Ah those lovely crazy Danes, the land of the forbidden deeplink, the latest windmill they're fighting now is adblockers. Danish media house Berlingske has gone so far as to block people from reading BT if they have adblockers installed - instead they are greeted with this;
--- Dear Reader message
You can read a google translation of that page here - they say;
We can see that your computer has installed an AdBlock, which allows us can not show you our ads on the website.
We can only give you free journalistic quality content, if we have ads on our sites, because they pay very much the costs associated with running a website. If ads will be removed, lost our income, and then we will not be able to continue to offer you free news on www.bt.dk
Have questions or comments please feel free to contact us
Naturally this started a thread over in AdblockPlus' forums on how to get around this.
This began with AidOnline's charity plugin - it replaces teh ads of a newspaper (or website) with their own, and when you surf you collect donations to charities involved. This didn't go down well when the newspapers realized that their advertising space was 'hijacked' and on Aidonline's homepage it now reads (bad google translation);
After a meetings with the charitable organizations where it was clear that pressure from their partners have been too large, AidOnline.com and organizations have agreed to stop cooperation immediately.
The computer program AidOnline which works by blocking advertisements on the Internet and use the space to insert new advertisements will not continue. The program worked by the user downloading a little heart into their computer.
I can understand the need to safeguard the media space that advertisers in fact pay for, but this will not wendell. I mean end well. Sorry, wendell, that's your cue.
I built this website. From scratch. Including the servers.
Adland® is a commercial-laden heaven and hell for advertising addicts around the world.
This advertising publication was founded in 1996, built on beer and bravery, Adland® now boasts the largest super bowl commercials collection in the world.
Adland® survives on your donations alone. You can help us out by buying us a Ko-Fi. Adland® works best in Brave browser
People who are savvy enough to install adblockers are savvy enough to get around this judging by those adblockplus threads.
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PermalinkIt never Wendells. But I don't use an adblocker; unless they shove a video commercial before you can see the content, I have no trouble working around ads on the web, and the placement, content and identity of sponsors tell me a lot about the people behind the site that they might not really want me to know. That's why I went nuclear and kicked Google Adsense off MY site for 6 months after they placed Pro-Proposition-Hate ads on my very tolerant blog. But the ads are back now, with disclaimers: "Google believes these are relevant to my content and your interests. Please humor them."
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PermalinkTrying to sort google ads out is a nightmare.
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PermalinkAidonline is dead – and probably rightly so, since the legality and ethics were fishy.
I haven’t heard of anything but Berlingske blocking visitors with adblockers, but I’m sure there’s a few other examples out there.
[rant] To me this is nothing but a pathetic attempt to breathe some fleeting life into an already dead business model: The internet banner ad.
Advertisers have never spent so much money on banner ads, and gotten as little response, as they do now. And it’s not just because consumers have become oblivious to them, it’s worse. They show increasing dislike towards them in media survey after media survey.
But still advertisers pump obscene amounts of money in their direction (in Denmark Internet advertising media spending are larger than for tv and print), and content sites do their best to hide the fact that these advertisements show sharply diminishing returns – even to the point of blocking their own consumers.
No-one seems to be willing to point out that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes. Because who dares attack “new media”? If you do that you’re nothing but a conservative dinosaur who refuses to move on. [/rant]
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PermalinkOf course, you could always argue (as I have seen some do) that Banner Ads are "Old New Media", "Web 1.0" and therefore as obsolete as the Old Old Media they were supposed to replace. But with declining returns on all manner of advertising as the target audience becomes more (a) wise (b) cynical (c) broke (d) all of the above, the failings of banner ads aren't standing out that badly.
And who is using banner ads these days? For a while, half of the banner ads I saw on the Web had those annoying pictures of Flat vs. Fat Bellies on them (One Simple Rule to Lose Belly Fat! - was that a John Ritter reference? Sorry.) [/blathering]
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