The next shot in the advertising/blocking war. AdNauseam is a FireFox plug-in, currently in beta, that works in conjunction with AdBlock and clicks ads while it blocks them.
The project was "initiated" by Helen Nissenbaum, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, and Computer Science, at New York University.
As online advertising is becoming more automatic, universal and unsanctioned, AdNauseam works to complete the cycle by automating all ad-clicks universally and blindly on behalf of the target audience. Working in coordination with Ad Block Plus, AdNauseam quietly clicks every blocked ad, registering a visit on the ad networks databases. As the data gathered shows an omnivorous click-stream, user profiling, targeting and surveillance becomes futile.
They also state "AdNauseam serves as a means of amplifying users' discontent with advertising networks that disregard privacy and facilitate bulk surveillance agendas".
Will this help things with online advertising, or make them worse, assuming that's possible?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pnkwarhall on Tuesday October 28 2014, @12:07AM
Widespread adoption would wreak havok with many marketers, as their primary metric of success is "engagement" -- ad clicks being one of the main engagement metrics -- but only the low-end of the totem pole. I fear it's too little, too late, and the success of "AdNauseam" would only speed the end of traditional forms of "billboard"-style advertising, to be replaced even more quickly by more subtle and effective methods like 'sponsored content'.
There is no escape from marketing influence in the digital realm.
Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
(Score: 1) by frojack on Tuesday October 28 2014, @12:49AM
Massive click fraud probably won't do a thing to reduce ads, because ad vendors already know all the tricks. They will defeat this in 12 minutes flat.
You can not both block AND click. What you get in the web page is source of the ad, and the ad, should your browser decide to fetch it, will bear the click target address. So for this to work you have to fetch the ad.
Then the software has to find and send the click back, and that launches another browser connection to the advertiser's site, which you then have to block THAT as well.
This sounds a little like self flagellation if you ask em. You do nobody any good, you chew up your own bandwidth, bog your machine down, when simply FAILING TO FETCH the ad would have been easier.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Tuesday October 28 2014, @01:43AM
Why not? Download but don't display. I don't care if it is downloaded -- I gave up dialup in 2000 -- I only care about it ruining my user experience, meaning, I don't mind so much a few banner or side column ads, but these modal ones that cover the screen are annoying.
Secondly, I love the idea of poising data. It's far better to poison than to avoid because by poisoning, you might make the world a little bit better, but merely blocking is purely selfish.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday October 28 2014, @01:54AM
Yeah, I can see both points of view, but bandwidth is still an issue, especially in the mobile world, and
it seems to me that there is an article on taxing by the GIG up on SN right now.
Actually, I don't block much except flash ads because of their annoying auto-activation.
I occasionally find other ads useful.
I'm not sure what happens to the net and free access to information once on-line advertising is beaten down to nothing.
At my day job we pay by the click for innocuous little google text ads. I don't know if they they pay their way in sales or not, I'd have to ask the sales guys. I do know our conversion (Clicks that result in a sale) rate is some positive number.
But if they stopped working altogether and we got big clickfraud bills I'm sure they would drop them.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by metamonkey on Tuesday October 28 2014, @02:55PM
Yeah, but I don't think this runs on mobile platforms, so mobile isn't much of an issue. If you're using a laptop on a hotspot, disable the plugin.
Okay 3, 2, 1, let's jam.
(Score: 2) by pnkwarhall on Tuesday October 28 2014, @04:16PM
It's not as easy as you make it seem to accurately judge ROI/sales resulting from marketing efforts (in any marketing communication channel).
On the Internet specifically, there are tons of products/services being marketed that don't fall into a conversion pattern of "click an ad --> buy a product", and "engagement" metrics like ad clicks are often the best way to judge the "success" of an ad campaign. Correlation =/= causation ;) but for many marketers, engagement-to-sales/leads correlation is the best client-communication of ROI that they can manage.
The metric and correlation is what AdNauseam is meant to corrupt.
Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
(Score: 3, Funny) by EETech1 on Tuesday October 28 2014, @02:45AM
Sooo... Would the Windows users get the attached root kit with the ad in the background?
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday October 28 2014, @02:59AM
I've yet to get one of those via any method.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday October 28 2014, @05:17AM
You have my sympathy. Better luck in the future.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 28 2014, @08:32AM
i had to buy a sony cd to get a rootkit.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 28 2014, @11:16AM
But is is specifically the download which I want to block. As long as it is not too obnoxious (like e.g. Google text ads), I wouldn't mind the display. But the tracking connected with the download, I don't want.
Also it won't work too well with other ways to use AdBlock. For example, you might have instructed it to block those annoying "Like" buttons. And not thinking of it, you install AdNauseam, and suddenly you auto-like all pages you visit ... oops.
(Score: 1) by soylentsandor on Tuesday October 28 2014, @05:32PM
Agreed.
You don't like the ad network tracking yet you are an active facebook / twitter / linkedin user? You might as well stop worrying about the ad networks.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 28 2014, @05:45PM
I didn't say I was one. Indeed, I have no account on facebook, twitter, google+ or linkedin. However there are people who do have one. Anyway, the facebook like button was only an example anyway; there are tons of actions that could be triggered by such artificial clicks.
Indeed, I'd not be surprised if soon some malware took advantage of such auto-clicking.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 28 2014, @05:47PM
Easy enough to filter out.
Setup 2 ads on a page. If they click out in under one second it does not count. But thank you for the metadata.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 28 2014, @12:24AM
Ahh, if only the loop was a noose and there was a long drop to follow. No shortage of trap doors involved already.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 28 2014, @01:09AM
I completely disagree with this program.
Adblock works fine and does not disrupt the advertising networks by skewing their analytics of people who legitimately click adds because they have seen a product or service they want to know more about.
Just because we dont like adds doesn't give us the right to disrupt other peoples business.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by TrumpetPower! on Tuesday October 28 2014, @01:23AM
Why the fuck not?
These fucking fuckers fucked up our network but good, so why shouldn't we fuck with them?
I'm not so sure this is a technically good way to fight back, but I'd happily ruin the profitability of advertising in a New York Adman's Minute.
Give me back the pre-commercial days of the 'Net, when people only put things up they gave a damn about rather than some shit they thought they could make money off of. You know? Before September?
No, you probably don't. Kids these days don't remember a time before September. Hell, most of 'em weren't even born until after September....
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 28 2014, @01:57AM
Oh Shoosh. Go preach your technocracy ideals on a BBS .. oh wait..it sucks ass and no one can here you troll.
And secondly your a hypocrite as try convincing anyone on here that you have never made a purchase online because it was either cheaper or more convenient. Ass.
(Score: 2) by Appalbarry on Tuesday October 28 2014, @02:02AM
Go preach your technocracy ideals on a BBS .. oh wait..it sucks ass and no one can here you troll.
Can't troll on a BBS? You must be trolling right now!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 28 2014, @11:18AM
This is only true if you think gopher Usenet was a better network. Remember, back before ads, when UIUC had a single web page listing all the places with WWW servers? I remember filling out the form to get my page listed, and when the list got long enough that they had to split it into categories. I remember manually submitting my site to Yahoo for crawling (of course, the ads had already started by then). Yahoo was so much better then the internet index. Sure, it's fun to be nostalgic for the days when all the web content was created by academics, students, and guys willing to spend $150/month to show pictures of their survival shelter, but essentially everything you do on the network today depends on commercial content and advertising. Deal with it. No one else wants 1993 back, because the content actually sucked.
Or don't deal with it: get a copy of the old network from the Internet Archive - it should fit on a decent sized thumb drive, and you can host the "internet" off a Raspberry Pi. While you're at it, tear the labels off your shoes, the brand-badges off your car, and the logo off your phone. I'm sure you don't want to be a walking billboard for teh ebil companies (and free of charge, at that). Of course, tearing the hood ornament off your own car is just fine; tearing it off someone else's car just because you object to advertising is probably not.
