Could Ad Blocking Become A Major Legal Battle?

Hmm, touchy subject. I'm more in favor of end-user convenience (obviously). Block ads on the margins don't bother me, but the pop up flash ones that suddenly block half a page, noisy ones, the 1 minute long ads on a 45 second youtube video, or the ones that appear when your cusor moves over a certain bit of text annoy me to no end, so I use a combination of adblock and NoScript. I disable them for small websites like this, but I have zero tolerance for the ones that get in the way of my browsing on big websites that can make a crapload of money off of other people.

I've run into a few sites that force me to disable adblock, but they're few and far in between.

What bugs me most about Adblock is that the developer has the gall to beg for donations... beg for donations for creating a plugin that helps ruin the revenue of others. Classy.

A legal battle is a big waste of time, money and energy but if you ad block, plain and simple, you're hurting the sites you value us a resource and if everyone ad blocked everywhere, we'd all be out of business. Think about it.

Whoa, did we lose comments in the server move or did an argument break out?? Some other articles are missing comments as well.

More than a few comments were deleted in this thread. Sad. It may prove a point about filtering, but most of the content at any of these tech websites that has value to me is comments by members who are unbiased by any commercial concerns. Without that content it's all just ads, so nothing left to read.

That's my opinion, provided to the site, as always, free of charge.

Some pretty innocent comments have been deleted from other articles as well. I don't think they're filtering posts, just that any post after a certain time point got lost in the server move.

Yeah, the forums haven't yet recovered from the move either. Is anyone able to post in the forums, or am I being censored? :D

No worries, I'll just head to RWilliams own tech forum and block his ads and not track for a while. :P

http://hothardware.com/cs/msgs/default.aspx?MessageID=32

http://hothardware.com/cs/msgs/default.aspx?MessageID=36

http://hothardware.com/cs/msgs/default.aspx?MessageID=90

Unfortunately, not all sites run clean ads like yours on HH. I have seen many not so smart people end up with viruses and malware from clicking ads on sites because they sound cool or look good. And not to mention having loud video ads pop up when my kid is asleep, or a skanky half clothed woman show up on screen as my daughter is sitting with me. I think having a choice protects us from sites who use the ad rev system poorly to begin with.

Once I see the site runs clean and 'safe to see' ads, I exempt it from being blocked, heck I even help by clicking some :) But taking away our choice to block is just simply wrong.

It could be the comments posted through the forums and not the main page. I've gone through this with a couple other forums lately.... hopefully it will be back to normal soon!

Testing...

Dave_HH:

Testing...

We're back, baby! (Thanks!)

Just as it the right of a site owner to add whichever type of ads they desire and the amount of ads on their pages it's equally the right of visitors to block them.

Paid memberships have been tried and not too successful.

The individual site must choose the ads and types of ads that will be acceptable to both the visitors and advertizers.

If I remember correctly there was an attempt not too long ago to prevent TV viewers from changing channels during a commercial break in the normal programing.It never materialized.

Manduh:

And not to mention having loud video ads pop up when my kid is asleep, or a skanky half clothed woman show up on screen as my daughter is sitting with me. I think having a choice protects us from sites who use the ad rev system poorly to begin with.

YES!

The loud videos are my #1 annoyance, and I can't stand it when i'm reading the news at work and for some odd reason they decide to post "The sluttiest dressed at..." on the front page, and there stands Marilyn Manson wearing a strap on, or ad for a dating site with a half naked woman on it.  I'm always waiting for the wrong person to walk by and freak out on me.

Advertising means by definition trying to force unrequested information on the viewers through intrusion into the desired content, so what's strange if the viewers try to avoid that ?

If for some reason I had no way to zap away and was forced to watch all the commercials interrupting the TV program I'm watching, I wouldn't watch much TV any longer, just like if for some reason I had no way to stop the delirium of popups, animations, banners telling me I won stuff, ads intended to cover the video I'm watching and so on, I'd visit very fewer websites (the ones that don't do that, basically) and this applies to a lot of people.

Never before had avoiding ads been regarded as some kind of offense; that would have been considered silly by pretty much everybody, advertisers included. This has always been how advertising works, since long before the Internet. The more viewers are reached, the more efficient the advertiser is considered. The advertisers' job has always been to try to reach as many viewers as possible knowing that the viewers will obviously try to avoid the ads. What happened now, have we started complaining that too many viewers succeed in avoiding the ads ?