Blocking web ads is 'as bad as Napster' | Hacker News Reader

Blocking web ads is 'as bad as Napster'

theguardian.com

4 pointsyabatopia9 comments

Quote from the article: “Research shows that very few people find advertisements in more established media annoying,”

I wonder where this "research" was conducted. I find any and all advertising annoying, no matter where it is located.

The difference between "more established media" (which I interpret the author to mean print/television) and the web is that the user has little control over being force-fed the advertising.

What they are really upset about is loosing the control to "force feed" users ads against their will.

Personally, I find tv and radio ads extremely annoying. But everyone who's experienced it finds my habit of muting the tv during ad breaks to be very strange.

So I can easily believe that I am in a small minority on this.

On the other hand, I generally don't object to adverts in newspapers and magazines.

When advertising companies weren't tracking my every move I had no problem with their ads. Since they seem to have decided I need to be profiled rather than to just use the contents of the page to determine what ad to display I have decided to stop honouring my end of the unwritten agreement and I feel absolutely no sense of guilt for that.

If an advertisement company pledges to stop any and all tracking I'll happily white-list them, even though I absolutely loathe any form of advertising I think that a company that would make such a pledge and would stand by it would deserve my support.

I feel the same about profiling, but it's hard to deny that publishers are in a difficult position. Say a publisher wants to stop tracking us. How would they go about it and how would enough people learn about it?

For publishers, not tracking users without destroying their revenue stream seems about as intractable as it is for users to block more selectively

I hope they aren't trying to make adblocking illegal, because that's the vibe I felt when reading the article.

They should make it trickier to block them, if anything.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract

The problem with this is that the ads are absolute: you get what they choose to throw at you. There's no sense that such-and-such an ad is apppropriate for such-and-such a site or user or time of day, just a firehose of attention-grabbing demands.

..and that's before we get onto the properly evil stuff, the ads that pretend to be UI elements or do Bad Things via scripting.

I can't control whether my ads are just ads, and not some heinous keylogger disguised as a porno or a cavalcade of exploding ponies. This is the social contract being broken by the advertiser. They can pout all they like, I'm still blocking.

What we need is a Nielsen ratings report for ad-blocking which reports statistics on sites being blocked, because either the publisher or advertisers have broken their social contract with readers.

For example, some readers may have strong opinions about publishers that embed Taboola "related links" without disclosing if they are clickbait advertisements.

Apparently "adblocking" is now a word.

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