New Ads – Please Whitelist Hackaday On Adblock

adblock-plus-whitelist

If you’ve been watching very closely you may have noticed that our ads have changed. If you didn’t know we run ads, I’m asking you to consider whitelisting Hackaday.com in your advertisement blocking browser plugin.

The plan to transition to advertisements which are more targeted for our interests was mentioned back in July, when Hackaday was purchased by SupplyFrame,  I say ‘our’ interests because the companies who have signed up so far are ones with which I have personally done business when hacking my own projects. These include the manufacturers: Atmel, Microchip, NXP, and Texas Instruments as well as distributors: Arrow Electronics, Element 14, Mouser, and RS Components. The ads are in the exact same places as they have always been, at the same size, with the core belief that on-page advertising should be entirely unobtrusive. If you find the ads to be otherwise, please do let us know about it (screenshots are helpful!).

Hackaday highlights a steady stream of project features every single day. These are the best engineering-oriented hacks the web has to offer. There is some cost involved in do this, which we cover by including advertisements on our pages. Please don’t block the ads. If you haven’t been blocking, thank you! If you do use an Ad blocker, I certainly understand that you want to get away from ads that automatically play audio, flash annoying colors, or include inappropriate content. Our ads don’t do this. Please throw us a bone by adding our domain to your “whitelist”. This is very simple, and after the break I’ve included the instructions for doing so with Adblock Plus.

If you are using Adblock Plus for Chrome there will be a red octagon with ABP on it to the right side of the address line on your browser. Right-click that and choose options. The image above shows the options page. Click the “Whitelisted domains” tab, type “hackaday.com” in the box, and click on “Add domain”. Make sure to pat yourself on the back as this small act helps to support Hackaday. Thank you!

163 thoughts on “New Ads – Please Whitelist Hackaday On Adblock

  1. What a bunch of crybabies. Oh, animated gifs, my limp wristed eyes can’t handle it! Please target me with XXX animated gifs, I love those things! Make this into the techno-porn site I know it can be.

  2. Ads are actually relevent to me. Supplyframe, thanks for not showing obnoxious ads that serve no other purpouse than to jerk and lag, taunting linux users that their flash performance is usually dreadful. These ads run relatively smoothly. Thanks.

  3. I’m not going to pretend that I’m watching the ads just so you get some money.

    The companies believe their advertisements influence my purchasing habits and are willing to pay someone for this voodoo, and these pleas simply reinforce the belief that stuffing advertisement everywhere helps their cause. I think it’s immoral to exploit people like that, especially when the side effect is more advertising.

  4. I’d like to suggest having a page that had all the ads. I’m OK w/ non-animated ads on the front page. Sometimes I find I want to go back and look at an ad and w/ dynamic ads that often doesn’t work. Most of the time the HaD ads have been relevant even if I wasn’t interested at the time, so I’ve not been bothered by them unless I couldn’t find the one I wanted to follow.

    Note there are various magazine (e.g. Sky & Telescope, High Power Rocketry, etc) that I buy once every 9-12 months just for the ads. Probably rather old school, but I have found it a useful way to know who’s selling what.

    I refuse to run Flash both because of the security issues and the bandwidth they suck up. I *really* dislike animated ads. I do block popups, though I’ve been encountering ads that circumvent that :-( I’m likely to quit visiting that site.

  5. Some of you are pretty conceded “Let me try turning it off, I will let you all know if I like it or if my obsessive compulsive disorder renders me unable to cope with a simple animated ad that takes up a small corner of the screen.” Seriously they rely on this to make money so they can operate, anyone who can’t see that should do HAD a favor and stop wasting their bandwidth.

    1. Ads are a security issue
      Ads use up MY bandwidth
      Ads contain tracking features, which invade my privacy

      I also find it unethical that I have no information and no say in how much my and everyone else’s “contribution” to this service is due to the money from the advertisement being invisible to me; for all I know the HAD owners are simply being greedy and want some pocket money.

      If HAD wants money off of me, simply ask me. As long as they’re not asking me directly to pay for the content they currently provide for free to everyone with no further obligation, I feel it my right to choose which parts of their publication I’m willing to view and not.