There are still plenty of places you can go to have the old internet-elitist experience. Many of them still run by college students for the four years they get free server space from their university. soylent is a pretty nice example (of elitist, not college-dependent). Of course, based on the progress of the soylent fund-raising bar, it looks like it's only going to be around as long as the core developers are willing to pay for your entertainment.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Gravis on Tuesday October 28 2014, @02:30AM
Adblock works fine and does not disrupt the advertising networks by skewing their analytics of people who legitimately click adds because they have seen a product or service they want to know more about.
Just because we dont like adds doesn't give us the right to disrupt other peoples business.
1) it's "ads" with one d.
2) we have as much right to skew their analytics as they have to show us ads. if they offered a simple way to opt-out of their networks like encasing all their garbage in an tag that is easily ignored, then i would agree with you. however, they have made no attempt to simplify blocking their ads and are costing me processing power->electricity->money to ignore them.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 28 2014, @04:18AM
To elaborate on (2), they don't have the right to collect accurate statistics on us. If they did have such a right, it would be useful to assign each person online a national ID number and require us to be logged in as our true identities at all times. We have the right to lie about our identities, a point of pride in American history: how many of the Founding Fathers published pseudonymous political treatises as "Cato" or "Publius" or "Caesar" or "Brutus?"
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday October 28 2014, @02:43PM
Dude, shut up! You'll give them ideas!
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Wednesday October 29 2014, @05:41PM
If they did have such a right, it would be useful to assign each person online a national ID number and require us to be logged in as our true identities at all times
What the hell kind of of false-dichotomy/strawman/slippery-slope-fallacy is this?
Please tell me you're trolling.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 28 2014, @11:37AM
Of course, many sites already do this, on purpose. That is, many sites 'fake-click' their own ads in order to raise their ad revenue. The ad hosters know this and they accommodate it. You think they don't know when one person clicks all the ads on a page? Or when one IP clicks on 10x more ads than a 'normal' person? You think they believe those clicks?
It's your computer. You've got the right to make it do just about anything you want. Don't want ads? don't load them. Want to hold a little ad-protest? go ahead and gang-click all the ads. Hell, write a script to crawl the web, loading every ad from every page. Or just continually load random URLs from doubleclick and adsense. But don't pretend it's anything other than petty whining. As a form of civil disobedience or protest, it doesn't even rise to the level of mailing empty "Business Reply" cards.
(Score: 2) by buswolley on Tuesday October 28 2014, @01:10AM
Sounds like a fast way to get malware
subicular junctures
(Score: 4, Insightful) by TrumpetPower! on Tuesday October 28 2014, @01:35AM
Only if they're completely clueless. The plugin damned well better not actually render or otherwise execute any content the advertisers are serving up; rather, it should simply do an HTTP GET for the target that Adblock is blocking, and send whatever the remote server replies with straight to /dev/null.
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 28 2014, @01:47AM
And chew up your bandwidth in the process? No, thanks. I'll stick with AdBlock, thank you very much.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 28 2014, @06:26PM
I predict that extension to not become very popular in Hungary [soylentnews.org] ;-)
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Tuesday October 28 2014, @02:59AM
Came here to say this. Not to mention a lot of sites have rather dodgy ads, clicking on them at work could result in a visit from IT and HR.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 28 2014, @04:56AM
a decent IT department should have centralized adblocking not letting any of the ad junk into the company at all
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday October 28 2014, @05:24PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by m2o2r2g2 on Tuesday October 28 2014, @04:42AM
or to get arrested. Blindly clicking links can send you to all kinds of places on the interwebz.
(Score: -1) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 28 2014, @04:52AM
now if there was a way to pretend-click on ads only on the webpages that you *don't* visit
wait...... ;-)