Ad Exec on Blockers: "Little Piss Ants" Threaten Freedom of Speech

[Snotnarok]

Look, supporting sites is great n' all but there's many sites that I go to, and love which are all good sites, sites that are 100% clean and nice...that I will not visit without it on my work machine.

Let's be frank, they are supposed to be advertising to make money but their third party has to do their job and filter out the garbage. I got a warning from a site 3 hours after unblocking them. I visit for concept art. I wanted to support them and I got a warning, even asked the owner and he was surprised but since the anti-virus blocked it I couldn't even tell him what one it was, but it was supposed to be filtered safely through the 3rd party handling it.

So it's this frustrating dance of wanting to support sites but also not wanting to lose work I've done because some ad was spiked with something. I'm not blaming the site, or the owner but whoever is supposed to be checking these ads.

 

[Silverbane7]

if adverts on the net did not do certain things, many people would not need to use add blockers.
most machines i fix (read that as whipe and reinstall their windows) come in because they have been hit by drive by downloads.
if the companies that rented the space from these sites, actualy checked their adverts for viruses and malware...we wouldnt need the addblockers.
if the advertisers would stop with their agrivating and anoying advertisements, we wouldnt need the addblockers.

give us simple, unobtrusive adverts on the side or top...ones that are not riddled with malware or drive-by downloads and most users would not need to use an addblocker. its that simple realy

 

[Neurotic Void Melody]

how are adds intrusive really? ive never bought this argument, i mean sure sound/video adds are shit but otherwise they are just images or gives occupieing the space they payed to take up. I honestly dont unserstand how this actualy inconveniences anyone.

Are you just new to the tinterwebs or are you a loyal employee/CEO of an advertisement firm? Because i fail to see how you have acquired this point of view at all. I am, amongst other things, currently blocked from reading certain news sites from my phone browser because the ads take up all the readable space while not giving me a working link to continue to whichever article i desire. Maybe that isn't so much "intrusive" as it is "denying access" or "smothering." Depending on your view. I do not use any of these (mentioned) adblock programns either. *looks smugly for escapist moderator validation and commendation* Now when do i get paid?


Edit: Why aren't we allowed to admit using any adblockers on this site? Surely that in itself is anti-freedom of speech? Is this another of those pro-business savvy US laws again?

 

[Weresquirrel]

Ever since I had a laptop become bricked after a virus piggy-backed in from an advert, I have a strict no-ads policy. I sometimes feel bad about content creators not getting paid for their services, but I try to support them in other ways, like merchandise or spreading the word about them.

I don't feel bad about denying this Rothenberg guy money though. He can use his ad-money to buy a step ladder to climb up my butt.

 

[FillerDmon]

Personally I work in marketing, and though my department specializes in TV ads, and things like DVR, Netflix, and even people distracting themselves during commercial breaks with smartphones and tablets and such are of great concern to us.

I ask this because I am -genuinely- curious as heck. What could you possibly do about that? If people don't want to be bothered by Adds, to the point of outright ignoring them by accessing other addless content until the add is over, as concerning as that might be for the people who work on the adds, I don't think I remotely see a way around that.

If someone doesn't want to be affected by an add, well, ain't that just the breaks? Doesn't seem like there's much you can do to fix that; the net is proof enough that attempting to do anything more forceful ends up making a lot of people want to actively reject it...

 

[Naldan]

Since you ask so nicely, yes, I do.

Since you actually can catch some virus/trojans/whatever through ads, I decide who I trust and who I don't trust.

Escapist is whitelisted, so don't worry. As is YouTube among others, as long as they don't show again ads for meds against vaginal fungus. Not kidding.


But once in a while, I click a link that leads me to a website of a company I absolutely despise. For example, sometimes, the link isn't labeled accordingly. I definitely should look into solutions to block these alltogether, but never came to.

In part, I agree with the message this guy is trying to communicate.

 

[chocolate pickles]

Oh shut up you jerkoff. Advertising is not 'freedom of speech'. The fact you put yourself in that category is frankly disrespectful to movements and ideas that have actually been about freedom of speech.

 

[K12]

Damn, you'd think someone that high up in advertising would be better at presenting themselves.

Can we just stop using the phrase "freedom of speech" completely? (Maybe we can use "freedom of expression" or "freedom of ideas" or something like that instead) It seems like everyone thinks their freedoms have been infringed every single time they can't say exactly what they want to anybody they want to say it to. This is an especially stupid example of that confusion.

