I was thinking about this further, and while it comes off as fairly irrelevant to start with, it's actually an extremely bad thing.
In essence, this has set up two tiers of advertising: those we have paid for white list privileges, and those who haven't. This is heavily in Google's interests as they are the only advertiser powerful enough to get by with only text adverts - nobody else has a platform like Google search where text only adverts are enough to overcome costs and provide viability.
By using Adblock Plus as a weapon against non-Google adverts, Google is removing the ability for other players to compete on level footing. It's very similar to the idea of paying AT&T for prioritization for Google traffic, and it destroys a lot of the foundations that the web is built on. It definitely crosses into 'evil' territory for me, in the same way as paying AT&T to slow down access to Bing would be.
While it's just an add on, it's a bad precedent to set.
It's interesting that people are upset about Google being able to pay to get their content around certain barriers, when this is essentially what Google AdWords is: a system for advertisers to pay to get their content displayed in prominent locations rather than relying on position in organic search. And yet nobody really takes it seriously as a Real Problem.
Not trivializing your complaint, btw... just pointing out that using money to get your message to the forefront is kind of the point of advertising itself, so the fact that Google is paying to get their advertising displayed is kind of... meta?
I'd love to have a discussion on HN about the necessity of advertising in the Information Age. I think we would all like to live in a world where purchasing decisions are based on reviews from people that have actually used a good or service, and I would think that the ubiquity of the web has made this kind of crowdsourced intelligence quite feasible.
Does advertising provide a valuable service beyond subsidizing information flow? If not, are there alternate viable strategies for subsidizing information flow, such as Wikipedia's donation model? Is a post-advertising world possible, or even desirable?
I think the damage this causes is far greater than setting up two tiers of advertising.
This is a shining example of how those with money are able to influence the system by corrupting the very mechanisms that were implemented to protect the "regular people" in that system.
If Google had paid a politician to exempt itself from certain laws, we would call it bribery. For the exact same reason, we should take issue with them paying Adblock Plus to whitelist their ads.
nobody else has a platform like Google search where text only adverts are enough to overcome costs and provide viability
Without endorsing the 'payola', something to bear in mind that Google chose to go with text-only ads instead of allowing advertisers to control the format. At the time people thought they were crazy and that text-only ads would not last very long for them. Turns out google was correct and its critics were wrong. Any of the other major search providers could have done this, but they didn't try it - and as a result their brands became hopelessly diluted by the garish advertising content, instead of the ads being part of the branding.
I manually enable adwords and google tracking on things like Ghostery and other software because adwords is the only platform that I don't find obnoxious and ugly.
I see the point you are trying to make, but Google has no special privileges here. They had to submit their ads to Adblock Plus' public forum for review to determine that their ads conform to the 'Acceptable Ads' guidelines -- just like everybody else. What is encouraging to see happening is that the success of Adblock Plus is actually reforming the entire (online) advertising industry: just make your ads non-intrusive and informative and you can ask for your ads to be whitelisted. I don't quite agree that Google is the only platform where such non-intrusive ads can work. Take for example the Reddit community, where ads are also non-intrusive and therefore whitelisted by Adblock Plus. I guess you can say that Adblock Plus has effectively created a marketplace bias the favors acceptable ads. But isn't that the whole point? The economic model of the Internet is allowed to work, but you and I are not accosted by truly intrusive and annoying and unethical ads. It's a perfect balance.
You really equate paying a third party to reduce their negative impact on your business to paying a third party to start negatively impacting a competitor?
One takes advantage of market conditions their benefit, the other changes market conditions to the detriment of the competitor.
While I kind of agree with your point it's worth noting that Adblock Plus can still disable the non-intrusive adverts (in fact the second that you can't do that a new Adblock Plus will appear).
The ethics of disabling advertising and non-intrusive advertising are another thing entirely.
On the other hand, I'm really pleased to find that they're whitelisting some ads by default, although I'm disappointed that money factors into it.
I use ad blockers, because so much of the web is a hideous mess without them. But I'm somewhat conflicted about it, because I know that a lot of sites depend on ad revenue. I see this as a kind of collective agreement with advertisers: I don't mind adverts, but I don't want them flashing all over my screen when I'm trying to get stuff done.
