Point taken. Adblock plus disabled on techreport.com

Hi All

It's amazing how a few ads can discombobulate some folk. Have attention spans suddenly dropped? I don't think what Scott is asking folk to do is unreasonable.

I don't run any type of AdBlocker, never felt that it was necessary. The TechReport is a very well laid out site, so in my humble opinion worrying about some nasty trojan or virus is like spitting in the wind, why do it.

my biggest complaint about adds is trust...... do I trust the links in the adds.... no, do I trust that the adds are credible.... no.

their is so much fraud on the web that I just can't get interested in online adds and when I see an add from a name brand company what do I care when I deal with them via suppliers all the time...... so hear we are, new adds get ignored, traditional ones get ignored, invasive ones get blocked and if you tried to charge per visit I'd stop coming.

I like TechReport..... I'm to the point that I visit TechReport by default first for most of my info..... I really like the site I really don't know what to say..... if you guaranteed safety somehow then I'd consider clicking on an add.

on a side note while the articles are really interesting what I'd consider a service is an up to date price search engine instead of going to Pricewatch or Shopbot..... I don't know what those sites earn but incorporating it would be awesome and yes I assume the task may be too much but I figured I'd offer a potential direction.

I used to visit TomsHardware but it's unreadable now because of the aggressive nature of it's advertising along with a few other sites.

While you're asking us as readers to do you a favor and let you advertise to us, let us ask you as the website operators to be just as responsible and obliging and only display ads that are non-intrusive. To me that means a linked static-image ad with toned down colors that don't distract from the content. Of course, there is a conflict. The advertisers want to distract us from the content, to look at their ads. That's where you guys would come in, rejecting those type of ads. I guess if that were to happen we could all hold hands and live happily ever after. But that never happens in the long run, because everyone wants to maximize their profit. That's why capitalism was invented, and in capitalism if your business model doesn't work, it just fails and something else emerges that is as satisfactory to both parties as can be.

TR does have a nice layout as far as ads go and some sites are terrible. It's almost impossible to navigate Moddb for instance, which is sad because it (once again sadly) is the best place to go for all the modbs in the world.

However, I do also agree with the post that claimed this is almost reverse entitlement.

Forgive me for this reference, but it reminds me of WoW. In WoW people have professions and after leveling them up (of their own accord) they claim they deserve huge sums of money for using their profession for you.

On one hand that does hold some merit, on the other they leveled it up themselves and It is almost 100% certain that they weren't forced to do it.

I have seen some really shady services, where if a person doesn't like what they're getting tipped (they work for tips) for pushing one button, they hold some of whatever they did for you and harass you till they get you to pay up. This isn't all that far fetched from how websites online work.

If they don't like what they're getting paid they harass you in the form of ads and it gets to the point where you just rather go out of your way and go to someone else rather then keep going to that source. Even then sometimes the shit still follows you in the form of spyware and adware. My friend for instance got a nasty virus from some advertisements off of a shady website that destroyed his computer and he has been using the FF popup and script blocker since.

I honestly can't blame him.

I digress, the similarities continued. A person in WoW who has a certain profession can 'charge' for their services, but they almost always find that people just go for another person of the same profession who is working for tips. Thats what happens in a cuthroat capitalist world. They don't have enough power where they can just throw around their weight and demand payment. So the shady cycle continues.

Online journalism is the same. I honestly have a few techsites I goto, while I enjoy TR the most it surprised me years ago when I found out the authors on the site do this for a living. I personally thought this was a hobby for Scott and Geoff till I found that out on the forums. As In I didn't think you could make a living doing this, rightfully so.

This is just that cutthroat and honestly if a paywall was put up, almost all of the TR base would disappear until EVERY decent hardware review website had a paywall. At that point people probably would pay, but they aren't going to till then.

I personally do not use a adblocker. I use Opera and never found ads on sites I frequent often that terrible. It could be that I pick sites with decent ads subconsciously as well.

To be brutally honest: If a paywall was put up, I wouldn't pay. If the ads got to be intrusive, I wouldn't keep coming here, but to be fair I wont install a adblocker. Thats the way things work, it's a constant balancing act between what the viewers will tolerate. Basically akin to a beggar asking for coins for playing a violin on the streets.

I'm not trying to stub toes or insult anyone, it's just the way I've always seen things operate online and how I view my surfing habits objectively.

I can't really understand why anyone would want to block ads on such a well designed site such as TR. The ads are not intrusive and they target the readers of this site quite nicely. I click on them often since they are actually of interest to me.

Really the only time an ad blocker makes sense is in the case of sites that typically aren't worth visiting in the first place.

