Marketing departments and public relations firms everywhere should have figured out by now that people don't consume media for the ads. Nobody ever hopped into a car to drive past billboards, nobody ever turned on the TV for the commercial breaks and nobody ever went on the internet to enthusiastically click every pop-up that shows up.
Ads are a product nobody wants to buy. Worse, ads are a product nobody wants to get given.
With the possible exception of SuperBowl Sunday.
+7
Options
ShadowfireVermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered Userregular
I find online ads pretty jarring but I've run adblock since like the day it was released and I haven't had cable since 2007... I'm not desensitized to them at all anymore.
TV commercials are crazy, y'all.
I never whitelisted Penny Arcade but Belasco and I both joined Club PA the moment it was available. I donate $3 to wikipedia every year. That may be the solution!
I can actually deal with TV ads, but for fucks sake, could they not crank the volume compared to the normal show? I know they used to sell TVs that auto normalized sound during commercials, did they get sued or something, because that is some useful tech right there.
There's a thing I read before that said those ads were actually not cranked up, they were at the maximum volume the channel would be set to. So, it wasn't that the ad was too loud, but that the show was significantly quieter than it "should" be.
The effect is the same, and it was probably just trying to shuffle blame over, but it's a thought.
On Thursday I found out the South Park episode where they creating a living human advertisment is a real thing.
A veteran Toastmaster trying to mentor me invited me to a seminar where I could learn business networking and leadership principles...
It turned out to be the Amway pyramid scheme. I was infuriated to the point I probably offended him. There are plenty of online stories of friendships destroyed because of That Guy turning a reunion or hangout into a business sale.
I find online ads pretty jarring but I've run adblock since like the day it was released and I haven't had cable since 2007... I'm not desensitized to them at all anymore.
TV commercials are crazy, y'all.
I never whitelisted Penny Arcade but Belasco and I both joined Club PA the moment it was available. I donate $3 to wikipedia every year. That may be the solution!
I can actually deal with TV ads, but for fucks sake, could they not crank the volume compared to the normal show? I know they used to sell TVs that auto normalized sound during commercials, did they get sued or something, because that is some useful tech right there.
Actually the US passed a law to prevent ads from being louder then the show they appear during.
I really wish Canada had some of that.
That law is kind of useless though. If there is a loud door slam once on a otherwise quiet show, that is the threshold the ads must stay under.
On Thursday I found out the South Park episode where they creating a living human advertisment is a real thing.
Sweet summer child etc etc
Google "Brand Ambassador" to find out that companies are paying college students and highschoolers money to promote their brand. Or just read this horrific article
According to John O’Brien, president of the AroundCampus Group, these ambassadors are college students who are “influencers on campus.” Attack! Marketing describes them as a “walking and talking personification of your brand.”
Sure, college students might not have a ton of disposable income, but they’re willing to spend money on things they value. According to NationWide, college students spend $1,200 per month. Forty percent of this budget is spent on discretionary items like cosmetics, food, and clothes. As you can see in the graphic below, that adds up to a whole lot of cash that could go directly into your company’s pocket. Plus, you can turn college students into lifelong consumers of your brand if you target them the right way.
“You’ve got the sweet spot of all things,” Corradino said. “You’ve got the 18-plus demographic, you’ve got some disposable income, and you’ve got a receptive audience. If you reach these people early on, you can create brand loyalty. It’s a no-brainer.”
On Thursday I found out the South Park episode where they creating a living human advertisment is a real thing.
Sweet summer child etc etc
Google "Brand Ambassador" to find out that companies are paying college students and highschoolers money to promote their brand. Or just read this horrific article
According to John O’Brien, president of the AroundCampus Group, these ambassadors are college students who are “influencers on campus.” Attack! Marketing describes them as a “walking and talking personification of your brand.”
Sure, college students might not have a ton of disposable income, but they’re willing to spend money on things they value. According to NationWide, college students spend $1,200 per month. Forty percent of this budget is spent on discretionary items like cosmetics, food, and clothes. As you can see in the graphic below, that adds up to a whole lot of cash that could go directly into your company’s pocket. Plus, you can turn college students into lifelong consumers of your brand if you target them the right way.
