Adblocker plus is theft

sanaxe1 said:
I'm talking about in your no advertising world not now. Sure people can make amazing sites but they need time to add to them to get them to a point where somebody would be willing to pay a subscription fee. Advertising provides that income for these people to be able to juggle both. Not to mention the fact that people have limited amounts of money. If i had to pay a subscription fee for every site i went on i would be skint!
Click to expand...

But that's just it... most 'big' sites are for companies who can afford to pay for the groundwork. Other 'interesting' sites are academic or personal, which don't necessarily need subscription and can be free because the costs aren't really huge.

The internet was full of interesting and useful sites around 1998... and there was far less advertising. In fact, going back to BBSs, all the main 'sites' were subscription based and there were many free hobbiest and academic 'sites' as well. It worked fine back then.

I suppose that everything is so cheap these days and everything is expected to be free, that people perhaps don't see things the same way... and yet I'm supposed to just put up with advertising being forced upon me ?
 
They shouldn't display so many or make them so obnoxious, ideally they should be simple images, also if they hosted them on their own domain instead it would be better, too many ad networks have become infected at some point and spread viruses around.
 
billysielu said:
It's not theft, it's upto the recipient of the advert what they do with it. Just like junk mail through your letter box, you can burn it if you like. That's the risk an advertiser takes.
Click to expand...

The difference is that junk mail reaches the recipient, AdBlocker prevents this from happening.

I'll block annoying stuff, I'll block anything that could be harmful to my computer or prevent me from viewing the site properly and I'll block anything that tries to get past my pop up blocker. Everything else is fine.

People that run websites just need to be thoughtful with the advertising they use. Make it garish, distracting, annoying, it's going to get blocked. Make it relevant to your visitors' interests and try to ensure that it fits the tone of your site and you shouldn't have a problem.
 
Lightnix said:
I guess you could probably make a rough estimate of how effective it is by looking around the room you're in at various items, seeing which of those you have seen advertised at some point and which you have not. Even if you didn't buy those products specifically because they were advertised, say you bought based off of a friend's recommendation, it's probable that the first person who bought the product and then started recommending it was influenced by some form of advertising at some point.

It's pretty amazing how useless people claim advertising to be, yet at the same time it's a fairly huge industry (it's where Google made most of its money after all) and that pretty much every successful company advertises on more or less every medium it can get its paws into.
Click to expand...

You're right, it probably does have more of an effect than most of us realise, it is just hard to see really, and there's an awful lot of ads for stuff I definitely won't buy on the internet.
 
BloodyL said:
TPS / MPS work just like adblockers, yet I don't see anyone up in arms about it.
Click to expand...

No they don't.

If a called someone you on a number which was registered with the TPS and got a dead line or engaged tone it would be the same, but they shouldn't be calling the number in the first place.

Same with postal campaigns - an MPS registered address should not be posted to/incur postage charge to the sender.

In both cases, no service has been provided to you as the "customer".

In the case of a web site, a visitor uses the site and the information provided (an actual cost to the website owner) in exchange for viewing the ads which try to cover the expense of maintaining the hosting and providing the information you wanted.

To me, using an ad blocker is much akin to using techniques to remove the "nag screen" on a piece of shareware.
 
fidget said:
In the case of a web site, a visitor uses the site and the information provided (an actual cost to the website owner) in exchange for viewing the ads which try to cover the expense of maintaining the hosting and providing the information you wanted.
Click to expand...

Erm, no.

A visitor uses the site, and the owner may try to include adverts in that site to help generate them so money... there's no 'in exchange for' on behalf of the visitor unless they have to go through such an agreement in the first place.

The closes analogy would be if you request a free magazine through the post, and when it arrives it also comes with several advertising leaflets... if you bin them without looking at them, you're ad-blocking. Of course, nobody would contemplate calling that 'theft' or suggesting you're denying the owner of the magazine because you're not looking at the advertising.
 
fidget said:
To me, using an ad blocker is much akin to using techniques to remove the "nag screen" on a piece of shareware.
Click to expand...

Actually that makes sense.

But, it should be remembered that people who know how to use firefox/adblock are usually good enough with the internet to never (or very rarely) click ads.
Just the same as a person who goes to the trouble of removing a nag screen from shareware is probably not interested in purchasing it anyway.

So the actual financial impact of adblock is lower than the amount of people using it (if that makes sense).

The way I see it, I would never follow an ad out of general principle, so I might as well adblock them.

Just my opinion though.
 
I wouldn't use an Adblocker if adverts weren't EXTREMELY annoying and being shoved in your face all the time. I love the fact that AdblockPlus stops youtube adverts and such. I don't mind a .jpg or too here and there if it's out of the way but crap adverts that are in your face and your forced to watch deserve to be blocked by an extension.
 
It depends on the ad, currently I don't run an ad-blocker that I am aware of (unless there's a windows one I haven't noticed :S).

I used to use ad-aware on an old computer though.

Generally I don't mind most ads so long as they aren't too intrusive, the pop up ones that suddenly become bigger when you mouse over something annoy me though, thankfully I haven't come across too many of them on sites I visit.

If I came across intrusive ads I would be tempted to find an ad-blocker.

So maybe the key is finding a happy balance between having ads and how intrusive they are.
 
If I remember correctly; Site owners get paid when someone clicks the ad, not when someone views the ad on their web page.

Think of clicking an ad as tipping the owner? Best analogy I can think of.
 
madteamkiller said:
If I remember correctly; Site owners get paid when someone clicks the ad, not when someone views the ad on their web page.

Think of clicking an ad as tipping the owner? Best analogy I can think of.
Click to expand...

For small sites which provide a useful service (like odd-ball car clubs that aren't popular) adverts may, just may, pay for the hosting, if they're lucky. Some months it won't and the admins dip into their pockets.

If ad block was standard across every browser and default on those sites would go.

Microsoft would cope, Google would find a way (probably something even more intrusive than ads) and the other big firms would adapt. It'd be the little guy who suffered.

Just like those riots in bristol recently, they may like to think they were sticking it to the man but it was the private individuals and small shops that got their business disrupted and property destroyed. Tesco didn't care.
 
I don't use blanket ad blockers. I use the block content feature of Opera. If an advert gets too intrusive (fast flashing colours, loud audio, excessive video content etc) then I block it.

This way the annoying ads are blocked (benefits me) and the ones that don't take the mick are kept (benefits the vendor) and it sends a message to the advertisers that the annoying ones don't work.

It's not perfect but it seems to be the best way I can think of.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom