AdBlock - Why It's Wrong

[Naposim1337]

I don't mind adds on pages in general.

It's just the fact that a ton of them are infected with viruses and what not and when I watch a stream and right when there is a key moment in the match an ad pops up.

Oh, and pop up ads in general are the worst of the worst.

i just dont get this... viruses? on the internet? i didnt have a problem with viruses for like.. 5 years. and i often visit serials/porn sites which i'd say have most of those. i would not be worried for them to be in ads ever.

[Chrysia]

i just dont get this... viruses? on the internet? i didnt have a problem with viruses for like.. 5 years. and i often visit serials/porn sites which i'd say have most of those. i would not be worried for them to be in ads ever.

Several ad agencies for the various webcomics I visit have released ad waves that they didn't properly check, causing Chrome and my anti-virus to flag them as attack sites. Thankfully, these webcomics haven't hesitated to drop these ad agencies like bad habits, but these attack ads do exist.

[Icaras]

i just dont get this... viruses? on the internet? i didnt have a problem with viruses for like.. 5 years. and i often visit serials/porn sites which i'd say have most of those. i would not be worried for them to be in ads ever.

All it takes is one time to get infected. I've had it happen to me (From a gaming blog, one I've given up on even with ad blocker for fear for further viruses), and I don't blame others for hearing the horror stories and deciding "Not worth the risk"

[Elexo]

Call me selfish but I really, REALLY hate ads.
In my first world with all of my first world problems, ads are by far the worst.
Some are so annoying it can ruin my whole day infact.
One day I woke up and the first thought in my mind was this stupid jingle I heard over the radio, bad mood for the rest of the day.

Even if ads were used to directly save some kind of charity or support starving artists I still would use adblock.
No fancy reasons here, not trying to justify anything, I just really hate ads.

[Naposim1337]

the actual problem i think is that internet entertainers/artists are not widely supported so the ads are some kind of necessary evil here at the moment. Then again if you produce something of high value you will not encounter problems with revenue. Today lots of various people wants to be streamers/youtubers and what not, but hey its not a job in the factory, you have to stand out.

[zaxlor]

AdBlock and piracy to me are almost one and the same. At least how people talk about it.

Make the "legitimate" people that don't block adverts and that buy their games, DVDs and Blu-Rays feel guilty for either not paying more for a product, or make them fearfull that at any second the prices could be jacked because of all those "bad" people not watching adverts or pirating stuff.

Never once do they come at it from the other angle and try to discuss the reason WHY people use AdBlock and pirate. They don't try to convert people who use AdBlock or pirate to not, they just shout at them, call them bad and silently pat the "good" people on the back for being "good" consumers.

I've said in other threads, if piracy was such a problem you'd see a direct cause of that piracy putting companies out of business. Same for AdBlock. Are we seeing swathes of websites going offline because someone dosn't want a full page advert converting the website into a giant billboard? The big boys are still around (youtube, google, twitch etc.), but possibly smaller outlets might go under, but that's due to relying on an un-stable business model.

If someone can get something for free and get away with it, why would they choose to pay? It's no different than companies taking my browsing habits for free, then making a profit from them.

[Deleted]

I've got an idea... How about MMOC tells us how much revenue they get from us, for each user a specific number depending on that user's activity here on the site, on average in a month from all their ads, then gives us a bank account number, and we'll wire them that money and keep blocking those shitty ads.

This way, MMOC gets the money they so desperately need, the actual advertising companies still get screwed as they've always been since nobody actually buys their products nor clicks their ads, and we don't need to install malware on our computers. Win-win-win.

I mean, it's like pennies per user, right? I'll send them 100€, that should be enough for the next 1000 years of me being here, right?

[StayTuned]

Yeah, as 99,99% of the posters already said before me, only if they manage to make ads not intrusive and so damn annoying anymore. I don't want to randomly surf around the web with my headphones on 5% volume and then one shit ad pops ups and plays casino sounds at 100% volume and kills my ears. Fuck that.

I actually once donated money to adblock. Mind you, just 5 dollars, but that's as much as I would pay if this was not a free app.

