Adblock Plus blocked from attending ad industry talkfest Content crasher Adblock Plus says it has been uninvited from an advertising industry confab after paying a pricey entrance fee. The online advertising scrubber will have to stay home and sob after the Interactive Advertising Bureau reneged on its approval for the Annual Leadership bash in California this weekend. Adblock Plus …
It's odd, engaging with the "enemy" would bring a lot of benefit to the table. The ad-peddlers are losing this war, and as soon as adblocking becomes simple on Android (it currently requires root to do properly), another massive chunk of their revenue will disappear.
Presumably burying their heads and ignoring the problem allows the people running the ship to pretend everything is OK, the iceburg actually hasn't done that much damage, we'll be in New York soon. So please carry on spending your money.
I find the most annoying ones are the normal looking adverts that have embedded code to redirect me to some malware filled website that tries to tell me that I have a virus and need to download their removal tool.
Disable Javascript once the page has loaded (sometimes before) on ad-filled sites. I do that frequently on the zergnet and other sites (you know - the ones with a paragraph on plus loads of adverts and spread over several pages).
In all honesty - it's those sorts of sites that just need killing. Apart from the slow load times with Javascript on, the page layout looks like a student created Geocities page.
This is why we don't trust the ad industry...
>God I hope (but doubt) it will become easier to block ads on Android soon.
Almost anyone reading this site probably has the skills for an easy fix for unrooted Android or even non jail broken IOS. Simply install privoxy on your router or some other dedicated computer on your home network and point the proxy on all your unrooted devices at it. Granted that only takes care of wifi at home but that is a huge help. You can also use the auto proxy url to http://ipad.speedmeup.net (works for all phones with proxy ability obviously) for anywhere else on wifi but then of course you are giving them your browser history by definition.
Given that Google's core revenue model is based on profiling, tracking and advertising, I doubt we'll be seeing simple adblocking (or at least simple adblocking that continues to work) on Android any time soon...
Given that Google's core revenue model is based on profiling, tracking and advertising, I doubt we'll be seeing simple adblocking (or at least simple adblocking that continues to work) on Android any time soon...
.. and I object against profiling, tracking and other violations of my privacy, and the fact that using Android in full either requires rooting it (making it unsafe) or agreeing to Google's terms which contain things I could not possibly allow. Which is why I ended up paying the Apple tax instead..
Targeted adds arnt really that bad are they? Apples news, music, assistance and mapping all suck because they cant draw from this information. Its a small price to pay for much better service if you ask me as you cant get a personal service without it.
Unless your up to no good. In which case you should go with Apple.
"Apparently Google scrapes all my info and does nothing useful with it."
Nothing useful to you.
This is a little bit like hearing a cow complaining that the slaughterhouse truck doesn't take you to any cool fields.
Yeah, just keep telling yourself that Apple doesn't track you and violate your privacy.
Easy: I see it in what leaves my network. It's a lot less with Apple, and it's easier to control. In addition, Apple doesn't have (a)socia buttons on every website and "free" statistics spread all over the Internet, so I reckon I'm in a better position than with Google..
"on Android any time soon..."
Can't do much for in app adverts, but for a much nicer web experience install Firefox and Ghostery and set the block lists to "everything".
Stuff is just so much quicker, and no more big shouty "YOUR PHONE IS INFECTED WITH 16,853,356,854,222,579 VIRUSES - CLICK HERE TO REMOVE THEM WITHIN TWENTY SECONDS OR YOUR PHONE WILL BE PERMANENTLY DAMAGED." messages. Yay.
goto hardocp.com (its a tech site) fourms and even talk about adblock they ban your account (the site owner admin bans you)
i surprised he has not implemented an adblock detection to auto ban people (he is very anti adblock) or main page block the site access
I encountered a tech site about a fortnight ago, it possibly had a solution for a problem I was trying to solve. It picked up I had adblock, and with no warning asking me to disable adblock banned our IP (so no one else at work could access the site without getting the same banned because you have adblock message)
This is the site: http://wsdlbrowser.com/
And their banned message http://wsdlbrowser.com/banned-by-adblock
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"And I'm sure you will happily pay for *all* of the content you consume without charge to you? Glad you can afford that."