Combined with AdBlock, I use Ghostery[1], which is a nice add-on (Chrome/FF/Safari/Opera/IE) : it blocks any javascript from ads networks, but also from analytics, trackers, socials plugins (and more) , and also cookies from the same trackers. Everything is configurable per-tracker and per-website.
It's quite a must-have if you don't want to be the product on the Internet. And a good failover over Ad-block.
Another alternative is blacklisting sites via your hosts file, which means it applies to all applications and not only the browser. Also, it works in any UNIX-based OS:
http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/
I think it was immoral and dishonest to sneak in a whitelist feature into AdBlock, which is in direct opposition to the core product value. Imagine a firewall that whitelists certain networks. And background updates add more networks that bought their way into your machine. Not a product I'd be willing to use.
1. There was a user survey in 2009, whether users would like to have every ad blocked or would accept some ads to a certain degree. And the result was that around half of the users are fine with getting some ads:
http://adblockplus.org/blog/adblock-plus-user-survey-results...
2. Adblock Plus has announced on their website that they have introduced "Acceptable Ads", and that it will be enabled by default:
http://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads
3. It isn't even a secret that they get paid from larger companies, for putting them on the whitelist (they though have to conform to the guidelines for "Acceptable Ads"):
http://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads-agreements
So Adblock Plus couldn't possibly be more honest and fair about its "Acceptable Ads" feature. If you don't like it, it's just 3 clicks to disable it. I don't get why lately, everybody is so surprised about thatfeature and feels betrayed.
The German media went completely insane over the past two weeks, and made a scandal out of that feature in Adblock Plus, which exists for quite a while now and was clearly announced and documented from the beginning by the AdBlock Plus Team, and can easily be disabled.
It's not immoral and dishonest to have a different idea of the core product value than you do. Personally, I run AdBlock not because I break out in hives in the presence of advertising, but because a lot of advertising on the web is just awful, makes sites harder to use and wears down my battery. Whitelisting advertising that is actually consumer-friendly is not at all against the core value I derive from the product. (Though I don't think my AdBlock extension does this, honestly, but I wouldn't mind if it did.)
Sneak? I don't know was for upgrading, as I've been a user on and off, but I can tell you that as of a few days ago it asks you upon installing if you want to turn this option on. It does so in clear language, and on a page that is not full of confusing options.
For what it's worth, on Firefox anyways, there's a fork of Adblock Plus called Adblock Edge that has no such ethical issues, and as far as I can tell, works with all the addon plugins that worked with ABP like the element hider and popup blocker.
I have been using AdBlock for years, and I have no problem with this feature, provided that they select their whitelist carefully and enforce the rules aggressively. I wouldn't have any problem with ads if they weren't such a disaster. If there are providers that can do ads responsibly - no animations, no sound, no taking valuable space where content should have been, then I have no problem with giving them the edge. I'm not opposed to the idea of advertisement in principle, I use AdBlock because otherwise bad ads (which are on 99% of sites) make using the web extremely tiresome and annoying.
If the Google leads the fight in making ads good citizens on the web and profits from it - fine, all power to them. If they would start abusing it - I'll turn off the whitelist and all their money would be spent for nothing.
Actually I don't mind the feature existing.
Small clearly labeled text ads don't add much to the page loading time and can be clearly seen as ads.
However I still normally disable the ads as I really enjoy the increased screen space gained by removing the ads.
Asking for money to whitelist ads it rather poor policy however. If an ad is small and clearly an ad then whitelist it. If it's not then blacklist it. Having to pay to have your non-intrusive ads whitelisted is shitty. I hope they didn't have to pay very much.
"Imagine a firewall that whitelists certain networks." er, you mean like a firewall? or is there some amazing new type of firewall that blocks ALL traffic, that I'm missing out on?
Since it seems to be a common misconception, I'd just like to point out that "Adblock" and "Adblock Plus" are two different extensions made by different people.
Yeah, for the longest time I thought the latter was an enhanced (paid?) version of the former. I can't believe naming browser extensions in a similar manner like this is allowed. It causes nothing but confusion.