[Cirque]

not that I'm completely disagreeing her, but this is pretty much the nature of man. Advertisers and programmers have had to get more creative to get their ads out there to be seen. They've had to get more creative because more people just ignore basic ads and/or block the ads. Therefore, new techniques are made to combat this, and as thus new ad-blocking schemes are developed to the new ads, then news are developed to by-pass the new ad-blocking schemes, and so on and so forth.

There's an age old adage, that if someone threatens you with a gun, you buy 2 guns to defend yourself. That person buys 3 to counter, then the other buys an uzi, so the other buys 2 uzis's. Basically until it mirrors the worldwide arms race and you are up to nukes.

Don't get me wrong. I understand the frustration, but it's not gonna end. Advertisers are going to be advertisers. Websites are businesses that are in business to make money. And if we want sites like this to stay free, we will have to put up with adverts. It's really that simple.

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I don't honestly know, but you do have to be able store tons of data, and it does all have to be backed up. You have to have the bandwidth to deal with thousands of people all at once.

I would be kind of curious if someone does have a ballpark figure they can throw out there.

Thanks for replying to me, but this is not necessarily true. These practices existed way before ad-block plus became something common (remember the excessive e-mail spamming in the 90s for example). Having a pop up blocker was pretty much mandatory even in Netscape days, and gathering information has been happening for quite some time. And remember the shit they'd install on your pc, so popups would happen even if offline?

I would actually be willing to pay, but only if the advertising world would back off completely. In a world where internet would be ad-free (or at least a lot less intrusive than they are now), I'd be willing to pay for the services I'm interested in, for example, MMO champion.

I'd like to say more but I have to go 10 minutes ago :< Will check back later!

[Naposim1337]

I've got an idea... How about MMOC tells us how much revenue they get from us, for each user a specific number depending on that user's activity here on the site, on average in a month from all their ads, then gives us a bank account number, and we'll wire them that money and keep blocking those shitty ads.

This way, MMOC gets the money they so desperately need, the actual advertising companies still get screwed as they've always been since nobody actually buys their products nor clicks their ads, and we don't need to install malware on our computers. Win-win-win.

I mean, it's like pennies per user, right? I'll send them 100€, that should be enough for the next 1000 years of me being here, right?

i guess they could make an option of ad-free mmoc for small fee, hard to say if it would be worth doing for them, most people would still prefer ads over ''subscription''. The danger of this however could be in potential premium services.

[Deleted]

i guess they could make an option of ad-free mmoc for small fee, hard to say if it would be worth doing for them, most people would still prefer ads over ''subscription''. The danger of this however could be in potential premium services.

Well, Curse does offer a "Premium", which costs like 5€/month, and you get all kinds of crap with it, none of which seems useful to me personally, but with it comes an "ad-free experience."

However, now that I think of it a bit more, I don't think I'd pay a cent after all. I don't feel like being held hostage over advertising.

"Pay us or we'll shove ads in your face!"

Yeah, no thanks. Free browser addons work better.

[Tokas]

What's funny is how many of you guys say this to try to be snarky, but the only thing you're revealing is that AdBlock changes your experience so minimally that you don't even realize it when it's gone.

Fwoosh.

can't argue, but time to time some adds really annoys me to insanity, this is when i remember

[Naposim1337]

Well, Curse does offer a "Premium", which costs like 5€/month, and you get all kinds of crap with it, none of which seems useful to me personally, but with it comes an "ad-free experience."

However, now that I think of it a bit more, I don't think I'd pay a cent after all. I don't feel like being held hostage over advertising.

"Pay us or we'll shove ads in your face!"

Yeah, no thanks. Free browser addons work better.

i would not be so dramatic, the bottom ads i never see at all and two on the top are really small and dont draw too much attention. Curse premium is the bad example of this type of service in my opinion. most of the stuff you get is useless for many people like me or you and when you just want ad free experience you would not feel good for paying for something you dont need along with it. dunno how much they make of one person who visits mmo-c daily, say in one year but yearly payment of idk, 5-10 dollars could be appropriate. but hey i cant say because i dont care about commercials.

