It's an Ad, Ad, Ad, Ad World

Maybe your browser should have a McDonald's-like sign that reads "Over 24 Billion Served." That's the number of ad impressions--ads loaded into Web browsers--generated in just one week. If you feel that a disproportionate percentage of those ads are hitting you square in the face, you're not alone.

This is not a black-and-white issue. Even people who detest Web ads concede that the explosion in Web advertising has financed a no-cost Internet rich in content. And even the most intrusive ads help pay for the Web's free content (including the news and information at PCWorld.com; see this month's Up Front for more about this subject). If every surfer blocked all advertisements all the time, companies might have to charge user fees for their Web services or, worse, they could go out of business.

But the latest generation of online ads don't just sit meekly on a host page, carrying an identifying label that says "Advertising" and hoping to get clicked. Instead, the ads pose stealthily as noncommercial content or bombard our eyeballs with pyrotechnic excess. And Darwinian competition among advertisers has spawned increasingly aggressive forms, formats, and features of ads.

If you want to put an end to the madness on your desktop, you can use ad-blocking software to eliminate most ads that appear in your browser. We tested four applications (see the features comparison chart below) against the most aggressive ad environments, and found that Intermute's $30 AdSubtract Pro was the most effective.

When It Rains Ads, It Pours

TV has its 15- and 30-second spots, as well as interminable infomercials. Magazines have multipage spreads on heavy stock, and perfumed blow-in cards. The Web, however, beats them both, with a bewildering blizzard of advertisement styles, sizes, and traps--some ancient (in Web years), some brand new. Before you can fight ads--or decide whether to try--you need to know what you're up against.

Standard banner ads, including new formats such as the vertically oriented skyscraper, stay inside the primary browser window. Not so with the now-infamous pop-up and pop-under ads: They appear in new browser windows, typically stripped of toolbars and menus, and either cover your original browser window or hide beneath it. Similar to pop-ups and pop-unders are interstitials (ads that appear after you click a link but before you see the next page) and pop-up transitionals (a type of ad that plays in a separate window between two pages of content). Superstitials, the most highly evolved ad species, move across the face of a Web page, as if they were animations projected on a piece of glass over the page.

Those ad formats can be annoying, but others are downright pernicious. Most legitimate sites try to avoid using deceptive ads to get clicks, but some don't mind the trick banner, an ad that mimics a dialog box: You click its OK button to dismiss a system message, only to be drawn into a spiral of other Web ads. Then there's adware like TopText, which skulks onto your system when you install certain shareware or freeware programs and then spawns its own pop-ups to compete with those launched by the sites you visit. (Utilities such as AdAware can detect and exterminate TopText and others of its ilk.)

Worst of all are the mouse-trappers and high-speed spawners, so called because they break your browser's Back button and/or disable the close box, and often have the scary ability to replicate windows faster than you can get rid of them. The sleazy underbelly of the Web is rife with questionable spawning techniques like these, and you'll likely hit them if you click the links in spam e-mail.

Block, Block, Block That Ad

You could apply some ad-blocking techniques without using ad-blocking software. All you'd have to do is turn off all graphics, Java, JavaScript, and Flash in your browser--and sacrifice nearly all the interactivity and usefulness of your Web experience in the process. That's why software that selectively removes the ad tumors, rather than killing the patient, is the smarter solution.

The emotionally charged nuisance factor often sparks people's interest in blocking online advertisements, but there are other good reasons to fight back: Blocking ads frees up precious bandwidth and can protect your privacy. Ads take time to load, and they get in the way. "They're forcing us to do something" that most people don't want to do, says Intermute CEO Ed English, whose company makes the AdSubtract ad-blocker program.

Because many ad servers place cookies on your computer, ad companies are able to track your surfing. The companies claim that the function of most cookies they set is to regulate the type and amount of advertisements you receive. But because the larger ad services span a wide array of Web sites, ad-related cookies can also provide the ad companies a lot of insight into your Web surfing preferences. "We never consented to be followed on the Web," argues English.

