Block that Ad!
Who is surprised that the Internet has followed the rest of American culture into a greater saturation of advertising, seeping into everything it can? Advertising-fueled pop culture is replacing civic values, literature, and history as the only thing Americans truly have in common.
On Usenet, spammers have ruined some newsgroups, driving the signal-to-noise ratio so low that the good guys have left town: as in the middle-class flight from deteriorating inner cities to the suburbs, some set up shop in new groups, hoping the trollers and spammers don't follow.
Your email inbox has probably seen the likes of "spamoflage" -- messages with innocuous or misleading titles, trying to get by your software or mental spam filter. If you see a message from an unknown sender title "answer to your question" or "Re: Hi" or "about your site", you can trash it; it's probably spam. Tell people on your website or in your newsgroups to give their messages good, specific subject lines.
Web pages harbor the most frenetic hucksters: banner ads, animated banner ads, popup ads (Geocities' contribution to human history), that invade your desktop and often crash your browser. Watermarks that try to stay visible in the browser window, and obstruct the content beneath. FUIs - fake user interfaces - where what looks like a dialog box from your operating system is simply a click-thru ad. Push "technology" (a la Pointcast) appears to have faded away, but we can expect more "interactive" intrusive ads in the future, jumping out of the browser, trying to capture and forcibly hold your attention: video on java, ads inserted between pages (already called "intermercials"), and ads that talk to you.
You, however, may be surprised by the array of weapons on your side. If you surf the Web on a Unix box, Mac, or PC, there are shareware and free programs that intercept these ads, uncluttering your life and speeding up your browsing. Some programs also block cookies from every site except your approved list, and may even send back fake cookies, with whatever content you want, instead. Stopping the Geocities of the world from impolitely plastering your screen with popup windows is also in the works. It's a heady feeling surfing with an ad blocker; you've reversed the trend of more corporate intrusion into your life. Each time you see a blank spot, or broken image icon, on the screen, you've stuffed an advertiser's attempt to elbow his way to the front and push his product in your face.
People in the business of throwing ads at you aren't happy about ad blocking. Kevin O'Connor, $100 million CEO of spamfactory Doubleclick, said: "It's a cute thing to do, but a lot of people find advertising is a key form of information. I think it's a prank, and I don't think it will be allowed to catch on. If advertising fails, content providers die, and people have no reason to go to the Internet."
Really. Let's examine this sentence by sentence.
Is advertising a key form of information? I wish that were the case. However, banner ads do not and cannot have much information, because the primary message is the exhortation ("Click here! Limited time offer!") to buy. Most advertising in most media lacks the sort of key information people need to assess and compare the product. Ads are to persuade and sell, not to inform.
Is ad blocking a prank? On the contrary, it's an effective way to better your life. It saves download time and lets you concentrate on the content you're looking for.
Will it not be allowed to catch on? Sorry, advertisers don't have that sort of control over the internet, or the software you choose to run.
Will ad blocking lead to content provider death, and no more internet? No. Web sites providing useful content will be able to move to micropayments to make money. Wouldn't you pay a penny for each good set of results from a search engine? The portals would have to improve their content, doing away with junk results like "Princess Diana" and "coffee" for "java crashes my browser", or having "Lincoln Highway history" return a hit for every snot-nosed business with an address on the Lincoln Highway. When every search costs, customers will demand better.
Is ad blocking "theft of services?" No. No site I've seen has you agree to a contract stating you will view ads in exchange for content. It may be an implicit assumption, but it's not enforceable.
Does ad blocking exemplify the "tragedy of the commons?" In other words, are ad blockers trying to get for free what the population as a whole pays for (by viewing ads)? No. There will always be people unwilling or unable to block ads. Most people, when surveyed, believe themselves less susceptible to ads than the general population (think about this) but clearly that's not the case: think of all the people that buy Windows 98, Chevy Grand Ams, Chia Pets, Tommy Hilfiger, Nike, NBA apparel, DIVX, and so on, and make sure to spend 2 months' salary on a diamond for the little lady. These people depend on advertising to show them how to conduct their lives. It's probable that ad-supported Web content won't die after all.
If ad-supported Web content goes away, will there be no reason to go to the Internet? No. That is the myopic, self-serving worldview of a person whose livelihood depends on forcing ads at people. The Web has expanded the information and entertainment resources available completely outside advertising- infected media. History sites, South Park scripts, games, music, quizzes, math tutorials, opinion columns, Internet news, recipes, support groups, and thousands of other resources are available on web pages hosted by ordinary people who have "real" jobs and do not put ads on their pages. O'Connor couldn't be more wrong. There are millions of people willing to offer information *for free*, just because it's a good thing to do. Please help get rid of the idea that anything worthwhile has to have some economic justification.
Suppose the ad-supported side of the Internet dies out. We'll be back to the Internet circa 1991, where the Net was populated by students, teachers, scientists, and citizens. But you'd still have the Web, CGI, Java, Apache, Linux, Perl, and all the other free tools and open technologies that keep the Web going. You'd pay for the internet, as you do now, through your ISP. As public and private utilities are able to upgrade their infrastructures, the "Net", and its maintainers, would figure out how to keep running and grow.
One final O'Connor quote: "People who want to strip out ads are probably too cheap for [commercial ad-blocking] software." Again, not true. Shareware ($30) ad-blocking programs are definitely worth it. How much would you pay to help tear down a billboard? How much do you pay for HBO or other ad-free TV channels? There *is* a market for ad blockers, just as there is for banner ads.
Depending on your platform, though, you can start blocking ads for free. Junkbusters, for example, gives their blocker away to promote their anti-spam goals. Here's a list of shareware and freeware ad blockers.
Junk Busters - very thorough issue and news site regarding cookies, ads, privacy, and spam. Offers free Junkbuster proxy, which blocks URLs (which includes graphics) matching a pattern in your "block list". The proxy also selectively blocks cookie requests, and can even send fake cookies to subvert a site's data gathering attempts.
Steve Falkenburg's WebFree - a Macintosh control panel. Works well with Netscape, but not as well with IE. Blocks all cookies (all or none), blocks images with URLs matching patterns, and stops animated GIFs after one cycle.
Update: DoubleClick is using customer databases from Abacus to associate your surfing patterns with personal info including address and phone number! Isn't that great? [Slashdot]
