Jimquisition: The Adblock Episode

[EvilRoy]

Well, I might be a little off topic here, but this kind of intrigued me.

I suppose that The Escapist doesn't choose the ads that are viewed on their site (or they do, I do not know), but how come that as soon as I turned the AdBlock off, the page gladly revealed to me an advert about premature ejaculation?

Could be based on whatever browsing history data they have on you, that gets run through some kind of algorithm to pick ads to display. Although I've found that you can get some pretty bizarre ads if they have little to no data.

I visit weight loss/exercise advice pages often so nearly all of my adds are 'you're fat take this pill' or 'you're fat buy this exercise crap.' For a long while I was getting that "sorry for being so direct, but.." add relating to obesity before most videos here and on youtube.

At work its usually drink less or car ads, presumably because my office displays too varied of interests to target ads very tightly.

 

[RJ 17]

Two things:

1: The only ads I really have a problem with are the roll-over, screen-conquering, auto-playing ads. You go to click the quote button on someone's comment because, obviously, you want to make a comment off of their comment. The browser jumps to the bottom of the page, conveniently to the text box down here at the bottom so you can jump right in and start typing. The sad thing is, the bottom right corner is where the roll-over ads like to hang out, so just by quoting some one you're often forced to having an ad take up a good chunk of your screen.

That, and they have a tendency to not "update" properly...as in when you're typing a larger response, the text-box grows to accommodate it. Yet there's the ad, refusing to move down with the bottom of the page and now it's taking up literally half your text box.

Still, I don't run any kind of ad blocker because I know that ads are just a website's way of paying the bills. As Jim said, the internet isn't a magic content box of free stuff, someone's gotta pay the talent. Someone's gotta pay the writers for their time. Someone's gotta pay to keep the servers up and running. And so on. Personally I can't afford a subscription, so if having to sigh every now and then at an ad (Seriously...what's up with these Toyota ads where the audio is completely unsynced from the video? ) if it means keeping this site and its contents free to people like me, then that's a tiny price to pay for the amount of enjoyment I get from coming here.

2: My brother got me that exact same Predator mask for Christmas. If it makes you feel any better, Jim, I look like a right tit when I wear mine as well...but my girlfriend insists on it. *drum rimshot*

 

[Furrama]

I guess Jim is better than me, because I will point fingers. Stealing is stealing.

Yes, but blocking ads isn't stealing. Are you stealing a TV show when you go to make a cup of coffee during the ad break, rather than watching the ad?

You have people like me who don't turn on adblock because I get how the money flows. The people who are using adblock, you are the guys that are making the ads more intrusive for ME.

That doesn't seem logical. The people blocking the ads are not the ones who create the ads, or run the ads. Why do you not blame the sites that choose to run these ads? They are the people responsible for running the ads, not those who block them

They're getting worse and more interruptive as time goes on because I'm one of the few "paying my dues". And I do remember back when they weren't nearly so bad, especially on higher end sites that weren't what you call "shady" to begin with.

You're going to need to show some evidence for your claim that ads are getting more intrusive because of ad blocking. Do you really believe that ads would suddenly get less intrusive if everybody stopped ad blocking?

There's also many other reasons why ads have gotten more intrusive over time:

1. Technology - people have fast connections today, so streaming video and animation, etc. is a lot more viable than in the past.
2. Audience - the internet has grown very rapidly, so there are many more people online to sell ads to.
3. Competition - the online advertising market has also grown rapidly, so advertisers have to compete with other ads.

The idea that Adblock users have an significant impact on this seems absurd. The vast majority of people browse without Adblock. And because of the growth of internet users, the number of people viewing websites without Adblock has grown over time, not shrunk. So how does it make any logical sense to blame more intrusive ads on Adblock?

I feel that your sense of outrage and blame may be wildly misplaced.

This is a snowball effect case. You can't argue on a personal morality level with this one. This is a case where something becomes wrong because too many people are doing the same thing and ruining something. Hence the "too much trash" analogy, (that you cut out of my quotes and didn't address because it doesn't suit you I guess). And there is always cause and effect when something like this happens, and while I don't have numbers it's pretty freaking evident that too many adblockers are having a negative effect on advertisers, who in turn pass the buck off to those who don't use it. If your audience goes down and you can't up your view count in your demographics, (which is the only thing that matters, butt in seat or not) you milk those who are still around. Sites with lots of tech savvy users probably have this the worst.

The worst thing about this is that you can't put the genie back in the bottle. If everyone stopped using adblock right now the ads would not get less intrusive and video makers would not take out the extra commercials. It would almost always be a lose lose situation for them.

And your argument is shot in the foot with the three point tech/audience/competition thing. If MORE people are getting online to see these ads, then why aren't people getting the money for the numbers that they're earning? What about the little guys who are getting shafted in this? You can look at the charts for your precious numbers, in the video even, they're pulling in about half of what they should be. Sometimes even less!

