An Approach to Fair Ad Blocking

Wladimir Palant, author of the ever-popular AdBlock Plus extension for Firefox, recently penned an interesting article on the AdBlock blog: An approach to fair ad blocking.

As I stated many times before, my goal with Adblock Plus isn’t to destroy the advertising industry. In the end, the Internet does need money to run and ads are still the most universal way to distribute that money. The only problem is that ads are becoming increasingly intrusive and annoying as webmasters try to maximize their profits which is the main reason people install Adblock Plus. So the idea is to give control back to the users by allowing them to block annoying ads. Since the non-intrusive ads would be blocked less often it would encourage webmasters to use such ads, balance restored.

Now it isn’t a secret that Adblock Plus hasn’t been performing particularly well towards that goal. While users can theoretically choose not to block ads on some sites, most users simply install Adblock Plus, choose a filter subscription (which will block all ads without exceptions) and forget about Adblock Plus.

I’ve long been one of the many who feel that ad blocking has gotten out of hand, but it certainly is interesting that the author of the extension has similar views. I think of AdBlock as a pop-up blocker; it’s for nuking the Flash ads that play sound or dance across your screen, not for removing all ads, and the publishers’ revenue with it. No, I don’t click ads, save for the occasional 125×125 banner on a tech site, if an interesting one happens to catch my eye.

Some sites get advertising right, shunning large, Flash-heavy ad networks for private sales or alternative networks like BuySellAds. These sites aren’t getting money per click, they’re being paid a a fee for an estimated amount of page displays over a set period of time. If you block ads, the number of impressions goes down, and it’s a lot harder to sell ads, and already low prices go down.

Wladimir is proposing a new feature in AdBlock Plus that may offer publishers and users alike a fair solution. A meta tag could be added that suggests that a site has unobtrusive ads. AdBlock would check the history when one of these sites is loaded, to see if you’re a frequent visitor to the site, and suggest that you whitelist the site.

It’s a little bit clunky, but it’s better than the situation the publishers are in now. Perhaps a better idea would be a central whitelist database that sites could apply to be in, and be reviewed by the community?

Wladimir later posted a summary of the feedback from the first post, and it seems that the meta tag is going to be built into the extension.

  • http://40tech.com Evan

    I’m as guilty as the next guy of not even thinking of the consequences of blocking ads. I installed AdBlock Plus and then forgot about it, until I noticed that the two ads at the bottom of the sidebar on my site weren’t showing. It was only then that I remembered that I even had AdBlock Plus installed. It would be nice if there AdBlock Plus could follow through on this and improve as the author has indicated. Unfortunately, ads on mainstream sites seem to be getting more intrusive, not less intrusive.

    • http://intensedebate.com/people/redwall_hp redwall_hp

      "Unfortunately, ads on mainstream sites seem to be getting more intrusive, not less intrusive."

      Yes, that does seem to be a problem. And I believe AdBlock is just the tool for the job there. Enough people blocking them will eventually push things to the point where they are forced to rethink things.

      I think networks like http://buysellads.com, http://fusionads.net/, or http://decknetwork.net/ should be off-limits to ad blocking though. (And let's not forget the sites that don't even use a network, and take the time to see to the quality of their ads by hand.) The trouble is, as things stand, many people running AdBlock aren't even aware of these much more reasonable advertisements…

  • http://ineeddiscipline.com/2008/07/04/19-blog-review-networks/ Dean Saliba

    The ads I hate are the pop-up ads or those annoying ones that float across the screen at you!

    I've used adblock programs before and they normally block legitimate pop-ups as well. :(

  • Random ABP user

    "Enough people blocking them will eventually push things to the point where they are forced to rethink things."

    Unfortunately, I suspect that a lot of sites will resort to those awful full-page ads with "click here to continue…" hidden on the page somewhere (or worse, "you will be redirected to the page you were expecting in X seconds…") before they'll think about making ads less intrusive. Or maybe the entire internet will become pay-only except a few scattered hobby sites. I'd love to be proven wrong though.

    Perhaps the damage is already done anyway – even if virtually every site in existence does away with the overly annoying ads, Adblock users won't notice because they'll have them blocked already by some indiscriminate ad filter. It would at least provide less incentive for more people to install an ad blocker, though.

    • http://intensedebate.com/people/redwall_hp redwall_hp

      "Perhaps the damage is already done anyway – even if virtually every site in existence does away with the overly annoying ads, Adblock users won't notice because they'll have them blocked already by some indiscriminate ad filter."

      Sadly, you may be right there. While a lot of larger publishers are moving towards progressively more intrusive ads, smaller ones definitely seem to me moving in the other direction. (Just look at the growth of BuySellAds.com as an example. They make a point of not accepting Flash-based ads.) Unfortunately, the massive amounts of people using the EasyList filter for ABP are blocking them, whether they know it or not. (EasyList not only has a rule blocking BuySellAds, but one specific to my domain…)