How likely would advertisers be to refuse to allow the Adblock ads?<p>I don't really have a problem with ads on websites, experienced users can easily block them, but I see no problem with providing ads for a free service.<p>Many organizations only have three methods to generate revenue, either show advertisements, have paid memberships, or take donations. Google shows advertisements, Apple has paid memberships, Wikipedia and Apache Foundation take donations. All three are great companies, they just have different ways to generate revenue. Many websites have no choice but to move towards an advertisements method to remain operational,<p>Adblock is trying to destroy that method of revenue and the online advertising market, it could destroy many great websites and companies that currently make money from advertising. While I'm not a huge fan of ads, they do serve a purpose, and destroying a harmless market such as online advertising without replacing it or supplementing it somehow isn't good. Plus if Adblock is actually successful and the online advertising industry collapses, then they will be putting themselves out of business.
To be effective, the adverts need to be the most obnoxious, loudest, gaudiest and intrusive designs possible :)<p>For extra points, they should flaunt their privacy invading features, e.g. follow you around on all the sites you visit, cheerfully reminding you about the places you've been and how all the other advertisers are recording this too.
Todd Garland from BSA chimes in - <a href="http://toddgarland.com/where-adblock-misses-the-mark.html" rel="nofollow">http://toddgarland.com/where-adblock-misses-the-mark.html</a><p>Take away quotes -- "Seems to me like this is nothing more than a half-thought idea because they have nothing better to do and are jealous of AdBlock Plus taking bribes from ad companies to "white-list" them from being blocked."<p>"Want to have a real impact on advertising AdBlock? Do something that puts money in publisher bank accounts and gets advertisers results that's less obtrusive than the current state of affairs. Be creative.<p>An ad-free internet is a desert."<p>(full disclosure I work at buysellads)
I'd understand the use of adblock that only blocks annoying ads, like pop-ups or animation / sound. But why would sane person block regular ads?
This makes a perfect sense actually. They want as much people as possible to use the extension so that more advertisers are forced to pay to adblock itself to allow the ads through. The ethics on the other hand on such a moves are questionable, since it makes ordinary advertising either obsolete or makes adblock the bottleneck of it's effectiveness.
A workaround to this would be self serving the ads, in combination with dynamically named tags / divs etc.<p>Obfuscating would complicate things, but at least it'd be a workaround.<p>It's crazy that buySellAds hasn't taken advantage of this.
It's actually pretty trivial to detect AdBlock and make your site inaccessible unless the user disables it. I've seen a couple sites doing that in the wild. Sounds like a business opportunity...
Chalk that one as an example of irony.<p>(The other front page article today: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6274914" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6274914</a>)
I don't understand how ad-blocking is even legal. It's like stealing - stealing content for free, IMHO there's no difference between stealing MP3s and news or any other content. There's some kind of user agreement between websites and its users - "you can use our site for free, but you have to watch the ads". Adblock violates this agreement. The people responsible for this should be in prison, they're thieves. And I'm pretty sure the time will come they will.