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Forums - Website Topics - Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love

Naum on 06 March 2010

Sorry I don't want to use more time on closing popup ads then what I spend on reading what I want to read.



If it isn't turnbased it isn't worth playing   (mostly)

And shepherds we shall be,

For Thee, my Lord, for Thee. Power hath descended forth from Thy hand, That our feet may swiftly carry out Thy command. So we shall flow a river forth to Thee And teeming with souls shall it ever be. In Nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritūs Sancti. -----The Boondock Saints

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Gnizmo on 06 March 2010
ioi said:

No, that's the distinction here. There is a difference between not taking notice of an ad and preventing it from displaying. In the first scenario the media company still gets paid, in the second they don't.

You can ignore ads all day, no problem, but physically blocking them from displaying is a different matter entirely.

 

To address other points, I know a lot of people block ads because of genuine security concerns, spyware, viruses etc and this is the counter-argument given for why adblockers are good. I absolutely agree that it is the responsibility of the website to ensure that ads are free of this and while there have been 2 occasions (in nearly 5 years) that I recall that we've had a malicious ad, this hasn't happened for a while now. The last couple of issues have been with people placing malicious code in their forum sigs which is somethinn we have worked to fix now as well.

In terms of general comments about how annoying ads are - I'm share the view of some of the comments here in that I don't really know what all of these annoying ads are that people are complaining about. In the US we have ads like Dragon Age, Dawn of War II, Heavy Rain, Bad Company 2, The Show 2010, Just Cause 2 - premium ads from premuim ad providers. In the UK we have Final Fantasy XIII, Xbox Live, recently we've had White Knight Chronicles, From Paris with Love. A lot of work has been done to provide high-quality gaming ads (they pay better plus they fit better with the site) and remove the low quality ad networks so I'm not really sure where comments of weight-loss and evony ads are coming from either...

I got infected with a virus within the last few months. This was the only website I had visited, and I can't think of any other way it got onto the computer at work. I have sigs disabled so it would be weird for it to come from that. The US ads tend to be really sketchy. I understand why that a lot of the time, but it is still an issue.

@Maxwell
Hrmm. It looks like the Vaginitis was more advanced than I thought. It appears you may have acted too late =(



Starcraft 2 ID: Gnizmo 229

rendo on 06 March 2010
ioi said:
phxprovost said:
ioi said:

Correct. Now you understand how visiting a website works.

If you say so, but until the day a lawyer shows up at my door and shoves paperwork in my face ill continue to browse the internet the way i do.  I guess we are going to have to agree to disagree here kind sir

Which is fine. I just find this whole attitude of "I can do what I want" personally quite annoying which is why I maybe get more animated about this than I should. You chose to visit a website, you accept the content as it is provided (including ads) and you accept the risks associated with consuming that content. That's how it works unfortunately. Your only real right is whether to visit the site or not.

That said, it is absolutely our responsibility and best practice to make sure that you don't get infected by malware or a virus to the best of our ability and this is something we take very seriously. Like I've said, I don't believe we've had a major ad problem for nearly a year now but we have recently had issues with hackers and injections of malicious code which is obviously something that is as much of an annoyance to me as it is to you and something we work hard to fix and prevent in the future.

Even though the restaurant analogy is FAIL, I'll use it just for you.  Visiting the site is like wanting a nice juicy steak dinner.  But on the outside of the steak are gross vegetables, lima beans!  Soggy carrots!  BRUSSEL SPROUTS! :(  So I want the steak, but I don't want those vegetables, so I push them off the plate.  Eh?  Eh?!?!?!  But we got the steak at the Soup Kitchen.  It's a nice soup kitchen, obviously. :P



Barozi on 06 March 2010

lol
US ads must be horrible.



thranx on 06 March 2010

I know you guys are talking about maybe implementing subscriptions for site (a free and premium content I believe) But what about an option where you can pay for no ads, maybe by the week or month. I have played internet based text games that have had a free version with ads, and then a premium version where the only difference was it had no ads.



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epicurean on 06 March 2010
ioi said:
epicurean said:
ioi said:

Nobody is asking you to look at the ads, I'm saying that technically you don't have the right to block them from showing (even though you can).

As I've directly commented, the health of your PC and not spreading malware or viruses is of prime importance to everyone who runs VGChartz. Whether you believe it or not, the occasional issues we have are no more frequent than on any other site.

As for blocking users with adblockers, since those users are already blocking ads anyway we'd be no worse off from a financial point of view - obviously it would be a shame from a personal point of view to lose certain users but you'd hope that those serious enough about the site would either disable their adblocker or pay to have ads removed...


I'm honestly not trying to be confrontational, but when you said "the occasional issues we have are no more frequent than on any other site", all I can say is that in the US, at least where I live, this is simply not true.  Over that past year, I have had more problems/attacks on my computer from this site than from every other site I go to combined.  And its not even close.

I say that not to be mean, or be on the "ad-blockers" side, but simply with the hope that you realize that there really is a problem with the ads in Americaon this site. 

Maybe (and I'm not trying to remove my responsibility here) if you were to PM me every time you have an issue like this with details on exactly what happened then I can look into it in more detail.