With a bit of effort, you can lessen the load, speed up your surfing, and reduce the clutter on the pages you visit. We snared four different ad blockers--AdSubtract, Guidescope, Norton Internet Security (which includes a Web ad-blocking component), and WebWasher--and ran them through the wringer, testing them against some tough ad-generating sites. We also examined two other anti-ad programs, Internet Junkbuster Proxy and Proxomitron, but rejected both. Junkbuster is extremely difficult to set up, and Proxomitron failed to banish some of the most common ads.

Some ad blockers are better than others, of course--AdSubtract walked away with our Best Bet prize by blockading every ad we encountered. But even the slackest of the four here successfully purged pages of in-frame, banner-style ads.

Most ad-blocking programs work as specialized proxy servers. Running on your PC, they examine the addresses that your browser requests, check each one against the entries in a frequently updated database of ad server addresses, and then drop requests for ad content. Some also rely on pattern matching to look for windows and images that match known sizes and shapes of ads.

No anti-ad utility works flawlessly; but without ads, pages definitely load faster. In our informal tests, pages with their ads blocked appeared in just 60 percent of the time they took to load with ads.

Finally, some advertising tactics defeat most ad-blocking software; rarely do the anti-ad programs prevent mouse-trappers and the high-speed window spawning that often accompanies them. In our tests, only WebWasher managed to circumvent these ultra-aggressive annoyances.

An Ad-Free Future? Unlikely

The Web is the new frontier of publishing, so it's no surprise that online advertising is in Wild West mode. "Anyone can have the publishing tools to put something on the Web, and not all those people play by the same rules," says Greg Stuart, president and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, an online ad industry group.

To Stuart and the IAB, there are no bad advertisements, only bad practices. "We're not out to stifle innovation," Stuart says. That means virtually everything goes. The IAB's guidelines are voluntary, apply only to its members, and include no mechanism for calling an advertiser to account. "If a member company was disguising an ad to look like a system message, we would probably have a discussion with them," Stuart says--but he adds, "the people who are doing that are not my members."

"You can't rely on the [advertising] industry to police itself," says AdSubtract's Ed English. "Too often, advertisers think they've won if we click, no matter how they got us there."

Beating back the tsunami of ads is a daunting task--and until recently, few people even bothered to attempt it. But as ads have become more intrusive, that situation may be changing.

As recently as last October, analysts found that three-quarters of surveyed Web surfers didn't even know that Web ad-blocking software existed. No wonder ad people like Jeffrey Silverman, vice president and general manager of North American media for DoubleClick, are so sanguine about the future of Web advertising. "No, I don't lose any sleep thinking about ad-blocking software," he says. "The [ad-blocking software] adoption rate is just so extremely low."

But as advertisers' tactics change, disgruntled users will likely take matters into their own hands. Marissa Gluck, a senior analyst with Web rankings firm Jupiter Media Metrix, says that Internet users are less tolerant of intrusive ads, particularly pop-ups and pop-unders. "In 1999, 23 percent of the people we surveyed found pop-up ads very annoying, to the point where they would consider not returning to the [offending] site," Gluck says. "But in 2001, that number was 41 percent."

Site visitors are mad because they're being subjected to a glut of ads and to sometimes-questionable advertising tactics, adds Brian Murray of Cyveillance, a company that tracks public perceptions for some major Web advertising clients. His company's research found that intrusive techniques such as spawning and mouse-trapping have moved from porn and gambling sites to the mainstream. Many sites that depend on ads as a primary source of revenue (including PCWorld.com) use pop-ups, pop-unders, and superstitials--sometimes all at once.

Why do advertisers use intrusive techniques when most surfers hate them? Frankly, it's because they're effective. "Some of the most intrusive ads have the unfortunate effect of getting a customer's attention," Murray says. "[Sites are] actually rewarded for engaging in these tactics."

