Are you sure the increase in clicks was deliberate and not accidental? I’ve clicked adverts before I wised up and installed Adblocker - and every single time was an accident.
It’s also very easy to accidentally click on adverts when viewed on a mobile phone or even a tablet.
(On a related note, it seems to me that certain ad supported apps are designed to maximize the number of accidental clicks.)
^That was my thought as well. Before I started using Adblock, I often accidentally clicked on ads here on the SDMB because there was a bit of a lag in the page display while the ad was loading. So I would open a forum, see a thread I wanted to read near the top of the page, and click on it. Except that I was actually clicking on the space that the ad would occupy when it finished loading, pushing everything else further down. So I was inadvertently clicking the ad. Damn it!–>click ‘back’–>wait for SDMB page to reload and all ads to load–>click on the thread I wanted to read–>repeat multiple times–>install Adblock.
I would agree, kind of. As a website owner, clicks were all I was interested in as far as adverts were concerned. They were how I got paid, after all. As long as they didn’t offend/annoy my readers or interfere with my actual site content, I wasn’t really concerned with what they were showing. Just as long as you clicked on it. If you didn’t then purchase whatever the advert was selling, well not my problem.
But yes, the advertisers themselves could maybe stand to learn a lesson that clicks aren’t everything. Unfortunately, the real life lesson they’ve learned to date is that ‘annoying, obtrusive and downright shady adverts get the most clicks’. Like I say, we as users have to take some of the blame for that - it’s no good just allowing the good adverts to be shown - advertisers and publishers don’t care. Everyone needs to engage with them as well. Click on the ones that interest you, buy the products if they suit you. That’s the only way that decent, non obtrusive adverts will ever take precedence.
I’d agree. But, while the bigger companies have more complex, customised setups, the majority of smaller sites will use an ad service such as Google Adsense or similar - it looks like the site you linked to uses these such services. These don’t offer a lot of control over what ads are displayed - you can select what formats you want and you can usually block specific categories or specific ads, but you don’t otherwise get a say. If a new advert suddenly starts being served up then you won’t know anything about it until you see it yourself or someone complains about it.
Going the other way, I used to have a lot of problem getting harmless, but not overly relevant ads to show on my site. If adsense couldn’t come up with ads that were relevant to my content, usually it just wouldn’t show anything at all. Again, as a publisher, not much I could do about that.
Considering the state of most sites whenever I surf without adblock, I wouldn’t say it was much of a secret. 
QFT. The worrying trend (I call it a trend, but it’s been going on for a few years now) is for the less scrupulous advertising partners (taboola, to mention just one) to format their ads to look the same as the parent site, trying to fool users into thinking they’re just clicking on a link to another page in the site.
Nope, pretty sure it was deliberate. I never allowed any adverts that looked anything other than what they were, I never allowed popups, mouseovers or anything like that. Sure, a few people probably did click accidentally, but certainly not due to anything sneaky or underhanded on my behalf.
Advertisers have got this down to a precise science - to the point where they can predict what parts of a web page you’ll look at first, where your attention will stay the longest, and what size, shape and format of advert you’re most likely to click on. It’s to the point where Adsense (the Google advertising service for websites) will tell you off if they detect that you haven’t placed adverts in the most optimal positions of your site.
I’m sorry but the ads are just too intrusive nowadays. They auto-play video which keeps the content from loading. They pop into my field of vision and block what I’m trying to read. They move around the screen and place themselves over the content I’m trying to click on, just as I hit the button. Then they open a webpage I have no desire to load from a provider I have no reason to trust. They blink and move in my peripheral vision making it hard to concentrate on what I’m actually interested in. They show pictures of things which look horrifying, making me click through to find out what on earth is happening, only to find completely unrelated content, with no explanation at all for the first thing.
Even “news” sites were loading so slowly I’d click on the ones I wanted to read and then go do something else for a while. And then the slow loading would start again every few paragraphs when I had to “click through” to “another page.” I was beginning to think the Web would be destroyed by them.
