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Welcome to the Block Party: The internet after ad blocking

75 points by cpeterso 11y ago

mojuba 11y ago
As a possibility, a model whereby advertisers pay both content providers and readers for viewing ads. I can imagine a system where before viewing expensive content (your next ultradeep NYT analysis I really want to read) I'm given a choice to view an ad (video, audio or picture) on one of the topics I'm interested in and be paid say $0.001. There are ad processors, let's say 2 or 3 major ones A, B and C, with whom I have an account. NYT hires one or two of them to give readers reasonable choices of what kind of ads to view and pay both ways. I'm registered with A and C with interests in cars, musical instruments and hiking equipment (in fact they may be priced differently), NYT supports A and B, which is fine, I'll be paid by A this time. I may of course change my preferences over time. This will make ads even more expensive for the advertisers, but will at the same time improve relevance. In fact advertisers may compete for keywords/interests just like they do with Google Ads.
- chc 11y ago
  What is the point of a system that pays people less than a cent?
  - mojuba 11y ago
    Right, that part needs some improvements. I'm thinking, advertisers might compete for viewers by paying more for a given keyword, i.e. the prices are not fixed and the highest bidder wins the viewer. Another question is whether these ads are skippable or not. Can I skip the ad, go straight to the article and not be paid? Maybe content providers could decide.
    - gregmac 11y ago
      > Can I skip the ad, go straight to the article and not be paid? Maybe content providers could decide. I think the content providers would argue that you getting the content is your form of 'payment' for seeing the ad. So if you skip it, why should they give you the content anyway?
      - mojuba 11y ago
        Some content providers may choose to allow that, because it's in their interest to deliver content to more readers, be more popular. Let's not forget, the whole point of journalism is to reach out to more readers. How the journalist's job is paid exactly is secondary really, as long as it's legal of course. So let's say 1% of my readers choose to view the ad, get paid for it and get the advertiser pay me too. I might be fine with that. I'll have more readers then who'd spread the word about (and directly link to) my awesome blog/magazine.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    The point is that lots of cents make up a sizeable income. The problem is that processing 'a cent' or a fraction of one costs more than you'll end up getting and nobody - to date - has been able to create a functioning micro payments system with associated wallet to gain sufficient adoption to make it work. It's a combination of a technology problem with a chicken-and-the-egg problem.
- cpeterso 11y ago
  Ad networks use real-time bidding to auction banner ad space as the page loads. (I imagine that's part of the reason it can take so damn long for some news sites to load.) Why can't the user (or their user agent) take part in this same auction? If I'm will to pay $0.02 per page view on nytimes.com, but advertisers are only willing to pay $0.01 then I should be able to win the auction.
  - ariwilson 11y ago
    So, exactly this: https://contributor.google.com/u/0/ https://contributor.google.com/u/0/ You even have control over who gets your money: http://i.imgur.com/4Vuuefm.png http://i.imgur.com/4Vuuefm.png
    - cpeterso 11y ago
      Interesting! I thought Google Contributor was more of a direct micropayment system for content, but from that link it looks like real-time bidding.
  - tomlor 11y ago
    That's a slick idea and one you could actually execute with some amount of success today. The basic idea would be that you could sign up for an advertiser account on a DSP (Demand Side Platform), create a retargeting audience, cookie your own web browser cache to place yourself in your retargeting audience, and then buy ads against that audience - ie yourself. That would be essentially the same thing this guy did to his roommate: http://mysocialsherpa.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roommate-with-targeted-facebook-ads/ http://mysocialsherpa.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-...
mintplant 11y ago
I don't want ad companies tracking me. Ad companies have roundly demonstrated that I can no longer trust them to show me ads without tracking. Sorry, but I'm not switching off that blocker. Maybe if the history of the internet had taken a different course. But now it's too late -- the well's been poisoned, and advertisers and publishers have only themselves to blame. Pointing the finger at the users doesn't do anything to repair this lost trust. Ad-blocking, insofar as it contributes to the decimation of advertising revenues, will hasten this exodus to the platforms. And there is no way to block the ads shown to you by Facebook or Google or Twitter in their own apps, especially not on mobile. Aside: There absolutely are ways to block ads within apps. There are already Android apps that accomplish this to various extents, and I'm sure they'll only get more sophisticated to match any migration of users to mobile.
