Jimquisition: The Adblock Episode

[WeepingAngels]

So, I stopped using adblock months ago.

But since this seems like a good place to mention it, I'd just like to say this:

That Jeep ad? The one that's been on the site for ages? Spreads out and plays a video if you mouse over it for even a frame? If you've seen it, you know what I'm talking about.

Entirely because of that ad, I will never, under any circumstances, purchase, drive, or regard with anything but loathing, a Jeep. I kind of wonder if whatever marketing company works for Jeep actually thinks that abomination will move product, or if they just don't care.

It's, well, the sort of thing that makes people use adblock. I'm not planning to go back to it just over this, but it's astoundingly obnoxious, and I don't think the Escapist is doing itself any favors by hosting it, since in the long run, that sort of thing will almost guarantee fewer ad-viewing audience members.

The server guy said that they pay 3-4 times more for ads like that. Intrusive ads are what advertisers want, people hoping to teach something to advertisers don't understand them. There is a reason ads have spread everywhere within the public eye and beyond and it isn't because consumers want to see them.

I understand that, and wasn't really expecting to convince anyone, and hey, if the Escapist gets paid more for it, that's at least a benefit on some level.

Mostly, this thread was a convenient opportunity to do a quick mini-rant on something that had been bothering me. Was pretty cathartic, actually, even if I've already devoted more time to this discussion than to that ad.

I wasn't talking about you. I was talking about people who say that threads like this are an opportunity for advertisers to learn where the limit is. They know where the limit is and their job is to push the limits.

I should also add that the more tolerant consumers are of ads, the more ads they will get served to them by advertisers.

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

i used to not give a single shit about ads and didnt bother with adblock, UNTIL a few months back, when this annoying new tab kept popping up about some mother i dont give a shit about making tons of cash or whatever, to this day i dont know if this ad came from a site or a virus or whatever, the point is after exploring many solutions to this terrible ad which would pop continually over and over again no matter how many times i closed it, often opening many tabs at once, i decided to try adblock and so far it has been the only way to get rid of the thing, i will unblock this site but i usually dont unblock sites because to this day i dont know what site, if any, was poping the ad


so you can thank scummy spammers for the existence of adblock too, not just advertisers

 

[Hellfireboy]

Dear God that was a lot of warnings to get that post up.

 

[AtheistConservative]

I think one of the biggest issues is that the advertisements are a poor fit to the audience. They annoy the audience and are often completely irrelevant to audience members' interests. But it doesn't have to be like that. There are plenty of products and services that I buy that I'd be totally up for seeing an ad for. As long as that ad doesn't ruin my browsing experience that is.

For instance, I don't like online gaming in general, but I do love single player RPG's. No matter how many times some half topless princess tells me to that I can rule the kingdom or whatever, I'm not playing. Some new RPG on the other hand? Let me know so I can even consider it. I almost missed Fallout 3 back in the day because I had never heard of the franchise, and only by chance did I see an ad on TV for it. Fallout 3 is now one of my favorite games.

 

[DjinnFor]

I'm sure some people wouldn't use adblock on sites that didn't use audio-visual ads that loudly autoplayed in the background whilst watching videos or reading articles and were impossible to mute and forced repeated reloads of the same webpage to get rid of. Or relied on scripting, since we all know thanks to facebook that letting advertisers run scripts is the quickest way to brick your valued customers PCs. Or outright crashed browsers for no reason. Or were literally fraudulent redirects to scam sites and other such nonsense. Or, worst of all, relied SolveMedia.

God damn, you tempt me daily, Escapist. You really do. The minute my anti-virus software alerts me of a potential abuse of scripts, that will have been the last straw. I draw the line on "supporting content creators" when I suffer actual damage to my personal property brought on by nothing short of negligence on your part.

 

[Blue_vision]

Thanks Jim. I've never disabled my adblock for any site, and I always try to compensate by supporting producers more directly. You've convinced me to finally get a publisher's club membership. So congrats, I guess. And good video, as usual.

 

[Hellfireboy]

I would also like to point out that I did this because you managed to appeal to my deeply held belief that nothing is free and what appears free is actually an offset cost. I didn't pay for it but someone somewhere did somehow. I would like nothing more than for the word "free" as it relates to products or services to be entirely removed from the lexicon.