“You’ve got the sweet spot of all things,” Corradino said. “You’ve got the 18-plus demographic, you’ve got some disposable income, and you’ve got a receptive audience. If you reach these people early on, you can create brand loyalty. It’s a no-brainer.”
Gross.
Didn't Community do an episode making fun of this? Britta started dating a Kia brand ambassador or something.
I think Google gets it mostly right. You search for something, they show relevant ads.
Meanwhile, Facebook does stuff like show ads for divorce lawyers if you use the word "marriage".
The only ads that I've ever seen work and have an actual purpose on Facebook are the teeny tiny little ones under the right-hand column. Those have actually been relevant to my interests once or twice.
The other functionality of those little ads that I've seen is super-cheap market research: due to the nature of Facebook, if you're trying to gauge interest in a new product, you can buy ~1000 views worth and spread them across set age and gender ranges. Whichever ranges have the strongest response you repeat the process on, and then you know what target market to go after (and hopefully, how to not annoy them).
I've got exactly zero sympathy for any online advertiser. They have done this to themselves. You can pry adblock from my cold dead hard drive.
They totally did it to themselves with shitty ads. But the question still remains: then what funds the internet?
I use adblock, and I almost never whitelist a site. But what I do now that I have some disposable income is support the sites I like in other ways. I subscribe to paid content, if offered. I even sometimes pay for content I don't use, because its the only way to support a site I like without ads.
It took me a while, but I realized quality content is worth something to me, so I try to find a way to pay for it. I prefer not to see ads, so I do this instead.
I don't use an adblocker. Do adblockers take care of 'promoted stories' - ads designed to look like news stories usually found at the bottom of a web page?
I don't use an adblocker. Do adblockers take care of 'promoted stories' - ads designed to look like news stories usually found at the bottom of a web page?
A Canadian university study has found that using the Adblock Plus browser extension can save between 25 and 40 percent network bandwidth if deployed across an internal enterprise network.
The study tested the ability of the Adblock Plus extension, popular amongst web users who want to block ads being displayed, in reducing IP traffic when installed in a large enterprise network environment, and found that huge amounts of bandwidth was saved by blocking web-based advertisements and video trailers.
Considering clickthrough rates in the single digits, that's a pretty massive amount of bandwidth that is essentially wasted if you look at the purely technical aspect.
Can confirm. 40% is a high estimate, but I do regularly see measurable reductions in bandwidth utilization when we implement a web filter that includes ad-blocking. It's usually more in the 5%-10% range.
Generally this is done simultaneously with blocking social media - Facebook is almost always the largest source of web traffic in an organization, followed by YouTube. The combination of adblocking+Facebook+YouTube often reduces overall bandwidth use by 20% - 30%.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
I've got exactly zero sympathy for any online advertiser. They have done this to themselves. You can pry adblock from my cold dead hard drive.
They totally did it to themselves with shitty ads. But the question still remains: then what funds the internet?
I use adblock, and I almost never whitelist a site. But what I do now that I have some disposable income is support the sites I like in other ways. I subscribe to paid content, if offered. I even sometimes pay for content I don't use, because its the only way to support a site I like without ads.
It took me a while, but I realized quality content is worth something to me, so I try to find a way to pay for it. I prefer not to see ads, so I do this instead.
I would cry not one goddamn tear if the vast majority of shitty clickbait websites (like Buzzfeed and pretty much every Gawker property, for instance) collapsed under their own weight.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
BTW, regarding bandwidth, I've found that in the workplace, a significant amount of web traffic is driven by sites that constantly update while they're in an unfocused tab or window. Most employees are good about focusing on their work and not spending unreasonable amount of time Facebooking, but they tend to leave Facebook and their other stress-relief websites loaded in the background.
There's a lot of bandwidth being used to deliver both advertising and content that literally no human being is looking at.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
A Canadian university study has found that using the Adblock Plus browser extension can save between 25 and 40 percent network bandwidth if deployed across an internal enterprise network.
The study tested the ability of the Adblock Plus extension, popular amongst web users who want to block ads being displayed, in reducing IP traffic when installed in a large enterprise network environment, and found that huge amounts of bandwidth was saved by blocking web-based advertisements and video trailers.
