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| Non-ad from reddit. Note the link for ranking underneath it (that is also used for real ads). |
Instead of ad-blocking everything by default, I suggest the following approach:
- By default, don’t ad-block.
- If a site goes overboard with ads, block them on that site.
- Better than blocking Flash is to deinstall it, because then its absence can be detected and non-Flash ads can be served. Gruber explains how to do it on a Mac, while keeping around Chrome for Flash content.
- Animated ads should be opt-in, I have never found a single one I liked. Web pages should not be like Harry Potter newspapers. Currently, deinstalling Flash mostly takes care of this, but it won’t be long before non-Flash animations become more widespread.
- Rank ads. This would allow us to make unpleasant ads go away and give desirable social feedback to advertisers. Digg has such a system for advertising on its site. As does reddit. The reasoning is: If we have to put up with ads, we should be given the opportunity to influence what is shown.
4 comments:
Lol; wake up.
Not helpful. You might have a point, but you are not making it.
Very sorry to say this, but I do not intend to stop blocking ads anytime soon. Several reasons:
A: They are annoying. Why do I care to see adverts for credit cards when I'm looking for info on oh say, masonry.
B: They are (sometimes) Malicious. Flash based ads are very easy to embed malicious content, redirects, etc into. That innocent looking ad banner could be loading any given nasty worm, malware, etc to your system as it plays
C: They are bandwidth hogs. As many know, alot of ISPs are forcing their customers onto metered services. (AT&T, Comcast are two). These nice little "ads" figure right into that cap, and not all of them are small. This is even more critical on mobile data. In most cases, on already slow connections, the problems are amplified by the need to load an advertisement that noone cares about.
D: They spy on you. Yes, sadly, while you look at those ads, the company behind it (Doubleclick, etc), are looking right back at you, tracking your surfing habits, and selling that data to other advertisers, anything to make a quick buck off of you, and just how much of this does the actual site owner see? Maybe .0001% if they're lucky.
There used to be a time that the only ads I didn't block, were google's ads, that is, until they joined the rest of the morons and went from simple, clean and unobtrusive text ads, to annoying flashy banners.
These are all valid reasons, yes. Since I have deinstalled Flash on my computer (except for Chrome, as a fall-back), ads have become tolerable (no more Flash games...). There are a few ad companies that do think about usability, maybe there should be a way to selectively unblock those.
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