During all my recent Firefox drama, I installed lots of new extensions. I installed half of the recommended extensions (about 10 in total) and a select few others. One of the extensions I installed was Ad Block Plus, which makes some interesting choices in regards to ad-blocking.

But first, my background in the subject. I first start blocking ads in college with my HOSTS file. A HOSTS file is basically like a pre-processor for IP addresses. When you ask a computer for a link, like www.google.com, the computer checks the HOSTS file on the local harddrive first to see if www.google.com maps to anything special there. If it does, then it uses that special value, and if it doesn’t, then it sends the request out to the network. (This description is over-simplified, but it’s good enough to get a novice up to speed).

So, in college, I would grab an ad-blocking HOSTS file from the net that would map servers like “ad.doubleclick.net” to dead IP addresses like 127.0.0.1. That way, anytime a website told my computer to go grab an ad from doubleclick and display it to me, my computer would grab nothing instead. I had to update my ad-blocking HOSTS file once a month because ad servers would change frequently (it was a cat-and-mouse game).

I eventually gave up blocking ads through my HOSTS file because it caused many pages to render poorly. There would be large gaps in pages, or other pages that required viewing an ad because seeing content (like iFilm) simply stopped working once I blocked the ad with my HOSTS file. I didn’t think avoiding advertising was worth the hassle of a broken browsing experience anymore.

Since my college days, the line between advertising and content has blurred significantly. A few examples:

• Harvey Danger released their last album entirely for free in unrestricted MP3s on the internet. It was advertising to get people to buy the CD (or donate on the website). Plus, it generated a ton of publicity. Download it if this sounds interesting to you.
• CareerBuilder’s Monk-e-mail (created by Oddcast) was a reliable source of bite-sized entertainment in the work environment. The content was an ad (or perhaps some people saw it as the ad was the content, if that difference makes sense).
• This beautiful Sony Bravia ad directed by Jonathan Glazer falls more under “content” than “advertising.” It’s art, that Sony was smart enough to fund.

Are these examples ads? Content? Both?

Circling back the the software that started this post, Ad Block Plus, here’s the point: Ad Block Plus doesn’t block AdWords, but it does block AdSense. It doesn’t block my MyBlogLog tracking script, but it does block my Urchin tracking script. It blocks my Indeed job listings… my Indeed jobs seem as much like content as anything else on my back because they’re persistent vertical search snippets. That’s the equivalent of blocking my del.icio.us bookmarks roll (if I had one) IMHO.

These decisions to block some “ads” but not others seem so arbitrary to me. What is content? What is advertising?

If a user wants to see something, does that make it content? When I’m shopping for a car, I want to see all the best car deals I can possibly find, so that would make any ads with car prices content in that context. What if that next day I’m researching stereos… now the car ads are just obtrusive ads, and the stereo ads are now content. So, whether or not a user wants to see something is too shifty to define content vs advertising.

If a publisher is paid to place certain text and images on a site in a certain location, does that make those text and images ads? This definition is also tenuous at best because every job listed on Craigslist in the New York area cost $25, but jobs listing are content to Craigslist users looking for jobs. Or try this counter-example if you prefer, the make-your-own Chevy Tahoe viral ad campaign paid “The Apprentice” to promote what ended up being rather funny critical commentary of Chevy. It was an indirect paid placement of critical content, not advertising.

This wandering argument is unfortunately drifting toward the trite conclusion that ads are in the eye of the beholder. But one more closing remark to try to keep things interesting: I’m still waiting for someone to develop a tool that allows me to ignore advertisers that I find obtrusive while also giving me access to ads that I find interesting (deem to be content), but without requiring my explicit permission or banning. The system needs to determine the difference implicitly based on my browsing behavior in order to be useful for me.