Confession time: I do keep Firefox around, with ABP and Noscript, for one purpose: browsing porn.

I'm not daft enough to trust my computer to random smut purveyors.

relying on ads shows both a: pure laziness and b: unwillingness to recognize that sites did and do survive without ads. There are other ways. If those aren't working out, stop being so freakin lazy and try experimenting.

I'm tired of all these people trying to act like the issue is whether or not there are ads on the site. Both the publishers and writers (you too scott) are to blame for misleading the readers. The real question is: why hasn't the website recognized that there are other ways to make money?

simple: because 90% of the sites out there are so lazy that short of a server meltdown they could care less.

Question: What about Flashblock? Does it affect your revenue? Well, typically I am ok with flash content but flash has been less than stable for me on Linux so have to disable it there. Hopefully that doesn't affect your ad revenue as that is not my intention :(

I am sure this will incite flames but oh well.

I don't understand this TR puts up a site makes it free to get to, then gets mad when people take advantage of that? It they don't want to provide it free then don't? Put up a pay wall or a block on popup blocking users and be done with it. If that puts you out of business then as harsh as it sounds maybe your content just wasn't worth it?
In some ways it almost sounds like reverse entitlement. I mean there is no guarantee because you work hard to provide something to people that they will deem it worthy of monetary compensation. Last I checked you throw your hat in the ring if you get beat down you get up and dust yourself on and try again or move on.

Actually, I ended up clicking on TR's banners ads because they showed a surprise super ncix special I wasn't aware of. Yay! The amount of hypocrisy and entitlement is seriously rage inducing, though.

xii's post modded down for profanity. Watch it, please, folks.

I turned off my ad blocker on TR for a while.
Well, moving images ARE a distraction. Simple experiment, simple result : content is more accessible without those dancing pigs.

Maybe static ads (not too bright colors) are OK.
Google text ads (not interstitial) don't bother me much.

I understand Scott's reasoning, TR has great content, needs money. OK.
Question is : is that content so great still when mixed with intrusive ads?
I honestly think that's a real question.

Control-F/donate found no buttons to press here around. How about trying a donation system? I'd be glad to support TR. And I think 5 bucks from 30% of the readers would suffice, if not to remove ads completely, at least to settle for the less annoying kind. How about that?

Love you TR.

I think that the vitriol comes from this sense of self-entitlement that this generation of web-surfers have. They have this magical expectation that everything should be free or cheap-as-free. They don't really have the consideration or the wearwithal to take a step back and realize that, like any other company, TR is a business trying to make revenues like any other.

I seriously, seriously appreciate the constraint Scott Wasson has expressed when it comes to the ads here, and while I haven't thought about it until now, I think that may be the reason why I go here. I *like* the content that's served at Anandtech, but I can't stand going there most of the time because of the damn double-underlined-text ads. Those things need to die in a fire already!

Other websites like gametrailers and even Shack are nearly worse offenders with fly-in "take this survey" obtrusive overlays. What the eff, get off the screen!

I haven't heard much complaint from TR readers regarding how TR conducts it's ad-spots and I think that's no accident. If you're a TR regular, however, and you use ad-blocker, you seriously need to go fall down a long flight of stairs. (This means you, Adisor)

If you read today's ars article and view clint's comment posts, you'll see that they would rather have you uninstall flash than use flashblock on their site, if Flash bothers you as a platform.

"My blanket statement in these cases though is that if you're worried about flash or its a hog on your system, just uninstall it.

You'll survive, trust me ;)

YouTube and Vimeo are doing HTML5 video these days, so put the pressure on the other guys to follow their lead (I am obviously under the impression that outside of ads one of the only other valid uses of Flash is to play video online ;)) "

The ego of the site is smoky enough to choke on. Lemmesee, uninstall flash for all sites to maintain ars revenue or uninstall ars. I wonder.

Next up: the ad technica advertising widget!

Ars has a primer on how to specifically allow ads from sites you want to support, while continuing to have a blocker:

http://arstechnica.com/business/guides/2010/03/safely-whitelist-you...

"we turn down substantial revenue each month due to our commitment to reject annoying ads of every stripe: pop-ups, pop-unders, interstitals, double-underlined keyword jobs, ads with sound, graphics that flicker in bright colors, videos that play automatically, files that are too large, ads with trashy content"

Thank you!

Does MSI still support you? I bought the P55-GD65 in part because of that support.

Here's the thing, even great sites that take a lot of care with their ads eventually end up serving ads with viruses, scripting issues, or inappropriate content. So ads are turned off. The internet ad industry has grossly abused the privilege of running ads on people's systems.