Considering clickthrough rates in the single digits, that's a pretty massive amount of bandwidth that is essentially wasted if you look at the purely technical aspect.
Can confirm. 40% is a high estimate, but I do regularly see measurable reductions in bandwidth utilization when we implement a web filter that includes ad-blocking. It's usually more in the 5%-10% range.
Generally this is done simultaneously with blocking social media - Facebook is almost always the largest source of web traffic in an organization, followed by YouTube. The combination of adblocking+Facebook+YouTube often reduces overall bandwidth use by 20% - 30%.
A Canadian university study has found that using the Adblock Plus browser extension can save between 25 and 40 percent network bandwidth if deployed across an internal enterprise network.
The study tested the ability of the Adblock Plus extension, popular amongst web users who want to block ads being displayed, in reducing IP traffic when installed in a large enterprise network environment, and found that huge amounts of bandwidth was saved by blocking web-based advertisements and video trailers.
Considering clickthrough rates in the single digits, that's a pretty massive amount of bandwidth that is essentially wasted if you look at the purely technical aspect.
Can confirm. 40% is a high estimate, but I do regularly see measurable reductions in bandwidth utilization when we implement a web filter that includes ad-blocking. It's usually more in the 5%-10% range.
Generally this is done simultaneously with blocking social media - Facebook is almost always the largest source of web traffic in an organization, followed by YouTube. The combination of adblocking+Facebook+YouTube often reduces overall bandwidth use by 20% - 30%.
Blocking Youtube? That's just fucking mean.
It's a huge bandwidth sink. Most employees have smartphones - if you want to watch a video or stream music, use your own bandwidth.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
A Canadian university study has found that using the Adblock Plus browser extension can save between 25 and 40 percent network bandwidth if deployed across an internal enterprise network.
The study tested the ability of the Adblock Plus extension, popular amongst web users who want to block ads being displayed, in reducing IP traffic when installed in a large enterprise network environment, and found that huge amounts of bandwidth was saved by blocking web-based advertisements and video trailers.
Considering clickthrough rates in the single digits, that's a pretty massive amount of bandwidth that is essentially wasted if you look at the purely technical aspect.
Can confirm. 40% is a high estimate, but I do regularly see measurable reductions in bandwidth utilization when we implement a web filter that includes ad-blocking. It's usually more in the 5%-10% range.
Generally this is done simultaneously with blocking social media - Facebook is almost always the largest source of web traffic in an organization, followed by YouTube. The combination of adblocking+Facebook+YouTube often reduces overall bandwidth use by 20% - 30%.
Blocking Youtube? That's just fucking mean.
It's a huge bandwidth sink. Most employees have smartphones - if you want to watch a video or stream music, use your own bandwidth.
Fucking around on the internet is part of the compensation package. It's what you get in return for being forced to stick around 9-5 5 days a week.
BTW, regarding bandwidth, I've found that in the workplace, a significant amount of web traffic is driven by sites that constantly update while they're in an unfocused tab or window. Most employees are good about focusing on their work and not spending unreasonable amount of time Facebooking, but they tend to leave Facebook and their other stress-relief websites loaded in the background.
There's a lot of bandwidth being used to deliver both advertising and content that literally no human being is looking at.
perhaps relevant is this piece on fake web traffic
it's rather difficult for companies who wish to advertise to track if they're paying for traffic from real people or from bots. there's an incentive to create ads that are more interactive, and thus more disruptive to the end user, as a result
If ad companies didn't want us to use ad-blockers, they'd do a better job at policing themselves so we wouldn't have to worry about loading up a fist full of viruses and malware just by visiting a page without the ad-blocker on. I'm sorry, but dropping a few hundred on repairs or another laptop is NOT preferable to some company whining that we're cheating them out of a few pennies in ad revenue.
Look at what happened to Forbes- they tried to persecute users who used ad-blockers and ended up serving up loads of malware because of opportunistic geese realizing that they had a situation where people had to disable their adblockers and would be vulnerable to those kinds of attacks.
The only positive to that whole mess was that YouTube reversed course on its whole policy on adblockers.
I adblock everything on both my phone and PC and I don't care if I'm "pirating" websites or part of the problem that is killing the web or whatever (pretend I just made the jerkoff motion with my hand).
Sometimes when I'm in the middle of a game on Steam I'll fire up the in-client web browser to look something up and I am just appalled at how awful the internet is without adblock. The difference is insane. Some websites go from nothing but content and beautiful whitespace to a complete mess with ads thrown everywhere, autoplaying video, the same "sponsored content" that shows up everywhere telling you about this new trick for [YOUR STATE] drivers to save on their car insurance!/a new weightloss pill!/how to buy iPads at a bidding site for just $10!/etc.
The internet will adapt to advertising avoidance just like music and television did, whether that means everything will have a paywall, there will be more subtle sponsored content, or there will be less content in general I can't say, but until then I'm gonna ride this beautiful ad-free internet until the wheels fall off.
If ad companies didn't want us to use ad-blockers, they'd do a better job at policing themselves so we wouldn't have to worry about loading up a fist full of viruses and malware just by visiting a page without the ad-blocker on. I'm sorry, but dropping a few hundred on repairs or another laptop is NOT preferable to some company whining that we're cheating them out of a few pennies in ad revenue.
Look at what happened to Forbes- they tried to persecute users who used ad-blockers and ended up serving up loads of malware because of opportunistic geese realizing that they had a situation where people had to disable their adblockers and would be vulnerable to those kinds of attacks.
The only positive to that whole mess was that YouTube reversed course on its whole policy on adblockers.
Most of the problem here is Adobe Flash, which has new major security vulnerabilities every goddamn month, sometimes several times a month. Yahoo's ad network was leveraged to deliver a Flash-based exploit as recently as six months ago. Given that along with its incompatibility with all iPhones and many Androids, there's no excuse for an advertising network to use Flash anymore.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
That ties into one of the biggest benefits of adblock - antimalware programs protect you against malware that released a week ago, adblock protects you against malware that released ten seconds ago.
I realized that AdBlock is also an environmental cause.... it's estimated now that 2% of our energy use is in keeping the Internet going, more if you count all the end user devices that are multipurpose but in practice mostly Internet machines.
Cutting even 10% off bandwidth use is a measurable impact.
Steam: SanderJK Origin: SanderJK
0
Options
Magus`The fun has been DOUBLED!Registered Userregular
Is there a legit way to block ads on an Android? There was an AdBlock plugin I've read but it's not available in the PlayStore (usually a red flag).
Is there a legit way to block ads on an Android? There was an AdBlock plugin I've read but it's not available in the PlayStore (usually a red flag).
I use ghostery browser
Adblock Plus is still obtainable/usable but has been pulled from the play store for reasons that aren't quite clear - google seems to be turning against proxy-style adblockers
Adblock browser is a standalone browser with adblock plus built in
If ad companies didn't want us to use ad-blockers, they'd do a better job at policing themselves so we wouldn't have to worry about loading up a fist full of viruses and malware just by visiting a page without the ad-blocker on. I'm sorry, but dropping a few hundred on repairs or another laptop is NOT preferable to some company whining that we're cheating them out of a few pennies in ad revenue.
Look at what happened to Forbes- they tried to persecute users who used ad-blockers and ended up serving up loads of malware because of opportunistic geese realizing that they had a situation where people had to disable their adblockers and would be vulnerable to those kinds of attacks.
The only positive to that whole mess was that YouTube reversed course on its whole policy on adblockers.
Most of the problem here is Adobe Flash, which has new major security vulnerabilities every goddamn month, sometimes several times a month. Yahoo's ad network was leveraged to deliver a Flash-based exploit as recently as six months ago. Given that along with its incompatibility with all iPhones and many Androids, there's no excuse for an advertising network to use Flash anymore.
Honestly, I don't think it would be an unreasonable imposition to say that web ads are allowed to be a jpeg under X kb (to be reviewed annually), with a hyperlink, and that's it. Audio and video content can have audio and video ads respectively, with some common sense guidelines.
