Anti-Ad-Blocking measures underway!!!

So I guess this is the beginning of the end of ad-blocking!
Since now sites more and more PUNISH the use of ad-blocking software.
Which I find anti-democratic to say the least.

One example would be BLIP-TV.
Now if you would want to play a video uploaded on Blip-tv, while the ad-blocker is on, you would be chastized for using the ad-blocker and now allowed to watch the video for a long time.

While I do get that they need the money from advertisements to pay the running costs and keep the service above water, I find it wrong to FORCE people to look at advertisements.

I mean, people use ad-blockers for a reason. Simply, because they are annoyed by the advertisements.
And seriously, most advertisements are so blatantly shoved into your face, that it is pretty much unbearable.
Sometimes they even cover up whole sites and prevent you from seeing what you actually want to see.

And the other thing is: ANNOYING SOUNDS!
I can barely remember the advertisement, that drove me to using ad-blocking software. It was an ad for a spooky online-game.
But every time you would hover the mouse cursor over it, even slightly, a stupid laugh would play. Every time your mouse-cursor hits the ad-box and at a such a high volume...
God, it drove me insane!!!


The point is: If people wouldn't be so forceful and stupidly "imaginative" about ads, then perhaps less people would use ad-blockers.
So yeah, it is the fault of the ad-operators, that people use ad-blockers.
Because they annoy them or drive them insane.


And now they want to FORCE people to watch ad's by PUNISHING the use of ad-blockers.
At least it is not common yet. But I fear that more and more operators and companies will jump onto this bandwagon in the end and ad-blocking, in its current form, will be destroyed more or less.

Like I said, I find it highly anti-democratic and morally repulsive to resort to such a forceful measure.
Whoever came up with this, deserves a good beating. :/

This topic could use a different title. You honestly had me worried AdBlock Plus was getting into some deep water.

Anyway, these types of warnings have been in use for a long time now. Just about every other website I know complains about people using ad blockers. The warnings range from filling the blocked adspace with "HEY YOU, WE NEED THE REVENUE" to locking up the site's UI until you disable your ad blocker.

Now, for normal, non-animated, non-flash ad banners, and text based ones, they're much more acceptable and I never block them. The whole point of AdBlock is to encourage more appropriate uses of ads, instead of annoying the site visitor and exposing them to Spyware infections. (The Internet is a far less scary place when you block ads; I don't know how many trojans I've gotten in the past from ads while visiting otherwise safe websites.)

Unfortuntely, the flashier, spyware-riddled advertisements net much more ad revenue than the text based ones, so they're being used much more often to compensate for site bandwidth usage by a large user base. Instead of taking money out of their own pockets to cover the expenses, (And sometimes this can run up in the $100's of dollars, or thousands if your site is that frequently visited.) they resort to the ads. That is somewhat justifiable, but if your site is barely $50 a month to cover bandwidth usage on, that's small beans and there's no need for advertisements.

Why a different title?
Those measures are clearly there to prevent ad-blocking. So anti-ad-blocking is a correct term for that.


Also, I recently wanted to watch a Blip-TV-video and this is the first time I have come across such measures.
So it doesn't seem to be that common yet.

Still, the "underway" part sounds like there a direct campaign against ad-blocking, and after the American public was recently made aware of government programs like PRISM, I think one less "OH GOD NO THEY BETTER NOT-" would be a good thing. You gotta be more careful with extreme headlines like that.

Anyway, point is, it's been done for months now, well over a year in my experience, and I've visited a lot of privately run sites, (Especially ones for open source and free indie dev games.) on top of fan wikis, affected by things like this.

It's pretty annoying, but I avoid sites that try it anyway; it's not even worth complaining about. If they want to push invasive, possibly malware-infected Flash advertisements that lag my machine, and strain its processor to the point that I can't enjoy their media without constant hiccups and annoyance, then their content's not worth my time or tolerance to view, simple as that. I'll go somewhere else for the same content.

There is a great purpose for advertisements on the Internet, but assaulting your site visitors with Viagra commercials and game trailers they've probably already seen hundreds of times by now, before the site can even finish loading, is not going to grind well on anyone's patience. It's much worse for people with limited bandwidth ISPs, they certainly will not put up with that long enough for the site to load, and there goes a potential regular.