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By Holloway in MLP
Tue Oct 16, 2001 at 11:23:55 AM EST
Tags: Internet (all tags) 		Internet

ZDNet are reporting of a webserver addon that can detect ad-blocking proxies, giving the user the option of loading ads, paying for the content, or being blocked from the site. It works by monitoring whether the IP address that requests a page also downloads banners - and if not it serves up a subscription request.

ARGGHHHH!!!

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Adverts or Subscription or Blank Page | 17 comments (17 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)
Idiots (4.30 / 10) (#1)
by J'raxis on Mon Oct 15, 2001 at 09:12:59 PM EST

Idiot marketers. Have the proxy download the banner. Send it to /dev/null. Problem solved.

— The Obvious Raxis

[ J’raxis·Com | Liberty in your lifetime ]

Yeh, easy fix (3.20 / 5) (#3)
by delmoi on Mon Oct 15, 2001 at 09:39:13 PM EST

It dosn't matter if you download the adds or not, all that matters is wether or not you see them...
--
"'argumentation' is not a word, idiot." -- thelizman
As the article points out, ad-blocking... (4.00 / 4) (#4)
by la princesa on Mon Oct 15, 2001 at 09:44:04 PM EST

is only done by a tiny handful (2-5 percent) of internet users. The adkey thing seems like a lot of effort to prevent a few percent of viewers from not seeing ads. Salon's got those horrid jump-through things where an ad appears before the article. I ignore it and read the article if I really want to read it. Most people do that with ads, either click them closed without looking at them or minimise them. And as the article says at the end, that chronic dismissal is a much bigger problem than a few people blocking the ads, so why not try working on that instead of endrunning around niche software?

Idiot Marketers (3.80 / 5) (#5)
by jayfoo2 on Mon Oct 15, 2001 at 10:00:15 PM EST

Wouldn't you think the people who take the time to block banners are about the least likely people to click on them?

I'm looking at my business degree on the wall and feeling just a bit dirty. Good thing I know perl ;)

Morons. (3.90 / 10) (#6)
by Elendale on Mon Oct 15, 2001 at 10:10:52 PM EST

When banner ads first started showing up, i was annoyed- but it was tolerable. Not everyone is willing to fork out the cash to maintain a webpage, after all. Unfortunately, due to the way the marketdroids defined "sucessful" advertising (that is: people drop what they're doing and visit that ad's site... sorry folks, you just aren't that interesting...) they weren't seeing much 'success. So then they started with the animated ads. That sort of pissed me off. It was damn hard to read stuff with crap flashing in the background, but it still wasn't too bad. But that wasn't enough for those bastards either, they wanted to disrupt you and force you to look at the shite they wanted you to look at, right now. Popups came around, and that really annoyed me. I grab a popup killer. Then came the flash ad. Specifically: the flashing red-and-white flash ad.

No more mister nice netizen. Ad blocking software with a well-defined block routine was loaded up. Now the morons are trying to get around my ad blocking software, which means i just get even better ad blocking software. Not to mention their language: attempting to say that because i'm not paying them/watching their ads that i'm the freeloader. No, i'm afraid it's the other way around: you're the freeloader. I have no obligation to pay you to use your site: you put it up on the net, and i can type your little adress into my browser, and up pops your site.

Now sure, sites like K5 or Slashdot get a ton and a half of traffic, so they probably wouldn't be able to exist without some sort of advertising revenue- but if people are going to try to force me to punch-the-monkey before i get into their site, i'll take my business elsewhere. I don't care if guys like that die off because i don't see their content either way.

The problem is this: the web was not designed for the way it is being used. There weren't supposed to be 5 sites that get 80% of all traffic (don't bother complaining about stats, i just made them up)- the web was supposed to be distributed.

-Elendale
---

When free speech is outlawed, only criminals will complain.
Oh no! (2.16 / 6) (#7)
by John Milton on Mon Oct 15, 2001 at 10:14:35 PM EST

Good riddance. I stopped reading zdnet a long time ago. Their stories aren't horrible, but their web design sucks. I've never seen a site that could bring my browser down faster. I think zdnet may be a grad school prank on how to make a site as unusable as possible. Their just extending that.


"When we consider that woman are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should Treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit." -Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Now... (3.50 / 2) (#13)
by Aelf on Tue Oct 16, 2001 at 10:16:10 AM EST

...If we had all shocked that monkey when we had the chance, we wouldn't be in this mess. At the end of the day though, how about instead of popping up this window demanding cash, redirecting the user to an archived version of the bannered pages? Say one week old? After all, you do want your visitors to return. I know I wouldn't if I got a popup demanding "Banners,cash or death". I can see the marketers now... "How about we display the adverts on the main page and put the site content in a banner?"

You think banner ads and popups are bad... (none / 0) (#14)
by aluminumaloi on Tue Oct 16, 2001 at 02:07:34 PM EST

Take a look at this:

http://developer.viewpoint.com/developerzone/5-142.html

The Durango one is just downright obnoxious.

So they're preventing use of text-based browsers? (4.00 / 1) (#16)
by pfaffben on Tue Oct 16, 2001 at 11:19:43 PM EST

I guess I can't use Lynx or Links or W3m to visit any of these sites. That's too bad, because those are the web browsers I use the most, and none of them are graphical.

Adverts or Subscription or Blank Page | 17 comments (17 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)
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