On the whole, I agree quite strongly with your analysis, Phate, and you certainly put it into words better than I ever could've. The key point for me - and the reason I use the default Adblock Plus settings which allow some ads, is, as you said, unobtrusiveness. I don't mind ads catching my attention, but they should not interfere with my use of the page. What does this mean for me?
First, ads should not be placed in between me and the content I want to access. Playing commercials before videos, such as on YouTube, is perhaps the most egregious example of this, but it is far from the only one. Even with ABP, if I attempt to visit an article on Forbes.com, I first get redirected to a page which hosts an ad, and while the ad itself is blocked by ABP, I still have to click through the page to access the content I want.
Secondly, ads should not play audio (at least by default). I've seen a recent surge in the number of ads which are displayed alongside page content, but which autoplay a video with sound, or begin making sound if you so much as hover over them. This is perhaps the surest-fire way to get me to
not click on your ad, no matter how relevant or interesting it is, because I don't want to be sending advertisers the message that that's a good idea. In fact, if there's no way to disable the audio, it's also a sure-fire way to get me to leave the site period.
Thirdly, ads should not have a significant impact on page load times. I know this is a bit harder to measure, because it depends on user network speed, the availability of CDNs, whether or not the JavaScript that inevitably loads them is sensibly written (ie., to not hang the entire page's load if it's slow to access the content), and the quality of user-end plugins used to display the content (try to load the simplest Flash animation on Ubuntu without it using an entire core,
I dare you), by and large this means two things: keeping filesize low, and not using
goddamned Flash.
Finally, and perhaps most detrimentally from the advertiser's perspective, a word on relevant ads. Scanning the content of a normal webpage to deliver ads related to its content? Okay. Scanning my emails' contents to deliver ads on Gmail? Not okay. Using tracking cookies, pixels, local storage, and other such technologies to keep a record of my interests to deliver ads you feel are relevant to me, regardless of the content of the current page?
Really not okay. User privacy should trump ad relevance
every single time.
So where does that leave us?
Well, you brought up Google and Facebook, and unfortunately, here I see two of the biggest offenders. While Google's text-based ads are wonderful, their image banners tend to be Flash-based, and that's a huge problem from a performance and load time perspective. The commercials YouTube foists on us before giving us access to the content we want to view, and indeed the popover banners that leave a button irritatingly covering part of the video even when they're closed, also run afoul of the first point. And of course, Google's highly-intrusive user tracking is a violation which goes without saying, because although they have the ability to opt-out of interest based tracking, they're quite fond of silently opting you back in when you use a new computer or browser, and have also been accused of disregarding this when you've logged out of your Google account. It seems they've also recently split the opt-out option between Google and Google ads on non-Google sites, since I was opted out of the former but into the latter when I visited their
ads preference page, which also gave quite a lot of insight on how accurate a profile they were able to paint of me from the sites I visit.
Facebook traditionally has been a bit better. Ads have been unobtrusive, and while they used on-site user tracking to attempt to build a user profile, they also seem very bad at it, considering most Facebook ads I receive alternate between, 'Have a Bar Mitzvah in Israel,' 'Shop for the latest in hijab fashion,' and the ever-popular ads for Rush Limbaugh's radio show. Unfortunately for them, they've not had a lot of financial success from these ads, and that's leading them to the dark side. The non-consensual use of user data to promote ads ('Friend X and Friend Y like Brand A!'), together with just
making shit up about what people like, has really gotten my goat. Inserting these ads directly into the news feed was not something that overly bothered me, but their newest plan to
insert autoplay video commercials into the feed? That's beyond the Pale.
On a tangential note, while Adblock Plus blacklists all animated advertisements as being obtrusive, I'm wont to disagree with them: animated ads aren't inherently bad, in my opinion, it's how they're used that is. Using Flash is a big no-no in my books, but animated GIFs have too high a filesize. My sincere hope is that as more and more people begin to upgrade to browsers that support new web technologies, we'll see a move away from Flash and towards embedded HTML5 video (which sites like
Gfycat are happy to point out has huge filesize savings over GIFs). By providing no audio and hiding the control track, HTML5 video can provide an identical visual experience to users as a Flash banner in a fraction of the filesize, with a fraction of the resource use.