And if you want to give a last line of moral judgement, so can I. You sound like the sort who wants to do what they want, damn the consequences, and justifies it to themselves and washes their hands of it.

It isn't ALL your trash, right?

 

[dakkster]

Browsing through this thread and seeing how completely randomly warnings have been handed out for saying that someone has The Escapist blacklisted because of autoplay ads with sound while others receive no warnings makes me NOT want to join the discussion. I don't know if the mods have discussed this, but you lot should really go through this thread and look at how arbitrarily you have handed out repercussions. It's not exactly discussion-friendly.

As for my opinions on adblocking, I'll hold on to them until I know I won't get arbitrary punishment.

 

[bonoes]

I paid money so I could view content without ads. Thank god for me.

 

[freaper]

I used to get extremely obnoxious adds for MMORPG's or whatever, but now I've turned it off and it's ads for a local clothes store, so I don't mind. Let's hope they stay that way.

 

[Bassmaster92]

just subscribed to the pub club, its pay day and im already sick of the adds from 2 days of white listing the site, although i wish the australian dollar was stronger

 

[weirdee]

I would be willing to remove adblock if advertisers stopped using the most shittiest of practices, but every time they escalate things, it just sort of underscores who started the shitfest first. I use it because of three things that I own and paid for: my CPU, my memory, and my bandwidth. When ads treat these resources like an all you can eat buffet (like for instance, the MANDATORY VIDEO ADS ON THE ESCAPIST), this is when I start to take issue with all of this. The exploitation, while also a factor, has sort of become part of the internet in of itself, so I'm not as bothered by it, since I employ safeguards for everything anyway.

Could you bring yourself to say "thank you" for me continuing to watch your content DESPITE those ads, instead of leaving entirely? I by no means wish to deprive you of income while viewing your content, but it would be so very easy for me to just stop visiting this site ever again and get all of my news from a feed somewhere else.

 

[Sergey Sund]

I have noticed that I do not see any adds despite having disabled Adblock Edge.
This is sad, because I have all video sites disabled in it - I want to be the goody-two-shoes kind of viewer who sits through 45 seconds of inane preroll adds.
Look, I don't need to tell you that it's smart / you need to have adblock software when you're moving through certain parts of the internet. I can't really deinstall it.
So any tipps on how to resolve this would be appreciated.

 

[Icehearted]

Adblock, or for that matter Firefox and Greasemonkey became a known thing to me years ago thanks to advertising that went beyond being merely intrusive and started dictating my browsing, in some cases hijacking my browser altogether. A while back I remember being highly annoyed with intellitxt, a popup ad that would activate when my cursor passed over a bit of text in any given article. I move my mouse around, that's how they work, but non sites that used these I found myself unable to read most of what I saw because one accidental movement of my hand and most of the page would be covered with little windows from those intellitxt ads.

IMDB pulled some shit too, with flash enabled ads that would, without any action on my part at all, roll over more than 70% of the screen literally blocking my view of everything but the lover two inches of my monitor with an advert that required I click several times or watch a video stream for about 45 seconds before being able to close it and see the content I'd come for, often just a quick look up for a name of some actor; a simple task now an obstacle course.

Even Penny Arcade fell victim to this, a flash ad banner years ago with a very noisy buzzing mosquito, and since it was flash it was loud as fuck and stopped for nothing. Gamesradar used to stream video ads right on the page, and if your speakers were enabled you'd get blasted with warfare sound effects.

I remember when I was trying to figure out how to remedy the annoying intellitxt ads reading one of it's designer's comments about them. She'd said, essentially, that the more annoying the ad the better, because love it or hate it, you will remember it, and that was not just her goal, or her team's goal, but the goal of the companies they were advertising for, to be remembered regardless of why. Ironically, I only remember the annoying nature of the ads, couldn't tell you what they were for.

I get that people want to be rewarded for their work, but I also get people don't want to be hassled for taking interest in that work. In many cases it falls to the content creator to choose their advertising, or manage what they will or will not accept. For better or worse advertising on the internet has shaped user's attitudes toward being open to allowing ads rather than simply blocking everything.

 

[Hellkiller15]

I was really quite happy to contently keep off ad-blocker plus off this website and wait for my videos because this is a website that I truly love and I watch and read things on here all the time. However when that fucking Joanna Lumley advert with her acting as a mobster and frankly acting like a complete idiot made me want to literally pull my hair out. I will probably take my ad-blocker plus off this site again soon because I was quite happy with the usual car ads and various other ones. That shit just pissed me off to no end and I couldn't take it every time I watched a video especially considering that typing in the phrase at the bottom of the video often bugged out and didn't work. Making it impossible to skip and all the more frustrating. Fuck you Joanna Lumley, you're a way better actress then this, get your shit together.