      1. Use an anti tracker such as ghostery, you realize that there are usually more trackers embedded into a page itself than the ads, as for bandwidth how much are you really loosing from a few images? Also do you know how much flak they would catch if they outright asked for money, the readers here are so entitled sometimes it is ludicrous.

        1. None of that is my problem.

          Whenever you’re offered a free service, it’s not the service that is what is being sold – you are. That’s why I’m simply choosing to limit how much I am worth as compared to what sort of service and attitude I’m being served in return.

          The personal cost of enabling the ads is inconvenience, insecurity, loss of privacy, loss of utility (bandwidth caps) and personal annoyance. We do not know if this personal cost is more or less than what HAD is being paid for it, and we don’t know if HAD is being paid more or less than their fair due, and we have no way to negotiate and haggle over the price, thereby ruling out the supply and demand mechanism on our part entirely, creating a “market failure” where the major incentive for HAD is to push out crap articles and troll for page views – and our only option should that come to is to stop visiting the site.

          I do not support services that try to indirectly weasel money out of me and others because the whole process is obscured and ripe for abuse. On the contrary, I feel it justified that I’m causing extra expenses to such services to discourage the practice.

          If HAD wants to run a business by selling these articles and content to readers, they should do it open handed. Present me the bill and ask me to pay for it. Otherwise you can stuff it.

  6. Problem is with Flash ads or things that require a lot of CPU cicles. Thats why i block ads. Also, tracking. There shouldnt be any tracking on a website if the ads are targeted to us. Once thats considered/confirmed ill whitelist.

  7. I disabled adblock on the site and was pleasantly surprised to find all the ads were about kittens from findchip.com. I regularly have adblock enabled on every other site but this is worth it. Amusing ads are better than no ads. In all seriousness please make sure there are no sketchy or inappropriate ads at any point though. That is why I hadn’t disabled adblock until now.

  8. I whitelisted it, so far the ads aren’t obnoxious. What I’d forgotten about was that damned block of

    Follow HaD on G+
    +1 like these 20000 other people. Here’s photos of a few.
    Like on facebook! 16000 facebookians agree! You should be a facebookian too!
    Follow @hackaday with 34000 of your closest friends

    So after a reload while recalling how to block all that friend-ey, huggy, hippie, share-ey crap I get a wad of friggin kittens telling me to use findchips. Except when electronics is boring, and kittens are the solution.

    Sorry, adblock is turning back on. Give me a donate button. Please.

  9. Until you bring ALL AD’s inhouse and personally vet them for safety (and no flashing, moving, sound, video, etc) then Adblock Plus will run full strength. Obnoxious ads are bad enough, but malware – NOT GONNA HAPPEN.

  10. How can we maximize the income for you from these ads? Viewing, clicking, buying something: do you get a bigger cut for the latter? If I’m making a big digikey order, how can I make sure you get a cut? I’m thinking if we can make you more money per ad then you can reduce the size and frequency of the ads while still making the same revenue.

  11. Well I unblocked your domain but see no ads. My ad blocker is reproting blocked ads from generic ad domains that I won’t unblock. In general I don’t allow ads because they are a common attack vector for compromising PCs and many anony me visual. They never seem to match the visual style of the sites they are on and the animated ones are too distracting. If hackaday uses pushes animated ads to me all ads will be re-blocked.

  12. ads.supplyframe.com spc.php, 2KB: 333ms
    lg.php ads.supplyframe.com 43 bytes: 146ms
    trackingservlet via analytics.supplyframe 43 bytes, 122ms
    then it requests lg.php AGAIN. ads.supplyframe.com. 43 bytes, 238ms
    again some analytics.supplyframe.com, 43 Bytes, 228ms
    etc etc etc
    15+ seconds later, the page is loaded

    Let me reopen the page, not hit F5, but click the URI and hit enter (this allows the browser to use it’s cache). 14.96 seconds of until onload event of THIS page.

    What the fuck is wrong with the internet today? Including all those damn JavaScripts from badly maintained and freaky slow webservers?

    I’m going to dns-spoof supplyframe.com and *.supplyframe.com in my local network, so it just spits out a local IP, which at least makes the website a bit faster. That is, I just can hand out empty files when HAD requests files. Loadtimes of 1~2ms.