As long as they're only whitelisting text ads, I don't think I mind. Even image ads that aren't animated are okay with me if they aren't offensive. The only reason I have AdBlock plus installed in the first place is the really vile shit - noisy SWFs, scantily clad women, drive-by PDF 0 day exploits, etc...
This whitelist was highly publicized, I even listened to a segment on NPR that interviewed an Ad Block Plus employee about it(Link below). For all you outraged individuals this was a very openly communicated addition and comes by default, but it can be easily turned off. Oh the outrage...
Although the ethics of paying as the method for being whitelisted can be subject to debate, IIRC Adblock states that whitelisted ads could be those that aren't animated, block access to content or distract the normal flow of browsing.
Adwords are just blocks of text. Ugly blocks of text, but they don't distract too much. And promoted search results are a fair tradeoff imo.
Anyway, disabling the display of whitelisted ads is not a complex task.
As others noted, AdBlock and Adblock Plus are two different companies.
I donated to AdBlock a couple years ago. Should have earlier. And should do again. Not claiming to be a saint. But I gave them some actual money. I'd like to think that enough people doing this, makes it possible for AdBlock to avoid doing what AdBlock Plus did.
I think this is a variation on the theme, "If you're not the customer, you're the product." Usually we talk about this WRT free web services. In this case it applies to what, back in the day, some of us would refer to as "shareware".
It's not just advertising that Google stands to benefit from.
The Google Ads also help them keep a track of where the person has been around the web and also acts as a proxy site stats data for Google (irrespective of whether you use Google Analytics or not).
I was always curious as to how they made money. He used to ask for donations. Asking for money in exchange for not taking actions that will harm another person's business (i.e. blocking their ads) seeing seems awfully close to extortion. Yelp was sued for extortion, and their conduct was far less egregious than this. Google probably couldn't handle the PR hit after the NSA stuff, but I'll bet their first inclination was to sue rather than write a check.
I suspected something like that when I realized Google Ads were now showing up on my screen a few weeks ago. I went to the Adblock Plus forum and all it said was that those ads had been added to the list, no reason why. I personally find it appealing and hope everyone switches away to an Adblock fork, if only by principle. Sure it's the extension' maintainer's right to take bribes, but the consequence should be that no one trusts the extension again.
The other day I was thinking about how Google keeps printing "download button" traps [1], despite it being in clear conflict with their TOS [2], for obvious reasons (abnormal high revenue from clicks).
Now, they "bribe" the author of AdBlock to keep a flawed model alive.
Advertising is a shitty industry, but boy, is Google taking it to the next level. And the nerds are too distracted with their shinny things and job offers to notice.
I defined an exception for AdWords when I first installed an ad blocker. I just want to block the annoying ads, but I understand that many sites have to advertise to stay online. I can live with text ads, but not auto-start videos with sound, animated banner ads, pop-ups, etc.
I did notice this recently and have been having to uncheck the box on all the new PCs I install it on. While the ads are "unintrusive" I have a media PC where I've turned the font up to huge to be able to read from the couch. Some search terms will cause maybe up to 4 different text ads to show up and that will effectively block out the actual search results when your font is large.
I'm glad I found out about this though. I always felt vaguely guilty unchecking it, because I thought it was maybe AdBlock trying to support the "Good Guys" of online advertising, but if Google themselves are paying for it, I no longer care.
I understand the apprehension in this community about ads in general but when it comes to search engine ads, it does add value (and relevance improvement) to many "commerce" oriented queries.
Google also already knows categories that generally don't get high ad engagement and doesn't show them for those. An example would be "chuck norris biography" - the intent is clear that you're looking for information primarily and even though I'm sure Amazon or others buy tons of ads against "chuck norris movies", etc. Google is smart enough to know not show you those irrelevant ads.
[+] [-] RyanZAG|12 years ago|reply
In essence, this has set up two tiers of advertising: those we have paid for white list privileges, and those who haven't. This is heavily in Google's interests as they are the only advertiser powerful enough to get by with only text adverts - nobody else has a platform like Google search where text only adverts are enough to overcome costs and provide viability.