It makes no odds to them, I have no interest in buyinhg any of the shit they try to sell me, so whether I see the ad or not has no marerial effect on their income, but I do object to them stealing my data allowance.
Have you not considered that they get paid for displaying ads rather than getting money for a click through? Ads have been round paying for stuff on the Internet for a very long time now, definitely way before the concept of a mobile data bundle existed. Fact is, ads pay for content whether you like it or not and a lot of the stuff you can access on the Internet would not be there if it were not for them. Don't get me wrong, I'm not for intrusive deceitful or malware ridden ads at all, but to moan about their existence in general is a bit rich and short sighted to say the least.
Prepare a web site with links to ad-blocking browsers and software for all platforms.
Park a van outside the entrance their venue with a wifi AP and a banner on the side with the SSID. Connecting to it auto-redirects to the above web site, and links to the most ad-infested sites run by IAB members
Buy the biggest billboard nearest to their venue with a before-and-after screen-shot of an IAB-run ad-infested site, and the URL of the link page mentioned above.
Fork a version of AdBlock Plus that aggressively blocks adverts from IAB members, aggressively circumvents anti-AdBlock measures, and doesn't have the white list. Effectively it's uBlock Origin, but it gets their brand on it and they can explain explain why they created it.
"Have you not considered that they get paid for displaying ads rather than getting money for a click through"
I have, and I did and I still didn't care...
"but to moan about their existence in general is a bit rich and short sighted to say the least."
perhaps, but I still don't care, adblocking is a solution to a problem, fix the problem and I wouldn't need to adblock, the ad agencies need to clean up there own act, not escalate the war.
*Enthusiastic, roof raising applause*
Hear! Hear! Brilliant! I can't upvote you enough for that!
Surround the building in classic besieging tactic, don't let anyone in without harrassing the hell out of them with shouted slogans, upraised signs, and any other form of PsyOps warfare that will get the message across that Ads Suck & banning an ad blocker from the forum only proves none of the participants are even remotely interested in making the situation any better.
Would we get Bonus Points for *projecting* through powered bullhorns about ads, hacking the internal video feeds to display "Ads Suck!" on every screen, infiltrating the audio system to play Lilly Allen's "Fuck You" in an endless loop, all while beaming BT/WiFi messages to every device capable of receiving it that "Ads suck, waste your bandwidth, & cost you money in data fees from your carrier. But you don't care so you shouldn't mind this ad for crowbars with which from your ass you can extract your head! Crowbars - Buy one now!"
*Cough*
Damn I hate advertisers. Good thing I've got a HOSTS file, anti malware, & have my browser's security screwed down tighter than a nun's knickers.
=-Jp
"And I'm sure you will happily pay for *all* of the content you consume without charge to you? Glad you can afford that."
Most people have no problem with ads in general. What most people object to is the ongoing results of the arms race between advertisers which results in ads over the top of content, full window/screen video ads, ad slingers not vetting ads for maleware, flashing/noisy ads and so on.
Some adslingers on some websites fall back to static or GifAnim ads when scripting is disabled which sit nicely to one side or even inline without "shouting" at you or obscuring the content. I don't actually use an adblocker as such. I use noscript and ghostery. Together, they block most ads because I want to block tracking and attack vectors. The fact the ads are blocked is incidental and something the adslingers will have to deal with.
I don't 'consume' content -- it's still all there after my visit.
Their stuff on the net DOES consume my bandwidth and resources, though. I choose to allow the specific content provider to do that. I do not choose to allow stupid greedy shitheads to do that, though.
"You do consume the website's bandwidth though."
Err... No.
With adblock, noscript and a modified hosts file I don't download these ads. Therefore I don't use up the sites bandwidth. So the site should pay a little less for their hosting.
I haven't requested these ads, they are forced upon me. In my opinion these unwanted advertisers are stealing my electricity, something that is against UK law.
With adblock, noscript and a modified hosts file I don't download these ads. Therefore I don't use up the sites bandwidth. So the site should pay a little less for their hosting.
If you download a webpage (which is what you're doing when you visit a website,) then you consume the website owner's bandwidth. Ads are usually hosted by the advertising network, blocking them won't affect the website owner's hosting bill in any way.
And I'm sure you will happily pay for *all* of the content you consume without charge to you? Glad you can afford that.