 

[crimsonshrouds]

snip

I don't use adblock at all and I've never seen a point too it. I have always supported the escapist and I'm proud of that.

 

[Arrikanez]

I use Adblock. I won't on this site, because I trust it, and people have asked nicely.
But I use it for the sheer fact that, if I don't, I end up getting VIRUSES. Those viruses that hide in ads on mouseovers, and the viruses that infect from just having ads on the page. I DO NOT like waking up to find my computer's worse than a piece of cardboard because some joe-schmoe decided it would be funny to stick a worm in a mouseover ad.

 

[Seneschal]

I've always kept the Escapist whitelisted, but I remember first learning how to do that after watching a similar "please support us"-video on another site (I think it was tgwtg). I don't think that's basic knowledge. And with adblockers becoming more common, sites should probably switch from censoring their every utterance to explaining what their impact is and how they can be selectively disabled if one wishes to support a site. Videos like this can do wonders.

I sympathize with the mods, since I suppose the ad services are breathing down The Escapist's neck about including that no-adblock-talk rule into the community guidelines, apparently operating under the impression that adblock is like Lord Voldemort.

But, honestly, I get the feeling The Escapist could find advertisers of a much higher caliber. The ads right now are just...unbecoming. This is a quintuple-Webby-winning site, for god's sake, so why do I feel like I'm on some seedy celebrity gossip blog half the time?

 

[alvaro barcenass]

i turned of my adblock during the episode out of respect, now i have two adverts runing on my computer and its taken more than 2 minutes to run the video i got adblock just because youtube's excesive ads taking 15-30 sec's each video but some are so bad in script and repetition and it's gotten way worse at the excapist but, I have learned that yeah i should un block the sites that i like for support

idea general: well the worst is that the more we addblock the worse ads get but what-if they show the add last or short and optimised ads, because holy hell the loading time is about quadruple i mean come on. still gonna have add block off for this site though.

 

[Jenvas1306]

I talked to a friend of mine who lives in the US after I watched Jims video. We both have been visiting the escapist for years. Now here my german ads are somewhat decent but after he turned of his adblock he gets autoplaying videos that slow the loading of the site a lot or even crash his browser. how can you not block ads that make it impossible to watch the content here?
I mean if I had that issue I would have to decide if I support the escapist or get to actually enjoy it at all, that cant be intened.
So just check your ads before you put them onto your site. use those that are optimised and non intrusive, after all its not just the consumers who change adds based on if they block them or not, its also the owners of the sites that must choose adds that dont inconvenient the target audience like a badger in the face.

 

[Diceman]

Y'know what?
Fair point, reasonable request.
Let's do it.

 

[KouDy]

I have escapist on white list in my adblock (so i am receiving ads). It's the way of supporting them and website is good.
At work we don't have adblocks at all so that would be another point to add.

 

[Rpground]

My simple rule is if they earn it I watch their ads.

If they entertain me and continue to put out good content that I enjoy then I will allow ads as a sign that I want to support the content creators and to see more of said content.

Really simple as that really...

 

[Calbeck]

When I find a site with content I like, I disable AdBlock because I want to support the show. I want to see more of it. I want to see the creator(s) rewarded for their hard work.

But very recently --- and I mean, in terms of a few months --- I have seen more and more invasive advertising that I can't even so much as mute. I put up with rollover ads by being careful with my mouse, and I ignored anything with that stupid smiley on it, and I otherwise enjoyed content while remembering that watching the SAME ad for the UMPTEENTH TIME for a product I was never going to buy was a small price to pay.

Indeed, it was the same price I paid to watch Warner Bros. cartoons on my TV growing up.

But I was finally forced to draw a hard line: I will absolutely AdBlock ANY show which allows the use of ads that override my ability to control what's being dumped onto my screen. Recently, for example, I was on an entirely different site which I quite enjoy, and had queued up five different shows while I finished watching something on a major video provision service.

While I was trying to watch THAT video, ALL FIVE shows on the other tabs launched auto-play ads with no-mute audio.

My sound card glitched with skipping audio from all six sources, my system locked for a bit, and I found myself scrambling to deal with what I --- initially --- thought was a virus. Given that these ads invaded my system, caused performance crashes, and prevented me from stopping them in any way OTHER than by using AdBlock, I now consider AB to be an anti-virus program. And since I have no way to predict that any given ad from a given source will NOT be an "ad-virus" prior to the damn thing triggering, I now AdBlock any specific show where such an advertisement launches.

I'd mute an annoying Skyper. I'd block a pestering Steam messager. I'd ban a YouTube channel-spammer.

For the same reasons, I use AdBlock.

But there's a ready solution! DON'T TAKE ADS FROM BUSINESSES THAT USE VIRUS-LIKE ADVERTISING. I'd love to continue to support the shows I love by watching ads that aren't trying to force themselves on me. Until then, I'll just throw some money now and again at the donation boxes when I see them.