welcome

This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website.
Please scroll to the bottom of page to read the notice if you are coming from the European Union...

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

"Developers of Adblock Plus, an award-winning add-on for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome boasting over 12,000,000 users, announced that starting from version 2.0 the extension would come with a white list of unobtrusive, privacy-respected ads. These will be allowed by default; users will still be able to block them by unchecking 'Allow non-intrusive advertising.' The developers say: 'Only 25% of the Adblock Plus users seem to be strictly against any advertising.' What is this — betrayal of ideals of annoyance-free web or birth of independent authority for standards for advertisement?"Ads are sometimes annoying, but they also make certain websites (like this one!) possible. Getting the balance right is tricky — I know I often avoid sites because of interstitial advertising, pop-ups, etc. Whitelisting sounds like a good way to reward sites that try to keep it subtle; offloading and generalizing the task of categorizing ads into annoying or acceptable gives sites and advertisers a good threshold to duck beneath. Next step I'd like to see: a sliding scale, so browsers can be set to zero, or eleven, for tolerable annoyance.

No comments:

Post a Comment