Let's kill this myth for once and for all, shall we?
If one subscribes to the financial forum, ADVFN, http://uk.advfn.com , which isn't cheap then one is blasted by adverts. In fact, most of the screen is filled up with adverts.
AdBlock is essential for sites like this because most of the bandwidth is taken up by adverts slung at the user. Now, if you believe in the mantra that to have no adverts then one should pay for the site then the reverse ought to apply: if you pay for the site then there should be no adverts.
I run a web site which is accessible by subscription only. Guess how many adverts there are on the site... That's right, none.
There are three ways to look at this issue, from the viewpoints of the user, the site owner and the advertising agencies.
The user tends to accept that a fee paid will remove adverts. That's fair according the user.
The web site owner requires income from the site and could either do this from advertising or subscription. As I have declared there's no adverts on my site and I think that's fair.
Then we come to the advertising industry. This is where fair play seems to break down. Looking at this from the viewpoint of a browser and web site owner I get the impression that they want more, more and more adverts served even if they are of dubious quality. They don't care what they serve and they appear to have little in the way of integrity.
So when I read that AdBlock has been prevented from attending the conference it doesn't surprise me in the least.
We hear a lot from advertising agency types here with their "accept adverts or pay for it" mantra and we hear from users who would happily pay for their often visited sites to stop advertising. But the funny thing is that we don't hear from the site owners much at all and the only voices we hear are from the advertising sector telling us that they know what the owners want. Which is something I don't believe.
On the whole the advertising industry is out of step with what is needed and what is required and is here only to serve themselves first an foremost, the site owners a poor second and not even give a thought for the users.
If it were otherwise then we wouldn't have paid-for sites like ADVFN serving adverts like they do. The advertising company that they use would have advised them to rein in a little on the adverts but, no, it's sell, sell, sell all the way.
"There are three ways to look at this issue, from the viewpoints of the user, the site owner and the advertising agencies."
There's a fourth (and these days a fifth).
The fourth is the actual advertiser. He's been sold on the idea of advertising by some agency in the advertising industry. The poor sod is now paying the industry and the website to piss off potential customers. The advertising industry is very good at selling advertising. Providing that's good for their bottom lines they've got what they came for. Why should they worry about anyone else?
The fifth? That's the malvertisers.
"And I'm sure you will happily pay for *all* of the content you consume without charge to you? Glad you can afford that."
As far as the advertiser's concerned if they were advertising something I might want then they're better off if I block the advert. If I get the ad them I'll probably boycott them and look for another vendor. And the more obnoxious the ad then the more likely the boycott.
The industry needs to figure out a workable micropayments scheme, or some other way than ads to support web sites. There no incentive to do so as long as advertisers are willing to pay sites to place popups, popovers, ads that move around and cover the content you are trying to see, ads with close buttons that don't actually close the ad, ads that flash or make noise, ads from shady sources that try to install malware, etc.
Site owners have no one to blame but themselves, no one would bother blocking ads if they were unobtrusive - no one ever had someone clipping the ads out of their newspaper or magazine or was otherwise really annoyed by them (other than those postcard-sized inserts that would fall out of the magazine) because the ads were unobtrusive. Unfortunately site owners got greedy and wanted more money, so they accepted in-your-face ads they knew their readers would find very aggravating.
At first they were pop ups, the equivalent of those damn inserts in magazines, but that was enough to get the ad blocking industry started with pop up blockers. Missing that newfound revenue they accepted worse and worse ads until browsing without an ad blocker became impossible on many sites. Unfortunately that led to collateral damage of responsible site owners who didn't go that far, but what are you going to do?
So fuck 'em. Let the content providers who rely on advertising alone go under. That will incent the content industry to come up with a micropayments scheme that is sustainable. I don't want to see the Reg go under as a result of this, but if that's what it takes to get a proper solution in place that isn't reliant on an arms race to make ads more and more annoying, then so be it.
It is NOT MY PROBLEM if my blocking ads causes problems for the site owners, just like it is not my problem if me skipping ads on a DVR causes problems for the networks. I'm sure you are one of those who argued against DVRs because fast forwarding through the commercials is stealing! If they didn't have such long and frequent commercial breaks fewer people would bother to skip them. I watched something on BET recently and there were some commercial breaks that were nearly 10 minutes long (no, I'm not kidding or exaggerating!)
quote from abp blog:
after buying a ticket, booking a flight and reserving a room, we got, ahem, dis-invited.
