Ad blockers are the solution to an advertising industry that largely has zero respect for users. Ad blockers are the logical extension of pop-up blockers and spam filters.
If the Internet advertising industry could be trusted to behave itself nobody would install ad blockers. The fact that people are installing such software should be taken as an indication that today's ads are too intrusive and too disrespectful.
Not to mention occasionally malicious. Of the people I've known who have gotten viruses in the last 5 years, a majority of them were from compromised ad hosts and/or malicious ads. In fact, there was one a week or two ago from Yahoo[1], of all places.
Yeah, I held out for years, in part because I didn't want a different than "usual" experience. I figured I would deal with obnoxiously ad-infested websites by simply not visiting them. Whereas I was afraid that if I used an ad-blocker, nigh-unusable websites would actually look usable to me, and then I'd make the mistake of sharing links to them with others, not realizing how bad they were. Then I'd promote the propagation of such sites, not to mention annoy friends/family when I send them links to sites with all sorts of obnoxiousness I never saw myself. So I wanted the unvarnished "default" sites, the better to flee as quickly as possible.
But I finally gave in and installed a basic ad-blocker (though not with a default blocklist), because it's become futile to try to use the web without one. Unless I restrict myself to a tiny number of whitelisted sites (here, Wikipedia, some .edu sites, arxiv.org, etc.), the web has just become unusable without filtering. At least some very basic filtering like blocking autoplaying flash ads and blocking popups is needed to regain minimal functionality.
> Ad blockers are the logical extension of pop-up blockers and spam filters
This is a nice way to put it. My answer to the question in the actual post: "both". Ad blockers are an answer to a problem, and they are perceived as a problem in and of themselves.
Ads themselves are not the problem. Intrusiveness is. I had no problem with the original Google ads, which were always off to the side of the search results. They were text-only, they were out of the way and they did not try to coerce the user into doing anything.
In my eyes, enything more intrusive is fair game to be blocked without mercy. If your service can't support the infrastructure to serve non-intrusive ads as part of the pages themselves, then you don't deserve to be in the business of serving ads in the first place. I ignore ads in the TV, and I ALWAYS skip them when watching recordings.
Find ways to serve ads without annoying me and you will find a customer willing to spend money on quality. Try to violate or creep me out and I will actively boycott you, utilising the full power of 3/11 rule.
can't agree more. On my desktop I typically run flashblock and don't allow animated gifs etc. That's enough there to do the job.
On laptops, etc that use battery and don't have a lot of cpu and in many cases are bandwidth limited I run adblock. Some advertises have little respect for the people they are advertising to.
Seeing as how modern web browsers are basically designed to download and execute code from random third parties at a second party's prompting, wouldn't you think it reasonable that the first party want a little control over the process? After all, us infosec folks always tell people to be cautious of what they download, turn off things like autorun, etc. The web browser is autorun for the Internet!
(Never mind all of the bandwidth wasted on loading all of the third-party crap. Not all of us have high-speed/low-latency network links. Many of my users operate in very out-of-the-way places. Disabling the extra crap seems to significantly improve things like page load times.)
Some advertisers have already moved from the force-fed ads culture inherited from TV and Radio to a model that involves, cooperate with, and rely on the viewer to spread the word (viral campaigns, Facebook, Twitter, ...). But it requires a higher level of creativity, so there's still a long way to go.
> And getting into the Acceptable Ads program isn't easy. According to Adblock Plus, it rejected 50% of 777 whitelist applicants because of unacceptable ads; the overall acceptance rate stands at just 9.5%.
It is possible that Adblock Plus has other motives for rejecting ads, but at least this supplies one data point: 50-90% of ads are, by some criteria, unacceptable.
If the Internet advertising industry could be trusted to behave itself nobody would install ad blockers. The fact that people are installing such software should be taken as an indication that today's ads are too intrusive and too disrespectful.