PBS Idea Channel did a video on the morality of adblock, and one of the ideas they discussed was that if ads pay for a site, and you block the ads, you are in effect blocking your "payment" and stealing. I whitelist sites that I visit frequently, as long as their ads aren't obnoxious. I wonder how much good that does, though. If ads are pay-per-view, I might have generated some revenue for some sites. However, if they are pay-per-click, I have never intentionally clicked on an ad. Am I stealing by not clicking the ads? What if I do click, but with the promise of never buying the product? Advertising to me has no value, but it's being sold like it does. In fact, it actually has a negative value, in that I've never bought something because of an online ad, but I do boycott companies that are super annoying about it. Geico and Direct TV will never get my business and have excluded themselves from my comparison shopping, and they paid to do it.
I pay for Hulu and Youtube without ads. The extra $3 I give Hulu makes it so much more enjoyable. I didn't plan on getting Youtube Red, but after the trial they gave out it was too hard to go back. I watch a lot on my Roku, where there isn't an easy way to block ads, and it seems like most crashes or lock ups are related to ads not loading, or not passing to the actual content after they played.
This is a nice idea, but it starts to fail once you realize that the "merchants" you are "stealing" from are just as likely to be "muggers" or "rapists" who are trying to hurt you.
As has already been said multiple times: advertisers did this to themselves. Any other company that so regularly delivered harm to their consumers and broke their property would have had to deal with the law long ago.
Marketing departments and public relations firms everywhere should have figured out by now that people don't consume media for the ads. Nobody ever hopped into a car to drive past billboards, nobody ever turned on the TV for the commercial breaks and nobody ever went on the internet to enthusiastically click every pop-up that shows up.
Ads are a product nobody wants to buy. Worse, ads are a product nobody wants to get given.
With the possible exception of SuperBowl Sunday.
It's too bad that advertisers have never caught onto the fact that if your ads are actually good, people won't change the channel.
Superbowl being an obvious example, but those perfume and cologne ads that they run around the holidays every year that are just these bizarre fantasy settings with supermodels and fantastical backdrops? I've never turned away from one of those.
For that matter, I don't think I've ever changed the channel on Flo (Progressive Insurance).
It's not that hard, just make ads that aren't fucking awful.
Marketing departments and public relations firms everywhere should have figured out by now that people don't consume media for the ads. Nobody ever hopped into a car to drive past billboards, nobody ever turned on the TV for the commercial breaks and nobody ever went on the internet to enthusiastically click every pop-up that shows up.
Ads are a product nobody wants to buy. Worse, ads are a product nobody wants to get given.
With the possible exception of SuperBowl Sunday.
It's too bad that advertisers have never caught onto the fact that if your ads are actually good, people won't change the channel.
Superbowl being an obvious example, but those perfume and cologne ads that they run around the holidays every year that are just these bizarre fantasy settings with supermodels and fantastical backdrops? I've never turned away from one of those.
For that matter, I don't think I've ever changed the channel on Flo (Progressive Insurance).
It's not that hard, just make ads that aren't fucking awful.
Really good ads even get people talking about them to other people for you. People tell other people "OMG, did you that hilarious ad for X?".
I don't think it's that advertisers don't know, it's just that quality costs money. Similar to how a lot of web advertisements (that aren't criminal scams) don't actually think that the obnoxious tactics are going to work, but that all they can afford are spam-level partners to provide content.
"Don't be terrible" is both just about the lowest bar you can imagine and yet online ads typically aren't capable of meeting it. Somewhere, someone has decided that ads that piss people off are OK, because it means people are now aware of the product that's being sold.
Civics is not a consumer product that you can ignore because you don’t like the options presented.
On Thursday I found out the South Park episode where they creating a living human advertisment is a real thing.
Sweet summer child etc etc
Google "Brand Ambassador" to find out that companies are paying college students and highschoolers money to promote their brand. Or just read this horrific article
According to John O’Brien, president of the AroundCampus Group, these ambassadors are college students who are “influencers on campus.” Attack! Marketing describes them as a “walking and talking personification of your brand.”