By using Adblock Plus as a weapon against non-Google adverts, Google is removing the ability for other players to compete on level footing. It's very similar to the idea of paying AT&T for prioritization for Google traffic, and it destroys a lot of the foundations that the web is built on. It definitely crosses into 'evil' territory for me, in the same way as paying AT&T to slow down access to Bing would be.
While it's just an add on, it's a bad precedent to set.
[+] [-] md224|12 years ago|reply
Not trivializing your complaint, btw... just pointing out that using money to get your message to the forefront is kind of the point of advertising itself, so the fact that Google is paying to get their advertising displayed is kind of... meta?
I'd love to have a discussion on HN about the necessity of advertising in the Information Age. I think we would all like to live in a world where purchasing decisions are based on reviews from people that have actually used a good or service, and I would think that the ubiquity of the web has made this kind of crowdsourced intelligence quite feasible.
Does advertising provide a valuable service beyond subsidizing information flow? If not, are there alternate viable strategies for subsidizing information flow, such as Wikipedia's donation model? Is a post-advertising world possible, or even desirable?
[+] [-] enraged_camel|12 years ago|reply
This is a shining example of how those with money are able to influence the system by corrupting the very mechanisms that were implemented to protect the "regular people" in that system.
If Google had paid a politician to exempt itself from certain laws, we would call it bribery. For the exact same reason, we should take issue with them paying Adblock Plus to whitelist their ads.
[+] [-] BrainInAJar|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anigbrowl|12 years ago|reply
Without endorsing the 'payola', something to bear in mind that Google chose to go with text-only ads instead of allowing advertisers to control the format. At the time people thought they were crazy and that text-only ads would not last very long for them. Turns out google was correct and its critics were wrong. Any of the other major search providers could have done this, but they didn't try it - and as a result their brands became hopelessly diluted by the garish advertising content, instead of the ads being part of the branding.
I manually enable adwords and google tracking on things like Ghostery and other software because adwords is the only platform that I don't find obnoxious and ugly.
[+] [-] MXcommenter|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kbenson|12 years ago|reply
One takes advantage of market conditions their benefit, the other changes market conditions to the detriment of the competitor.
[+] [-] noir_lord|12 years ago|reply
The ethics of disabling advertising and non-intrusive advertising are another thing entirely.
[+] [-] cynoclast|12 years ago|reply
Adblock was created because advertisers got greedy and took it too far, not because advertising is bad.
[+] [-] jpdoctor|12 years ago|reply
FOR CHROME:
Go to "Settings"
Find Extensions in the list on the left
Find AdBlock, select "Options"
Click the tab "Filter Lists"
Uncheck: "Allow some non-intrusive advertising"
FOR FIREFOX:
Go to the Firefox menu in the upper left corner
Select "Add-ons"
Select "Extensions"
Find Adblock Plus, select Options.
Find the "Filter Preferences" Button
Select the tab "Filter Subscriptions"
Uncheck: "Allow some non-intrusive advertising"
[+] [-] CrazedGeek|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] takluyver|12 years ago|reply
I use ad blockers, because so much of the web is a hideous mess without them. But I'm somewhat conflicted about it, because I know that a lot of sites depend on ad revenue. I see this as a kind of collective agreement with advertisers: I don't mind adverts, but I don't want them flashing all over my screen when I'm trying to get stuff done.
[+] [-] gcb0|12 years ago|reply
someonewhocares.org/hosts_zero/
Save this hosts file in your house's router and be safely free of advertising, shock sites, tracking.... On ALL devices
With no added attack vector as with an extension and not limited to one browser in one device
[+] [-] adPothier|12 years ago|reply
It's quite a must-have if you don't want to be the product on the Internet. And a good failover over Ad-block.
[1]. http://www.ghostery.com/
[+] [-] cake|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1qaz2wsx3edc|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mparramon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] znowi|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wallunit|12 years ago|reply
2. Adblock Plus has announced on their website that they have introduced "Acceptable Ads", and that it will be enabled by default: http://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads
3. It isn't even a secret that they get paid from larger companies, for putting them on the whitelist (they though have to conform to the guidelines for "Acceptable Ads"): http://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads-agreements
4. Plus the source code is open source, that everybody can read it: https://hg.adblockplus.org/adblockplus/
So Adblock Plus couldn't possibly be more honest and fair about its "Acceptable Ads" feature. If you don't like it, it's just 3 clicks to disable it. I don't get why lately, everybody is so surprised about thatfeature and feels betrayed.
