7 ms·

After selling his company to Google, this man now wants to block ad-blockers

34 points by stoev 11y ago

kwhitefoot 11y ago
“Given the legal precedents, it’s clear that users have the right to try to block ads,” he said. “But at the same time, publishers have the right to respond, either by blocking access to ad-block users, or allowing us to help them serve ads in ways undetectable to ad-blocking software.” That's a bit like saying that encrypting a DVD is going to prevent someone copying it. If you reveal something to the user you reveal it to the computer too and then it's just an arms race.It would be better to have a functioning micro-payments system.
- maelito 11y ago
  "It would be better to have a functioning micro-payments system." What's the closest to this at the moment ?
  - nothis 11y ago
    Don't think there's any serious options but check out Google Contributor: https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/
  - porsupah 11y ago
    It's never really managed to gain much traction, but I've long been fond of Flattr's model: you allocate a monthly budget, and that's then split across all the sites you've flattr'd that month. (If you really liked something, you click more than once, to give them that many more slices of the pie) That way, you know how much you're spending every month, avoiding the tip jar situation where you might wind up donating more than you'd reckoned, and you're able to contribute, even if modestly, to that many more sites than with, say, Patreon.
- nothis 11y ago
  >It would be better to have a functioning micro-payments system. There's some things that seem inevitable to me. True flat-rate music streaming services was one of those things and we're pretty much there. Moving away from ad-supported websites to a convenient subscription model is the other. I don't think the war against AdBlock can be won. How do you disable a software that simply hides content? Force users to click the ads? Put them into more and more annoying places? We already know the endgame of that and it's shady pop-up orgies. I doubt the New York Times wants to be associated with that. But I also won't pay $10 for every single website I might visit a month (some, maybe, for only an article or two in a link). What we need is a common subscription flat-rate that fairly splits revenue between websites you actually visit. Not sure about the privacy concerns but at least here, the user data wouldn't have to be used for advertising.
  - DanielBMarkham 11y ago
    Agreed. More to the point, it can be argued that if I do not want to consume ads, my browser displaying them means my browser is broken. This entire thing where your attention is hijacked because you have a passing interest in subject X is out of date. Yes, we've had passive ad sponsorship of all kinds of events in times past, but it wasn't a situation where the advertisers monitored your every move and were aggressively interfering with your content consumption. It was a situation where they wanted to be recognized for supporting the content you were consuming. Ads have gone from being passive, supportive, widespread constructs to being aggressive, directive, in-your-business constructs. Not good.
    - dhimes 11y ago
      Also agree. It's especially broken on mobile, which seems to be the Wild West of grabbing accidental clicks and seedy tracking. I don't mind ads. Trackers need to be outlawed. I'll tell an ad service what kinds of ads I'd like to see if they'd like. I don't want to be tracked though.
  - smoe 11y ago
    I would love to have an option between flat rate and non-expiring prepaid. Let me pay e.g 100$ into an account and subtract some cents for every article I read. Or maybe I'm just weird with my dislike of subscriptions in general:) I'd be happily spending the equivalent of a annual nyt subscription per year but I'm not willing to pay that amount to a sole news site. As it is, everybody tries to do a vendor lock-in while whining that people are not walking into or get out of that trap.
- Guthur 11y ago
  I'm not sure if it's intentional but the DVD copy protection is a some emotive comparison. There are clear laws against copying content without permission, not so with adverts. I am not obliged to sit in front of TV and watch ads during the break, nor when visiting a website unless there is some contractual obligation for me to do so. I have yet to come across a site that tells me I must agree to view the adverts to access the content.
- feld 11y ago
  I would like to see someone challenge ads and/or ad blocker blockers in court. They're a huge waste of resources especially on mobile: bandwidth, battery life, etc. Bandwidth is very expensive on mobile especially outside the USA. This uninvited use of your resources is stealing. I think you could make the case that all of the resources wasted by visitors is more valuable than the website is generating via ads (or losing from being blocked). There would be many hurdles to cover especially due to all of the technical details (you requested a resource, they just served it) but I think you can argue that when you click a link to an article the user intends to request the article not the junk they're forcing you to have with it. It actually would be nice if Google ranked pages by page size or had some way to tell you what you were in for by clicking on a link in your search results...
  - cwyers 11y ago
    It's not uninvited, you're requesting the website.
    - gadrfgaesgysd 11y ago
      Perhaps some distinction between domains could be made. The law should/could be interpreted in a way so that a website belongs only on a certain domain. Then access outside of it would be uninvited?
      - cwyers 11y ago
        I mean, I feel like outlawing cross-domain site access in order to shut down online advertising is like burning the house down while you're still inside it to avoid taking out the trash.
        gadrfgaesgysd 11y ago