    STOP INCLUDING 50 EXTERNAL DOMAINS WHICH I NEED TO RESOLVE, AND THEN ACCESS FROM A DAMN SLOW AND CHEAPASS CRAP SERVER!

    I’ve blocked access to Facebook, 3/4th of Googles domains, and many others. Just because too many websites embed their shit, which makes the websites SLOWER then browsing back in 1996 online via dialup (and yes, this is serious! that’s the problem!)

    Is there some option to donate to HAD? Or can you make the ads load faster (within 50ms max!)?

    1. This is very true. I wonder if somebody’s already written a blacklist for all the useless third-party stuff that so many websites load up?

      It’s also annoying many websites just don’t load without Javascript. The content’s embedded like flies in a web, all over the place in little spots.

      If a stray IP-targetted cruise missile comes into my hands, I’m aiming it at outbrain.com. I dunno what it does apart from slow down link following, and presumably spy on me, but the fact it’s taking over the web like Venom over Spiderman trips my Corporate Fuckery sense, and that’s a deep and primordial one in me.

  13. I like the business cat, that made my day.
    Funny thing is i installed adblock a couple days ago but whitelisted this site
    and then you put this article up. Where is the violin?

  14. …. these are the least informative ads i have ever seen.
    the name of this should have been “Hackaday: now with more cats!!!!” this annoys me. i like the amazon ads for lab equipment and an all in one welder/plasma cutter more.
    That one with the cat telling me to hack electronics isnt even an ad its a life suggestion

  15. Sorry can’t do!! There is no honor among hackers!! We want you to encode your whole website coded inside a ad frame…. so your entire site get blocked if i have ad block on!! I want this site to be blocked 100%!!

  16. Eh, you guys need a better ratio of good:trash content before I start unblocking articles. Putting lleds in a door knocker, making lego keyboards or chatting about some company’s highend robot youtube video…all are not quality hacks. (examples I pulled from the front page 8october 2013)

  17. Advertising is probably how half the internet even works.

    I have a page on the web and there is no JavaScript, Java, Shockwave, Flash, embedded content, meta elements, nothing. Just raw HTML and no ads whatsoever.

    I run NoScript. Top level domain by default, everybody else ain’t getting anything. If there’s 20 sites that want access and I can’t figure who needs to be enabled to make $FEATURE work then I just open another browser where I vigoriously purge on a regular basis (and I disallow cookies by default, only when it *absolutely* needs one does it get one).

    For a real scare, try watching an outgoing connection monitor. You’ll see connections going out to sites that are …well, suspect. Do you know who bidder.us.east.liverail.com running of pot 9292 is? Neither do I, and that connection is denied.

    I don’t like ads, mostly I ignore them, because they’re usually totally irrelevant in every fashion, and because I don’t click on ads. If I see an advertisement for $SOMETHING that I may be highly interested in, I don’t click the ad. Rather, I search for it on Google or I enter the site in manually and track it down. The only time I click on ads is accidentally on iOS based devices.

    Ads can be very dangerous. Those redirects could lead *ANYWHERE* to $Zerodaybrowserexploit.

  18. It would be a good idea for you guys to have this plastered on your main page somewhere unobtrusive.

    Just bought myself a new laptop and you guys were back on the block list.

    Don’t see why anyone cares about the animated GIFs, these guys need to make money some how and if a moving picture will produce more revenue than a static one I’m all for it.

    I do however agree on the colour scheme, it’s horrible. White on black or grey would be so much easier on the eyes…just goes to show your content’s good If I keep coming back after how awful I think it is.

  19. a suggestion: have you ever thought of deploying some of the same tactics that click jackers use?

    have a script that secretly clicks an ad without the user even knowing (no popups, no opening into new windows and no redirecting to another site).

    or do product placement having hacks that involve products you advertize on the site like

    http://images.ads.supplyframe.com/f385b47d5790001569a9d4f48e0697a5.png

    any development boards work myst use microchip’s chipkit boards for example.

    making the latest hack

    http://hackaday.com/2013/11/15/arduino-astronomic-clock-automates-lights/

    would be a product placement for the arduino development board and tiny rtc board

    or all images that show on each hack must contain an open can of soda or involve the use of an empty can like a can stove or pulse crusher magnet

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