Ads on websites are a bit of a touchy subject. Sites do need money to stay ‘alive’ and advertising (and in our case as well donations) helps pay the bills. However, there is a limit to what can be consider acceptable. Small non-intrusive text (or even image based) ads are good. Pop-ups, pop-unders and Flash based ads are what can be consider intrusive.
Starting with Adblock Plus (ABP) 2.0 for Firefox and Chrome, ‘non-intrusive ads’ will be shown by default. This can be turned off via the ABP preferences and if your are using a ‘privacy’ filter, those ads likely won’t be visible anyway.ABP developer Wladimir Palant explains
Starting with Adblock Plus 2.0 you can allow some of the advertising that is considered not annoying. By doing this you support websites that rely on advertising but choose to do it in a non-intrusive way. And you give these websites an advantage over their competition which encourages other websites to use non-intrusive advertising as well. In the long term the web will become a better place for everybody, not only Adblock Plus users. Without this feature we run the danger that increasing Adblock Plus usage will make small websites unsustainable.
Source: ZDNet
I don’t think it will change things much. Those who use AdBlock will continue to block everything, those who already made per-site exceptions won’t go further.
The point is, even if AdBlock is a great success it is nevertheless used by a minority, that of those who are fed up with ads, and that many users on the other hand either don’t care, don’t bother or sometimes even like advertisement … as the system says, let it be and life will spread widely, with that array which is the lot of liberty. Ads are making good money on the Web, which demonstrates that most users just don’t bother. AdBlock is for a minority, obvious.
Last night I downloaded ABP v2.0rc.3335 to see the differences. I use EasyList and EasyPrivacy filters and was really curious to see how it would work. As it turns out the filters I use prevented ABP from downloading the whitelist filter and I don’t see an option to enable it. I’ve always wondered if ads are displayed but not clicked on is there any income generated?
I use ABP more for blocking images in certain forums I participate in. There are those people who don’t grasp the concept that a signature should not be 10x times as long as your post with a ton of images. The images, while cool to see on the first couple posts gets old after that.
I know exactly what you’re saying about the signatures. There’s always someone who has to use banners and embed pictures for there sig. I’ve used Element Hiding Helper for ABP a lot (if that’s what you’re using) and never thought about cleaning up some of the signatures. Good answer!