        Hyperbole. Cookies were banned in European Union, e.i. only made available if the user agrees. Then it is up to the user to white/black list sites. The same could be made for external domains. Most blockers already support that. It is already happening. What we need is merely making it mandatory by law.
- ejcx 11y ago
  Not necessarily. Browser extension APIs have to provide APIs for the way ads are loaded. For example if they are magically loaded, chrome needs to give you an API to intercept magic. I'm not sure if chrome requests API allows you to block websockets, but maybe it's possible to load ads over websockets and Adblock would be unable to interfere. Even if it is not possible, there's probably a lot of ways to abuse Adblock to make it do a much worse job.
  - Vendan 11y ago
    Loading doesn't matter as much as display does. You pretty much have to alter the DOM to show your ad, and we already have the ability to mess with the DOM.
irahul 11y ago
> publishers have the right to respond, either by blocking access to ad-block users All the best with that. The number of sites on which I will have to disable ad-blocker because you won't show the content otherwise is in single digits.
- f055 11y ago
  Nobody is against publishers blocking access to ad-block users. But if 80% use ad-blocks, you block out your entire audience and let it surf to the competition who figured out how to serve ads that are not making people puke (ie. sponsored stories, endorsements, non-intrusive ads, social selling etc.) It really is the fault of publishers that people hate internet ads.
  - nraynaud 11y ago
    I think it's the same reasoning with paywalls. I stopped going on pando when they paywalled. I don't see why I would pay to read Paul Carr feuding against the Intercept, the entertainment value is mild, and frankly I would better use my leisure money at the pub or for renting movies.
- nraynaud 11y ago
  I don't think I have any exception to my ad-blocker. I have not yet encountered something I want bad enough to make an exception, and asking me to make an exception is a reminder that I'm the product, which is not exactly the most positive call to action.
  - dhimes 11y ago
    I make exceptions for ad supported sites that don't use trackers, like Duck Duck Go. I think we all should :)
- Arnt 11y ago
  There's someone around who matters more than you: Googlebot. Google wants sites to serve users and Googlebot much the same page, and will penalise sites who don't.
IshKebab 11y ago
Wouldn't be difficult. Especially if you are happy with requiring javascript on your site.
hammerzeit 11y ago
There's already an internet-scale mechanism to avoid seeing ads while ensuring that publishers are compensated for the content they're creating -- it's the very ad exchanges that show us all the terrible ads we see. All you'd need to do is set up a pixel retargeting yourself, match it against the exchanges, and then bid an uncapped amount against it while displaying a blank creative. Admittedly this won't block 100% of ads, closer to 50-60%, although it would most likely block all of the worst offenders. Likely net cost would be in the $1-$3/day range, distributed amongst the sites you patronize. And, again, all of the infrastructure to do this already exists. You wouldn't need to do deals with publishers or anything like that. I've always wondered why nobody's created this yet; I've always assumed it's because people using ad blockers would not actually pay for an ad-free experience. Other ideas?
- niravshah 11y ago
  I think Adieu (https://www.adieu.io/ https://www.adieu.io/) is attempting something like this.
  - dcgoss 11y ago
    Checked out Adieu, it does sound very much like what he/she described.
- dexen 11y ago
  I love this idea, and would be more than happy if Project Wonderful [1] provided such functionality for end-users. Oh the joy of being micro-patron of my favourite comics :) [1] https://www.projectwonderful.com/ https://www.projectwonderful.com/ ; they serve ads on several popular webcomics
- falcolas 11y ago
  So long as I'm only targeting and paying for myself, this is a fantastic idea. Just need a how-to for folks who are not inoculated in the ad culture; most of your instructions were inscrutable to me.
- icebraining 11y ago
noir_lord 11y ago
If add's didn't do such shitty things I'd happily run with them on with sites I like so they'd get the revenue but I'm not exposing my computer to their shit to nominally support sites I like. If you block me for using an ad-blocker I just won't use your site/share it/talk about it or anything else.
- adamc 11y ago
  > If you block me for using an ad-blocker I just won't use your site/share it/talk about it or anything else. This. I'm completely at ease with this as a solution, but I think it's why most sites don't (and won't) block folks using ad-blockers.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
merrywhether 11y ago
One way to push ads into a more palatable direction would be to have a browser that goes much farther beyond current ad blocking. I'm thinking closing all 3rd party domain connections after 2 seconds of loading time and/or turning iframes into click2flash-style empty boxes. I don't care so much about ads showing up, but rather the endless cascade of ad-reselling that happens during page loads and makes my phone have poor performance while the page self-flagellates with ad calls. Get your ads in quick or render them on the server or whatever. I feel like something like this (with white lists where necessary) would help people get to a happy middle ground.
- stephengillie 11y ago
  Check out uMatrix.
jkot 11y ago
I genuinely hope he will succeed. Adblocking is becoming too mainstream and too easy. Nerds are loosing competitive advantage. And current ad-blockers are not effectively blocking Adwords, Facebook and other major players. We need something to level the field, to bring smaller players and more innovation.
- surds 11y ago
  They are also blocked. AdBlock charges the major players to let their ads pass through as "Whitelisted Ads". IMO, that is just plain extortion.
jordigh 11y ago
