Comments on: Ad Blockers Considered Harmful

By: Brian

Brian — Sat, 02 May 2009 15:24:52 +0000

The free web is unlikely to disappear, even if marketing does. I’m not sure if you remember, but the web was almost entirely free in it’s former iterations. There are other ways for quality sites to remain; Wikipedia for example. My company also hosts a Mediawiki project on our websever without charge or advertisement. Web-hosting has become so ridiculously cheap that any small to moderate size host who decides to ’support’ their fee’s with advertisements is probably greedier than those users looking for a smoother browsing experience.

Working for ad-blocking software is most definately the ilk of ISP caps. Flash ads and images take up considerably more bandwidth than text. They take a long time to load, and in the case of java or flash, they can cause instability. These ads then, while bringing in individually insignificant amounts of income for the webmaster, are also costing their readers a similar minor fee.

And yes, this is most definately the result of webmasters and ad companies together. It is the fault of your counterparts, not grubby users. Consider a 7 page article with few words – the text representing say 20% of the screen space. We all know the ilk. Or the fly-overs, pop-ups, pop-unders, flashing banners, etc. Ad-blockers are the seeds come due.

By: qman

qman — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 09:06:41 +0000

I have to agree with Jonathan, the problem started with large, unscrupulous ad companies (like Doubleclick) that made annoying, browser-killing ads in the first place. Smaller ad-rings and custom ads, which are designed to fit the site in question, and are not designed to annoy users, are the answer. These don’t get blocked by the big lists because they’re different. Google’s text ads were a good idea, but they have one big downfall; load times. Google’s server response is just too slow, it causes pages to take an extra 15-30 seconds to load, even on broadband–something that’s just not acceptable in these times.

Now, I’m not against webmasters trying to stay afloat, or even make a buck. All I’m saying is, the reason ad blockers exist is because advertisers went too far. This problem can be remedied, but only if advertisers take more care to make less annoying ads, and the writers of block lists take care to judge ads by how bad they are, not just make catch-all lists. A 1-10 scale would be appropriate, and let the user decide what level they want to start with.

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 18:01:37 +0000

I use Firefox and Adblock. I have to say… you know, it’s a valid point and all, but it’s the advertising companies doing all of this bullshit like making ads that scream at you and ads that spawn a million popups that made the advertising model fall into the hole. The business crushed itself by becoming too annoying for the consumer to put up with it anymore.

It’s not like they ever payed well in the first place. If you have something that you need to support itself, you’d probably be better off selling some kind of merchandise or having ads contracted on a smaller scale from people within the same field of interest so that they wouldn’t be blocked by default.

By: James

James — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 22:33:13 +0000

I have issues with “ethical ad blocking.”

1) Taste. I don’t need to be seeing advertisements of females in various stages of undress on Facebook and other sites. This is a big issue for a lot of people.
2) Flash is still largely crap on Linux. It no longer completely crashes my browser every three ads or so, but this is a relatively new development. Not having Flash installed is extremely close to using an ad blocker. Am I “hurting the free internet” by not using a buggy closed source plugin which is fond of crashing my browser?
3) Both your approved ad blockers appear to be Windows only and commercial. Bravo.
4) AdBlock Plus, the most popular adblocker for Firefox, defaults to blocking everything and allows the user to whitelist sites with two clicks. This is more than reasonable. Having to manually blacklist every single site I don’t want to see ads for is ridiculous; I go all over the net. It’s far more reasonable for me to whitelist known inoffensive sites I visit regularly and enjoy.
5) Ads make websites take longer to load and waste bandwith, something dialup users and people with restricted throughput detest.
6) The tiny fraction of users are using adblock are not cutting deep into your profit because they aren’t the people clicking on these ads in the first place.
7) Adblock Plus features custom subscription blacklists. A lot of your complaints could be addressed with such a list. Care to recommend one?

By: Ravey

Ravey — Sat, 24 May 2008 13:39:37 +0000

Opera is pretty handy with pop-ups, you can choose how it handles them which is nice. If ad-blockers exist that block the actual ads on pages, that’s definately wrong but pop-ups are less of an issue and if they have to exist, it’s better if they pop-up under your website in a seperate tab and perhaps close automatically after a short while.

It’s also important for ads to be relevant and non-disruptive…Which used to be much larger issue than it is now.

By: Adam

Adam — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 11:45:02 +0000

Link removed, since you’re spamming for your own site. I’m aware of the history of “considered harmful” but your crusade doesn’t seem especially meaningful.

By: Anonymu

Anonymu — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 16:48:47 +0000

See link. “Considered harmful” considered harmful. I just wish we’d all stop using this “considered harmful” crap. This is a good example of “‘considered harmful’ considered harmful.” “Ad blockers considered harmful” is not a meaningful title, and it produces the wrong impression. Read the “‘Considered Harmful’ Essays Considered Harmful” essay. (No, it’s not mine, not my website, and not related to me in any way.)

By: Peter

Peter — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 10:57:12 +0000

I agree that blocking all ads is harmful. The hosting of my website dosbox.com is payed from advertisement income.
If I don’t get enough money from that anymore. I will probably simply unplug the plug. Making free software or other free products costs resources enough already. I don’t want it to cost money to deliver it to you.

But some people don’t see understand that. To support other sites I don’t have any adblocking software installed. Off course sometimes there is an annoying ad, but that is a small price to pay for the free things you get in return.

Unfortunately people like Arnos only think about their own profit and might lead to the downfall of the free internet as we know it.

By: Arnos

Arnos — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 00:21:25 +0000

Perhaps I was exaggerating the severity of the bad ads. The ads that annoyed me, I saw at casual, normal, games blog (http://freegamer.blogspot.com/ and http://jayisgames.com/ to be precise), they were advertising some stupid MMORPG, I guess that after seeing no ads for such a long time, I over-reacted.

Btw, when I said one in a thousand I meant 1 in 1000 ads, not sites.

By: Adam

Adam — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 00:11:27 +0000

Lol thanks, I’m more in need of art than anything else!