The German media went completely insane over the past two weeks, and made a scandal out of that feature in Adblock Plus, which exists for quite a while now and was clearly announced and documented from the beginning by the AdBlock Plus Team, and can easily be disabled.
[+] [-] mst|12 years ago|reply
I want to encourage sites providing me with free content to show me adverts that don't annoy me.
And it was announced well enough that I, a non-user, heard of it, so I think 'sneak in' is frankly disingenuous.
[+] [-] chc|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dylan16807|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Karunamon|12 years ago|reply
For what it's worth, on Firefox anyways, there's a fork of Adblock Plus called Adblock Edge that has no such ethical issues, and as far as I can tell, works with all the addon plugins that worked with ABP like the element hider and popup blocker.
[+] [-] smsm42|12 years ago|reply
If the Google leads the fight in making ads good citizens on the web and profits from it - fine, all power to them. If they would start abusing it - I'll turn off the whitelist and all their money would be spent for nothing.
[+] [-] kcbanner|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ellipsis753|12 years ago|reply
However I still normally disable the ads as I really enjoy the increased screen space gained by removing the ads.
Asking for money to whitelist ads it rather poor policy however. If an ad is small and clearly an ad then whitelist it. If it's not then blacklist it. Having to pay to have your non-intrusive ads whitelisted is shitty. I hope they didn't have to pay very much.
[+] [-] oneeyedpigeon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fintler|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enraged_camel|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevingadd|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diggan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nwilliams|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tenpoundhammer|12 years ago|reply
http://www.onthemedia.org/2013/may/10/adblock-plus-internets...
[+] [-] webwanderings|12 years ago|reply
With recent onslaught of attack on Ghostery and Ad-block, I wonder if these two tools are doing exactly what they're supposed to do: help people.
[+] [-] jasonlotito|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tr4656|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SomeRandomUser|12 years ago|reply
Adwords are just blocks of text. Ugly blocks of text, but they don't distract too much. And promoted search results are a fair tradeoff imo.
Anyway, disabling the display of whitelisted ads is not a complex task.
[+] [-] 6cxs2hd6|12 years ago|reply
I donated to AdBlock a couple years ago. Should have earlier. And should do again. Not claiming to be a saint. But I gave them some actual money. I'd like to think that enough people doing this, makes it possible for AdBlock to avoid doing what AdBlock Plus did.
I think this is a variation on the theme, "If you're not the customer, you're the product." Usually we talk about this WRT free web services. In this case it applies to what, back in the day, some of us would refer to as "shareware".
[+] [-] naner|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dotmanish|12 years ago|reply
The Google Ads also help them keep a track of where the person has been around the web and also acts as a proxy site stats data for Google (irrespective of whether you use Google Analytics or not).
[+] [-] downandout|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dendory|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hcarvalhoalves|12 years ago|reply
Now, they "bribe" the author of AdBlock to keep a flawed model alive.
Advertising is a shitty industry, but boy, is Google taking it to the next level. And the nerds are too distracted with their shinny things and job offers to notice.
[1] http://www.ghacks.net/2012/06/17/how-deceiving-ads-trick-you...
[2] https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/topic/1308149
[+] [-] guelo|12 years ago|reply
It does seem to have a lot of google.
[+] [-] scotth|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mratzloff|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cupcake-unicorn|12 years ago|reply
I'm glad I found out about this though. I always felt vaguely guilty unchecking it, because I thought it was maybe AdBlock trying to support the "Good Guys" of online advertising, but if Google themselves are paying for it, I no longer care.
[+] [-] calbear81|12 years ago|reply
Google also already knows categories that generally don't get high ad engagement and doesn't show them for those. An example would be "chuck norris biography" - the intent is clear that you're looking for information primarily and even though I'm sure Amazon or others buy tons of ads against "chuck norris movies", etc. Google is smart enough to know not show you those irrelevant ads.
[+] [-] mknits|12 years ago|reply