I'm so annoyed with watching ads being my capitalist duty. I do not want to be told to buy things I do not need. What I want is to look at a web site, not to be told to buy shoes. If you think, website owner, that I am losing you money by refusing to be told to buy home insurance, then just give me a way to give you that money directly and stop nagging me about it.
- ig1 11y ago
  How many websites do you subscribe/donate to ?
  - NikhilVerma 11y ago
    That's a silly argument to make. It's just not easy to setup a donation system as easily, if sites I visit had an option for easy microtransactions many people would do it in a heartbeat.
    - stephengillie 11y ago
      Like a one-click Stripe-me-a-dollar button?
- corobo 11y ago
  I have to call bull on this. You'd donate to my tiny site that popped up in a Google search, one that you'll likely only visit once? Just by me providing a donation link?
  - tonyedgecombe 11y ago
    If they couldn't get revenue from adverts my guess is the content industry would come up with a solution to this pretty quickly.
  - valarauca1 11y ago
    If the site offered functionality I needed, or liked the answer is yes. Services like Patreon are great for this model. Where I can just throw $2-3 USD per month at artists or projects I want to continue making new things. The challenge is you the creator needs to make a service or tool that I actually want, need, or of such exemplary quality that I feel obligated to help see it continue existing. This isn't a new daring model of funding, NPR/PBS/FSF have done this for decades.
downandout 11y ago
I have never understood this issue. Companies that are supposedly losing millions, and in some cases billions of dollars to ad blockers can't figure out how to randomize ad sizes, links, div names, etc with each page load to the point where it would be impossible for an ad-blocker to deal with it? No footprint, no blocking. It really is that simple. The issue is more difficult with ad networks, since they always point to specific domains and run specific bits of javascript. But it seems to me that ad networks could simply offer a PHP et al script that publishers could locally host and include in their content that would basically proxy the connection between the user and the ad network. Clickthrough URL's would appear to be on the originating site, like any other content on the site, and the script would forward them to the appropriate site. I have given this all of ten minutes of thought, and I'm on my way to a solution. I don't buy that companies with real money on the line can't solve this issue.
- Arnt 11y ago
  Most companies don't serve their own ads. They sell an iframe reference in a particular kind of page to someone else who runs their own adserver software, so there's a detectable footprint for organisational reasons. Quite often there's more than one level of resale; I've seen five and a friend who works in the business told me he's seen even more. (Digression: I have also heard that Ghostery (.com) makes most of its money by telling companies what ads are on their web pages.)
  - downandout 11y ago
    I understand the iframe/network issue, which is why suggested a downloadable script that publishers could host that would grab the ad server-side, reference it as a a locally-hosted image or include the text of a text ad in the native content of the page, and send all links to a local redirect script. It wouldn't be that much more difficult for a publisher to roll such a thing out than it is for them to add the iframes or javascript they use today.
    - Arnt 11y ago
      That approach would be slower (oddly enough the ad people seem to care about performance) and worse, the ad server loses its cookies. When it's on its own domain it can use cookies and track people across web sites.
iMark 11y ago
I'd love to see something along the lines of Spotify's model for the web. Let me pay a set amount per month, then distribute it among all the websites that I visit, weighted by number of visits (or some other more suitable metric). Adverts for those not signed into the scheme, a blissful ad-free existence for those who do.
- LukeB_UK 11y ago
  Isn't that what Google Contributor is? https://contributor.google.com/ https://contributor.google.com/
  - gambiter 11y ago
    Not totally... They only say you'll see 'fewer' ads. I'm in a similar boat... I'd like to set my monthly amount and that amount be split up among my most used sites, because I do want to support them, but I'm going to continue using uBlock. The entire point is to get rid of ads in favor of something else. What would rock is if uBlock or Adblock had a subscription service for exactly this.
  - iMark 11y ago
    I had no idea that existed. Thanks
SpaceManNabs 11y ago
My problem with ads is mainly that they could be used as vector for attacking my machine. Two secondary problems that are not unimportant are that ads sometimes redirect me to other sites while in the same tab if accidentally clicked and can be quite obtrusive. If those two are fixed, I don't minds ads at all when privacy concerns are minimal (anonymous tracking).
- tonyedgecombe 11y ago
  My problem with ads is they try and sell me things I don't need.
  - dhimes 11y ago
    Anybody else remember when Google started, we all worried that their ad-based business model would make the web suck? Their argument was that people would want to see ads. Well, maybe 1998 ads, but the problem is that ad-serving has perniciously evolved into what we have now. Which sucks.
jlebrech 11y ago
how about a feed reader than displays the ads of the source sites, I hate checking a site and there's nothing new but I still get the ad.
yomism 11y ago
When reading a lot of the comments from the ad-blocking people I hear this: "I want to browse every website for free, I don't want to pay for any of the sites that inform me, entertain me, help me to better do my job. But god forbids if someone touches a cent from my salary..." In the end it's just a question of entitlement and don't wanting to pay for things. If you are annoyed for seeing some ads think about the anoyment of the people generating value for you without seeing a fucking cent. Don't be so selfish, please.