I have no remorse whatsoever about blocking them. If a site put up a Sticky saying “We have curated our ads to be silent and static, filtered them for malware, and limited the bandwidth they can use.” Then I’d have no problem letting them show up on my screen.
Until then, uh-uh. My time and attention are my own; I have in no way abdicated my right to control them by clicking on your website.
In Opera, I use manual blocking. If something is annoying, I add it to the list. Non-annoying ads are okay by me. (Which are very, very few in number.)
I sometimes use Firefox, and it’s just much easier to use AdBlockPlus. Sure, that blocks more than I’d care, but I don’t use it enough to “teach” it what to block.
There’s a market that’s not being exploited. It may not be large. But it exists. What we need is an ethical ad vendor. No popups. No photos of the inside of mouths. No moving images. So scammers. As for clickbaity stuff, I don’t know how to clearly characterize that in words. Maybe they would need to convene a panel.
The idea is that the ad middleman filters content and in return delivers ads to those who use ad-blockers. Lots adblock plus folk check off “Allow non-intrusive ads”, so it’s not like the number of viewers is tiny.
That should include page-load time and bandwidth theft by those parasites.
I don’t see ads on the Straight Dope, because I use UBlock Origin in Firefox, and I prevent trackers with Ghostery on my desktop machine and on my iPad (though I don’t use Ghostery’s browser on the iPad the blocking code still works).
I’d pay for Straight Dope membership in a second if I didn’t have to use PayPal, which I won’t touch with a three-metre pole. The mods know this because the issue has been raised in three or four threads in which two or three participated.
I can only conclude that the powers that be don’t care that I, and who knows how many others, are thwarted by that bad, but possibly purposeful, membership-purchase coding.
So I stopped caring, since advertising on the Straight Dope site appears to be so unimportant that the Chicago Sun-Times (which might hate Canadians) prefers I block its ads (and any trackers they may contain) than purchase a membership to achieve the same end.
Just before posting this I checked to see if PayPal remains my only membership option. No surprise; it is.
And in walks Google Contributor.
The way ads work: Site with an ad space offers it up to an ad network; vendors bid to have their ad placed in the space. Visitor to the site sees the winning bidder when they visit.
Google Contributor adds another bidder on the ad space: You, the site visitor. You nominate your monthly ad-blocking budget, and whenever you visit a page that has an ad space on it, you are one of the vendors bidding on the ad space. If your bid wins, the ad space will show an image you’ve selected. The site still gets paid, so it’s immaterial to them that you didn’t see an actual ad when you visited.
What do we think of this?
Contributor is a waste of time, from a website visitor’s point of view. It doesn’t address the real problems with ads.
The pricing is bullshit. You can pay up to $10 a month but you’re still only able to block, at most, only 50% of the ads.
Plus, there’s nothing changed about the type of ads you’ll see, so viewers are still at risk from aggravating popovers and malicious scripts.
It does nothing to address the way ads eat bandwidth and screen space, especially on mobiles.
I use the following:
uBlock Origin
Ghostery
NoScript
And I don’t have Flash installed.
Nothing about Contributor will change that.
OK, I’ll grant that this wasn’t meant seriously, but it’s still fun to treat it as serious because lot of folks seem to think this way.
So I have these questions:
Why is it OK for advertisers to intrude themselves, unbidden and unwanted, into my life and steal hours out of my life? I never asked to be subjected to a loud torrential din of “BUY THIS!! YOU NEED THIS!!! BUY IT NOW!!!”
Why is it OK for commercial television to be the only option for the majority of programming, so that I have to be subjected to said din? I never asked for that, either. Ditto for ad-supported Internet sites.
If blocking ads is “stealing”, what if I watch the ads, and then swear a sacred vow to never, ever buy anything that was advertised, or anything that is every produced by the company doing the advertising? Is that OK?
What if, in addition to vowing to personally never buy anything from the advertiser, I watch the ads and then saturate the social media with horrible negative reviews about the products? Is that OK? I mean, the advertisers get their speech, and I get mine, right?
