French publishers join Swedish 'Block Party' to pester ad refuseniks French publishers are joining the “block party” - by taking aggressive collective action to thwart ad-blockers. In August, around 80 to 90 per cent of Swedish publishers will participate in a co-ordinated campaign to nag readers using ad blocking software that they really shouldn’t use ad blocking software. Le Figaro suggests …
A farce, indeed, when one can equate "easier to fire" and "easier to employ" while keeping a straight face.
It is the truth though. I work for a US company that, when it starts a new project/product, hires many developers, in various places (US, UK, Ireland, India). If the project isn't successful some of those developers are redeployed, some are laid-off. Granted the US lay-off approach is brutal in execution, but few of those that I know spent more than a month or two unemployed before getting rehired.
All except the French branch, where laying people off takes 6-9 months, and the layoff comes with a lump sum, a package of 6-9 months retraining, a year's health care, and at least one month's salary for each year of seniority. all paid by the company.
There, the US managers' attitude is simple. No more hiring in France, it's simply not worth it in an uncertain market. The unions expect "jobs for life", and no sensible (non-French) company will pander to them. Hence the high French unemployment rates, and huge black hole in pensions, health and welfare budgets. If it's too hard to lay people off when the going gets tough, companies simply invest in jobs elsewhere.
All except the French branch, where laying people off takes 6-9 months, and the layoff comes with a lump sum, a package of 6-9 months retraining, a year's health care, and at least one month's salary for each year of seniority. all paid by the company.Total bollocks. Learn what a CDD is.
Total bollocks. Learn what a CDD is.
I know perfectly well what a contrat à durée déterminée is. It's a fixed-term employment contract which can be used only to hire someone for a precise and temporary task, such as maternity leave cover. It has very strict legal limitations, and can be renewed at most twice. As for being bollocks, I've gone through the process several times so far, and I can assure you it is an accurate description. I also know that my US-based managerial colleagues simply refuse point-blank to even consider hiring in France because of it.
"I also know that my US-based managerial colleagues simply refuse point-blank to even consider hiring in France because of it."
And to balance this, I know some Europeans that were pink slipped when the company decided it had what it wanted from the employees - as in here's your pay, note the pink bit of paper, get out - and as such they refuse point-blank to work in the United States.
Whereas in America, the black hole in pensions is blamed on "unenforceable" contracts made in the "golden age" promising "too much" in terms of retirement benefits.
But is actually caused by the administering organization not funding the financial instruments upon which those benefits were calculated for years upon years.
See: New Jersey State Govt., Wisconsin State Govt., [insert state name] State Govt.
Caveat: Contracts to deliver bonuses to junior officer ranks and above in the Banking sector are considered "Extremely Enforceable" and not subject to debate even by the people called upon to fund such bonuses when the said officers prove incompetent in the highest degree.
> All except the French branch, where laying people off takes 6-9 months
Your company's French managers may want to brush up on their French contract law, as there are a number of different types of contract to cater for precisely this situation (and I submit that many projects are indeed successfully and profitably started and concluded in France every day).
Exactly which contract is a better fit depends entirely on the situation at hand, in some cases a contrat à durée déterminée (as mentioned below) may be appropriate, when it is exactly known between which dates a given resource will be needed, in other cases a contrat de prestation de services may be more appropriate, or even a contrat à durée indéterminée. All of these impose certain rights and obligations on both parties, which rights and obligations are known so their relative merits can be judged and their cost can be fairly accurately estimated and budgeted for since day zero.
In other words, from your description your company's HR people are rubbish. Either that or they expect that because in the US things work (or fail to work) in a certain way, it must be the same all over the world.
your company's HR people are rubbish. Either that or they expect that because in the US things work (or fail to work) in a certain way, it must be the same all over the world.
Both true, and both irrelevant. Why hire in a jurisdiction where change is difficult and expensive, when you can hire in one where it is neither?
Your companies hr department is rubbish and doesn't understand foreign employment law
Where did I say that?
My company's French HR department understands French law very well, and applies it rigidly. The company, however, is international. It's used to being able to hire staff for a project, and if all goes well it expects to keep them and grow the team. If, however, a new product doesn't do well in the market and is, after a few years, cancelled, the company expects to be able to redeploy, or if necessary lay off, the staff working on the now-cancelled product. That is not difficult in most places, but French law makes it painful, slow and very expensive. So, managers choose not to hire staff in France. It's nothing to do with not understanding law, they understand it only too well, it's simply a case of sensible planning. The recently proposed changes to French employment law would have considerably eased the problems, but the unions won't play. Seems they prefer to have record levels of unemployment, rather than take a risk on a job being less than 100% certain. It's a very "franco-francais" attitude.
