![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The revolution will not be animated
May. 24th, 2005 10:17 pmI’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
(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.
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.