How about Internet ads that install viruses and crapware? How about telemarketing ads that interrupt my dinner, or distract me in the middle of preparing dinner, or cause me to drop and shatter the main item on the menu when the phone suddenly jangles because some asshole in a call center in Punjab wants to sell me duck cleaning services? And I don’t even have any ducks?
In short, how about the concept of a Punjabi advertising agent for duck cleaning services ruining my dinner, installing malware on my computer, ruining my TV shows, and taking hours out of my life that I’ll never get back? How’s that for a deal?
Seems much more complicated than just directly paying the content providers you support. And likely gives them less money.
My model is simple: I pay for what I like. It’s your job to convince me that what you have is worth paying a tiny bit for. People who have more disposable income will tend to give more, since it’s set up as a donation with perks. Those on a low fixed budget won’t, but we’ll still pay more than ads.
As one of the reviewers I support pointed out, she got 1/6 a cent per ad view. Consdiering that there’s two ads per video, and she puts them out monthly, I can give her $1 a year, and I’m still increasing what she gets by 250%.
I do block, but FWIW I don’t buy the bandwidth arguments. The content provider is paying for bandwidth, too.
Without ad blockers and anti-trackers, a smartphone user ends up paying for all the extra data being transferred to and from the smartphone/tablet, thanks to the **200 or so ** third-party tracker and advertiser net connections on a single page, some, if not most of them anonymous, and the connections made by those connections to other trackers and ad farms, ad infinitum.
[quote]
It’s no different with computers that simply use the net through direct ISP connections and hit the users’ data caps thanks to the parasites.
Looks like the verdict is in…
Rothenberg Says Ad Blocking Is a War against Diversity and Freedom of Expression
Randall Rothenberg, being the president and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, must know what he’s talking about.
Cancelling someone’s reservation after they signed up from a public website with an open invitation sounds pretty disinviting to me.
Censorship? Freedom of the press and speech is only protected at government and some organizational levels. As I mentioned above, these ‘freedoms’ end at my property line. I can quite literally and legally go tell anyone on my property to go piss up a rope and have the authorities enforce it.
Wanker.
I use ad blockers for several reasons. Mostly because ads are annoying and intrusive, but also because I know that ads are one of many vectors used to deliver malware to connected devices. If I use anti-virus, am I preventing hackers from earning their livelihood? Cable TV companies charge consumers a lot of money for their ‘content’, correct? Then, they also deliver advertising every few minutes and charge the advertisers for that. Why should I pay to watch commercials? Short answer, I don’t.
Search providers, like Google, show you ads along with your search results. They make money by delivering ‘your eyes’ to their advertisers, but if you don’t see those ads is Google losing money? Not by a long shot. Ever use Yahoo to search for something? Almost all of the results you see are ‘sponsored’, in other words Yahoo is paid to show you those results. So your ‘search’ results are skewed in order for Yahoo to make money.
Ad blockers have been around for many years but they’re only recently starting to get attention from the Internet because more people have caught on to their use. Now the advertisers and industry groups are starting to panic and spew rhetoric about how ‘bad’ they are for commerce. BS! Ad blockers are to the Internet what Donald Trump is to the Republican party - a wake up call. Let’s hope they both pay attention.
My name is harmonicamoon, and I am an adblocker.
It started two years ago. Because of this very site. There was horrible audio music. Maybe it was a virus. I can choose not to look, but I cannot turn of my ears.
It is obvious that sites know when you have adblockers enabled.
Do they also have information that indicates how many people leave the site, preferring not to drop their shields? If so, this is a heads up for them. As they are losing viewers.
Every time I leave a site because I won’t lower the shields, I am hoping someone is paying attention to my actions.
I’ve thought about it. I think I tried and couldn’t get it to work.
Anyway, the main reason is that I have a sloooowwww connection and my bandwidth is quite limited too. Over a certain amount, and I get throttled back to a point where it is completely useless.