Sep

11

AdBlock Plus - Is it Evil?

September 11, 2007 |

The AdBlock Plus extension has lately been getting a lot of (good/bad?) press because of this guy here, who really, really hates it. Today, Chris Soghoian at CNNET chimes in as well.

In the end, a few things are clear: Users of advertisement-skipping technology are essentially engaged in theft of resources. Web site owners have not, yet, wrapped their Web sites in shrinkwrap contracts, and so while the ad-skipping may be immoral, it certainly isn’t illegal. Web site owners are perfectly within their rights to utilize any and all browser/extension/Web behavior detection technologies in order to blacklist the ad blockers. Similarly, creative users are more than within their rights to evade whatever detection technology the Web site designers use.

The real question to be answered is: will other Web site owners wish to get themselves into an arms race that they almost certainly cannot win?

Personally, I am pretty unapologetic about using AdBlock Plus and recommending it to all my friends. How can I do that, and still run ads on my site? Because it is not all ads that annoy me. I don’t mind text ads. But there are only so many dancing aliens I want to see who try to sell me (who doesn’t own a house), a mortgage.

I think this hints at the problem with the advertising model in general (that is, on TV, radio, and the web).  A lot of people are simply tired of seeing ads. At the same time, we don’t have any better model to work with right now, so we all put up ads everywhere and hope that not too many people will use software like AdBlock Plus. Because we mostly think we are (relatively) anonymous on the web, we don’t worry about any consequences of this and don’t lose any sleep over it.

If advertisers annoy people, can they really be angry when people tune out their messages? AdBlock Plus is a crude tool, but it’s the best we have and you can fine-tune it pretty well. If you don’t mind Google Ads, just allow them.

Of course, all this discussion about why AdBlock Plus is just going to get more people to install it…

Technorati tags: , ,

Share This

Related Posts

Comments