 

[Lilani]

Personally I work in marketing, and though my department specializes in TV ads, and things like DVR, Netflix, and even people distracting themselves during commercial breaks with smartphones and tablets and such are of great concern to us.

I ask this because I am -genuinely- curious as heck. What could you possibly do about that? If people don't want to be bothered by Adds, to the point of outright ignoring them by accessing other addless content until the add is over, as concerning as that might be for the people who work on the adds, I don't think I remotely see a way around that.

If someone doesn't want to be affected by an add, well, ain't that just the breaks? Doesn't seem like there's much you can do to fix that; the net is proof enough that attempting to do anything more forceful ends up making a lot of people want to actively reject it...

To answer your first question, there's really nothing we can do about it other than adapt. Keep our eye on our customer base, keep track of what appeals to them and what doesn't, watch sales numbers in relation to our ad campaigns, test our ads against focus groups to see what appeals to them and why. And also begin to branch out to other forms of advertisement, which I will fully admit my company is very behind on. We have a minimal number of web ads, and our social media feels like it's being run by 40 year olds who are pretending they know how to run social media. Actually, that has more to do with the higher-ups trying to tell the social media team what to do rather than letting the social media team come up with and execute their campaigns...but that's another problem altogether.

Some marketing firms have tried to sue telecommunications companies that offer automatic ad-skipping on their DVR services, but if I recall correctly nothing came of it. And I doubt nothing ever will, with basic cable slowly moving out of relevance anyway. At this point it's better worth the marketing firms' money to look to the future than to fight for a dying audience, and it's better worth the telecommunication firms' money to keep making things more convenient for users and remain relevant for as long as possible.

To answer your second question about people not wanting to be affected by ads, that is something we keep in mind a lot when making our ads. The company I work for specializes mostly in sporting goods, so sometimes we are at odds as to whether we should make ads which have very specific people in mind (hunters, hikers, fisherman, etc.), or general ads which can appeal to a wider range (basic men's and women's clothes, kid's toys, etc). But typically the argument is settled by simply saying, "Look, there are people who are looking for sporting goods, and people who aren't looking for sporting goods." Our ads aren't meant to convince non-sporting people to buy sporting goods, it's to sell us as one of the best sporting-good retail chains out there. The best we can do is offer the greatest range of the products we specialize in to appeal to those within our market.

Now, we DO have events that take place in stores to try and get non-sporting people interested in trying things such as hunting, fishing, and hiking. But those are handled very differently from our ads which specialize in specific products. Our social media team has been trying to take over the bulk of promotions involving those events, with lukewarm success. Again, in that respect, what my particular company needs is a changing of the guard in our higher-ups.

 

[MeatMachine]

You have a right to speak, you do not have a right to be heard or listened to.

Holy shit, someone said it without me having to say it first. It blows my mind how easily entitled ideologues conflate "freedom of expression" with "freedom from being ignored, spoken over, criticized, or not taken seriously at all."

Ad-blockers provide a service to consumers who want something - the difference between ad-blockers and ads is that consumers actually have a choice as to whether they WANT that service rendered to them. The negative consequences that ad-blockers have on content providers is a very real and interesting problem to explore, and I'm eager to hear what content creators and providers such as YouTube channels and website admins have to say about it.

Listening to advertisement executives who's "provided content" and "services" are unsolicited, bothersome commercials with no substance or entertainment throw a hilariously transparent shitfit about ethics and scandalism, however, is the closest they'll ever come to being worthy of earning my attention rather than forcing it.

This is not an admission of guilt to using ad-blockers, by the way. Please don't B& me.

 

[rembrandtqeinstein]

I want to buy some ad space on sites this guy visit and put in this image:



Using and not using adblockers is a personal choice and (in accordance with the forum guidelines) I'm not admitting to nor advocating using them.

However I will say (incoming warning) that using adblockers, script blockers, and 3rd party resource blockers greatly decreases a variety of security risks.

Unfortunately website owners are partly to blame. They take 3rd party content and foist it on their viewers without vetting it first. Then act like the BP CEO when something inevitably goes wrong, saying "I'm sorry, won't happen again" but not doing anything to actually prevent it from happening again.

The reality is I don't want to be "influenced". And my time and attention is worth more to me than the fraction of a cent a website owner is getting paid for my impression.