Personally here in the UK I've never had a single issue with any ad on this site. Every time (that I have been alterted) that we've had an issue overseas we've worked to fix it asap. As far as I believe, we use the same networks and the same pool of ads as most major gaming sites so I don't see why we would be any worse than anybody else but if you genuinely believe that to be the case then we will look into it. PM me with some more details on where you are from and what particular issues you've had if you get time and we can look into it further...

I had saw you said something similar to this before, and I really did plan on doing it - but last week when it happened and i got redirected to one of those "your computer is infected" sites that wants to fake scan your computer, my first thought was "KILL THE PROCESS RIGHT NOW" instead of "take a screenshot so i can send it to the website".  Unfortunately, that's probably how I'll act in the future as well. 

If simply emailing with a description of what happens can help, I'd be more than willing.  As I said in an earlier post tonight on this thread, I still saw the evony and weight loss ads.  Though as I said then, I couldn't care less as long as it isn't harming my comptuer.



Owner of PS4 Pro, Xbox One, Switch, PS Vita, and 3DS

Gnizmo on 06 March 2010
ioi said:

Maybe (and I'm not trying to remove my responsibility here) if you were to PM me every time you have an issue like this with details on exactly what happened then I can look into it in more detail.

Personally here in the UK I've never had a single issue with any ad on this site. Every time (that I have been alterted) that we've had an issue overseas we've worked to fix it asap. As far as I believe, we use the same networks and the same pool of ads as most major gaming sites so I don't see why we would be any worse than anybody else but if you genuinely believe that to be the case then we will look into it. PM me with some more details on where you are from and what particular issues you've had if you get time and we can look into it further...

I would like to reinforce how true this is. I have had an issue a few times on this site for various reasons. Everytime ioi has seen to it that it is resolved quickly, and efficiently. This includes 2 monster threads on forum issues, and a few back and forth PMs about an old issue with Opera. If there is a malware/virus issue then alert the staff and it will be dealt with quickly.



Starcraft 2 ID: Gnizmo 229

phxprovost on 06 March 2010
ioi said:
phxprovost said:
ioi said:

Correct. Now you understand how visiting a website works.

If you say so, but until the day a lawyer shows up at my door and shoves paperwork in my face ill continue to browse the internet the way i do.  I guess we are going to have to agree to disagree here kind sir

Which is fine. I just find this whole attitude of "I can do what I want" personally quite annoying which is why I maybe get more animated about this than I should. You chose to visit a website, you accept the content as it is provided (including ads) and you accept the risks associated with consuming that content. That's how it works unfortunately. Your only real right is whether to visit the site or not.

That said, it is absolutely our responsibility and best practice to make sure that you don't get infected by malware or a virus to the best of our ability and this is something we take very seriously. Like I've said, I don't believe we've had a major ad problem for nearly a year now but we have recently had issues with hackers and injections of malicious code which is obviously something that is as much of an annoyance to me as it is to you and something we work hard to fix and prevent in the future.

Last time i checked i can do what ever i want on my pc within US laws and regulations and until a law is passed about ads i will continue to do what i wish with my pc.  Your only option as a content provider is to A. deal with it and accept the profits you are currently raking in and ignore people like me, Or B. try to do something about it but risk losing all the people like me.  I cant believe the attitude you seem to have believing your entitled to force feed me ads without retaliation of any kind simply because your site regurgitates infromation from around the net.



Gnizmo on 06 March 2010
ioi said:

It absolutely does, how do I know there is a problem with ads (which are highly region-specific, even down to city sometimes) if you don't tell me?

The issue with Evony (google it) is that they keep signing up to different ad networks under different names so it is hard to block them...

I am not certain exactly how the ads on websites deal is implemented, but I do have a potential way to alleviate the situation. Would it be possible to put someone with from America in control of the ads along with yourself? Not complete control mind you, but enough power to take out the nasty ones we get. I think a lot of the ad woes simply comes from you not getting the same experience as the plurality of your users.



Starcraft 2 ID: Gnizmo 229

epicurean on 06 March 2010
ioi said:
epicurean said:

If simply emailing with a description of what happens can help, I'd be more than willing.  As I said in an earlier post tonight on this thread, I still saw the evony and weight loss ads.  Though as I said then, I couldn't care less as long as it isn't harming my comptuer.

It absolutely does, how do I know there is a problem with ads (which are highly region-specific, even down to city sometimes) if you don't tell me?

The issue with Evony (google it) is that they keep signing up to different ad networks under different names so it is hard to block them...


Fair enough.  Like I said, I don't care about Evony, I just mentioned it because I had saw you said earlier you weren't sure why people were still seeing them.

So, for what its worth, last week (tuesday or wednesday, I think) I came to the homepage and it immediately redirected me to one of the "fake virus" scanning pages.  I know its mal-ware, I've seen it on our campus at work before, so I killed it immediately.  I live and work in Omaha, Nebraska.

I've continued to browse the site since, however, and haven't had any problems, so I'm not sure what the cause was.  I am pretty positive, however, that I don't visit any other risky sites on my work computer.  And I know its probably too late to trace.  But that's what I remember happening.

From what I'm reading, it sounds like sigs are a problem some of the time - do the people who disable them have much less problems?  I should probably do that...



Owner of PS4 Pro, Xbox One, Switch, PS Vita, and 3DS