34 points by stoev 11y ago

“Given the legal precedents, it’s clear that users have the right to try to block ads,” he said. “But at the same time, publishers have the right to respond, either by blocking access to ad-block users, or allowing us to help them serve ads in ways undetectable to ad-blocking software.” That's a bit like saying that encrypting a DVD is going to prevent someone copying it. If you reveal something to the user you reveal it to the computer too and then it's just an arms race.It would be better to have a functioning micro-payments system.

maelito 11y ago
"It would be better to have a functioning micro-payments system." What's the closest to this at the moment ?
- nothis 11y ago
  Don't think there's any serious options but check out Google Contributor: https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/
- porsupah 11y ago
  It's never really managed to gain much traction, but I've long been fond of Flattr's model: you allocate a monthly budget, and that's then split across all the sites you've flattr'd that month. (If you really liked something, you click more than once, to give them that many more slices of the pie) That way, you know how much you're spending every month, avoiding the tip jar situation where you might wind up donating more than you'd reckoned, and you're able to contribute, even if modestly, to that many more sites than with, say, Patreon.
nothis 11y ago
>It would be better to have a functioning micro-payments system. There's some things that seem inevitable to me. True flat-rate music streaming services was one of those things and we're pretty much there. Moving away from ad-supported websites to a convenient subscription model is the other. I don't think the war against AdBlock can be won. How do you disable a software that simply hides content? Force users to click the ads? Put them into more and more annoying places? We already know the endgame of that and it's shady pop-up orgies. I doubt the New York Times wants to be associated with that. But I also won't pay $10 for every single website I might visit a month (some, maybe, for only an article or two in a link). What we need is a common subscription flat-rate that fairly splits revenue between websites you actually visit. Not sure about the privacy concerns but at least here, the user data wouldn't have to be used for advertising.
- DanielBMarkham 11y ago
  Agreed. More to the point, it can be argued that if I do not want to consume ads, my browser displaying them means my browser is broken. This entire thing where your attention is hijacked because you have a passing interest in subject X is out of date. Yes, we've had passive ad sponsorship of all kinds of events in times past, but it wasn't a situation where the advertisers monitored your every move and were aggressively interfering with your content consumption. It was a situation where they wanted to be recognized for supporting the content you were consuming. Ads have gone from being passive, supportive, widespread constructs to being aggressive, directive, in-your-business constructs. Not good.
  - dhimes 11y ago
    Also agree. It's especially broken on mobile, which seems to be the Wild West of grabbing accidental clicks and seedy tracking. I don't mind ads. Trackers need to be outlawed. I'll tell an ad service what kinds of ads I'd like to see if they'd like. I don't want to be tracked though.
- smoe 11y ago
  I would love to have an option between flat rate and non-expiring prepaid. Let me pay e.g 100$ into an account and subtract some cents for every article I read. Or maybe I'm just weird with my dislike of subscriptions in general:) I'd be happily spending the equivalent of a annual nyt subscription per year but I'm not willing to pay that amount to a sole news site. As it is, everybody tries to do a vendor lock-in while whining that people are not walking into or get out of that trap.
Guthur 11y ago
