Last week I did a little experiment. I tried to surf the net without an activated adblocker. And I survived! Till then I never touched any site without one. Exactly like you do. For over 10 years. And then I turned it off. To be fair I have to say that I did not turn of the popup-blocker that is built into chrome, but everything else was deactivated.
At first I was a little bit afraid of doing this. Will I still be able to read my news, blogs and other content on the net? Will I see tons of click-overlays, blinking flash adverts and other annoying stuff that made me install an adblocker in the first place?
The first hour of surfing without an adblocker was eye opening. Advertisement has learnt a lot in the last 10 years. And the site owners too. Most of the sites changed from “ads right were the user is most annoyed to see one” into “ads were they don’t piss off the user”. And most of the ads have learned that lesson, too.
In the second hour of surfing I did something I would not expect to do ever. I actually clicked on an advert that interested me. It was the ad for a computer game I wanted to buy. And after seeing the trailer on the ad-site I bought it. To be fair I would have bought that game anyway and clicking on ads was very rare in that week. There were only a handfull of ads I clicked on. And most of them didn’t interest me after I saw their site.
In the next few days I got the feeling that I was wrong in activating the adblocker on all sites. Most sites do respect you and try to make money with ads and think hard on where to place them. Sadly there were exceptions. Some sites love to put a video ad in full browser window size that you have to click away. With activated sound. But those were rare.
After the week was over I thought about activating the adblocker again, but I felt I did not need it for most sites. I only want to punish sites that didn’t respect me and tried to do evil stuff with ads. Stuff that I think was not okay. Like those full screen ads.
Sadly Adblock Plus, the adblocker of my choice, did not have a nice gui interface for that “blacklist mode”. If you know how to write the filter rules, you could have the plugin only filter ads on certain sites. But I didn’t want to do that manually. So I forked the plugin and added that feature. The fork can be found here:
https://github.com/bitboxer/charma_adblockplus_chrome
If you clone that repo and load the plugin into your chrome, you can activate the blacklist mode in the last tab of the settings panel. After that the adblocker is deactivated on all sites and you can enable it for specific sites with a click on the icon in the url bar.
And I really encourage you to at least try this for a few hours. The internet can only be free if we allow ads. Only those few sites who do annoy you with bad designed ads need to be punished. Not all sites.
TL;DR: Ads are not that bad like they used to be. Try to switch to an adblocker that only enables adblocking on bad sites, not on all sites. I have created a fork of adblock plus for chrome that does this.
I have not been using ad blocker for the past few years. The advertisers are trying their best with targeted advertising. For some reason these day’s I almost never notice an ad if the site i’m visiting has one.
Anyway I hope people find the fork useful!
Using an adblocker has another benefit: Speed. The pages load a lot faster if your adblocker prevents any ad related assets from loading. This alone is a reason to use one, at least for me.
Second big reason is privacy. Personally I just don’t want that all kinds of 3rd parties, totally unrelated to the site I’m looking at, are tracking me. Call me old fashioned but I don’t like this implicit – no chance for opt-out – user / interest tracking.
So adblock plus and ghostery are my plugins of choice – also I even point a long list of hosts to 127.0.0.1 via /etc/hosts
Yeah, the privacy is an issue here. But hopefully the do-not-track stuff makes its way through the web standards committee.
I started using the internet HEAVILY in 2005, I have never used an ad blocker in all that time. Maybe I am too young to know what ads really looked like pre-2005. Agreed some ads are plainly annoying, and no matter how useful you site seems, if you present me with a full page ad, I just hit CTRL+w.
Where ≠ Were
The internet can only be free if we allow ads.
False
When people have to pay to host their stuff, we get more quality content.
People spend their own money for hosting when they are “invested” (no pin intended) in a topic.
If hosting is add supported (aka Free) you see a billion “my cat took a poop” pages.
And news sites that regurgitate blogs that reposted the same news in a chain repost reaction.
Hosting is not expensive, if you care about your topic (even if it is about your cat
).
.
Adds encourage garbage on the net, and is making the good stuff harder to find.
Hey when there is too much garbage to go through, a search engine becomes more valuable (and harder to do), so it is another win for google
I’m sorry but I refuse to disable my Adblocker because of one simple fact.
Even perfectly legitimate non-adult websites insist on displaying adult adverts.
No, I don’t want to meet sexy singles in my area.
@Artful: I was a little bit afraid of that, too. But this did not happen to me. I have seen none adult ads on non-adult sites. For me this is a myth.
Did you or your employer just start an ad-funded site or something? This sounds very much like propaganda.
Yes, how offensive ads are vary. Perhaps they are less offensive now than before (I wouldn’t know, very few web ads make their way to my screen). But they’re still part of a market that, rather than make information available to you in a pull model, tries to push it on you. Fundamentally, advertisement is about making you know about and want something you would not, on your own initiative, seek out information about or buy.
And no, “the internet” (presuming you meant “websites” here; I get billed monthly for my internet) does not need ads to be free, nor is a “free” (which you pay for with the attention ads pull from you, and the marketing data of where you’ve been before through tracking) web necessarily a good thing. If a web page is funded by ads, they get nothing from me. I block their ads, and should they manage to defeat the various filters I have, I make sure to boycot the product advertised. If a web page charges money for a service, or sells product, they will make money, assuming the service or products is of value to me. If they are merely presenting information (e.g. your blog) and lets me do microdonations (e.g. bitcoin) in some way, I will donate to the interesting ones to support them.