/quote
quote 2 from abp blog:
and it informed us that our registration for the summit was canceled and our fee refunded.
/quote2
so... did IAB also compensate them for the cost of the airplane tickets and hotel reservations? Doesn't look like they got their airplane tickets and hotel reservations refunded to me.
i would think that since IAB took the 'nuke them' option themselves, this counts as a valid reason for nuking any IAB member company out of the acceptable ads program.
Splendid idea: An outfit which undoes some of the damage that your unethical industry causes; has a userbase in the high millions; and yet is prepared to work with you. Why not personally piss off the leaders of that project? In a high-handed and dismissive fashion? What could possibly go wrong....?
why bother with bricks? i heard there might be an available orbital weapons platform out there... a couple of plasma torpedoes would probably be enough... and they're cheaper than bricks and much faster to deploy when comparing to the amount of bricks needed for all those doors and windows :p
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Orbital_weapon_platform
I don't browse the net on my phone at all. I visit specific sites as reference, but I leave my general browsing to my desktop that has AdBlock.
When I got a new phone with a new data plan I started browsing more, and was inundated with auto-play, auto-start, pop-up infested crap from even sites I would consider reputable. As I've been using ad blockers (uBlock at the moment) for years now I had no idea that's what websites had become. If that's the current state of "advertising", they can fuck right off. Frankly, the only good thing to do with that ad conference would be to make sure they all gather there, then lock the doors and sink the building into some quicksand. Which, on second thought, probably wouldn't work since these lowlifes have probably already gone as low as they can go, so couldn't sink any further.
Pretty much in the same situation, although I do have a few sites I white list. There's also the security issues which come with allowing ads, a friend of mine decided to do the whole "pay google for no ads" thing for a couple weeks and ended up with their first virus in years (a trojan caught by anti-virus fortunately). There's far too little work that goes into checking that ads are sanitized if they're going to have dynamic content
If you're technical enough and have a fast enough home connection, OpenVPN and Squid are your friend. :)
I route my phone like this, it ensures my phones connection isn't being snooped on by unknown WiFi networks, gets me around the pointless blocks at work and removes a lot of ads (not as many as adblock on the desktop does, but enough).
On a related note. Since last night the Telegraph has blocked access to its online front page unless you turn off your Adblock. They should have been content with pushing their advertising sponsored features which didn't get blocked.
One less newspaper to take up my time trying to sift the populist dross from hard news. Pity their layout wasn't too bad.
Edit: the block seems to be variable - dependent on cookies??
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gosh, I didn't realize Daily Telegraph is one of the whatdoyoucallthem... tabloids. Never read the buggers anyway... Strange, but their page opens up in my browser, despite all the ad-blocking plug ins. Mind, you, can't see any ads on their page, other than, well, garbage masked as news...
> I didn't realize Daily Telegraph is one of the whatdoyoucallthem... tabloids.
The Telegraph certainly is NOT one of those tabloids who show some topless model on page 3.
Instead we have several pages of tasteful pictures of the teenage daughters of some minor royal in their bikinis and a journalistically acclaimed 10page special on a new lingerie range - with pictures.
I have only seen them block pages that would require paying the fee (and only a couple of times on one machine so far) - I find it ironic they say they are committed to quality on the blocking overlay (or something like that) as it has been steadily going down hill for years so I am not inclined to pay even the nominal subscription fee and I often wonder why I paid for the Saturday dead tree edition
" I find it ironic they say they are committed to quality on the blocking overlay [..]"
I now think that what they have changed is their "you have had your free accesses for the week" overlay - to include a note that you also have Ad blocking in place. Possibly a taste of things to come?
The DT works fine for me on FF with adblock, ghostery etc running. BTW here is a neat add-on for FF to remove cookies for individual sites so you can quickly bypass the DT article limit.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/remove-cookies-for-site/
Chrome has similar add-on.
... Gun...
... BANG!
Dear Advertisers, YOU are the problem, not ad blockers. YOU are the ones who are annoying people off to such an extent that they want to use adblockers.
