(no subject)
I've been thinking too much lately, and a lot of it has been about tech news. I have a rant bouncing around in my head, but not enough time to get it written down before I have to be somewhere, so I'll just throw up something I found this morning to tide you over if you're one of the two or three people who read my journal partly for its tech content. And if you don't particularly like it, just avoid any entries tagged "techno-rant."
ZDNet is reporting that Web ad blocking may not be (entirely) legal. I run Adblock (the predecessor to the Adblock Plus mentioned) and I absolutely love it. As ads become more and more invasive, atrocious, and irritating people are going to rely more and more on tools to block them. Which, in turn, will lead to even more invasive and annoying ads, creating a sort of advertising arms race. So far, relatively few people have ad-blocking tools installed, and most of them are the technically-savvy types who don't click on banner ads anyway. I'll admit that there have been a few banners I've clicked on because they were interesting, but that number is preciously small compared to the legions of ads I've seen.
Further, most ads seem to rely on just the tiniest margin of click-through to base revenue off of. It's similar to how the Nielsen ratings people have a few houses wired with boxes to monitor what they watch and extrapolate off of that. So, I don't imagine any advertizers are actually feeling a real hit from this kind of technology yet. They're just up in arms that somebody figured out how to circumvent their gaudy pictures.
ZDNet is reporting that Web ad blocking may not be (entirely) legal. I run Adblock (the predecessor to the Adblock Plus mentioned) and I absolutely love it. As ads become more and more invasive, atrocious, and irritating people are going to rely more and more on tools to block them. Which, in turn, will lead to even more invasive and annoying ads, creating a sort of advertising arms race. So far, relatively few people have ad-blocking tools installed, and most of them are the technically-savvy types who don't click on banner ads anyway. I'll admit that there have been a few banners I've clicked on because they were interesting, but that number is preciously small compared to the legions of ads I've seen.
Further, most ads seem to rely on just the tiniest margin of click-through to base revenue off of. It's similar to how the Nielsen ratings people have a few houses wired with boxes to monitor what they watch and extrapolate off of that. So, I don't imagine any advertizers are actually feeling a real hit from this kind of technology yet. They're just up in arms that somebody figured out how to circumvent their gaudy pictures.