 

[MCerberus]

Things that piss me off that his council hasn't done anything to try and fix the standards on:

CSS "curtain" style adds not closing when you click off the active area (you are satan if you hide behind a tiny close button)
Autoplay video of the non-scrollover kind
ANYTHING that defaults to not muted
Obvious scams being green-lighted by ad networks

As a programmer who has done web design, the biggest sin has to be script fragmentation. If you bring up anything that sources all the scripts on a page (noscript is good for Firefox) some sites are in the triple digits of source sites. Aside from the obvious security risks, this pulls in a ton of connections that could potentially break functionality. Ideally you only want 5ish sources of scripts on your page, 2 of which being CDNs... not 100

 

[Ugicywapih]

The guy should just go watch North Korean propaganda 24/7. The creators surely want him to, so his refusal to oblige, by his definition, infringes on their freedom of speech.
I agree with the point, that adblockers and related software like Brave effectively acting as middlemen for ad providers is a valid concern, as this both invites a conflict of interest on the blockers' side and causes diminishing returns for ad providers, making their business less profitable and possibly spelling the end for many sites, that mainly rely on ad support. Now this could all be remedied by the ad industry trying to self-regulate and imposing some clear rules, that will make adblockers effectively unnecessary, such as mandatory virus scanning for all ads before they're published, limited or abolished ads that cover up content, no autoplay sound ads, perhaps limits on ad size allowed per site or the ability of the site's owner to qualify the site as a mobile page or low bandwidth friendly page, preventing it from displaying smartphone unfriendly or overlarge ads... Ads clearly related to illegal activity such as pyramid schemes should also be banned IMO, but in and of themselves they are mostly easily enough ignored. What will NOT solve those problems is a spoiled manchild throwing a tantrum.
In all honesty, I've never gotten around to using adblock both because of laziness and because I figure if the website's interesting enough to have me spending time on it, dealing with the ads is the least I could do. That being said, I've encountered several ads that made me wish I had an adblocker installed and when I read a backwards rant like that, it really makes me wonder if I wouldn't be better off running a blocker just to help put this particular twit out of business.

 

[ccggenius12]

how are adds intrusive really? ive never bought this argument, i mean sure sound/video adds are shit but otherwise they are just images or gives occupieing the space they payed to take up. I honestly dont unserstand how this actualy inconveniences anyone.

The problem is that those passive ads are no longer the norm. There are several sites I used to frequent that I can no longer visit at all without a blocker, because the sheer number of bandwidth draining ads causes my browser to crash. Never mind the ads that hijack your browser and require you to shut the browser down in the task manager, lest you download malware.

you.... dont understand how advertising companies work do you, by cutting off adds are primarily hurting the site your on, as that less clicks for the add company to actually have to pay for. if the amount of 'registered' traffic gets too low the add company will just leave and the site will need to find another who will pay for low traffic, which generally pushes the standards down. And unethical? REALLY? there is nothing ethics related at all here, adds are unethical when they are deceptive, not when they are annoying, to claim that annoying adds are unethical is absurd.

The ethics comes in when those advertising companies don't have a system in place to ensure that what they're putting out there WON'T destroy the computers of the people who happen across them. As you said, they have no financial or legal reason to give a damn, and therefore it's wholly dependent upon their morality.
The fact is, there are plenty of people who'd willingly take off the blocker if they knew there wasn't going to be an issue. For example, I let Youtube advertise away, because nothing they plug is going to require a clean install after viewing. If those advertising companies don't bother to do better, I see more sites moving to the "crowd-sourcing Patreon/donation bar" model of doing business, and thereby obviating the need for them entirely. By the time it DOES start impacting their bottom line, I don't think there will be too many content creators who will be likely to give a damn.

 

[flying_whimsy]

While I can see where the ad guy is coming from: that industry brought it upon themselves with both the obnoxiousness and lack of curation that has made any ad a loud, annoying security risk. They made that bed, time to sleep in it.

I have an 8-core processor and my entire system ground to a halt over two webpages: between the fifty ads a page and my malware protection going off about half of them I'm surprised my system didn't just hold up a stop sign. It just makes me mad to see these people try to avoid acknowledging that they poisoned the well by using free speech as a shield.

The ex-mozilla guy seems kind of extreme in his response, but I can only imagine how much extra work he saw being dedicated to patching firefox because of ad-related security vulnerabilities. And I wouldn't be surprised if the ABP were invited to that conference if only so they could be barred at the door by being disinvited: I can just see that ad guy standing there going 'see if you like getting blocked.'

