AdBlock.org

Why does adblocking software exist at all? After all, advertising not something that’s so loathsome or unheard of in other media. We all put up with advertising on television, print media, billboards, even blimps and banner-towing airplaines.

Thou Shalt Not Annoy
Unfortunately, advertisers on the Internet have let money come before better judgement. Perhaps there should be a commandment in advertising, “Thou shalt not annoy.” The internet would be a better place for it. Flashing, jittering ads tempting you to “Punch the monkey”, all for the purpose of coaxing a click out of a user have pushed consumers to the edge of tolerance and beyond.

Pop Up Ads
Pop up ads are another area of annoyance. If you follow the money flow, you can see why pop up and pop under ads became so popular. Website owners are paid for either for impressions (ad views) or clicks on an ad. With a pop up window, you can simulate a clickthrough, where the user lands on the advertiser site without ever having clicked on anything.

Advertisers have since cracked down on this activity, but the damage is done. The months and months of “pop up prison” where you mistep into the wrong cyber neighborhood and your browser springs to life with pop up windows, so unstoppable that the only recourse was to turn off the computer, have once again, pushed Internet users beyond what they can reasonably be asked to bear.

One could reasonably argue that any unwanted pop up window is too much.
If you expect everybody to tolerate it, advertising should be passive. Don’t disrupt my activity to make me close a window that appeared in front of my face. At least allow me to choose whether I am willing to view pop up ads. Even this author of a website about webmaster rights, would vote to eliminate the use of unrestrained pop up advertising. Once you move from inside your allocated advertising space within the confines of your website to opening new windows on my computer, I draw the line. In fact, I have nothing against software that blocks pop up ads as long as the user has knowingly installed it and there is some
indication that it is operating in the background. Many very good free pop up blockers exist that meet that criteria.

Here We Are
So all these things have led to an army of software companies developing products that defeat advertising, from the malicious to the annoying to the benign.

I’d argue that as much as advertisers have been overzealous with their advertising techniques, adblocking software authors have also gone too far with their blocking. Particularly when the end-user can get adblocking software installed or delivered on their computer without their knowledge, and the software operates invisibly. If a user chooses to block advertising, they should be able to do that. However, that software should operate visibly and clearly, and even announce to the website owner the preferences of the user. More on that later.

Until the Internet comes up with a better way to compensate website owners, advertising will remain an important fact of Internet life. In fact, most people
you ask are probably fine with viewing websites that have non-intrusive advertising on them. If all parties could exercise a little more judgement, restraint, and respect, we could reach a happy medium. This could facilitate the creation of standards and tools that would allow for user choice and preference around viewing advertising.

Is Peace Possible?
What if Operating Systems, browsers, and adblock software took a more active and visible approach to the issue. Standards could be created that would allow a user to specify advertising preferences, much like the privacy preferences today and the P3P Policies, and the webmaster could serve content appropriately. We’ll explore this idea soon in a future article.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 19th, 2004 at 2:33 pm and is filed under For Developers, Adblock Software, For Webmasters, For Consumers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.