[thaumaturgy]

I predicted a showdown between users and advertisers back around 2010, and every year since, I've been surprised it hasn't happened yet.

Malicious advertising is probably the biggest driver of AdBlock Plus growth. Anecdotally, we just had another customer get hit by a remote computer service scam because she searched for something like "canon ink technical support", and an ad was listed at the top with an 800 number that she called without realizing that it wasn't Canon at all.

Google does its best to differentiate its ads from its search results as little as possible. A lot of less savvy computer users never even notice the little "Ad" tag; I had to point it out to her. In Yahoo's case, it's even worse -- the difference between the pile of ads at the top of their page and their search results is so subtle it even took me a moment to figure it out.

And then there's saturation. Advertising is everywhere now. Magazines spend as much print area on advertising as content; television is down to, what, 10 minutes of ads for every 20 minutes of content, or worse; radio, if you're silly enough to still listen to that, is hilariously bad; news sites and publications are experimenting with "sponsored content" -- ads that more and more closely resemble regular articles -- billboards, bulk mailing, text messages, robocalls, and email spam all add to the load.

On the whole, the ad industry ends up feeling skeezy, pushy, and overwhelming.

So AdBlock Plus gives users a way to remove all of that from one part of their daily life. I don't think we've ever had a negative response from a user when showing them AdBlock Plus for the first time; the usual response when reloading yahoo.com or msn.com with AB+ is, "oh, wow, that's really nice."

I keep expecting to hear that the bottom's fallen out of online advertising.

[furyg3]

This this this. There are some huge players in the online advertising world who are supposed pillars of innovation and sustainability, but they have really failed at keeping sketchy, scammy, or downright malicious advertisers away. Inaction here will kill their industry.

Google ads look like results and link to sites with malicious software downloads. iOS apps are full of "you have one unread message!" misinformation banners. These are the 'reputable' players, of course grandma also plays bridge online while little Johnny searches for boobs on the family laptop. What do their ads link to?

In this world the solution is just block freaking everything.

[zarex]

> iOS apps are full of "you have one unread message!"

Android isn't any better.

I have used adblock for years now, practically since I started using the internet. About 2 sites are whitelisted: hackaday and reddit. They show reasonable ads. I absolutely hate flamboyant flashing ads. Especially those that go full-screen on mouse-over.

If all ads where like the ads on reddit and HaD I wouldn't complain, I proably wouldn't even have an adblocker. But that malicious bulk? No thank you.

[thaumaturgy]

> Inaction here will kill their industry.

That's the part I'm less certain about. I would've expected it to happen already; they're hurting themselves, but so far not fatally.

[coldpie]

We need to get web browsers to ship with Adblock from the start. You'd be insane to set up an email server without some form of spam filtering, why not do the same with browsers?

Yes, it would collapse the current web business model. I fully support this.

[userbinator]

As much as I loathe ads myself, I don't think it's a good idea to default to blocking ads, not the least because the definition of an ad is a little hard to capture completely without either false negatives or positives. Different people also have different ideas on what they consider acceptable ads, so it could be a form of unwanted censorship to some.

Default to showing all the content, but let people make their own choice on what to filter out.

[Tloewald]

You act like this is new (magazines, for example, have long been more ads than content). We only which TV on demand, so we see very few ads (Hulu Plus, only) but the prevalence of ham fisted product placement is staggering (I remember when Burn Notice suddenly went from 70s muscle car to Hyundai).

But advertising itself has always been at least partially evil, which makes Google's slogan combined with its utter reliance on advertising revenue a problem.

[cliveowen]

I always wondered how much advertising, in any shape or form, works. I know for a fact that advertising didn't convince me to buy anything this far.

[SteveGerencser]

While advertising may not have convinced you to buy anything, which is doubtful that it hasn't has some influence, there are millions of people that are influenced by advertising. This is why it's done.

What is sad is that obvious marketing attempts work so well. One weird trick ads really do work. I was as surprised as anyone when we started running these for a client assuming that they would fail and we could stop. Sales nearly doubled for that ad group.

It's hard to blame the marketers for the dumbed down advertising when it works so well.