Sure, college students might not have a ton of disposable income, but they’re willing to spend money on things they value. According to NationWide, college students spend $1,200 per month. Forty percent of this budget is spent on discretionary items like cosmetics, food, and clothes. As you can see in the graphic below, that adds up to a whole lot of cash that could go directly into your company’s pocket. Plus, you can turn college students into lifelong consumers of your brand if you target them the right way.
“You’ve got the sweet spot of all things,” Corradino said. “You’ve got the 18-plus demographic, you’ve got some disposable income, and you’ve got a receptive audience. If you reach these people early on, you can create brand loyalty. It’s a no-brainer.”
Gross.
That article is mostly describing people who get paid to give away free samples of a product on a campus. Most of the time, that's all Brand Ambassador means. The "walking and talking personification of your brand" thing is marketing bumf. For example, if you're promoting an Australian sports product, that company will do it's best to find athletic looking Australians to give away the samples or whatever. It's hardly evil.
The rest of it is describing something also non-offensive, which is replacing ads with something that your potential customers instead might enjoy, like a free sponsored-concert or similar. That's basically what Content marketing is: replacing an ad with something with inherent value of it's own, either informative, entertaining, inspiring or relevant. See: Red Bull putting a guy into space, Kronenbourg putting out an album of slowed-down classic songs, or Bethesda creating 'Fallout Shelter' for iOS.
Also, yes, this sort of thing can be useful experience for students interested in getting into marketing.
Posts
With the possible exception of SuperBowl Sunday.
There's a thing I read before that said those ads were actually not cranked up, they were at the maximum volume the channel would be set to. So, it wasn't that the ad was too loud, but that the show was significantly quieter than it "should" be.
The effect is the same, and it was probably just trying to shuffle blame over, but it's a thought.
A veteran Toastmaster trying to mentor me invited me to a seminar where I could learn business networking and leadership principles...
It turned out to be the Amway pyramid scheme. I was infuriated to the point I probably offended him. There are plenty of online stories of friendships destroyed because of That Guy turning a reunion or hangout into a business sale.
That law is kind of useless though. If there is a loud door slam once on a otherwise quiet show, that is the threshold the ads must stay under.
Google "Brand Ambassador" to find out that companies are paying college students and highschoolers money to promote their brand. Or just read this horrific article
Gross.
Didn't Community do an episode making fun of this? Britta started dating a Kia brand ambassador or something.
The only ads that I've ever seen work and have an actual purpose on Facebook are the teeny tiny little ones under the right-hand column. Those have actually been relevant to my interests once or twice.
The other functionality of those little ads that I've seen is super-cheap market research: due to the nature of Facebook, if you're trying to gauge interest in a new product, you can buy ~1000 views worth and spread them across set age and gender ranges. Whichever ranges have the strongest response you repeat the process on, and then you know what target market to go after (and hopefully, how to not annoy them).
I use adblock, and I almost never whitelist a site. But what I do now that I have some disposable income is support the sites I like in other ways. I subscribe to paid content, if offered. I even sometimes pay for content I don't use, because its the only way to support a site I like without ads.
It took me a while, but I realized quality content is worth something to me, so I try to find a way to pay for it. I prefer not to see ads, so I do this instead.
Yes
Or at least, ghostery does
Can confirm. 40% is a high estimate, but I do regularly see measurable reductions in bandwidth utilization when we implement a web filter that includes ad-blocking. It's usually more in the 5%-10% range.
Generally this is done simultaneously with blocking social media - Facebook is almost always the largest source of web traffic in an organization, followed by YouTube. The combination of adblocking+Facebook+YouTube often reduces overall bandwidth use by 20% - 30%.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I would cry not one goddamn tear if the vast majority of shitty clickbait websites (like Buzzfeed and pretty much every Gawker property, for instance) collapsed under their own weight.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
There's a lot of bandwidth being used to deliver both advertising and content that literally no human being is looking at.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Blocking Youtube? That's just fucking mean.
It's a huge bandwidth sink. Most employees have smartphones - if you want to watch a video or stream music, use your own bandwidth.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Fucking around on the internet is part of the compensation package. It's what you get in return for being forced to stick around 9-5 5 days a week.
perhaps relevant is this piece on fake web traffic
http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-click-fraud/
it's rather difficult for companies who wish to advertise to track if they're paying for traffic from real people or from bots. there's an incentive to create ads that are more interactive, and thus more disruptive to the end user, as a result
Look at what happened to Forbes- they tried to persecute users who used ad-blockers and ended up serving up loads of malware because of opportunistic geese realizing that they had a situation where people had to disable their adblockers and would be vulnerable to those kinds of attacks.
The only positive to that whole mess was that YouTube reversed course on its whole policy on adblockers.
I can has cheezburger, yes?
Sometimes when I'm in the middle of a game on Steam I'll fire up the in-client web browser to look something up and I am just appalled at how awful the internet is without adblock. The difference is insane. Some websites go from nothing but content and beautiful whitespace to a complete mess with ads thrown everywhere, autoplaying video, the same "sponsored content" that shows up everywhere telling you about this new trick for [YOUR STATE] drivers to save on their car insurance!/a new weightloss pill!/how to buy iPads at a bidding site for just $10!/etc.
The internet will adapt to advertising avoidance just like music and television did, whether that means everything will have a paywall, there will be more subtle sponsored content, or there will be less content in general I can't say, but until then I'm gonna ride this beautiful ad-free internet until the wheels fall off.
it's the color of television tuned to a dead channel the transparent layer of a .png file
Most of the problem here is Adobe Flash, which has new major security vulnerabilities every goddamn month, sometimes several times a month. Yahoo's ad network was leveraged to deliver a Flash-based exploit as recently as six months ago. Given that along with its incompatibility with all iPhones and many Androids, there's no excuse for an advertising network to use Flash anymore.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Cutting even 10% off bandwidth use is a measurable impact.
Steam Profile | Signature art by Alexandra 'Lexxy' Douglass
I use ghostery browser
Adblock Plus is still obtainable/usable but has been pulled from the play store for reasons that aren't quite clear - google seems to be turning against proxy-style adblockers
Adblock browser is a standalone browser with adblock plus built in
Honestly, I don't think it would be an unreasonable imposition to say that web ads are allowed to be a jpeg under X kb (to be reviewed annually), with a hyperlink, and that's it. Audio and video content can have audio and video ads respectively, with some common sense guidelines.
No code, no security problem.
This is a nice idea, but it starts to fail once you realize that the "merchants" you are "stealing" from are just as likely to be "muggers" or "rapists" who are trying to hurt you.
As has already been said multiple times: advertisers did this to themselves. Any other company that so regularly delivered harm to their consumers and broke their property would have had to deal with the law long ago.
It's too bad that advertisers have never caught onto the fact that if your ads are actually good, people won't change the channel.
Superbowl being an obvious example, but those perfume and cologne ads that they run around the holidays every year that are just these bizarre fantasy settings with supermodels and fantastical backdrops? I've never turned away from one of those.
For that matter, I don't think I've ever changed the channel on Flo (Progressive Insurance).
It's not that hard, just make ads that aren't fucking awful.
Really good ads even get people talking about them to other people for you. People tell other people "OMG, did you that hilarious ad for X?".
I looked for their advertising on Youtube and I don't even know if I can buy the shit in Sweden.
"Don't be terrible" is both just about the lowest bar you can imagine and yet online ads typically aren't capable of meeting it. Somewhere, someone has decided that ads that piss people off are OK, because it means people are now aware of the product that's being sold.
That article is mostly describing people who get paid to give away free samples of a product on a campus. Most of the time, that's all Brand Ambassador means. The "walking and talking personification of your brand" thing is marketing bumf. For example, if you're promoting an Australian sports product, that company will do it's best to find athletic looking Australians to give away the samples or whatever. It's hardly evil.
The rest of it is describing something also non-offensive, which is replacing ads with something that your potential customers instead might enjoy, like a free sponsored-concert or similar. That's basically what Content marketing is: replacing an ad with something with inherent value of it's own, either informative, entertaining, inspiring or relevant. See: Red Bull putting a guy into space, Kronenbourg putting out an album of slowed-down classic songs, or Bethesda creating 'Fallout Shelter' for iOS.
Also, yes, this sort of thing can be useful experience for students interested in getting into marketing.
Steam: adamjnet