You have got so wrapped up in the idea that getting your content in front of peoples' eyeballs is the most important idea that you can't see that people are fed up with their eyeballs bleeding as a result of all this crap!
Try stepping back and taking a deep breath and considering *why* people are blocking your content and think that, just perhaps, there's a better way of doing things.
Or you can sit in your smug little echo chamber and ignore anyone who points out anything that conflicts with your idea that "Well, advertising's good, isn't it, so more advertising's got to be even better, hasn't it...?"
Thank you.
Signed
Everyone you've pissed off.
we will blacklist all ads that don't meet our acceptable ad criteria. But we like going to these shows to offer adslingers the chance to pay us lots of money to whitelist them
It's pretty much blackmail and I don't think they're the white knights they purport to be, but I still use 'em
"we will blacklist all ads that don't meet our acceptable ad criteria. But we like going to these shows to offer adslingers the chance to pay us lots of money to whitelist them"
There is a statement on the Adblock website that says they only take money from the larger agencies - not small or medium sized firms. I guess ultimately, it costs money to implement schemes like Acceptable Ads as people need to be employed to make sure advertisers are compliant and remain so.
I thought this was adblock own policy, making "carefully selected" ad-men pay a pricey entrance fee to the un-blocked blocked content, aka whitelist? Well, they are morally superior, as they do let through those ads, while the ad-men do not let through the door adblockmen. Perhaps they should be grateful lynching by ad-men must be at least as nasty as watching their ads.
Schadenfreunde? You bet!
According to the IAB's rather garish website, there are "Still a few seats left" so it looks like AdBlock can go ahead and rebook - unless IAB's stance is no more than a fit of pique.
http://www.iab.com/
And the site seens to work with AdBlock set. I rather hope that may change.
I have a few rules advertisers must follow before I will disable Ghostery and NoScript. These rules are not too difficult because the internet once thrived when my rules were being followed, except for rule 6. If it was successful once, it can be successful again.
(1) Absolutely no tracking in any way, no exception.
(2) Absolutely no autoplay videos of any kind except when I press play on a video or when I click on a link for a video (and not a link for a story).
(3) Absolutely no ads that cover part or all of a website.
(4) Absolutely no ads that try to use my location. No "Shocking secret [city name] man discovers!"
(5) Absolutely no ads that use Flash, Java, or Javascript, no exception.
(6) Since you took the money, you are financial responsible for vetting your ads. If you ads injects or attempts to inject malware, you must pay a fine.
you forgot....
(7) No ads for things I never buy.
(8) No ads for things I already own. (Amazon!! WTF?)
(9) No ads for things I will *never* own (take a guess, it will be 99.9999% of what you peddle).
I will in return visit a website once a month and tick a box for every single object, service or whimsy I *might* be interested in and you can send me a link to a PDF I will download and read.
Otherwise, I will take all possible steps to block ads that consume cycles biological or electrical...
P.
Go to a website to order things. Immediate popup asking me if I want to save 10% by subscribing to their newsletter. Or...online chat popup -- in the first 15 seconds I'm on the site.
I'm going there to order light bulbs, because my local home center doesn't have them.
Light bulbs is all they sell.
No, I don't want your light bulb newsletter. Just take my order and send it to me.
SO, as an open minded person, I turned off my adblockers and went to a well known clickbait website and waited.
and waited.
and waited.
For all the ads, java, silverlight, tracking cookies, etc to load.
It was like being back in the 90s with 56K dial-up, waiting for that page to load.
BTW, I am on a 80Mb/s fibre connection (and it DOES run at 80Mb/s!!).
ABP+ re-enabled.
I was young and had hair when this page started loading.
Full page ads - if I can't read the content why go to the site?
Video - auto plays (usually at full volume) a deffo no. Had an android app that used to play an unskippable video played at full volume even if the phone was on silent. Uninstalled.
Until this shit stops my adblock, ghostery and noscript remain!