- rhizome 11y ago
  One thing Doc Searls points out is how direct marketing stole online advertising from Madison Ave. http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2015/09/08/if-marketing-listened-to-markets-theyd-hear-what-ad-blocking-is-telling-them/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2015/09/08/if-marketing-lis...
- a_e_k 11y ago
  Tracking is one thing that bothers me. The other are video ads that hijack my speakers and sap my bandwidth, pop over ads that hijack my screen focus, etc. Those are where I draw the line. I don't use explicit ad blockers, but I do run with NoScript and Cookie Controller. Simple, well-behaved banner and sidebar ads are fine. Overly aggressive ads get killed.
- calgoo 11y ago
  I do DNS Hijacking on my own network for known trackers and ad networks. On my mobile devices i have an active connection home to filter the data. It kinda works... Im now looking at building the DNS filter into an app that i can load on a raspPI or a old laptop to handle all blocking and integration with addBlock lists.
Animats 11y ago
Maybe the ad-heavy Internet was just a phase. Business models come and go. Craigslist killed newspaper classifieds as a business. Ad blockers may kill web ads as a business.
- venomsnake 11y ago
  And we slide into closed and centralized places ... that is scary.
  - anonymousab 11y ago
    Or people continue to provide compelling content for free, if only more temporarily.
  - Animats 11y ago
    Every business will still have a web site for their own products and services. Amazon won't have a problem. Wikipedia will go on. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Economist are already pay sites, and they're almost the only news sites with actual reporters. Pay TV will continue to fund news networks, which will have sites with additional content to get people to watch their TV. All we'll lose are the millions of bottom-feeder sites which take content in, hang ads on it, and hope to get paid. No big loss.
    - thedz 11y ago
      As the article mentions, 40% of NY Times' revenue is still provided by advertising.
    - dingaling 11y ago
      > and The Economist are already pay sites, and they're almost the only news sites with actual reporters. The Economist doesn't actually have on-staff reporters, they rely on correspondents around the World who sell their articles either ad hoc or on a commission basis. They do have staff who write editorials, but not the news articles. The Economist is also happy to ( try to ) utterly bombard me with ads on their website despite being a subscriber. They even had a crawl-up SUBSCRIBE NOW! ad at one point when I was logged-in.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
ipsin 11y ago
Given the date and the description of blocking ad banners specifically, my guess is that they were talking about an ad-blocking proxy like Internet Junkbuster. These proxies weren't as easy to install as browser extensions, but they did a good job of blocking ads, and I remember similar conversations about The Future of Ad Blocking at the time.
venomsnake 11y ago
I don't run ad blocker since 2009. I just got that good at ignoring ads. F12 + delete offending element works wonders for the most annoying stuff. And there are always hosts files.
- mintplant 11y ago
  I would consider a specially-crafted hosts file a form of ad blocking.
windlep 11y ago
Would've been nice if the article had pointed out that ad-networks have become a popular way to distribute trojans and malware using Flash exploits (though I'm sure when Flash is gone, ppl will keep finding other browser exploits ad's can exploit).
Jerry2 11y ago
About a year or so ago, my dad called me out of the blue and told me that my mom was crying because "internet ads were following her and making her anxious". Earlier that day, she came from a doctor and ended up searching for a medical condition on a famous search website. After that, she started seeing ads for various bullshit remedies all across the internet. Almost every website she visited, showed her same types of ads. Even when she wanted to forget and take her mind of it, she couldn't because these ads were constantly reminding her of it. She got so disgusted that she quit using the web for the rest of the day and cried. I guided them on how to install ad blocking addons and how to change default search engines (she now uses Startpage) But we couldn't easily block it on iPad so the solution was to switch the search engine and clear cookies. All these companies that make money off tracking people and are selling search results really need to rethink their business models. PS: She also wrote an email to Tim Cook complaining about this and got a reply from someone that they will "look into it". I'm glad Apple will now a provide solution to block these kinds of things on an iPad.
