Ad blockers are good in the long term, says Google

[Keyper7]

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/12/17/1436257/Google-Says-Ad-Blockers-Will-Save-Online-Ads?from=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashd ot%29

Too tired to comment right now. Maybe later.

[Hyporeal]

If people get too aggressive with ads, then ad blockers will become more popular and companies will get less aggressive with ads. The market will sort itself.

That's not the way markets work. If people are circumventing the marketing then the marketing will fight back. If AdBlock were to be installed and configured by default on every new computer, advertisers would definitely not "get less aggressive". They'd start forcing users to interact with ads to reach content, along with other tactics.

As the article points out, advertisement is opt-out. People don't really like ads, they simply use whatever is available by default. It is disingenuous of Google to suggest that advertisement is somehow a desired benefit, and I challenge them to make their ads opt-in if they're so confident that people want ads.

[Skripka]

That's not the way markets work. If people are circumventing the marketing then the marketing will fight back. If AdBlock were to be installed and configured by default on every new computer, advertisers would definitely not "get less aggressive". They'd start forcing users to interact with ads to reach content, along with other tactics.

As the article points out, advertisement is opt-out. People don't really like ads, they simply use whatever is available by default. It is disingenuous of Google to suggest that advertisement is somehow a desired benefit, and I challenge them to make their ads opt-in if they're so confident that people want ads.

Especially when the internet has become so saturated with ads, that most pages have as much ad space as content on a given web page.

[lisati]

There's always the hope that when marketers get less hits on their web pages they'll go away. Dreams are free :)

[Keyper7]

That's not the way markets work. If people are circumventing the marketing then the marketing will fight back. If AdBlock were to be installed and configured by default on every new computer, advertisers would definitely not "get less aggressive". They'd start forcing users to interact with ads to reach content, along with other tactics.

But the thing is: the day when AdBlock is installed by default will never come. Adblock users are not and most likely never will be majority. That means most efforts to circunvent blockers will be twice as intrusive to a lot of users who do not use blockers of any kind, and very likely to **** those users off. You need to have some really good content to get away with this.


As the article points out, advertisement is opt-out. People don't really like ads, they simply use whatever is available by default. It is disingenuous of Google to suggest that advertisement is somehow a desired benefit, and I challenge them to make their ads opt-in if they're so confident that people want ads.

They are not confident that people want ads. They are confident that people don't mind about ads if they are unintrusive enough.