I'm not sure if it's intentional but the DVD copy protection is a some emotive comparison. There are clear laws against copying content without permission, not so with adverts. I am not obliged to sit in front of TV and watch ads during the break, nor when visiting a website unless there is some contractual obligation for me to do so. I have yet to come across a site that tells me I must agree to view the adverts to access the content.
feld 11y ago
I would like to see someone challenge ads and/or ad blocker blockers in court. They're a huge waste of resources especially on mobile: bandwidth, battery life, etc. Bandwidth is very expensive on mobile especially outside the USA. This uninvited use of your resources is stealing. I think you could make the case that all of the resources wasted by visitors is more valuable than the website is generating via ads (or losing from being blocked). There would be many hurdles to cover especially due to all of the technical details (you requested a resource, they just served it) but I think you can argue that when you click a link to an article the user intends to request the article not the junk they're forcing you to have with it. It actually would be nice if Google ranked pages by page size or had some way to tell you what you were in for by clicking on a link in your search results...
- cwyers 11y ago
  It's not uninvited, you're requesting the website.
  - gadrfgaesgysd 11y ago
    Perhaps some distinction between domains could be made. The law should/could be interpreted in a way so that a website belongs only on a certain domain. Then access outside of it would be uninvited?
    - cwyers 11y ago
      I mean, I feel like outlawing cross-domain site access in order to shut down online advertising is like burning the house down while you're still inside it to avoid taking out the trash.
      - gadrfgaesgysd 11y ago
        Hyperbole. Cookies were banned in European Union, e.i. only made available if the user agrees. Then it is up to the user to white/black list sites. The same could be made for external domains. Most blockers already support that. It is already happening. What we need is merely making it mandatory by law.
ejcx 11y ago
Not necessarily. Browser extension APIs have to provide APIs for the way ads are loaded. For example if they are magically loaded, chrome needs to give you an API to intercept magic. I'm not sure if chrome requests API allows you to block websockets, but maybe it's possible to load ads over websockets and Adblock would be unable to interfere. Even if it is not possible, there's probably a lot of ways to abuse Adblock to make it do a much worse job.
- Vendan 11y ago
  Loading doesn't matter as much as display does. You pretty much have to alter the DOM to show your ad, and we already have the ability to mess with the DOM.

irahul 11y ago

> publishers have the right to respond, either by blocking access to ad-block users All the best with that. The number of sites on which I will have to disable ad-blocker because you won't show the content otherwise is in single digits.

f055 11y ago
Nobody is against publishers blocking access to ad-block users. But if 80% use ad-blocks, you block out your entire audience and let it surf to the competition who figured out how to serve ads that are not making people puke (ie. sponsored stories, endorsements, non-intrusive ads, social selling etc.) It really is the fault of publishers that people hate internet ads.
- nraynaud 11y ago
  I think it's the same reasoning with paywalls. I stopped going on pando when they paywalled. I don't see why I would pay to read Paul Carr feuding against the Intercept, the entertainment value is mild, and frankly I would better use my leisure money at the pub or for renting movies.
nraynaud 11y ago
I don't think I have any exception to my ad-blocker. I have not yet encountered something I want bad enough to make an exception, and asking me to make an exception is a reminder that I'm the product, which is not exactly the most positive call to action.
- dhimes 11y ago
  I make exceptions for ad supported sites that don't use trackers, like Duck Duck Go. I think we all should :)
Arnt 11y ago
There's someone around who matters more than you: Googlebot. Google wants sites to serve users and Googlebot much the same page, and will penalise sites who don't.

