Adblocking software is a response to abusive activity by advertisers.
It's the continuation
of what amounts to an arms race between advertisers and adblock software developers. If the cycle of ad blocking and more agressive advertising continues, ultimately we all lose in a classic "tragedy of the commons" scenario, where overuse of a common resource can cause it's ruin.
At adblock.org, we're interested in discussing the issues, and pushing for all parties to stop the battle and work toward cleaning
up the advertising mess that's been created on the Internet.
July 26th, 2004
Note: This is an arcive copy of this page and out-of-date. See the current version here: Current NIS Block List
Norton Internet Security 2004 has ad blocking turned on by default. One of the ways that NIS attempts to block ads is that they block link tags that contain text that matches any entry in a long list of targeted text and words. for example, NIS will block any link that has contains the text “/ads/”. This blocking is indiscriminate and will block any html that contains the text in this adblock list. All of this is done invisibly and without the user actively choosing this behavior.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Adblock Software | 3 Comments »
July 8th, 2004
In the past several months, ad blocking software has become very prevalent. Under the premise of “user choice”, software that now comes installed by default on many computers, actually modifies the content of web pages based on some very rudimentary and aggressive rules. Software like Norton Internet Security comes installed for free on a very large number of computers. Even worse, the software is configured to automatically block advertising content.
How does Ad Blocking work? Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Adblock Software, For Webmasters, For Consumers | 11 Comments »