[warlocx]

The reason why i don't watch TV in the first place is because off all those damn commercials, now they've opened the commercial world into the web. I will fight it with every possible way. IF adblocker stops i will move to the first best replacement.

[Cirque]

The reason why i don't watch TV in the first place is because off all those damn commercials, now they've opened the commercial world into the web. I will fight it with every possible way. IF adblocker stops i will move to the first best replacement.

It's why I don't watch TV either, but internet has always been commercial since the public could access it. 13 years ago when I started using the internet, the battle was mostly against adware that installed itself on your pc, popups and e-mail spam. I remember friends asking me to "fix" their pc, worst case I saw was a pc that booted with about 5 ad-windows that wouldn't go away, online or offline (back in the days when you weren't always online), highly taxing on the then limited resources pcs had. In those days, data was really expensive (remember the 100MB max e-mail storages?), so spam-mail was even more annoying. Mail services would advertise with how great their anti-spam was and anti-spam software was considered about as mandatory as anti-virus software for companies. Spamfilters weren't very effective or accurate though, resulting in me usually disabling them.

It was then I started having multiple e-mails: one only friends knew, and one I'd give to websites. That mail quickly became filled with spam, because websites made a very lucrative business in selling e-mail addresses (and probably other personal informations). Bots existed back then to scan the net for email addresses, so if you had some sense you wouldn't write myname@hotmail.com, but myname [[@]] hot mail . com or something in an attempt to circumvent that.

No doubt these scanning and selling practices still exist, but I just wanted to point out that advertising is not new on the web.

[Endus]

All of which means the money would be coming from your pocket, instead of being free for you.

The ads don't make it "free for me", either. Advertisements work because they attract some of my attention, either getting me to click on them out of curiosity, or just by reinforcing the brand's image in my head. That attention is mine to give, or not, as I choose. If I run with ads activated, I am conceding a portion of my attention to the advertising as the cost of access.

That's how the entire business model of advertising works. If it didn't work that way, "advertising" wouldn't exist.

It isn't "free", any more than those retail membership cards are "free". They don't cost money, up front, because you are the product being sold. Sure, they divide that labor into hundreds of infinitessimal events and hope you don't notice, but that does not mean you have not contributed.

There are costs other than cash up front, and I'm not willing to pay the price that adverts ask.

[ComputerNerd]

ads aren't intrusive, on big sites you barely see them.
i just hope people on youtube/twitch get ability to block ppl with adblock

So an ad popping up over a video while you are watching it is not intrusive ?
Yes it is.
Stop with the anti-adblock crusade, and actually notice what people are saying.
Many ads are intrusive, resource hogs, and simply getting in the way of the content they are supposed to be supporting.
Make better behaved ads, and we won't need to block them.
Of course you won't support that idea, since it won't give you you something to complain about.

Fighting adblock is not the solution, but giving us less reason to use it is.

[Deleted]

i just hope people on youtube/twitch get ability to block ppl with adblock

Whatever.
It's not like those sites would be indispensable. At least not for me.

[Pony Soldier]

Well maybe they shouldn't force you to stop what your doing so that you can look at their stupid ad. For example on Yahoo they have an ad that enlarges so it takes up the whole screen so you have look for the X to exit out of it. I don't mind if the ads are on the side and don't do anything but they cross the line when they force you to watch or look at an ad. We watch enough ads on TV I don't need them on the videos I watch, especially when they're only a minute long. You watch a 30 sec ad so you can watch a 1 minute long video. I never would've thought that someone would actually support ads. In that case maybe we should have more solicitors come to our houses everyday to advertise a product.

Bottom line is ads are a pain in the ass. If you're going to have an ad, don't force people onto them, have them on the side where it doesn't disrupt what people are doing. That's why I use adblock.

[Kujako]

i would not be so dramatic, the bottom ads i never see at all and two on the top are really small and dont draw too much attention.

Out of curiosity I tried looking at MMO-C without ad-block. About 30% of the page was taken up by a massive ad at the top, one at the bottom, one of either side of the page and one in the center. All advertising the same Civ4 expansion. No thanks.