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Advertisers Should Take Responsibility for Annoying People and Driving Them to Use Ad Blockers

posted by cmn32480 on Monday October 26 2015, @06:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the if-they-had-only-listened-before dept.

iWantToKeepAnon writes:

Marketoonist ran a story about marketers saying, "Oops, our bad."

The Interactive Advertising Bureau issued a remarkable mea culpa last week about the state of online advertising. In response to the rise of ad-blocking software, IAB VP Scott Cunningham said digital advertisers should take responsibility for annoying people and driving them to use ad blockers:

"We messed up. As technologists, tasked with delivering content and services to users, we lost track of the user experience....

"We build advertising technology to optimize publishers' yield of marketing budgets that had eroded after the last recession. Looking back now, our scraping of dimes may have cost us dollars in consumer loyalty...

"The consumer is demanding these actions, challenging us to do better, and we must respond."

Nod to pipedot for running this story.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2015, @08:49AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2015, @08:49AM (#254586)

    Who in their right mind is going to remove ad blockers just because these guys ask for another chance?

    Nope, the advertisers aren't expecting that. The about face is just to soften the outcry when they *buy up* all the ad blockers and make them useless.

  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday October 26 2015, @01:15PM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Monday October 26 2015, @01:15PM (#254643)

    You're going to have to explain exactly how that would work. What prevents more people from making ad blockers, or forking existing ones?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2015, @06:09PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2015, @06:09PM (#254797)

      fear of ninja lawyers

      • (Score: 2, Informative) by Bogsnoticus on Tuesday October 27 2015, @02:33AM

        by Bogsnoticus (3982) on Tuesday October 27 2015, @02:33AM (#254990)

        Ninja lawyers? Don't make me laugh.

        They don't stand a chance against a BOFH and his cattle-prod.*

        *Not forgetting the roll of carpet, bag of quicklime, and shovel.

        --
        Genius by birth. Evil by choice.

  • (Score: 3, Funny) by iWantToKeepAnon on Monday October 26 2015, @06:46PM

    by iWantToKeepAnon (686) on Monday October 26 2015, @06:46PM (#254823) Homepage Journal
    They're going to buy my phone's hosts file?
    --
    "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday October 26 2015, @07:33PM

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Monday October 26 2015, @07:33PM (#254839) Journal

      Unless you want to block everything you don't already know, that won't help. You need a greylist, and greylists are a lot more difficult than either whitelists or blacklists. And in particular, they already work around blacklists, by periodically changing numbers. (I'm being a bit vague here, because precision would be misleading. This is true for phone numbers, TCP addresses, *ETC.*. It's not limited to those categories.)

      --
      Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by iWantToKeepAnon on Tuesday October 27 2015, @03:04PM

        by iWantToKeepAnon (686) on Tuesday October 27 2015, @03:04PM (#255120) Homepage Journal
        You're right of course, a hosts file is only partially useful and needs constant updating (thankfully there are those invested enough to do that already). But it was the easiest-effective thing for my phone. On my computer I use palemoon w/ all the addons. The major failing of a hosts file is when a site hosts their own ads b/c a host file can't block based on a partial url. But the nice thing is, all the big ad providers like to host their own images and videos so blocking entire domains is still useful. They could get around this by making sites host the files, but then they loose information and traceability. That's what I call a win-win for us! :))
        --
        "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy