Guest post by “At Google we’re constantly trying to make the web faster – not just our corner of it, but the whole thing. Over the past few days we’ve been rolling out a new and improved version of show_ads.js, the piece of JavaScript used by more than two million publishers to put AdSense advertisements on their web pages.”
I might as well be the first to say, adblock + ghostery or noscript solve the problem of slow web bugs by not loading them in the first place.
Yep. Google can keep trying to increase their ad loading speeds all they want. Meanwhile, I won’t be distracted by them, let alone notice any slowdown from them loading, since I block them. What must load, will load, and waste time and bandwidth in the process–simple as that. Stopping them from even loading is the only way they will, you know, not waste time loading in the first place.
I will no longer browse the Web without AdBlock Plus and NoScript. It’s so much faster and more pleasant. Very few sites are tolerable with no ad/script blocking.
Edited 2011-03-17 22:38 UTC
Hi,
Yeah, I know that the group mentality is that AdBlock is the bomb, and that all sites that serve sites are evil etc.
However, have you actually considered it from the other side? Somebody needs to pay for hosting, and generate the original content that you’re consuming.
Now, obviously, internet ads went a little too far (popups, CPU-sucking Flash banners, auto-playing animated ads), and it’s good people are fighting back, but it’s a little selfish to declare that the internet should have no ads.
It’s a hallmark of this entitlement generation that gosh, I want something, so I should have it, and for free!!!
It’s like that study on piracy and pricing. All these people came out of the woodwork, to declare that they were “entitled” to this content, at a price they deemed fair. Sorry guys, that’s not how capitalism works.
I have a lot more respect for the people that say, the RIAA/MPAA are evil, so I’m NOT GOING TO BUY THEIR CONTENT. I have less respect for the immature little teenagers who’s idea of an ideological stand is I’m just going to torrent it, and thats’ me taking a stand…lol. What a joke.
Cheers,
Victor
I can’t focus on reading the text when animations are trying to get my attention in my peripheral vision. An adblock that makes all ads static and greyscale would solve that. I also don’t mind paying if it is easy and affordable. I always wonder if I pay $100 per year and it gets spread over all pages that I visited would that give the site owners enough to make it their job? I don’t mean just buying off ads. I really want more stuff from the sites that I read.
If you think only teenagers use Adblock, you’re deeply misunderstood. As an example, my parents are both using it and are quite happy with the result. For them, it’s an opportunity to get revenge on the 10-minutes ad breaks which it’s now common to see even on public TV.
Myself, I used it some time ago, then changed my mind. Using Adblock is a coward’s move when you don’t want to face what the web financial model truly is. My new approach is to see the true face of websites, and learn to hate it instead of living in an artificial world where they haven’t fallen for ads.
Looking at other broadcasting media like radio and TV, we have an idea of what the web of tomorrow will be if we do nothing, and that despite server maintainance cost being much, much lower than a radio’s operating costs.
You mention the “entitlement generation”, I’ll put these into the much larger group of those who think that we can’t do a thing about the gradual crappification of some parts of our world. It’s not for nothing that less and less people are interested in politics…
Edited 2011-03-18 06:37 UTC
“Yeah, I know that the group mentality is that AdBlock is the bomb, and that all sites that serve sites are evil etc.”
It’s not that sites that serve ads are evil, it’s more like this: why should I waste my time and resources on ads which are ineffective for the way I seek products.
Between giving ads my personal attention and then ignoring them, or not giving them any attention at all, I choose the latter – my brain has better things to do.
“It’s like that study on piracy and pricing. All these people came out of the woodwork, to declare that they were ‘entitled’ to this content, at a price they deemed fair. Sorry guys, that’s not how capitalism works.”
It’s not the same thing though, at the risk of going off on a tangent… The internet completely transformed the way content is consumed. For the first time in history the reproduction/distribution costs are virtually NIL. Even the initial recording/editing costs are a fraction of what they used to be. Early on, musicians truly needed the music studios to produce and deliver albums. Today’s cheap & powerful technology largely eliminates the technical dependence upon music studios. Today, neither the consumers nor artists need nor want the studios, they’re clearly obsolete. However, they’ve amassed a great deal of power and influence, leaving them pulling desperate measures to remain “relevant”.
You speak of entitlement on behalf of consumers, however you’ve ignored the sense of entitlement on the part of the studios – why should consumers subsidize their existence when they don’t contribute anything back to society? Quite the opposite in fact: they’ve imposed DRM at the consumer’s expense only to make products worse by all counts.
This may be an English mistake on my side, but I wouldn’t use the “studio” word in this context, but rather the “editor” word.
Around here, recording studios are relatively small companies providing musicians who don’t want to care about technology (among others) with the hardware and experience it takes to produce quality recorded audio. The big companies which do CD packaging, ads, DRMs, and other superficial/annoying stuff, while taking most of the benefit on each CD/mp3 sold, are called editors. But maybe the words have different meanings in English.
French “editor” = English “publisher”. Though for recorded music the term is usually “record label”; music publishing just deals with the music/lyrics.
“This may be an English mistake on my side, but I wouldn’t use the ‘studio’ word in this context, but rather the ‘editor’ word.”
Yes I guess “label” would have been the best word.
“editor” would have confused me more though.
Or maybe somebody doesn’t need to pay for hosting.
It’s a hallmark of this entitlement generation that gosh, I want to run a website, but I shouldn’t have to pay for my hosting!!!
Think about how hard searching the web is now, because you have to fight through 20 of the same content re-posted on 20 different websites, because they all want the ad revenue; the domain parking sites; the keyword spam pages; etc. Do we really need someone to be paying for those?
Maybe if no one finds your “original content” worth paying for, including yourself, that’s saying something.
+1 on Adblock
There are no legitimate popups/advertisements/i-wanna-sell-you-stuff scripts.
I’m looking at you OSAlert.
A few days ago a friend got infected because I’ve sent him a link to a download page (not a pirate site) that happened to have an ad with a huge “Download” button on it. Point taken – in future whenever I help some less security savy friends secure their computers – installing AdBlock will be a must.
Still a lot of sites rely on add revenue, so I would be ok if there was an option to block only the obnoxious and shady ad sources.
Edited 2011-03-18 06:58 UTC
While I agree with the previous posters that a lot of the ads are annoying and in my way I also want to point out that a lot of the smaller guys use ads to help pay for server and bandwidth.
I have used AdSense and I think that text ads are pretty nice if they are sparse and somewhat relevant. The fact that they just got a bit faster is only positive.
I am trying to not use ads on my current project, since I wish to let my users enjoy my software without anything but voluntary donations. But there are some real benefits with ads and we should not be hasty and try to get rid of all of them.
That said, I still hate flash ads, popups, popunders, big “Download” button ads and the like. Text ads are OK, still images I can handle, but anything else, anything that interrupts my workflow, will have to go.
Weird though that I can accept a few minute breaks on TV as long as they are not too long and don’t crank up the volume.
Just my 2 cents…
You’ve forgotten the worst kind of all: ads that have sound on by default.
This is the ad google ads showed me for the RSA securitty breah:
http://www.lifetechnology.com/teslashield.htm
See, this is the kind of awesome stuff that blocking ads prevent you from seeing.
I especially like the “The Ultra Advanced Psionic Money Magnet^a"c.
“To use an analogy, The Psionic Money Magnet^a"c operates like a high speed modem which hooks up our subconscious minds and etheric fields to the creative software of the universe.”
Wow.
Edited 2011-03-20 11:47 UTC