http://www.addart.eyebeam.org/
Of the 100+ add-ons available for Firefox, “adblockers” are the most popular. The most current, Adblock Plus , has over 4 million downloads since Jan 2006 (currently around 150,000/week). It’s predecessor, Adblock, has been downloaded over 8 million times. These extensions work by preventing advertising images from downloading and replacing the ads with blank space. Their popularity has risen as pop-up ads, banner ads, and ads incorporating sound and animation have permeated the internet.
For many, replacing ads with blank space would be enough. AddArt attempts to do something more interesting than just blocking ads – it turns your browser into an art gallery. Every time you visit the New York Times online or check the weather you’ll also see a spattering of images by a young contemporary artist.
The project will be supported by an small website providing information on the current artists and curator, along with a schedule of past and upcoming AddArt shows. Each 2 weeks will include 5-8 artists selected by emerging and established curators. Images will have to be cropped to standard banner sizes or can be custom made for the project. Artists can target sites (such as every ad on FoxNews.com) and/or default to any page on the internet with ads. One artist will be shown per page. The curatorial duty will be passed among curators through recommendations, word of mouth, and solicitations to the AddArt site.
With the overwhelming popularity of adblockers, if AddArt were to attract 5% of existing users, the numbers would be in the hundreds of thousands. AddArt can bring contemporary art to the desktops of all types of people at home and in their workplace – all over the world.
Filed under: Brand New Tech, Innovative Tech
Surely though, as with anything, this new blank space can be sold. It will all get corrupted at some point in time. Seeing as they will effectively be advertising the art, it wont be long until they are targeting more niche markets directly by selling the blank spaces. So it wont be space open to just anyone who wants to advertise, it will be open only to the huge brands etc.
Also it’s not really surprising that they have created a full ‘adblocker’, the whole idea (aside the military origins) of the internet is that you can browse at leisure and skip straight to the info/ stuff you want, which is ruined by intrusive ads that just pop up in front of what ever you are reading, or if your mouse casually moves over it whilst going to select something else it opens up.
What do you expect when you invade browsing space like that? They annoy me, but as of yet not to the extent I want to banish all ads. The banners that stay put are fine. Perhaps instead of a total-blocker, stricter rules and regulations concerning internet ads could be put into place…maybe, ‘I dunno’. I doubt it will be that popular in the main. It may very well of had 4 million odd downloads, but that will be half of the 8 million who have already downloaded the older version. According to ‘http://www.internetworldstats.com’ there is an estimated world population of 6,574,666,417 peeps (2007) of which 1,244,449,601 use the internet, and only 8 million people have (so far) downloaded this adblock plus. I don’t think there is much cause to worry yet and a lot of people are savvy enough to not really mind the ads. To be fair hardly any ads pop up on my computer, the only thing that really gets me is the streaming ones that open up as you scroll over them.
AND! actually… isnt it said that the net is used primarily for porn? People like these little seedy adverts etc, the downloaders of wee porn arent going to be downloading any blockers anytime soon.
And and… adding art to the blank spaces to fill in for the adverts will soon be contested when certain pieces are deemed offensive etc and other petty, politically correct odd complaints. Just sounds like an elitest load of rubbish to me. High art and culture and all that crap. It’s an endless effort to control everything we are exposed to.
I think something should be done to cut down or regulate the cheap ads, the ‘you have won for being the millionth online user’ / ‘you have a message’ ones, that induce epilepsy. They do use up a lot of bandwidth and can slow the cpu networking down a lot…. And I have now lost my trail. Time for a tea break.