IshKebab 11y ago

Wouldn't be difficult. Especially if you are happy with requiring javascript on your site.

hammerzeit 11y ago

There's already an internet-scale mechanism to avoid seeing ads while ensuring that publishers are compensated for the content they're creating -- it's the very ad exchanges that show us all the terrible ads we see. All you'd need to do is set up a pixel retargeting yourself, match it against the exchanges, and then bid an uncapped amount against it while displaying a blank creative. Admittedly this won't block 100% of ads, closer to 50-60%, although it would most likely block all of the worst offenders. Likely net cost would be in the $1-$3/day range, distributed amongst the sites you patronize. And, again, all of the infrastructure to do this already exists. You wouldn't need to do deals with publishers or anything like that. I've always wondered why nobody's created this yet; I've always assumed it's because people using ad blockers would not actually pay for an ad-free experience. Other ideas?

niravshah 11y ago
I think Adieu (https://www.adieu.io/ https://www.adieu.io/) is attempting something like this.
- dcgoss 11y ago
  Checked out Adieu, it does sound very much like what he/she described.
dexen 11y ago
I love this idea, and would be more than happy if Project Wonderful [1] provided such functionality for end-users. Oh the joy of being micro-patron of my favourite comics :) [1] https://www.projectwonderful.com/ https://www.projectwonderful.com/ ; they serve ads on several popular webcomics
falcolas 11y ago
So long as I'm only targeting and paying for myself, this is a fantastic idea. Just need a how-to for folks who are not inoculated in the ad culture; most of your instructions were inscrutable to me.
icebraining 11y ago

noir_lord 11y ago

If add's didn't do such shitty things I'd happily run with them on with sites I like so they'd get the revenue but I'm not exposing my computer to their shit to nominally support sites I like. If you block me for using an ad-blocker I just won't use your site/share it/talk about it or anything else.

adamc 11y ago
> If you block me for using an ad-blocker I just won't use your site/share it/talk about it or anything else. This. I'm completely at ease with this as a solution, but I think it's why most sites don't (and won't) block folks using ad-blockers.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

merrywhether 11y ago

One way to push ads into a more palatable direction would be to have a browser that goes much farther beyond current ad blocking. I'm thinking closing all 3rd party domain connections after 2 seconds of loading time and/or turning iframes into click2flash-style empty boxes. I don't care so much about ads showing up, but rather the endless cascade of ad-reselling that happens during page loads and makes my phone have poor performance while the page self-flagellates with ad calls. Get your ads in quick or render them on the server or whatever. I feel like something like this (with white lists where necessary) would help people get to a happy middle ground.

stephengillie 11y ago
Check out uMatrix.

jkot 11y ago

I genuinely hope he will succeed. Adblocking is becoming too mainstream and too easy. Nerds are loosing competitive advantage. And current ad-blockers are not effectively blocking Adwords, Facebook and other major players. We need something to level the field, to bring smaller players and more innovation.

surds 11y ago
They are also blocked. AdBlock charges the major players to let their ads pass through as "Whitelisted Ads". IMO, that is just plain extortion.

jordigh 11y ago

I'm so annoyed with watching ads being my capitalist duty. I do not want to be told to buy things I do not need. What I want is to look at a web site, not to be told to buy shoes. If you think, website owner, that I am losing you money by refusing to be told to buy home insurance, then just give me a way to give you that money directly and stop nagging me about it.