Posting stupid? Post anonymous....
Says the anonymous poster.
but the unions won't play
For the record, the unions are negotiating unimportant details of the law while the vast majority of the population demands its unconditional withdrawal. In other words, the unions are playing along with the government.
Seems they prefer to have record levels of unemployment
Indeed, we prefer to have record levels of unemployment rather than record levels of poverty among the population as is the case in the US. People's well being comes before corporate profits.
For the record, the unions are negotiating unimportant details of the law
I'm not sure they'd agree with that, when the more moderate unions "only" want « le retrait de la barémisation des indemnités prud’homales », i.e. the removal of limits on lay-off packages (despite the fact that the prud'hommes themselves have said that the proposed limits are only formalizing general practice) ) and the removal of almost all the relaxation of the 35 hour week rules. They're happy to go along with the pro-worker stuff like the CPA, not much else. Meanwhile the usual more militant suspects in CGT, FO etc, are calling a strike next week for "pure and simple withdrawal" of the whole thing.
while the vast majority of the population demands its unconditional withdrawal
Yes, 67% of French people still seem to think that money grows on trees. No wonder the Euro zone is such a bastion of mediocrity.
> It's used to being able to hire staff for a project, and if all goes well it expects to keep them and grow the team. If, however, a new product doesn't do well in the market and is, after a few years, cancelled, the company expects to be able to redeploy, or if necessary lay off, the staff working on the now-cancelled product.
That is exactly what many French companies do, day in and day out.
Now, I'm not saying that French employment law is not in many cases a complete arse, or that the unions do not love to shoot themselves in the foot repeatedly, working solely towards their own interests and not those of their members. However, all that is a known quantity and in practical terms, not a major impediment to actually adjusting headcount for anyone who knows what they're doing. Trust me on this.
You ask why companies would hire in France as opposed to other places. From my experience I can suggest, for example: 1. France has, by some measures, the highest productivity rate of all of Europe, in terms of GDP/work hours. 2. Certain fields of expertise are well developed in France which makes it easier/possible to find competent people at reasonable rates (e.g., the aeronautical and nuclear industries). 3. Some contracts may simply stipulate that you open an office in a certain location or hire people from a certain region.
Do not get me wrong, I hate France as much as one is supposed to, but the attitude of your company does not seem particularly productive.
Why hire in a jurisdiction where change is difficult and expensive, when you can hire in one where it is neither?
I rather like the irony here. We have a ban on hiring anyone of US origin, holding a US passport or anyone who can be classed as "accidental American" (no, I didn't make that up, it is an actual term - look it up).
All of these impose certain rights and obligations on both parties, which rights and obligations are known so their relative merits can be judged and their cost can be fairly accurately estimated and budgeted for since day zero.
That's sound theory, but in practice market success is difficult to predict, so that any such budget needs to allow for the potential costs and risks of eventual failure, to make sure that one failed product doesn't bring the whole company down. In a country with rigid, old-fashioned labour laws (like France) such costs tend to be much higher than in more flexible countries (like the UK or Ireland).Fixed-term contracts for aren't going to interest people looking for a career, they do tend to send the message "we don't expect this to last", can be a self-fulfilling approach.
> But it isn't "coordinated". Liberation are not on board with this suicide pact.
I was going to say, I've just come from over there so was a bit surprised to see this. I haven't tried any other French news sites. They tend to be paywalled anyway (well, and one I am actually a subscriber).
> in their national/linguistic niche there won't be an alternative for you to switch your (non-)custom to
Until someone sees the business opportunity. :-)
Inflicting shit ads on the consumer is the lazy man's way of funding their online presence. More savvy businesses use a number of other methods, less intrusive and occasionally more attractive to the user. El Reg appears to be one such example, with their partnerships with other businesses such as Outlaw.com and various consultancies.
Agreed. the most horrendous site I have seen is the Independent. Constantly straining on the seat attempting to deliver it's excrement. It is actually unusable at some times and you have to wait until a straining cycle is over before it decided to give you the content you have clicked on.
Resource hungry adds and added vectors to infect the machine are unwanted on my part.
the most horrendous site I have seen is the Independent.
Just came from there, with ScriptBlock and uBlock Origin engaged. I never go online without them. There is a lot of white space on the Independent home page now, but it's possible to read their typo-ridden content without wading through visual noise.