Is that advertisers are increasingly acting as if they have the *right* to force people to view their wares. There's a good example of this on the Daily Torygraph's website, where the content is obscured by a modal div telling me that I need to disable my adblocker - not only that, but the body element has been set to overflow:hidden so that after removing the obscuration layer the content is still invisible (cunning technique though!). Took about 15 minutes to write the correction script in TamperMonkey. This is comparable to the enforced adverts^h^h^h trailers on Amazon Prime Video or those in YouTube. Although the German court cases (http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/may/27/german-broadcasters-adblock-rtl-prosiebensat1-eyeo) have been lost, it's probably only a matter of time before some scumbag^h^h^h marketeer manages to persuade the courts in their favour. I was "part of" the internet waaaaaaay before the WWW or Eternal September came about, and I never agreed to carry commercial content on my network - so, as far as I'm concerned, they're breaching my terms and conditions by spewing this rubbish onto my network.
"There's a good example of this on the Daily Torygraph's website, [..]"
Not sure what it is they are trying to today. That Ad blocker warning came up to cover their front page - which has previously not been view limited in any way. Deleting the cookies as per usual for the content pages' limit seems to stop it reappearing.
...if you have good content and a good community they will pay.
I use a few sites that every year have a fund-raiser week where they ask for contributions to help pay for the site to keep it ad free.
I'm more than happy to chip in $10 a year for the pleasure and I'm sure that more revenue in a year from me than ads would garner.
Malvertising is the sole reason I block Ads. After getting hit a couple times from infected Ad Networks I had enough and started blocking them... My Web experience has been better for it and my computer runs better for it.
I recommend everyone try out OpenDNS... you get a free account for home and just block malware and ad networks.. works a treat for home use. Also have a corporate account with work... great service!
A well-known UK bank recently 'upgraded' their web site. I found this would now take ages to load, and freeze for around 30 seconds before I could even type anything into the login screen, like we were back in the '90s with dial-up. A quick search on t'web informed me that blocking their marketing sub-domain with my ad-blocker would solve the problem, and now it loads properly (and works perfectly well).
So you see, it's not just blocking ads that these things are useful for, they give you a greater degree of control over what parts of a web site you load, so you can cut out the crap you don't want to waste your bandwidth on.
^^^This. Damn it, this is so bloody apt.
I tried to go to a site to find out how to fix some issue I was having, only to have the site refuse to finish loading. My ScreenReaderEnvironment just kept making the clicking noise that signals the page is being refreshed & reloaded, even long after I hit escape to stop it from doing so.
I had to kill the entire browser to get rid of the tab with the site on it, refuse to let it reload the site once I relaunched the browser, and tried to view the site from a Google cache.
The plain text copy was essentially useless & it took saving the target to a file so I could open it in an editor to find out why.
The WebDev coders had filled it with so much scripting & cruft that my SRE couldn't process the entire page before the script forced a metarefresh, thus causing the SRE to start reading again from the beginning in an endless loop.
Disabling scripting, reloading the page, and *POOF* there's suddenly content... only to find out it had nothing to do with what I had gone there for in the first place.
And all the code causing it to shit itself? Trying to load third party ads, beacons, trackers, web bugs, et al. There was so much advertising crap crippling the site that it *couldn't* load properly.
And we're supposed to let these idiots cram such untested code down our throats? How about No. In fact, how about I just leave scripting disabled by default, make sure my HOSTS file is current, that my browser refuses to load cross-domain content, blocks pop up/under, and refuses to play audio/video except that hosted on sites like youtube. Oh look, now my SRE stops having a cow, pages load quickly, and I can actually find the content I went there to find to begin with! *Gasp!*
They started this war, I'm merely making sure I don't become a casualty.
This may be pedantic nerdery, but hey, it's a tech site.
I think it unhelpful to refer to "blocking" ads. That's not how HTTP works. Everything you see in your browser was requested by your browser, a piece of software running on your computer. You own it, you control it. No one can oblige you to pull down ads or any other disagreeable content. Those who bleat on about it being unfair that you deprive website owners of income by "blocking" ads probably don't realise this, and could use some education on the topic. We didn't ask them to make their stuff freely available.
Anyway, it's only because of the deeply broken third party ad-serving model that we have arrived here. If web sites served ads from their own servers, implying that they took some kind of responsibility for them, the likes of adblock would not exist.
-A.
Like most people here, I don't block ads on general principle. I do it for security and sometimes for usability issues.
At home I use Firefox with Adblock. At work I am forced to use IE, and sites that I use at home are so slow they are almost unusable, frequently I get told the proxy is blocking me for exceeding the sessions per second limit. crash.net is probably the worst offender for this.