ig1 11y ago
How many websites do you subscribe/donate to ?
- NikhilVerma 11y ago
  That's a silly argument to make. It's just not easy to setup a donation system as easily, if sites I visit had an option for easy microtransactions many people would do it in a heartbeat.
  - stephengillie 11y ago
    Like a one-click Stripe-me-a-dollar button?
corobo 11y ago
I have to call bull on this. You'd donate to my tiny site that popped up in a Google search, one that you'll likely only visit once? Just by me providing a donation link?
- tonyedgecombe 11y ago
  If they couldn't get revenue from adverts my guess is the content industry would come up with a solution to this pretty quickly.
- valarauca1 11y ago
  If the site offered functionality I needed, or liked the answer is yes. Services like Patreon are great for this model. Where I can just throw $2-3 USD per month at artists or projects I want to continue making new things. The challenge is you the creator needs to make a service or tool that I actually want, need, or of such exemplary quality that I feel obligated to help see it continue existing. This isn't a new daring model of funding, NPR/PBS/FSF have done this for decades.

downandout 11y ago

I have never understood this issue. Companies that are supposedly losing millions, and in some cases billions of dollars to ad blockers can't figure out how to randomize ad sizes, links, div names, etc with each page load to the point where it would be impossible for an ad-blocker to deal with it? No footprint, no blocking. It really is that simple. The issue is more difficult with ad networks, since they always point to specific domains and run specific bits of javascript. But it seems to me that ad networks could simply offer a PHP et al script that publishers could locally host and include in their content that would basically proxy the connection between the user and the ad network. Clickthrough URL's would appear to be on the originating site, like any other content on the site, and the script would forward them to the appropriate site. I have given this all of ten minutes of thought, and I'm on my way to a solution. I don't buy that companies with real money on the line can't solve this issue.

Arnt 11y ago
Most companies don't serve their own ads. They sell an iframe reference in a particular kind of page to someone else who runs their own adserver software, so there's a detectable footprint for organisational reasons. Quite often there's more than one level of resale; I've seen five and a friend who works in the business told me he's seen even more. (Digression: I have also heard that Ghostery (.com) makes most of its money by telling companies what ads are on their web pages.)
- downandout 11y ago
  I understand the iframe/network issue, which is why suggested a downloadable script that publishers could host that would grab the ad server-side, reference it as a a locally-hosted image or include the text of a text ad in the native content of the page, and send all links to a local redirect script. It wouldn't be that much more difficult for a publisher to roll such a thing out than it is for them to add the iframes or javascript they use today.
  - Arnt 11y ago
    That approach would be slower (oddly enough the ad people seem to care about performance) and worse, the ad server loses its cookies. When it's on its own domain it can use cookies and track people across web sites.

iMark 11y ago

I'd love to see something along the lines of Spotify's model for the web. Let me pay a set amount per month, then distribute it among all the websites that I visit, weighted by number of visits (or some other more suitable metric). Adverts for those not signed into the scheme, a blissful ad-free existence for those who do.

LukeB_UK 11y ago
Isn't that what Google Contributor is? https://contributor.google.com/ https://contributor.google.com/
- gambiter 11y ago
  Not totally... They only say you'll see 'fewer' ads. I'm in a similar boat... I'd like to set my monthly amount and that amount be split up among my most used sites, because I do want to support them, but I'm going to continue using uBlock. The entire point is to get rid of ads in favor of something else. What would rock is if uBlock or Adblock had a subscription service for exactly this.
- iMark 11y ago
  I had no idea that existed. Thanks

SpaceManNabs 11y ago

My problem with ads is mainly that they could be used as vector for attacking my machine. Two secondary problems that are not unimportant are that ads sometimes redirect me to other sites while in the same tab if accidentally clicked and can be quite obtrusive. If those two are fixed, I don't minds ads at all when privacy concerns are minimal (anonymous tracking).

tonyedgecombe 11y ago
My problem with ads is they try and sell me things I don't need.
- dhimes 11y ago
  Anybody else remember when Google started, we all worried that their ad-based business model would make the web suck? Their argument was that people would want to see ads. Well, maybe 1998 ads, but the problem is that ad-serving has perniciously evolved into what we have now. Which sucks.

jlebrech 11y ago

how about a feed reader than displays the ads of the source sites, I hate checking a site and there's nothing new but I still get the ad.

yomism 11y ago

When reading a lot of the comments from the ad-blocking people I hear this: "I want to browse every website for free, I don't want to pay for any of the sites that inform me, entertain me, help me to better do my job. But god forbids if someone touches a cent from my salary..." In the end it's just a question of entitlement and don't wanting to pay for things. If you are annoyed for seeing some ads think about the anoyment of the people generating value for you without seeing a fucking cent. Don't be so selfish, please.