Torquay Herald Express
Yep, they need an intervention.
That's not a foghorn you're hearing, Herald Express, it's the sound of silence when ad- and script-blocking add-ons hit your site. Wow, your home page loaded in a snap. Lots of interesting stuff to read about kangaroos, foghorns, piglets and a gas works. Your pages look a lot better with ads blocked than a few of my local news sites, I'll give you that. But I turned off uBlock Origin and ScriptBlock when I started writing this reply, and the page took for-freaking-ever to load. And enabling scripts for your domain opened the door for 11 scripts from other domains. No way, Torquay!
Even some retail sites misbehave with a sane blocking regime, so I keep a separate unblocked browser just for affected valued retail sites, but for all other sites which misbehave I'll either add more blocks to remove their blocking overlays or just permanently firewall blacklist them at my router, like have done for some stubborn newspapers and magazines, to avoid wasting my time later.
Exactly. The law of unintended consequences...
It's hard to believe, but there are a lot of people out there who do not know that ad blockers even exist. Let's face it, a lot of people have no idea that their web browser is not "the internet", or that there are other browsers. It's not just the elderly relatives, it's a surprisingly large number of 'generation smartphone' as well.
Yeah try explaining to someone that the monitor is in fact a monitor and the box everything connected to is the computer.
The computers not working?
Have you turned it on?
Yes the light on the front is on.
On the screen?
Yes
What about that big fucking box where all the wires go, did you think it was there and connected to the power just for fun?
Oh. It is now.
My gran will get it one day. Bless her.
I can top that. Not only does my wife consider the monitor to be 'the computer' but I have given up (after 20 years) trying to explain how a thermostat works.
Apparently the radiator is 'on' or 'off'. If it's cold - it gets turned up, if it's hot it gets turned down.
Apparently the concept of setting the thermo-valve such that a median temperature is maintained no matter whether it's generally colder or warmer outside doesn't compute.
Point-in-case: I come home the other day - all the windows in the living room were open, and yet the radiator was on full blast. When I asked why, my wife said that she had turned the radiator down a bit (but not off) never expecting it to keep on getting hotter the colder the room got. Arrrrgggggggghhh!
These days I just bury my head in a bottle of spirits straight away - it saves time :)
This just worked temporarily for me (thanks Reg posters, you are really my kind of people):
Clear browser caches (chrome and FF)
Install Ad-block Plus (I already used a hosts file, but not good enough)
Install Easylist subscriptions
For a brief moment, I could read what I wanted.
But it only worked for two tries, and now I'm really annoyed. Sometimes the anti-adblockers get confused when you come in through a VPN, but they can eventually figure that out too.
Perhaps a sandbox background-browser emulation will be the way forward. May the smartest, most motivated win.
Escalation, escalation, escalation.....
As things currently stand ad blockers are a necessary security requirement to anyone with the slightest sense. If the ad slingers get their own house in order and stop spewing malware then maybe they might get some eyeballs back. Until then they go ram a rusty implement up their ringpiece!
Whole online ad system is a joke anyway as noted many times here, ads sold and placed by bots then viewed by bots only. Time for the publishers to follow the print model and embed something relevant to the site content not constant ads based on one Amazon search back in 2008 as they typically serve now.
Several years back I had a flight that went through Manila and I had a 1-day delay due to monsoon season at the destination, so searched for places to stay for the night. One ad network now just spams me with video-based, blinking ads for "Meet Filipino Girls Now!" or other SE Asian dating websites.
I use Google Contribute because I'd rather directly pay for content than be advertised to. What is annoying is when sites don't sign up for this service and then complain that my blocking their ads is so horrible as if there were no alternative available to generate money from me...I'll pay directly thank you very much.
"I use Google Contribute "
You might want to conribute more data to Google, as far as I'm concerned they can fcuk off. Along with the idoits that link to Google fonts (and the like) instead of putting the miniscule files on their site and caring for other people's privacy. Their shite sites can die as far as I care.
At least the content doesn't jump around like a mexican bean whilst all the ads are loading.
One of the most annoying things I find these days is when I try to click on a link, and it's hopping about due to the page changing layout mid-load - you never know what you end up clicking on.
Well, yes, there's no contract requiring you to consume advertising. There's also no contract requiring them to give you the content for free. What there is is a business model: they provide free content on the assumption that you'll at least sometimes look at the ads, and if you don't want to play along and give them what they want then they're within their rights to try to stop you from from getting what you want.