- mojuba 11y ago
  I'm sorry but how do you know it was the search website that sold information? It could as well be the first web site that she opened that happened to be on the same ad network as other related web sites she visited. Just guessing.
  - ipsin 11y ago
    I agree with your point, but to the user it can feel like a violation of privacy, and at that point it's not particularly important who's doing it. Whether it's the faceless search engine or the faceless retargeting company, the net result is that something you thought was personal and private feels less so.
  - hueving 11y ago
    Said search website was probably google. If that's the case they don't have to sell it, they just use it to target ads from their own network. If you search something on Google it will follow you like the plague.
- 11y ago
oconnore 11y ago
Another possibility is that people will learn to care about what they read, and learn that it costs something. We don't have to tip, either. Also, I'm sorry, but I'm never going to login to Facebook to read the Economist, and I stopped using Twitter's mobile app when they introduced sponsored content.
- eru 11y ago
  > We don't have to tip, either. And in Australia, we don't.
mtgentry 11y ago
Why don't more publishers try to detect the ad blockers with stuff like this? https://github.com/sitexw/FuckAdBlock https://github.com/sitexw/FuckAdBlock And then they could throw up a page that says "Sorry, AdBlock must be disabled to view this content"
- eru 11y ago
  Ad blockers could become smarter in return.
  - mtgentry 11y ago
    I see, so as long as the code can be looked at, it can be circumvented?
    - MichaelGG 11y ago
      No. So long the code is executing on an uncontrolled device, then you cannot guarantee it'll execute how you intended. So if you make a device, like an iPad, seal it to prevent hardware tampering, and ensure no user-triggerable bugs exist, you're all set. There's also remote attestation, like Intel SGX might start to bring. But on existing general-compute devices like PCs, it's a hopeless battle.
      - eru 11y ago
        And even on a sealed iPad, a user could just use a piece of cardboard to cover the portion of the screen showing the ad.
    - gregmac 11y ago
      In a way. An extreme could be not loading content until the ad is loaded, and there is some type of check to verify that it did actually load (not blocked). If someone is determined enough, they could simulate the ad being loaded (eg, maybe it actually IS even loaded, but the DOM element is hidden in one of dozen different ways which the ad-loaded-verification code doesn't check for). Essentially the problem boils down to running code (HTML, Javascript, CSS, and even Flash) in an untrusted environment (the user's browser). The site sends the user bits of data to be displayed, but there's ultimately no way to know if the user's browser ACTUALLY displays those in the browser window, let alone to the user's eyeballs. As a content provider, you can get very, very clever, but you can never get to 100%, and there will always be a motivated user to work on an adblocker that circumvents everything. It's really not any different from DRM (as someone else in thread pointed out). The movie/music/TV/games industry has spent billions of dollars coming up with various schemes of DRM, yet you can still download basically anything (stripped of its DRM, of course) within days of release, if not earlier.
wmt 11y ago
Damn, that article took a strange leap with discussing what better ads would be. Somehow it entirely skipped the possibility that more ads might resemble the ads of the most successful advertisers of the web (like google, facebook, twitter) and instead leaped on a dystopian slope where all ads are served by the content platforms of those companies. Saying that twitter, google or facebook ads cannot be blocked is just bogus. People use them on normal web browsers that quite easily could block them. The reason they're not blocked is that it's not worth the hassle, because the ads are clean, small and polite. You know, better ads. Such better ads are not patented, and switching to pleasant text ads like the industry leaders leaders did would make ad blockers a marginal phenomenon.
- 001sky 11y ago
  Such better ads are not patented, and switching to pleasant text ads like the industry leaders leaders did would make ad blockers a marginal phenomenon. The risk is that advertising would also become a marginal phenomenon.
  - a3n 11y ago
    It's amazing to me that so many smart minds in content outlets can't figure out a way to make money other than ads, particular privacy invading ads. It's been said often enough and long enough to sound tired, but we really are products, not customers. The entity that a content outlet cares about is the ad networks. NOT you. The content is just a bug zapper meant to attract you in.