Some sites that depend on advertising to make ends meet even take the aggressive step of blocking users of ad-blocking software. One German company, MediaBeam, has developed software it calls AdKey that can tell whether a Web visitor's browser has loaded ad graphics. If AdKey determines that the visitor is using blocking software, it prevents the user from visiting the site as long as the blocking software remains on. A German hacker managed to find a way around the software fairly quickly, but MediaBeam promises that AdKey 2.0, a work in progress, won't suffer from the same weakness, raising the stakes in an increasingly aggressive programming arms race between ad and anti-ad forces.

The future looks grim for anyone who wants to see fewer or less-intrusive ads. Research firm GartnerG2 projects that online advertising will more than double by 2005. That means a lot more ads, and probably new evolutionary steps in advertising technology. One way or another, the battle to capture our attention on the Web is only heating up.

Gregg Keizer, an Oregon-based writer, detests pop-ups but enjoys (well, tolerates) banner ads.

AdSubtract Beats Ads Best (chart)

Of the four ad-blocking packages we tested, AdSubtract Pro blocked the most ads overall and the most forms of ads. We subjected each product to sites that use large numbers and various types of ads, and we timed how long the page took to load with and without ads. See the results on the next page.

AdSubtract Beats Ads Best (chart)

PRODUCT	Price	Works on	Pro	Con	Ad types blocked	Ad-free pages display
AdSubtract Pro (http://www.adsubtract.com)	$30	Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP	Easy to set up, does the best job of beating back ads.	Regular installation of filter updates required to maintain effectiveness.	Banners, pop-ups, Flash ads, cookies	1.7 times faster
Guidescope (http://www.guidescope.com/home/)	Free	Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000	You're not required to download new filtering instructions.	Remote proxy transmits your surfing habits to Guidescope--a scary thought for users concerned with privacy.	Banners, Flash ads, cookies	1.9 times faster
Norton Internet Security (http://www.symantec.com)	$70	Windows 98/Me/NT/2000/XP	Ad-blocking element is just one component of this antivirus and personal firewall suite.	Failed to block many types of ads; ad-free page still includes blank clickable areas that take you to ads.	Pop-ups, Flash ads	1.3 times faster
WebWasher (http://www.webwasher.com)	Free	Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000	Sophisticated settings let you fine-tune the blockade; only product that prevented mouse-trapping.	Its cookie blocking and management features couldn't do the job.	Banners, pop-ups, Flash ads, mouse-trapping	1.5 times faster

Is It Wrong to Block Ads on Free Sites?

All of us use ad-supported Web sites. Does that mean that we're duty-bound to support ads? Absolutely, say advertisers. "Users must accept the quid pro quo of advertising," says Greg Stuart, head of the Internet Advertising Bureau, an online advertising trade association. "They're getting something for free or at a reduced cost. And yes, blocking ads violates that implied contract."

That basic deal seems to be acceptable to most users and sites. After all, successful ad-free sites that charge subscription fees are as rare as hen's teeth. Porn sites aside, you could count them on a couple of hands. Without advertisements, the Web as we know it would vanish faster than a pop-up slain by AdSubtract.

Of course, some sites don't want to depend on users' choosing not to block ads. If more sites adopt software like MediaBeam's AdKey, which denies site access to visitors who block the site's ads, users may feel more pressure to accede to this unspoken contract. But will users give in? "Most people would equate ad filters with a TV remote used to switch the channel when an ad comes on," says Junkbuster's Jason Catlett. Ed English of AdSubtract puts it even more bluntly. "Are you obligated to read every single ad that's in a print magazine or a newspaper?" he asks. "Of course not."

Blocking the most intrusive ads is an easier call. After all, you may put up with a perfumed card inserted into a magazine, but would you feel as generous if it popped out and spritzed you in the eye?

For some ad-blocking proponents, the fundamental issue is not ethical but practical. "It's like it's never enough," says AdSubtract's English. Banners led to animated GIFs, which led to Flash animations, which begat pop-ups and pop-unders. Ads litter our drives with temporary files, hog CPU resources, and consume bandwidth. In the end, English says, "People have a right to control what appears on their computer."

My computer, my bandwidth, my life. Now them's fightin' words.