... then good luck with that. If you don't want me to see your "quality journalism" without at the same time accepting you to push in-your-face jumpy noisy annoying ads down my throat, then I might not be part of your target group.
Good luck with those remaining visitors who apparently don't see a correlation between the advertising behaviour and the quality of the "journalistic" content that is trying to sell these ads.
The ad slingers are behaving as if they some how created the internet and it's our payment for using it by which we have to put up with this... they did not, and they call us parasites! I have donated to some blogs (where it was possible) I like and get value from. Those who block me for where the value add is marginal, I drop them. You know what I now have less procrastination in my day and it feels better.
Given we just had the news of how yet another ad network was serving up malware I have no reason to stop blocking these intrusions into my browser. some how I think the ad slingers are unlikely to take responsibility for their lack of security until the first class action kicks off.
I have yet to see an easy to use subscription alternative to ads. I am aware there are a few services that operate on a pay per article model but none that would offer an all you can eat bundle for various sites/papers. I guess it would be too much like co-operating with your competitor to them.
Mention of itv & C4 was amusing, I was blocked from them ages ago, I was allowing all their domains (including being generous and allowing their domains to run scripts) but was blocked due to my browser / hosts clampdown on third party scripts / cruddy web sites.
If they served vetted ads from their own domains they would have retained my custom, they chose to chuck all sorts of 3rd party dross at me & there's plenty of other providers of video content out there to keep me amused, far more content than I will ever have time to watch.
Ironically I ended up finding the content I was looking for on ITV (Tour de France footage) on a French content provider.
Mention of C4 in particular reminded me why I stopped using 4OD.
Some years ago (and at least two laptops ago, I guess, since it was when I still had Flash installed) I tried watching something on 4OD. I've never used an Ad Blocker, but I have been using NoScript for a very long time, and I enabled the right scripts to get the content working.
Now, for those unfamiliar with UK TV advertising, and how that extends to content on 4OD:
On TV, for an hour long program, there's advertising at the start between the program you want to watch and the one before/after it, as well as three advertising breaks during the program.
With the online version, then, you get some adverts before the content, and three more advertising breaks to coincide with where the breaks would be on TV. (There may be advertising after the end as well, but I don't know - would anyone leave it running?)
As I said, I enabled the scripts that I felt were necessary. I saw the first set of adverts, before the content. Then I saw the first part of the content, and then I saw the next set of adverts, during the first break.
And when it came to play the second part of the program, I got a message saying something to the effect of "you appear to be using an ad blocker" and refusing to show me any more.
I reloaded the page (didn't change any settings), and tried to skip forward to the second part of the program. It allowed me to do so, but first I had to wait for the pre-show adverts to play again, then the first break adverts, *then* it allowed me to play the next part of the show.
Thankfully I didn't get a repeat of the problem at subsequent breaks - but because of their (early?) attempts at blocking content to people with ad blockers, I ended up having to put up with the first two sets of adverts twice.
I have never since watched anything on 4OD (or even visited Channel 4's website). To hell with them.
I suspect there are some folk who would pay (I won't over-egg the claim by saying "willingly") to receive ad-free content.
Let's take El Reg, as an example. How much would we pay for an ad-free Vulture ? £12/year ? £24 ?
Either way, if it turns out that the number (and more importantly *worth*) of people who would pay to dodge ads exceeds what sites like El Reg make from advertisers, then the chill wind will blow through the world of advertising.
I return to my hobby-horse of the moment that I can't believe there are people who *pay* Sky, and STILL GET ADVERTS !!!!!! Surely if you pay for Sky, the very minimum level would be fewer, if not no, ads ?
Let me tell you this - I have no website of my own so I'm not versed in the ad revenue business; but I do frequent Patreon where some people turn these days for a stable revenue stream from their readers, and what I noticed is that those who offer to remove ads from their sites at a certain patronage level per month tend to do so at surprisingly large targets, usually reached with great difficulty or not at all. Which kinda implies that sites with a significant amount of traffic turn out to make a rather staggering amount of income from showing ads, especially compared to what they can make from the contributions offered by the truly minuscule percent of their readers who are actually willing to pay a modest contribution.
"Let's take El Reg, as an example. How much would we pay for an ad-free Vulture ? £12/year ? £24 ?"
I probably, almost certainly, would with one massive caveat. They have to ask ME for more money when the subscription expires. I DO NOT want potentially very many sites automatically talking money from my account unless I remember to cancel. They can email me reminders and if I choose to I will renew, but I certainly don't want to spend the end of every month checking which subscriptions are due so I can cancel the dross I may not have re-vistited in months.