 

[Parasondox]

You know what I love the most? Crappy "ads" blocking my browser and not letting me use the bloody thing or messing with my laptop. Click on one link and 3 more comes in it's place. There are ways around it but adverting companies need to calm it down.

Also, to the upset and hurt CEO, cry me a river, go suck on a moldy lemon, take your "freedom of speech/expression" excuse, turn that into an unstoppable, or better those ads that take over half the screen, and broadcast how much of a whiny little cumbucket man ***** you are with those "fight words". Immoral? Unethical? You are rich enough to buy both a thesaurus and a dictionary. USE IT!!

 

[SteinarB]

Aaaaw. The poor ad-exec is feeling hard done by. My heart bleeds for him, it really does.

I mean, really? Freedom of speech? Excuse me while I spend the next five minutes laughing mockingly at this insignificant arsewipe and the ad-covered horse he rode in on. Fuck him and his entire ethically bankrupt industry.

 

[Callate]

"It's on the Internet so I should get it for free" is a real problem for people who make creative content. But the advertisers have to recognize that they shoulder a huge part of the blame for the current state of things. The number of ads I see that hinder or prevent the loading of what I actually came to view, attempt to run scripts that cause browser crashes, contain actual malware (!) or simply demand I watch a minute-long commercial to view forty-five seconds of video...

Oh, and for extra-special bonus points, let's have a hand for whoever came up with ads that don't even need to be clicked on, but hijack your browser when you simply move a mouse cursor over them. Let's curl that hand into a fist and apply it facially.

If those jolly jackanapeses who have spent the last decade trying to artificially bolster ad visibility statistics had been willing to self-regulate and draw a hard line with regard to keeping the sponsored content accessible and limiting what they would attempt to run on hardware over which they had no ownership rights, there's a good chance they wouldn't be in such a stir now. Instead, they turned it into an arms race, with entirely predictable results, and brought about a state where many people view all Internet ads as a plague to be eliminated by any means necessary.

I pity the creatives, and it has to be recognized that the antipathy towards advertising also plays a role in the skepticism and allegations of corruption facing many creators who write reviews and entertainment media coverage stories face today- "stealth" advertising being an all but inevitable result of that same arms race.

But as far as the advertisers themselves go? Take a look in the mirror, guys. J'accuse.

 

[senobit]

The ad-industry is an absolute cesspit and has no body but itself to blame, theres the straight forward stuff like full page ads on mobile, auto-playing media the creepy level of tracking, but all thats a side show compared to the real damage they cause by having no real intrest in security - anything from ad-server should be treated with the same level of suspicion as a random file arriving in your inbox or finding a usb stick in your office's carpark.

Instead of talking about the dire need the industry as whole needs to improve the security and stop casuing harm to the end-user of their customers, this idiot just wants to play the victim, have big a tantrum and call people names.

 

[Covarr]

The web advertising industry is directly responsible for web ad blockers. Over the years, they have found ways to make ads more and more intrusive. Not merely annoying, but actively interfering with usage of a site. Auto-playing videos (horrible on mobile for users with limited data), ads with sound that plays on sites with other sound (Newgrounds is guilty here), popup windows, ads that expand to cover the screen, ads with scripts that break sites... All in the name of making them harder to ignore.

There's been this attitude of arrogance behind it all, as though users are so desperate for their precious content that they will put up with anything. But that turned out not to be true. Some users just abandoned sites that were too obnoxious with their advertising. Countless sites drove users away in the early-mid 2000s this way, and aren't around anymore as a result. But other users didn't just leave. They fought back.

It all started with popup blockers, the precursor to modern ad-blocking software. It's worth noting that this didn't block all advertising, or even most of it. Not by a long shot. It only blocked the ads that were most problematic at the time: popups. And it worked. Nearly every major browser has popup blocking built-in these days, and advertisers have pretty much abandoned them.

Unfortunately, big advertising didn't learn from this. They didn't ask themselves why people wanted to block popups, or make any effort to develop ads that users wouldn't try to block (except Google, who had a really big text-ad initiative; bless 'em). Instead, they continued to do exactly what they'd done before, exactly what had already backfired on them. They made bigger, more obnoxious ads.

So, advertising industry, here's my challenge to you: Don't make horrible ads that people will feel compelled to block, and people won't block them. It's basic cause and effect. Funny how that works.

P.S. Thanks