What pushed me into using it was when comics.com (now gocomics.com; the official online source of a number of syndicated newspaper comics) had ads that would -minimize my browser-, display a pop up designed to look like a Windows system warning, that advised me to download some malware masquerading as a virus scanner.
Gocomics.com is a particularly good example - I find it surprising that they appear to accept such low quality (one weird old tip) and shady (download now/you have 1 new messages/etc) ads.
It can be tricky to balance between going broke and accidentally showing ads that some users dislike when you're using a large network like AdSense.
As someone with a browsing profile that isn't targeted by those kind of ads, I've found out second-hand that I've been running ads like that a few times. Trying to prune specific ads is an endless game of whack-a-mole that I've never been able to win, and disabling an entire category of ads just to prevent 1% of them from running is very tough on the bottom line.
Adsense could also try enforcing their policies once in a while too. I remember complaining about a series of shady "Download Now" ads earlier in the year, including full URL trails, etc, as required by the complaint process. Needless to say, not one damn was given and the ads continued unchecked.
THAT is why people install Adblock. Content owners crying butthurt because "Adblock hurts the sites you love" ignores that the sites you "love" can often just not be trusted not to accept ads that are shady, scummy, or worse. And there is no excuse for that. If your business revolves around spraying dog mess over people's windows, don't be surprised when people put up fences. You reap what you sow.
Is actually very easy to solve. When someone wants to run an ad on your ad network. The vetting process should be more than "how much money you got?" If not for their own sakes anyway.
Ad block needs to continue to run rampant over this "internet economy" because advertisers need to come to terms with the fact that now a days users get to choose what they see and how they see it. Maybe one day it will occur to someone in the industry that aggressively hostile ads are ruining their industry rather than being a staple of it.
If they don't... Then I don't mind seeing that industry die.
It's not easy, because there isn't really much of a vetting process on most ad networks; everything possible is automated.
You may not mind seeing that industry die, but until you start paying for visiting websites, you'll have to amend that to say "I don't mind seeing the internet die".
I would be ok with some (not-too-intrusive) ads to make the internet go around. But every single website now links to 30 trackers that try to track and profile your every move on the internet, with no accountability anywhere.
In addition to the NSA, GCHQ, SVR RF, Mossad and other n-letter agencies, there are some 30 corporations that know everything about what and where you browse, keep that data not-very-secure, sell it to the highest bidder - any bidder, actually.
Yeah, the best example is YouTube - sometimes more than 100 elements shows up in AdBlock. There are afaik 3 blocks of ads + possible few trackers. Then what is the other 90?
Honestly, I've only seen the "tricky" Download Now buttons on shady video websites (read: those that have all the episodes of Seinfeld on them).
Though I've had more and more invasive ads in newspaper sites (the fact that I get so many ads on NYT's site despite being a subscriber is frustrating to say the least), I do like keeping free websites running. I find using ABP to be somew immoral , violating the contract with which you're looking at someone's content. I have less sympathy for people who are basically showing stolen content (not technically stolen , but still), though...
> the fact that I get so many ads on NYT's site despite being a subscriber is frustrating to say the least
Have you never seen the print edition of the NYT (or any other newspaper)? Since they just use news to fill in the otherwise blank areas between ads the motto really should be all the news that fits, we print.
"they just use news to fill in the otherwise blank areas between ads"
That is pretty much literally true. When I worked on a student newspaper, it was pretty common for the advertising manager to rush in to the editorial offices and say things like "I've just sold another full-page ad, so we're going to be printing extra pages - do you have any copy to fill them?"
> When I worked on a student newspaper, it was pretty common for the advertising manager to rush in to the editorial offices and say things like "I've just sold another full-page ad, so we're going to be printing extra pages - do you have any copy to fill them?"
Perhaps at a student paper, though that's considered a pretty huge ethical breach. I can attest that the New York Times definitely does not do that; they take this separation very seriously. Even at their headquarters, as of relatively recently, business and editorial enter through separate elevators, as they are on opposite sides of the building.
There definitely are publications without such strong and heavily enforced senses of editorial ethics, but the New York Times is not one of them.
That's bollocks - it's not in the slightest an ethical breach to do that. It's just advertising working with production to make the product. We're not talking about running advertorial or anything.
The papers I've worked on usually had a little flexibility in terms of extra copy or advertising to populate pages as required.
> it's not in the slightest an ethical breach to do that. It's just advertising working with production to make the product.
Well, that by definition would be considered an ethical violation at a paper like the Times. Not at a student paper, no, but at the New York Times, definitely.
They're not asking for any adjustment to the content, but for extra content, eg a feature piece that isn't tied to a particular date. Bear in mind that a full-page ad only covers one side of the paper so you need something for the reverse side, and newspapers are generally printed on folding sheets (ie 4 pages to a sheet), so that means 3 extra pages to be filled. It's not like the advertising department content is suggesting which content to use. Every newspaper has a variable pile of feature material whose exact publication date depends on the size of the print run, which is highly variable.
I'm curious about what you think the ethical breach here is. Advertising and editorial departments have to coordinate on practical matters like page layout.
No, it wouldn't. By definition, the advertising department has to talk to production to establish runs and page counts. I guarantee that this happens at the NYT, because a paper could not possibly be produced without this process.