If you want to serve ads, then you will need to serve them as linked images only, so they are not distinguishable from content. That's the only thing I would ever allow on my system nowadays.

Does anyone using a non-Atom computer with a CPU from the last 5 years actually see their computer bogged down by Flash ads?

I personally have not ever noticed this, even on low speed single-core Athlon 64s. I rarely see CPU utilization go over a few percent, on any computer, with more tabs open than I'm going to realistically use.

People I know who do nothing demanding with their computers point out things their older computers do slowly to me all the time, but I've never even once had anyone tell me anything about the internet in its entirety slowing their computer down.

I call BS on this being some sort of widespread problem.

I think a big problem is that some people have no idea what the costs are of just running a site of this size. Hardware, server colocation costs, and bandwidth are just a part of the nominal expenses Scott and company must deal with to keep this up and running.

So how does one go about donating, anyways?

I've never bothered with an ad blocker. TR's ad's don't bother me. You guys find the perfect balance. Sites with annoying ads (the ones that expand and block the actual site information) i just stop visiting. Period.

I like websites like this that are choosy about the style of ads they use. Websites that have auto-playing video or audio are just terrible, or those ads that take up most of the screen and force you to click "close"... oh man that makes me want to not buy whatever they are selling. Pop up windows in general are just a bad idea. A well-designed website should be able to accomplish everything it needs within a single window.

I was here first. It was a nice place all hackers and dweebs learning about computers and networking.

Your many commercial operations came later. I feel no pressure at all to take out my ancient userContent.css. I have not changed it in years and it still blocks almost everything. Here's a clue, it still works fine.

You are doing this to support yourself and your families. While I do appreciate well written anything I do not believe you do what you do for me.

+1 for the flashblock camp. I have nothing against your garden variety advertisements, but I do have an issue with poorly engineered flash ads. It got to a point that 9 times out of 10 that I felt that my computer was sluggish, it was to blame on a flash ad in one of the gazillion tabs I had open, with Firefox hogging a core.

Death to flash!

edit: you guys should run a adblock/flashblock poll

edit 2: I just took a peek at the 2 flash ads that were on this page (Gigabyte Big Time, OCZ Vertex), both of which could have easily been made using good old animated GIF or SVG, in which case it would have counted as an impression. And I would not have minded one bit. If Gigabyte and OCZ want to have a share of my eyeball-time, they'd better ditch Flash pronto.

Most people don't give a rat's behind about anything but their own interests, and have their own axes to grind, so when it comes to giving a little -- in this case, humoring a few ads -- they just can't do it.

I'm feeling a bit cynical lately, but meh...

Complaining to or begging your viewers to allow ads, to view ads, OR to click on ads is not the solution.

This is the internet on a computer, not a news show on a TV. If you want support for your site it's time to think outside the box and not emulate TV/newspapers.

I have a few suggestions:
1) Create a gold account with a subscription to exclusive content that non-members can't see, but pays for the costs of non-members to view the site.
2) Start a magazine, basically have the same content you have on TR but in magazine form, obviously that's not easy, but neither is making money AMIRIGHT, haha.
3) Start a TV show, hey, if you can't beat them, join them.
4) Create your own energy drink and sell it through TR website only.

I know these suggestions are gonna get way better.

5) Sell tickets to TR in concert. I'll hold lighter up for you guys, honest.
6) Open up a lemonade stand that also provides tech news, obviously the lemonade revenue will pay for the cost of providing tech news.
7) Change your site's name from techreport.com to iloveflashads.com. Haha, sorry that was a low blow, keep reading.
8) Start a gerbil farm. Come on, you knew that was coming.
9) Really, ads on a website, that didn't work in 2001, why would it work now?

Look guys, I'm sure you can stay in business, just be creative, this is the internet, anything can happen.

Its the users that humor me the most. Users that, seemingly on impulse, will go out of their way to disable ads by installing software, setting up lists, adding exceptions, and tell others about how high and mighty they are for sticking it to the man.

I mean, is it really that difficult to just visit a site, read it, and ignore ads without additional software? That certain individuals seem to lack the brainpower to separate ads from site content?

Do you visit TR and read a GPU review and at the end of a sentence randomly FFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU at an ad to the right of the screen?

I really don't get it. Just another case of nerd OCD, imo.

Next time TR has another cool give away they should just post it as a banner ad at the top of the page :-P

i don't mind ads as long as they don't popup like in dailytech or have speech in them (worst category). techreport does a good job of showing ads unobtrusively

Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? On the surface, the Parasite expects the doctor to heal them for free, the farmer to feed them out of charity. How little they differ from the pervert who prowls the streets, looking for a victim he can ravish for his grotesque amusement.