Can we have a way to disable animated ads?

elusive on 25/02/2016 - 10:59

I don't know if it's a recent change, but I'm noticing a lot more animated ads recently.

Now, I could just enable adblock on ozb, or disable ads through my user settings. But I disabled adblock for a reason.

Unfortunately, I'm finding it harder to keep at it. Apart from the animations being particularly distracting (obviously - that's the point), they're also not ideal for a little browsing at work ;)

So - can we maybe get an option to disable just the animated ads? Could be a user option like the global disable.

Or maybe that's too hard to implement and other people don't care enough, so I should just disable ads entirely.

Site Discussion

Comments

  • scotty on 25/02/2016 - 11:07
    +2

    Unfortunately ads on OzBargain are sold through Google AdX — I don't even know what ads are showing up as many could be retargeted ads from networks outside Google. The "animated ads" could also be Flash (getting rare now), animated GIF or just HTML5 (more and more of those these days). If they bug you, you can either

    • Go to your settings to turn off display ads completely (uncheck "Show advertisement"), or
    • Use an ad-blocker
    • elusive on 25/02/2016 - 11:10

      Ah, that might be why I'm seeing more recently - this is a new browser profile and I forgot to make Flash click-to-play. Thanks! I can probably live with the few HTML5 ones for now.

      It's a pity that there's no way to opt in to text-only (or even static image) ads, but I suppose you have to work with what you have available.

  • peterpeterpumpkin on 25/02/2016 - 11:23
    +1

    I don't think that Google Ads give webmasters the option to opt-out of animated ads on a per user basis, only across the entire website (https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/3234887?hl=en).

    Amazingly, I think only Internet Explorer natively supports an option to prevent animation of GIFs.

  • pformag on 25/02/2016 - 12:58

    I stopped using ad-block for their whitelist seems to be getting bigger. Try uBlock Origin, it is an open source adblocker addon. One of the very best, and there is a range of option.

    • elusive on 25/02/2016 - 13:02
      +3

      At the moment, I'm intentionally not blocking ozb - I want to support the site, and the ads are generally not crazy.

      However, if it comes down to it I suppose I could tweak the filters to just block video elements and gifs. The downside is ozb gets no ad views when the filter triggers - this could be avoided if a simpler ad was always served instead but apparently that's not possible.

  • scotty on 26/02/2016 - 15:06
    +1

    Okay. I was wrong. There's indeed a way to let individual users to opt in text-ads only. I have that implemented in the development build, and that will be available sometime next week. I'll keep you updated.

    • elusive on 26/02/2016 - 17:43

      Thanks! I hope it wasn't much trouble.

  • scotty on 01/03/2016 - 13:43
    +2

    You can now go to your account settings. Under Banner ads you get to choose between

    • Text/Image ads (default)
    • Text ads
    • No ads

    For Text ads I basically instruct Google AdSense to send back text ads only. However, it does not work 100%, as we are using AdX to programmatically sell our banner space, and AdSense is only used as backfill. In the case where the ad space has been sold to someone other than Google AdSense, an image ads might still popup.

    • elusive on 01/03/2016 - 14:13

      Looks great! Thanks.

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