“build into Chrome” is wrong. You mean “built into Chrome”.
@W no, my company did not just start a ad website.
Turn it off? Why? They still blink and animate, don’t they?
Won’t they make sites load slower? (Yes I know you have a bazillion megabits at home now, but those adservers are slooow.)
Won’t I support site makers who live on linkbaiting with money?
Lets’s see… Yes, yes, and yes, in order. So don’t.
well, the real problem are no advertisements, the real problem is flash, I’m surfing net without Adblock for quite long time, but wouldn’t do it without Flashblock and still even with flashblock some of the advertisements are overlapping some pages make them useless, so in those few cases I could use Adblock, but it’s too much hassle to have it activated and play with black/whitelist and sometimes is also causing problems with usability of webpages, so I chose lesser evil – Flashblock yes, Adblock no
Why turn Adblock off? I am leaving mine on. I am glad that I did not see the ad for Skyrim. I want to buy it but it is expensive and I need to save the money.
As long as I live, I will do everything in my power to use every resource possible to prevent ads from hitting my eyeballs or eardrums or nose or tongue, and to help everyone around me (parents, friends, colleagues) to also avoid them. Ad Block is one of the greatest heroes of freedom in this increasingly brave new world.
@Franklin: than invent an model how webpages make profit without ads that actually scales well
.
If I eventually decide to make money off my web site, I will try my best to figure something out.
If we get benefit from a site, we should also allow that site to get benefit from ads.
But the reason I use Ghostery is privacy. I don’t like the fact that ad services track users. If they show ads related to that site without tracking, I’ll never use any adblocker.
Although I don’t block DoubleClick/Google Adsense, Amazon Associates and Commission Junction just because most sites I visit often use them. And I want them to get some benefit too.
someone may have mentioned it already but you can whitelist domains in ABP. it’s built-in. as a rule of thumb used with firewall policies, block all first (blacklist) then only allow a few (whitelist). do the reverse of blacklisting!
plus, privacy wise it is NOT wise to remove ABP (plus ghostery, disconnect, facebook disconnect, widget block).
@rino19ny yes, you can do that, but as I said: you can’t do that with the gui in the ADP. I added a gui for simple adding/removing Sites to the whitelist.
Actually i don’t mind the banners and overlays. And Adblock Plus for Firefox allows me to switch of the blocker for individual sites which i tried for a site where i spend a lot of time watching streams an videos.
But then i got a commercial Intro video everytime i switched stream/video (which i do frequently) and adding insult to injury always the same single on in one day.. I activated the blocker again.
Being so worried about ads slowing down pageloads, but still want to support the website; wouldn’t the best option be some sort of delayed ad-load? instead of blocking all entries on blacklist, move the adserver content to the bottom of load-order? (aka. ads start to load only when the content is ready.)
I understand that people want to make money off their pages and content, but some people are not the target audience for advertising. Word of mouth for me is the most powerful thing, as is the ability to see and hold something tangible. As long as I can do it, ads will always be blocked on my computer. Never bought anything as a result of an online ad and likely never will, so I am not their target audience, no matter what demographic they try to place me into.
IMO this is a fallacy: “The internet can only be free if we allow ads.”
But it wasn’t the point you were making and you probably didn’t give it much thought.
IMO, the basic paradigm of ‘user as ad target’ is inherently demeaning and humiliating, and the lack of better business models simply denotes a lack of collective commitment and creativity. A great talk that explores this issue is Jaron Lanier’s Edge interview: http://edge.org/conversation/the-local-global-flip
In the meantime I would encourage anyone using an ad blocker to get a http://Flattr.com account and start tipping (with real money) your favorite content providers.
Ads are terrible. If i know im never going to click an ad, might as well block them from showing up anyways. There’s a reddit thread a few days ago where a user went to some random cracked.com page and noticed without an adblocker, the page made 200+ http requests. With adblocker on, it only made about 100. So it’s not just about the ads being in your face on the page, but also the load time of the page and the browsing experience.
Here’s a good post about ads from last week: http://www.elezea.com/2011/11/future-of-web-reading/
@Franklin Chen says:
November 27, 2011 at 3:43 pm
As long as I live, I will do everything in my power to use every resource possible to prevent ads from hitting my eyeballs or eardrums or nose or tongue, and to help everyone around me (parents, friends, colleagues) to also avoid them. Ad Block is one of the greatest heroes of freedom in this increasingly brave new world.
agreed!
I block ads because I want to live in a world where it is impossible to support yourself by publishing. I believe the quality of life on earth with be dramatically improved if this ever comes to pass.
[...] How I survived one week without an adblocker (bitboxer.de) [...]
I haven’t really used an ad-blocker either for years. Can’t really say I’m bothered (except for the intro-ad-videos on youtube, etc. They’re too intrusive).
Of course the internet could be free without ads. There would just be a lot less money in it (and a lot fewer jobs, companies, conferences and community, etc).