    - tertius 11y ago
      "It's amazing to me that so many smart minds in content outlets can't figure out a way to make money other than ads" There are many ways, but nothing that is as profitable.
axefrog 11y ago
I was always a defender of a site's right to use advertising in lieu of any better way to pay for its content. As someone who'd had stabs in the past at making content sites with useful content, I understood that it was a case of etiquette. If you want to read my content, do me the courtesy of allowing an unobtrusive text ad to exist off to the side. On that basis, I never blocked ads. Sometimes the ads were even interesting. I use an ad blocker now. Too many abuses of my willingness to let the publishers show me ads and I eventually just got sick of it. Where the line was crossed for me included: - Videos (or audio) autoplaying over the top of my own music; especially when they're in some other tab, halfway down the page, forcing me to go hunting to figure out where the sound was coming from - Links commandeered by popup launchers; especially when they cancel the original click, or load my link in a new tab and override the current tab with the ad popup, which often resulted in me accidentally leaving the ad tab open while I closed the tab I actually wanted. - Hover ads that activate because I was careless enough to not pay precise attention to the location of my mouse pointer - Page content scroll positions jerking up and down as ads appear or disappear (usually just the former) - Overlay ads appearing on top of content I'm trying to read, and in particular those which make the close button either hard to see, unresponsive when clicked, or which respond as though I've clicked the ad itself - Content that just won't display because it's blocked by ad resources that have stalled while loading And so forth. I'll stand up for publisher's rights, but only to a point. Eventually the noise and bad behaviour just becomes too much.
jimworm 11y ago
It's possible that some advertising will merge in with regular content and become covertly invasive over the long term. Publishers become credibility farms, where credibility is built using real articles and sold via "propaganda" pieces. One possible example is the Wired tennis physics link posted recently [0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10210808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10210808
mahranch 11y ago
The author gets one thing massively wrong. So do the reddit commentors they quote. The quote: "Ad blockers could end up saving the ad industry from its worst excesses. If blocking becomes widespread, the ad industry will be pushed to produce ads that are simpler, less invasive and far more transparent about the way they’re handling our data" Oh? And how are you so sure they won't go the other direction? Because that's where I'd place my money in a heart beat. Adblockers rely on blocking requests to known ad networks and affiliates. If the ads are instead served up locally, from the site the person is visiting itself, it can't block the ads. Ad blockers are 100% ineffective in those instances. A company like google or any other major ad network just needs to create some sort of back-end, plugin or server side program that serves up ads from the domain you're visiting. The ad blocker wouldn't know if it's a picture of a cat or an ad for Netflix since it's all coming from randomsite.com Several smaller companies have already started doing this and it could very well signal the end of ad blockers if it becomes widespread and adopted by the big players (specifically adsense). The one thing I don't see is ad companies becoming more transparent & open. That's silly to even think about since it's less profitable alternative. The companies that don't do this will cannibalize the ones that do since they'll be shooting themselves in the foot. No, I see ad companies becoming more clever. As far as content creators go, I don't even know how this is a debate. Just how entitled are people nowadays? Is this why they call millennials the entitled generation? If someone creates content, and wants people to see an ad for Pepsi before you can consume that content, that is the creators prerogative, not yours. End of story. There's no further argument here. I don't know why people think everything should be free. Nothing is free, everything is subsidized by something.
- mintplant 11y ago
  If the ads are instead served up locally, from the site the person is visiting itself, it can't block the ads. Why not? I don't see why an ad blocker couldn't identify and block certain URL schemes/patterns, common scripts, or element structures. Also -- doesn't cross-site tracking rely on third-party cookies from a shared (separate) domain?
  - cpeterso 11y ago
buffoon 11y ago
I love the mantra of "the web is supported by advertising" that every one of these sorts of articles at least quotes. It's not. Shitty business models are supported by advertising. There are plenty of us who provide non-advertising driven services that are profitable and can afford transit costs. As for blocking, the technology allows it so I will use it. If it doesn't allow it, I have no ethical qualms about breaking it until it does. If I'm paying for the portal device be it tablet, desktop, smartphone, TV, I will be in control of it. If it's subsidy-driven, their funeral.
- sangnoir 11y ago
  > Shitty business models are supported by advertising. Just because you do not like it doesn't make it a shitty business model: most sports are supported by advertising (e.g. NFL, UEFA). Endorsement deals, sponsoring teams/stadia/leagues and TV rights are just various forms of advertising. TV shows are also funded by advertising, as is most journalism that is not state-funded (a.ka. propaganda).