I've found that mobile web sites are becoming less and less tolerable due to the over abundance of ads, and their ad techniques are becoming more stealthy for clicks.
Waiting for ads to load on an ad server slows down page load times. I just give up waiting for a page to finish loading and I move on. This kills the time I would have spent on a web site which is bad for the webmaster.
Trying to watch a 1 minute video clip that take a long time to preload a 30 second ad gives me enough time to just click back or move on. Ads are also loud and obnoxious while I'm sitting quietly and peaceful. Again this is bad for the webmaster who loses my eyes.
Ad masters have found that loading up ads with "Next" page buttons tricking me into accidentally clicking their ads as they get paid per click is also obnoxious. The webmasters also appear to place the next button so close or sometimes on nearly on top of ads so fat fingers like mine will accidentally click their ads so they can receive a paid click. If the click accidentally open a link to an app install also slows down my cell phone. I just move on.
My favourite of them all, how the "Next" page button is just below an ad and magically just as I'm about to click the page moves downwards so I accidentally click an ad. Even just slightly moving my finger close to my screen makes the page pull down automatically causing displacing the next button. I just learn to avoid that web site and again the webmaster is losing my eyes.
That's my experience. Mobile web sites are becoming less and less usable for me, and adblocker would fix all of those problems if it were available on mobile.
... So why would I invite advertisers to vomit over my laptop? I've blocked ads for years now, partly because I absolutely detest intrusive advertising and partly because they're complete junk in every respect and contain more dodgy code than a dyslexic cryptographer's notebook. I genuinely can't understand why someone running a site would sign up with the ad networks that operate the way they do. I've no idea how bad sites are these days and I'm not disabling my defences in order to find out. Similarly I don't know what dog shit tastes like. From what I remember of all the bullshit popups and garish animated gifs, the autoplaying videos and annoying sound effects, you have to wonder who the ad slingers think they're targeting with that crap? Even worse is the supposedly "personalised" content. I bought an ironing board from Argos sometime last year, stuck it on the Argos card because I was strapped and a couple of days later I got a "personalised" e-mail from Argos showing me their range of ironing boards. How many ironing boards do they think I fucking need? If that's what passes for intelligently targeted content in the world of ads then is it any wonder everyone does their utmost to ignore/avoid them?
For those who bang the drum about advertising funding sites, so fucking what? If they charged money instead most would pretty soon disappear because so many sites are just garbage that nobody would ever pay hard cash for. There are very few sites I'd miss enough to want to pay for them and those that I do find some value in (as opposed to mindless timewasting) I'd stump up for. I've done so in the past when obscure forums I frequent have needed help with server costs, etc.
Oh, and for those saying you can't get ABP on Android without rooting the phone, go look at the ABP website. You download the APK directly from them, set up a localproxy on your wifi connection and you're done. It filters the traffic as it hits your phone, before it gets passed through to whatever's requesting it. It's not perfect but I rarely gets ads on my phone, except for through Youtube and similar. It even strips ads out of most apps which makes for a refreshing change.
The only real downside is that it can't do anything about ads served over the data connection, but if I'm using my phone for browsing I'm generally either at work or at home so have access to wifi. If I'm out and about I'm probably doing something more interesting than nobbing around on t'internet.
Setup a local proxy with them (AdBolck Browser)...
Its more secure then say rooting. lol Enjoy giving whoever runs said Proxy all of your Passwords, PINs, and or Bank Account Numbers. To the person(s) behind whatever Proxy in use on the day.
I'll be sitting here with the rooted 'droid with Adaway installed. It kills all the other anoying as [REDACTED] InApp Advertising as well! Double lol
Thanks but, I think I'll carry on with AdAway. This might not be the Silver Bullet to stop 'em all. But, I would still have yet to find anything that could do the half of what it does. Let alone do that much of it any better.
Quote apart from the fact that the sort of ads being pushed (flashy, distracting and all that) are the sort that put me off doing business with the company so advertised, I would want the advertising industry to guarantee the safety and security of all adverts served up and compensate people for losses incurred when malware gets into the system, all without the need for expensive litigation. If they're not prepared to cover my losses, I'm not prepared to risk letting their dodgy scripts have access to my system.
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