 

[Matt K]

I agree with a lot of these posts that the main problem for us viewers is the manner in which these ads as done. Personally I'd have no issue with static ads (or 15-30 sec videos for actual videos but not trailers since they're ads in and of themselves) that the site maintained the code for. Personally I've gotten viruses from a number of ads because no one seems to police these codes before they go live. Heck I most likely go one from a site a love who uses banner ads but he has no way of vetting ads before they run. Plus another issue is the bandwidth for these video ads. For instance at work there are bandwidth limits and I had ads for a 15 min video from Nostalgia Critic that was 3gb in size. Ad in the annoyance with loud autoplaying videos, hover over videos, etc.

I have to agree with Scrumpmonkey, the use of various blocking software is the viewers way of rejecting this type of annoyance. No one is saying they don't want sites to make money but they're saying its not worth having to deal with these issues to them. The industry is going to have to change the way ad's made and placed on sites or they're going to die off. Personally I think a change is going to be the best for everyone. Sites need better ways to vet the ads they run before they go live. Its the sites job to attract viewers and part of that job I believe is to ensure that said viewers encounter as little hassle as possible. Those type of tools would be very beneficial as it would allow for better and safer ads and also less intrusive.

 

[Neta]

If your advert is obnoxious and intrusive, then it deserves to be blocked. There's a high chance it's going to infect your computer with adware or malware so better to be safe than sorry.

If, however, it's a harmless little image-only banner, then it's not a problem.

Unfortunately if you've been using the obnoxious and intrusive adverts and gotten blocked because of it, then the user isn't going to know when you've learned your lesson and switched to the more user-friendly and disease-free adverts.

 

[Ross Tuddin]

I don't use an Adblocker however I go through random periods of time when I don't get ads before the videos as an example of just watching this video. I don't know why that happens but even if these down times in ads didn't happen i still wouldn't use an adblocker (even when I marathoned half of the shows). I get ads frequently when watching Twitch and I support content creators and websites using ads to continue to do the things that they like and allow me to watch their hard work.

 

[Squintsalot]

It's the exact same point this very site makes about game publishers; no one is automatically entitled to your money. That is what telling you not to add block is; it's being entitled.

The problem with advertising is it is one sided. To an advertiser you are a piece of meat. You gain nothing from turning on adverts. If advertising is being disabled by a lot of people it's because they find it objectionable, the fact that sites use advertising as their primary revenue stream is tangential and not really your problem.

It reminds me of the music industry bitching about the fact that digital downloads now exist. Advertising is an outmoded revenue model if people find it so horrible they block it universally. If you can't get enough ad dollars, for whatever reason, that is because your monitization model is broken. You either adapt or die. The market does not care which.

That is crucially where advertisement models fail; the market is rejecting them. As cold and impersonal as it sounds you either accept this fact or fade away. It's nothing personal. Addblock is legal, more convenient and safer. Like it or not this is the way the internet is going.

I agree wholeheartedly with everything you've written here.

Videos like this feel like they miss the most important point - content creators should be looking at ways to keep themselves afloat, other than "inconveniencing" your audience and then saying you're sorry. It would be a more interesting, non-polarizing discussion, I think.

 

[Xan Krieger]

Never used adblock myself so my solution when an ad is horrible or browser destroying is to go to the tech team. I remember an ad that was a collection of links and one of them involved an image of a botfly coming out of a cat. If you don't know what a botfly is I envy you. For those of you who do know what one is you know why I went right to the tech team. Sure enough before the day was over I wasn't seeing that ad anymore.

 

[Squintsalot]

I sort of did myself with the first post I wrote in this thread, #348 page 10, but uh, I have a number of warnings already and didn't want to push my luck. Consider it a light version of what you wrote veiled in niceties and less to the point. No reaction to it yet.
It might be that there's not much else to say than what you did. I certainly have nothing to add on that point, since you nailed it so well. Any attempt to do so wouldn't really do it justice and while people can apply all the sympathy and valid concerns of content creators they want, it doesn't change the fact that "we aren't friends" with them, as you so eloquently put it.

