Mice want cheese. If you put a mouse at the start a maze, and cheese at the end of it, a mouse will likely go through a maze to get the cheese. It will likely pay attention to the maze to try to figure out how to get through faster next time. But if the mouse can figure out how to get around the maze, maybe by climbing over a wall, don't be surprised or angry. The mouse doesn't like the maze at all; it's just an obstacle. The mouse just wants the cheese, not the maze.

Advertisements are like the maze. In early days, people were forced to sit through them in between parts of shows on the radio. Print ads had to be looked at so that people could find the articles. Nowadays, people are able to get around these 'mazes'. Morally, people might want to support the content-creators, but if you ask any newspaper executive or journalist, guilt can't get you very far for very long. Technology has enabled the blocking of advertisements, and a few mice have had a taste of the easy-to-reach cheese. These mice will almost certainly not go back to trudging through the maze as they did before.

Many critics offer a better solution: Make the mice want to go through the maze. This is certainly a more difficult solution than making a banner ad with a logo. It requires a fair amount of creativity, time, and effort. But some advertisers are already doing this. Take a look at the Burger King games: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mt2do5oV2-8

Burger King has made their brand fun and engaging, making the consumers want to consume the advertisements. In fact, they pay for them! Now isn't that ingenious?

Another example is woot.com. People want to buy stuff, suppliers want to sell stuff. They connect at Woot, and are directly engaged with the product.

This is the way marketing is supposed to work. Plastering noise and garbage on a webpage will drive your users to clean it up. They will find a way around your maze.

His suggestion makes certain sense, but ...

It's not the ads on a specific website that I don't like, it's the specific ads on all websites. Also it's not just the ads, it's also the tracking contraptions including javascript bloatware and such. It is far easier for me to just keep blocking them altogether than to rely on a subjective opinion of a webmaster if his ads are annoying or not, and not know what it is exactly that gets unblocked.

The day they add this feature and enable it by default is the day I fork ABP and distribute it without that feature.

Yup, I know this is "stealing". I don't care.

If this feature becomes popular among webmasters (it should, as many use only Adsense which is usually far from intrusive), it will become annoying for the user.

I see a possible solution in tracking users' decisions to show or disable supposedly unintrusive ads. This way ABP will be able to see which websites likely abuse this feature and which websites are likely fair in claiming non-intrusiveness. So, in 'obvious' cases ABP could make an automatic decision to show or hide the ads.

P.S. I hope the above is readable.

I will not tolerate ads, but will pay money to be able to access certain web sites. I see the purpose of Adblock Plus as being to force site owners to provide an alternative (e.g., subscriptions, micropayments, whatever) to ads for people like me. So, the way I would like Adblock Plus to restore the balance to be more fair to site owners is to refrain from blocking ads on sites that give the surfer some practical way to contribute to the cost of the web site without being exposed to ads.

>> "A webmaster should insert this tag into his pages if he thinks that the ads used on his site aren’t intrusive. "

Erm in what way is that fair? How about the default being that you assume websites won't do intrusive crappy advertising,

and only block ads on the minority websites that persistently abuse that trust.

All I've ever wanted from adblock was a 'Disable ads on this site' button. Maybe they could even make it social so a central list of blocked sites could be generated.

Normally I'm happy to see the ads. For me it is part of the experience.(Maybe I'm biased in this way cause I work in online media). But there are certain sites that have crappy ads that take too much from the experience.

His proposal seems fair enough to me. But I don't use an ad-blocker. I vote with my feet as they say and don't revisit sites which have a poor signal to noise (useful content to annoying ad) ratio. I personally find those sites which have genuine annoying ads are those websites with a poorly aligned moral compass anyway!

Why not put algorithmic constraints on what is an acceptable ad?

For example, acceptable ads are:

1) Text only, no larger than the average font size on the page 2) Non-animated images under a particular size 3) Not served by blacklisted domains 4) Or listed by a whitelist-----

--------screeecchhh stopping myself right there, new thought:

What about a plugin which annotates ads with thumbs up and thumbs down buttons. Do what the Gmail "Report spam" button does: develop reputations for advertisers, products, domains, etc. There is probably a great market resource business in here too somewhere....

I guess the summary of my post is that there must be a win-win-win solution in here for users, webmasters, and advertisers.

Hi Hacker News! (my 1st comment here ;)) How about this solution: Make AdBlock to think more. Now it's every ad or no ads situation. How about middle ground? AdBlock would block only very irritating ads, these ads that tend to pop up on screen, animated ads (you can "deanimate" them, privoxy already implement this) and very big ads. Maybe we can have some way measure how much of advertisements given page contains? If site has 50% of ads we can reduce them to half of it. Also, adding something like <img adblockpriority="(0-6)"/> might help.

So, what do you think?

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Theoretical question (loosely related) if it is ethical to remove adverts from "free" websites is it ethical for those websites to ban ABP users from the site?

How far does that argument go?

(I am not sure my position on it TBH, thought I would throw it out to you lot).

I honestly hope advertisting does die a horrible death. I liked the web a lot more before it was commercialised.

As I stated many times before, my goal with Adblock Plus isn’t to destroy the advertising industry.

I'll play the devils advocate, with conflicting interests, so

Nope, your goal is perhaps to earn money on the back of the webmaster and that might be considered theft. Some ads are intrusive, yup very. Example in point, the economist. It has so many ads, I hate being on that website for more than a bit. What do I do, click away. Problem solved. I still have the power you see, without necessarily punishing the other webmasters who aren't as intrusive.

Now, of course it is a free market economy. The advertisers want sales so they become intrusive, the publisher wants revenue so they hold the ads, the visitor wants free content so he bears the hassle, or of course being smart installs an adblock and leaves the previous two in cold water. Fair enough, power to him who has the knowledge that such option exists, but no need to come back playing the fox saying you do not really want to give them such option. You clearly are providing a service and that service is attracting only low subscription currently, if it was higher subscription then your service would go cold as the webmasters would adapt. But seriously if by definition a blocker of ads does not destroy advertising then perhaps it should change the name to blocker of something else.

P.S. No wonder I hardly get revenue from Firefox users, perhaps as a way of regression every webmaster should block the smart firefox users and be stuck with the hell of internet explorer.