No, that's entirely wrong. That's how the layout for a newspaper is established and the news budget (meaning what will fit in the paper) is set — it's mostly based on the size and requirements of the ads that will run in that day's paper. If you have a really important story (or a dearth of advertisers), you might add pages for editorial content without regard to ads and fill the layout holes with house ads, but the actual size of the paper is determined by your advertising. That's literally what's paying for the paper you're printing on.
I agree about the Times, but what in the story about the student paper constituted an ethical breach? The ads were not influencing copy, just allowing more to be printed.
I recall having bad experience with these things on (or via?) sourceforge. It's probably the main reason why sourceforge dropped to last resort for me.
cnet.com is a particularly egregious offender - I also stopped DLing anything from there because they started bundling things inside a wrapper of crapware.
And if you try to download Windows binaries from Sourceforge, your download may be enhanced with WinZip, the Ask.com toolbar, and other optional offers.
Flashblock is not needed on Chrome - go to settings/advanced/content settings/plugins and select "click to play". Now flash will not run automatically. But you can decide to click on something and allow it to play if you want. Works great - no plugin needed.
Firefox differs from Chrome in that it will enable Flash for a whole page, rather than per-element. This means you still need an extension for blocking Flash ads on Flash video sites.
Firefox's model is better, I think. Plenty of sites use hidden flash videos for various utility functionality. How are you supposed to click on these hidden videos so that you can enable them?
I've been using the web for pretty much as long as it has existed ('94) and I've always held off on using an adblocker mostly just as a test to see if I could. I finally broke down recently and started using abp on chrome. Sometimes pages will take a while to load but overall it's just such a better experience.
I should note that I have no qualms about blocking ads I would never click anyway. I don't harbor ridiculous puritanical notions that I must suffer in exchange for "free" content. Nor do I abide by the notion that anyone else has the right to sell my attention merely because they make content. Monetization should be cooperative, not coercive (and I also support content creators directly quite often).
I'd love an adblocker with a blacklist instead of whitelist so I could keep the ads on for the long tail of my browsing and remove them only on sites that go overboard.
For me it was my first autoplaying video with sound in a pop-under.
Fuck that. You pull that shit, your whole industry can just go and get fucked. If you need to pull that shit to live, you need to fucking die.
This laptop has 8GB because Firefox with ABP is really fat. It's worth every byte. I use FF for personal stuff, Chromium for work; occasionally I load a non-work page in Chromium and am bloody horrified at what the web looks like with ads.
This is what I've never understood about the people claiming that "they have no choice" or that they feel morally justified in denying revenue to authors and other content creators. I don't use ABP, but it's really not that much effort to have to see bad ads on each "bad" domain _once_, and then blacklist and not have to deal with that entire domain and their bad ads ever again. I do something quite similar with a JS blacklist (mostly for poorly-coded newspapers where I can't even scroll until they fetch some non-main-content resources over JS).
> "feel morally justified in denying revenue to authors and other content creators"
I do think that only a very small portion of adblocking users wants to "justify" anything in this regard. Most just don't want to see ads and skip the faulty and economically biased moral debate around it.
edit:
While I agree that the blacklisting solution shouldn't be too much work, the charming "setup and forget" experience most adblockers provide will probably win through.
> I do think that only a very small portion of adblocking users wants to "justify" anything in this regard. Most just don't want to see ads and skip the faulty and economically biased moral debate around it.
This is possibly true, but not particularly relevant, as my comment mentions that I'm talking specifically about those who _do_ engage in moral justification. Among the people with whom I've talked about it, those who claim a moral justification are far more common than those who simply say "I don't like ads and I don't care about creators not getting paid". I would be surprised if there weren't many HNers whose sample is similar to mine.
Tangentially but not importantly, I'm not convinced that only a small portion of users openly think "yes I'm consuming a product without paying and I have no other justification other than 'i dont want to pay' ". Part of the reason you see such contortions in an attempt at moral justification is because one can draw a pretty clear parallel to "I would shoplift if I didn't think I'd get caught", with the only (somewhat dubious) distinction being differences in marginal cost.
Note that I have talked to people who have a moral stance on adblocking and piracy that _is_ consistent, but this is rare since it's usually accompanied by a pretty radical stance along the lines of "all information (music, art, writing, etc) should be completely free", which requires a pretty massive amount of philosophical baggage in terms of having a sense of how this affects the incentive to create said information.
Of course, but that's not relevant in the slightest. Independently of whether or not one is happy with non-ad monetization, the decision under discussion is:
"In the _absence_ of non-ad monetization for a given product, do I decide that the transaction (view ads, get the product) is not for me or do I unilaterally decide to take the product without compensation".
O pretty much never click on ads, so ppc campaigns are worthless on me... as to ppv ads, most of them are obnoxious.. including on the main site I work for... I tend to whitelist it only because I need to make sure ads work.
That said, thankfully the new design has fewer ads, which should help a lot. It really just depends, it's easy to go down a rabbit whole with ads... but we get 90% if our ad revenue from 40% of our ads. So cutting out a lot changes the layout of income without nearly so much impact on revenue.
But with the "download here"-button ads, there is no way to know what button to press anymore. Now installing Adblock is a requirement.