You made a very good point, actually. Finding better revenue sources is exactly what content creators should be talking about.

 

[Alar]

If I didn't already pay the yearly subscription (and I have since it came out), I would turn it off for the Escapist. But I do, so it isn't an issue for me. I throw some scratch in the direction of those I support, be it through purchasing merchandise, subscription-based content, or disabling adblock. But I still use adblock for 90% of the sites I go to.

 

[daxterx2005]

I hope someone sends Jim a Xenomorph mask.

 

[Mikeyfell]

12 ads on the page your video is on plus a banner pushing the payed subscription to the Escapist
one of those ads had sound that I could not stop from playing so I had to pause your video and wait for the ad to run it's course after watching the un-skippable ad before I could even watch your video (Not an ad for the LRR show Un-skippable mind you)

Sometimes, The Escapist runs so many ads at a time that it literally crashes my browser.

Then The Escapist has that rule that says you're not even allowed to talk about Fight Club [footnote]Ad Blockers[/footnote]

There are mouse-over ads that are really obtrusive, in fact I've accidentally moused over the one at the bottom of this page twice already (Whoops make that 3 times). And I remember back in the good ol' days when the ads were actually broken so they wouldn't scroll down the page as the comment text box grew so there would be an ad covering up what I was trying to type.
Sometimes the video ads that play before a video take longer to buffer than the actual video I came here to watch.

And every Captha I attempt to type (Which has an ad attached to it) always fails to register the first time (100% of the time) sometimes I have to "Retry" an Ad-captha 5 times before it'll post my damn forum comment, even though I'm absolutely sure I correctly typed the captha every one of those times.

So as you can plainly tell I do not ad block this website (Or any other site for that matter, because this is the worst site I go to when it comes to advertizing, and I would certainly start here if I ever determined that my convenience was worth more than contributing to the compensation of the content creators I watch regularly, which I won't)

So for the record, I'm glad that Jim doesn't see using ad blockers as some sort of crime or personal insult to him.
And hopefully saying this won't get me shat upon by moderator wrath but I feel sorry for the people who turned off their ad blocks for today, I couldn't imagine how it would feel jumping from an Escapist that ran properly to this. I mean assuming that turning off ads would even make the site run smoother, I don't know if that's even the case I've never ad blocked any site.

 

[Mikeyfell]

Why not just assume that people are going to block ads to begin with and then work around that?

Instead of saying "adblocking is bad so don't adblock" you should say "please whitelist us - here's why you should".

That's exactly what the video said...
Are you just reiterating what Jim said for the benefit of people who came into the comment section to wait for one of the pre-video ads to finish playing?

 

[Karadalis]

Well im only using the "no autoplay" function of chrome since i got really tired of finding the one tab where the one obnoxiously loud commercial was playing and starting itselfe up every 5 minutes or so while im browsing.

Im not entirely sure if that counts as an addblock since i do still see all the static adds.. but yeah thats my only problem with the adds.. its that they autoplay and are obnoxiously loud.. louder then the vids i came here to watch.

I dont have a problem with adds before videos or even banners thought they are more like commercials and i dont mind them on TV. Heck after all i put up with youtubes 30 sec adds before most videos.

But i do like my eardrums intact so there you go.. also more protection from addware and other undesirables that comes with letting adds play themselves automatically.

You see the Escapist doesnt guarantee me that their adds are free of malware and addware so i cannot guarantee you to just enable autoplay again.

 

[LordMonty]

I suffer the adds on this site, but seriously the noise(it really ain't selling me stuff whne i can'y work out where the picture relating to the image is) they make some times they are really loud...

Although on that subject its funny when you open like 10 pages at once when i'm just catching up on a day or two of news posts and videos and they then all go off together its a choire of gibber echoing in my ears... most amusing on some level so i just turn the sound off read the written posts then move onto the videos(like this one) after the sound attack finishes.

But I do feel for you as not getting paid for hard work is something most people should be able to conect and sympathise with. I think Yeats said it best...

But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

You are forever bound to the whimsy of the mad old interwebs Jimmy boy. Keep making me chuckle and engaing me with your twisted wisdom and i'll keep tuning in from old blighty to watch your and your damnable adds.