Ad filtering

An ad blocker (also: advertisement filter ) is a program that displays advertisements on a website away. Advertising on web pages is found in various types, such as images, animations, text and pop-ups.

History

Ad blocker came in the 1990s for television by (eg RDS, later through the WWW) simultaneously commercial breaks were signaled via a parallel pathway. The Fernsehfee application could be removed from video recordings in 1999 as the first advertising in real time. Notoriety she gained mainly by the injunction, which sought the Association of private TV and radio stations. The manufacturer defended themselves against this and after a marathon process lost RTL in summer 2004 before the Federal Court. With the WebWasher program there was in 1999 the first commercial but for private use free ad blocker for the PC. This eliminated advertising from web content.

Operation

Since there are standards for the sizes of the commercial arts, is a method of blocking, hide graphics with certain dimensions.

Another method is advertising based on their internet-address (: URL ) to detect. These mechanisms are as black and white lists and regular expressions. Here, images, scripts, and other embedded objects are blocked if its URL contains an expression contained in the used filter list, eg / ADServ /, / ads / etc. Here, the "ad" stands for English advertising = advertising.

Most ad blocker for the WWW now combine both methods.

Another option is to filter based on the DOM tree. The advantage is that even text ads can be removed.

Since advertising on the Internet nowadays often technically complex is ( Flash animations, layer ads ) and therefore can not be displayed without supportive programming languages, just helps against moving advertising often turning off JavaScript using a script blocker like NoScript.

Benefit

The immediate benefit of an internet filter is located in a Web presentation free of distracting advertising. In addition, the page structure is accelerated and less resources consumed. If you already transmitting the advertising prevents it comes to capacity savings in Internet traffic. In this case, ad blocker can suppress the automatic collection of visitor data by advertising companies and other parties and thus contribute to the Privacy Policy.

Disadvantages

Some free internet services require that man - to perform an action (eg, to a text from a web page from submit ) - finally clicks on a banner ad that this service ( at least partially ) to the financing. If a banner ad completely removed by an ad blocker, you can therefore use the Service only if you have the ad blocker for this page disabled.

Another possible disadvantage is that the companies that offer ad-funded services, revenue loss, and thus created financing problems could. The actual loss of revenue, if any, but is difficult to measure and depends on the individual case of the general intention of the user of an internet filter to generate revenue due to advertising.

Examples

Known ad blocker, for example AdBlock, Adblock Plus (Add-on for Firefox, Chrome and Opera (free software )), and Proxomitron, Privoxy also suitable for filtering and modifying web pages, especially on central computers; Greasemonkey is suitable for special modifications of individual pages, which you can in some pages blank remaining fields where once the banners have been removed (eg, the Yahoo webmail ).