HOSTS files are the way to go.
Until late last year I had all ads blocked on YouTube too.
Watching YouTube with the adverts really seems shocking to me when I use a computer that is not mine.
There have been a few sites that I frequent where they now say something along the lines of, "Thank you for visiting, you will make me no money, but I do not want you to go away"... That works much better than the pestering adverts you see these days.
Long gone are the days of selling a product that consumers want because of quality.
These days it is about selling a product that you can make Facebook or Twitter users "think" is worth while.
Save $0.0001 on a cheaper capacitor just so you can add that money back to the advertisting budget, who cares if it dies in 5 years instead of 12... The customer will only have it 9 months before we start pushing them to the new replacement.
Surely the publishers have only themselves to blame.
In the case of the paper press the ads are embedded in the page, you see the page, you see the ads, it is one.
Now, for whatever reasons, publishers have chosen to implement online ads such in a way they can be easily removed. It is a analogous to those "inserts" the paper press put in their publications; the ones I drop into the nearest bin, the ones I don't hear them whining about me or anyone else discarding.
So, why do publishers expect the consumer to behave any differently just because the content is online?
You raise an excellent point. Our local supermarket has a special recycling bin next to the news stand. Almost everyone holds their paper or magazine over it and gives it a shake to dump out the loose leaflets before they even pay for it. The supermarket provides the ad blocker for the 3rd party junk :-)
Ads served on websites which are part of the page, don't require scripts and don't get served from a 3rd party advert slinger can't be stopped by any ad blocker unless you block gif|png|jpg etc so why don't they have fall back adverts to show people with ad blockers?
The ad industry really should shut up about ad blockers. If they make enough noise they have another hit from the law of intended consequences. The punters - those who pay for the ads - will catch on to the huge negative impact advertising can have and walk away. However the industry is full of people who are so full of themselves they're not going to work that out before the punters; their self-image wouldn't stand the damage.
"Ad blocking is a genuine threat to the free availability of quality online journalism ..."
I assume this means free as in beer, and quality as a negative. For sites whose content I value, I disable my ad-blocker. If the advertising is hideous, then it gets reenabled. Pop-over ads? That's a blocking. Flash animations? That's a blocking. Auto-play video ads? You better believe that's a blocking.
..if their campaign infects one or more computers with mal/spy/ransom/etc ware and other things because someone actually disables the adblocker.
I mean, not using an adblocker when lots and lots of computers get infected that way is, well, not recommended.. When someone knowingly tricks somebody into doing it anyway, and as a result they get one of those..wouldn't/shouldn't that be punishable by law?
If it were physical property it would probably be called willful damage or something, but..
Today, ad-blocker work by not issuing requests corresponding to an ad. When you are a publisher and built a page, you know there is an ad on your page, and thus a browser not blocking ads should display it: the server receives a GET request. Hence, when you do NOT receive a GET for the ad after the page have been loaded, you know there is an ad-block on the way. This is a correlation that works even when the user blocks all scripts.
What I would do if I had some spare time is code a new type of ad-blocker that would simply issue the GET as expected by the server but not display the ad, like putting it with display:none, or somewhere else in an invisible iFrame or any technique you could come with.
Doing so, the server would think it served you the ad and would be very pleased! The only drawback is that you generate the same network traffic as a non-blocked page, where current ad-blockers can actually give you a faster browsing experience (because ads are not loaded).
But then probably ad-makers would come up with some JS technique to remove your display:none or obfuscation techniques... cat and mouse!
it's a measure of how good you can persuade the advertisers your site is. And when people are turning off your adverts in droves, well, you can deduce that *something* is upsetting them.
There is *no* website - no, el Reg, not even this one - which I would be persuaded to use if viewing the adverts were the only option. Advertising funding - i.e. selling eyeballs to advertisers - is not the only way to go, and if people won't accept it then the websites will have to find some other way of working, or they will disappear.
The arguments about avoiding advertising because of bandwidth, privacy, tracking, security, and other grounds have been rehearsed into the ground; I won't repeat them. There are too many sites which are pure clickbait, which exist only to get advertising money. Some of them provide services which many people find useful - social media sites, for example - but without which people managed quite well before they existed and without which they will no doubt manage once they vanish. As people begin to discover the disadvantages of the funding model they may also decide not to use them. On the other hand they may prefer to (gasp) pay for the use in some other way: if the site cannot find that new method then it will disappear.
