the packet or it returns a NXDOMAIN for an unasked A query. Probably this was sold to the user as a "security" feature, the practical upshot is that lots of perfectly good implementations will stall when trying to connect to some of the popular advertising sites.
You would think that this was something advertising companies would want to fix, but it seems not. Somewhere along the lines "we make advertising" plus "people are annoyed by advertising" became "it's our job to annoy people" and so there was no interest in fixing the problem. I don't know if it ever got fixed at all.
Adblock Posted Aug 16, 2010 22:43 UTC (Mon) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]
The problem is that many ads are ANNOYING. Get rid of popups. That includes floating elements that cover up the article content. Get rid of flash and any animation or sound. Stop popping up hover ads when I try to get my mouse cursor from the corner of the screen to some relevant link in the article (especially annoying when the hover ad then covers the fucking link and I have to click some miniscule close button to get the ad out of the way again).
I don't run adblock, but I do run Flashblock, and if someone had an extension that only disabled ads that screw up the page layout or are annoying, I'd gladly and happily run that too.
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