The revolution will not be animated

[avram]

I’m using Firefox on both my home and work computers. And I’ve got the Adblock extension installed. This means that I’ve got the power to delete annoying images from my web-browsing experience.

I find animated ads annoying.

There are lots of weblogs I read on a regular basis where I’m not seeing ads. On Making Light, I only see the text portion of the ads — at some point there must have been an ad there (or in another Blogads weblog) with an animated image, and I right-clicked it, chose “Adblock image” from the contextual menu, and edited the filter string to read http://images.blogads.com/*. Bang, no more images (of any kind, animated or still) in any ad (on any blog) served by Blogads.

(I’ve since learned that hitting the ESC key stops all animated GIFs on a page in Firefox. But I’m not about to go back and edit all those saved Adblock filters. And I don’t think ESC does anything to stop Flash ads.)

I suppose that, should this habit of mine catch on, Blogads (and I’m choosing them as an example only because they’re handy) could change the way they publish their ads. It probably wouldn’t be hard to randomize the name of their image server, or maybe use some fancy DHTML tricks to serve annoying content some more sophisticated way. Then I’d probably have to use Greasemonkey to defeat them, and might wind up not seeing their ads at all — Greasemonkey allows much more interesting ways of bypassing ads.

But I don’t want that to happen. I like it when web authors can earn money off their content without locking it up behind for-pay subscription walls. And an ever-escalating war of advertisers-vs-scripters could be even more annoying than the animated ads.

What’s the solution? I don’t know if there is one, or even a problem, really. I doubt that even 10% of web users will ever take up habitual ad-blocking. As long as there are only a few of us, advertisers and publishers probably don’t have much of an incentive to counter our blocks. Still, I wonder if there’s a way that someone who wants to have ads can avoid serving up annoying content. I’d expect this to be an issue for web cartoonists — who wants an annoying, flashing ad served up next to one’s art?

A first stab at a solution: An advertising service could set up a special “no animation” tier. Presumably this would pay less than the regular tier of service. This tier would have a policy of serving only JPEG and PNG images; I don’t think animation can be done with either of those. No JavaScript either. I think that would eliminate all animation, and it could all be verified programmatically.

Comments

[stormsweeper.livejournal.com]

http://flashblock.mozdev.org is really useful, too.

The ad war is interesting, as it shows a weakness of the market. Every bit of research out there shows text ads are mroe effective and profitable, and most users find takeovers and popups/popunders annoying, but advertisers keep pushing them. Executives all over don't seem to get it, so they push harder and harder for more results from the graphic ads, which leads to all sorts of nastiness.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

What bugs me most is, in order: stupid graphical tricks (pop-ups, pop-unders, animations), and distraction. If I go to a web page, I go there to read about something that interests me. Ads that are actually related to the subject of the page are much less unwelcome than random gibberish about stuff that doesn't interest me. This is part of the reason why google are cleaning up in the ad market -- they're less annoying because they're relevant. But in the long term, advertising itself is part of the problem. I have a finite amount of attention to give to various data sources and advertising is an attempt to piggyback on my attention. By becoming more intrusive and more insistent, the advertisers have sensitized me to their product. It's gotten to the point where I now watch very little TV, and switch off the sound during advertising intervals so I can read a book instead of watching the glowing tube.

[baldanders.livejournal.com]

I loathe animated ads. I understand they want to grab my attention, and I'm mroe or less okay with that. But animated ads won't let go; I literally cannot properly concentrate on text with an ad flashing in my peripheral vision. I've written to sites telling them I won't go back because of their unavoidable animated ads. I've never heard back from any site I've written to, though, and I assume they think I'm part of an insignificant minority.

Thanks for the link, which I am installing.

[(Anonymous)]

Your theorized solution is in place by artist control: artists who have anything resembling a decent market in unique IPs very commonly maintain a level of control over the ads displayed. Also although the ads are usually hotlinked off site (unless a separate caching system is agreed upon), file format can be verified in page.

Furthermore, if your audience is broad enough, you can choose to run your own ad services (which a lot of webcomic artists do).

[tnh.livejournal.com]

If an ad is just text, the client has to judge whether it's well written: effective, pertinent, all that stuff. It's much easier to tell whether an animation looks cool.

Most animated web ads are worthless. I can't remember the message of a single one. In a few cases I remember the animation itself, but not what it was selling.

On any smart lock...

[ikaev.livejournal.com]

there is a smart key.