As an observation: Facebook had a billion or so users and a turnover last year of around eighteen billion dollars (according to Wiki). So a user is worth an average of eighteen bucks a year to facebook... it's not a lot - would you pay it to avoid adverts? (I don't use it; I can't comment).
Small problem there - I'm absolutely convinced that less than 1% (and I'm being immensely generous here) of users would turn into paying customers unless a) that would be the only way to access the site and b) the site in question would be perceived as incredibly valuable and thus worth paying for (not assumptions most sites would meet). That sort of implies paying users would have to foot a bill of eighteenhundred bucks per year to offset all ad revenues, and I know of no-one who would be wiling to do that...
I'm sure you're right.
It's a question of what it it worth, to whom... Facebook sells it's billions of dollars' worth of advertising, and the advertisers obviously think it's worth paying even though the click through rate is something like 400 in a million (Google manages 80,000 in a million) - and that's fine, until users start blocking advertisers.
At which point FB has to decide whether to lose the blocking users, or lose the advertising revenue and find another funding mechanism.
Our web-block subscription allows us to ad-block at our corporate firewall. I just had to check the category "Advertisements".
It's funny, we have had a content filter available on our firewall for years, but never enabled it. Management has always been fairly liberal with filtering/tracking here at the company. They have always had the opinion that if they thought they had to nanny employees that much, they shouldn't be working here. In fact, they did terminate an employee a while back for abusing (and I mean really abusing) Farcebook.
It was finally the annoying ads that made us enable the content filter. So far, the only content we block is ads! It took a while for me to get the okay, but the recent stories of malware spreading via the ad networks finally sold it. Everyone that works here is finally seeing how the web really should be!! People are coming to me to see how to get an ad blocker for home.
"quality online journalism"
That one almost had me rolling on the floor laughing.
"quality online journalism" is rapidly vanishing. The Reg is one of the few "news" type sites that I look at because the quality of the journalism elsewhere, generally speaking, has dropped to the level of a third grade newsletter.
I had one Australian news web site popped up add banners across the top of the page.
Depending on the character width of the screen, line wrap would cause the rest of the page to jump uncontrollably. I don't go to that site any more.
Where can I get the addblock block blocker,
after which I'll probably need an addblock block block block blocker.
I have one browser set up with uBlock Origin, and another with uBlock Origin and NoScript.
The browser that just has the blocker sets off the ad-block blocking, but the one with NoScript doesnt.
Looks like they need to run scripts to have the ad-block block run, but stopping that script effectively blocks their ad-block block.
El Reg ain't the rag it used to be.
But it is still better than many other outlets for our daily dribble of news, especially for those of us with the handicap of intelligence.
I've made this comment before, but I will make it again.
Please El Reg, let me pay you.
As it stands adverts are, and will remain, blocked.
C'mon, let me subscribe and waste my money where I see fit.
And put an El Reg logo beer glass in the shop.
Cheers.
TV remotes often have buttons to change to another channel or mute their TV's. Whilst this is a perfectly acceptable use of the remote control for a TV, I've noticed several people also using these controls to temporarily change channel or mute sound whist adverts are on. This should be stopped and requires only simple reprogramming of the controller to prevent these harmful, unwarranted and unjustifiable acts.
I'll stop using an ad blocker when you can guarantee me the following:
- Your ads won't try to infect my computer with malware. Ever.
- Your ads won't play audio
- Your ads won't use excessive bandwidth (e.g. playing video)
- Your ads won't use distracting flashing animations
- Your ads won't pop up over the content I am trying to view
- Your ads won't try to open a separate window/tab
- Your ads won't scroll with the screen, making a portion of my browser window permanently unusable
- Your ads will work properly on a mobile device, without making it impossible to scroll past them to view the actual content.
- Your ads won't use flash
- Your ads won't use cookies, or use unique identifier to try to track me in any way
What's that - you can't, or won't guarantee me any/all of those? Fuck off then.
Google is hard-up for a few bob and has to take whatever ads it can get to scrape by.
They could use some of their income to apply due diligence to whoever pays to serve ads through them.
I understand companies need to make money, but I don't see they have the right to insist I see their adverts anymore than someone pushing leaflets through my door has a right to come back and check I read them.
Ad-blockers are surely no more unfair than putting a sign up that says 'no leaflets, ads, or free newspapers, mad cat-hurling person lives here'
.
I'll be keeping ad-blockers on my browsers until there's a better solution that works keeping me safe from ad-served malware, and terrible messes of webpages that take my bandwidth and serve me cascades of ads and no actual site content
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