Forum Moderators: martinibuster
1. If you "fix" the software to stop it filtering then you create a product that doesn't do what it claims. That aside, letting through certain "brands" of advert is probably a non-starter for financial reasons - I doubt that any sweetener Google could offer would approach the revenue generated by product sales and repeat customers, or cover the revenue loss from negative media coverage of their "loophole".
2. Why not take the presence of an advert-filter as a sign that this customer is not receptive to / does not want to recieve the sorts of advertising that are currently on offer. From a purely marketing point of view why do I as an AdSense publisher (or Google as the ultimate provider) want to waste time on someone who is unlikely to click my adverts? Why not use that view on a candidate with a better potential rather than effectively wasting that view?
3. If all else fails they could just become more aggressive with their advert-serving technology to try to get past filters, but given Google's grass-roots origins that has the potential to turn users against Google as a brand.
...
In my opinion over the long-term ad-filters are a problem that will keep attracting more consumers with promises they can deliver, they will keep getting "smarter" and they wont go away.
As a consumer looking at the way the market seems to be evolving I see advertisers are still working on on creating more and more irritating adverts that insist on interfering with browsing / being in-your-face just as much as pop-ups ever were (interstitials, sliding layers etc.) - this is precisely what caused people to hate pop-ups and created a "pop-up blocker" revolution.
Give it a few more years and ad-filtering will become just as mainstream as pop-up blocking is now because of a small minority who annoy the community just enough to make them react (if I told you 3 years ago that various ISPs and even IE would have a pop-up blockers [webmasterworld.com], who'd have believed that?) and when that happens it will be a case of "innovate or die" for all involved.
Any thoughts?
- Tony
In fact, I think that Adsense is one of the few programs that isn't actively involved in an arms race with the ad filter programs (in which, as always, we the end users are as traumatised as surely as the surviving villagers after the army marched past... :( )
There's issues with copyright infringement and restraint of trade.
Pop-up blockers are probably here to stay, but products that disable portions of websites, rewrite links so they aren't clickable, remove images, etc. are probably not going to last.
What's really telling is their feature list - the first entry for NIS 2004 under their "firewall" section isn't "stop hackers", it's "Web assistant lets you block ads".
When they can use that as a sales technique then you know that feature is something that consumers want, and mainstream consumers too - not just the high-tech crowd.
- Tony
(I'm talking purely about blocking & removal, not replacement which I don't really agree with and typically isnt normally a "feature" that you're made aware of)
Consumers.
If people buy the latest version of "AcmeSecurity" because it allows them to block adverts then pretty soon every competitor product will have it too, and eventurally it becomes a core feature that people expect/demand of their products. If consumers don't like a feature it *will* die irregardless of how much money is thrown at it. The economic version of survival of the fittest if you will.
The internet is a global market, and so if ad-blocking was "outlawed" in the USA for example (and I can't just toggle it on/off as you can with DRM in Media player) then I could download a version created in Europe, or Taiwan, or Russia etc.
Unfortunately the ad-blocking genie is out of the bottle, and while you may not like the current commercial implementations I guarantee you'll prefer them to whatever will replace them because there is *much* more aggressive blocking software out there.
- Tony
Create a firewall that strips all TOSes and copyright notices and advertise with:
- Get all free content!
- Legal copying of the internet!
- No longer be bound by silly TOSes and copyright!
Now if you agree it would not be right to remove these bits of the webpages without the user knowing, how would it be right to remove any other bits?
What if I decide to write my TOS as a banner graphic linked to an affiliate link? Should that exempt all users of ad blockers from my TOS?
SN
Why not take the presence of an advert-filter as a sign that this customer is not receptive to / does not want to recieve the sorts of advertising that are currently on offer.
I think the real problem is with firewalls that block ads by default, as Norton Internet Security does. If users want to block ads, that's their privilege, but they shouldn't have to opt out of an ad blocker. (After all, some users might actually like to see ads--especially ads that are relevant to their interests--just as they do when they're reading magazines.)