  - buffoon 11y ago
    TV doesn't have ad blockers though.
    - tertius 11y ago
      Tivo?
- jgianakopoulos 11y ago
  The mantra? This is how the majority of the web is monetized. It's not a mantra, it's a fact. People contribute content to the web and you pay with viewing ads. I don't know how you can rationalize that as being a "shitty" business model just because you purchase a device that is capable of connecting to the internet. If what you really mean to say is that it's a bad business model because people like yourself can install ad-blocking software and consume content without paying for it, then I see what you're saying although you come off as entitled and naive.
Nkdo 11y ago
This is why I encourage all the people I know, who aren't great with computers, to use adblockers: http://i.imgur.com/dzwaKhI.png http://i.imgur.com/dzwaKhI.png Saw that ad for what is borderline malware on a fresh install of windows 10 while trying out Microsoft Edge to see what it's worth as a browser. It's a google ad (you can always spot them through the X button), on a popular website. As long as google doesn't do any real policing on what is permissible in their adnetworks, it will always be a user's right to protect himself. Television and newspapers have higher standards for ads, at least in my country. This was also a reminder that Edge will not be a real browser until Microsoft adds the possibility of using an adblocker. No extensions, no deal.
- MertsA 11y ago
  That little triangle looking logo in the to right is the AdChoices logo, Google has that on everything going through AdSense but just because AdSense -> AdChoices does not mean that AdChoices -> AdSense. That advertisement is actually an AdSense ad in this case but not everything you see with that logo is AdSense.
- cpeterso 11y ago
  Microsoft announced earlier this year an IE feature called "SmartScreen Filter" that is supposed to detect and block misleading or malicious ads. I assume Edge has this feature, too, but from the blog post (and your experience) it sounds like it is disabled by default. http://blogs.technet.com/b/mmpc/archive/2015/04/28/cleaning-up-misleading-advertisements.aspx http://blogs.technet.com/b/mmpc/archive/2015/04/28/cleaning-...
dombili 11y ago
Content providers (from ad networks to movie studios) need to realise that you can only go so far. Ads have become more than ads. They track you wherever you go, not just online but offline too and people are starting to realise how intrusive this is. Most people are reasonable. A lot of articles have been publish about how terrible ads are but if you show them in a tasteful and a non-intrusive way (meaning that they don't track the user), they can be very successful. Podcasts have been getting more and more popular everyday and I listen to a lot of them. I almost never skip any podcast ads even though I've heard most of them before because they feel more authentic (mostly because it's read by someone whose opinion I trust) and they're not intrusive at all. It seems like a good trade of to listen to them while getting great entertaining/informative content for free and I might get a good deal on something I might be interested in (since they mostly offer promo codes). If I'm listening to a podcast on technology, I get to hear Hover's ad spot, for example. That's interesting to me because as someone who's interested in listening to a podcast about technology, it's possible that I already manage a couple of domains and I might not be happy with my registrar (then again, who is). They're generically targeted ads. While on the websites, cookies follow me wherever I go, sometimes even when I delete them and my information is sold by companies I trust as a user because they're greedy and some other party want my information just so they can put ads in front of my face. When I try to block these, I'm called unethical because I'm taking food off the table of the writers. There's a middle way here but I don't think ad networks ever going to realise this the same way movie studios haven't realised you can't solve piracy problem by adding more and more DRM. Don't be intrusive. Don't fuck up the UX. Don't bother me. I don't mind removing my ad blocker and see ads if that means I'll support the websites I visit. But ad networks are greedy and I fear this is only going to make them become more intrusive because of how easy (and now probably widely reached) ad blockers are going to become. And even if they do realise their mistake and make ads less intrusive both for privacy and UX reasons, no one will be there to realise that because everybody will be using ad blockers.
greenleafjacob 11y ago
Have we hit peak ads? [1] [1]: http://peakads.org/images/Peak_Ads.pdf http://peakads.org/images/Peak_Ads.pdf
PhasmaFelis 11y ago
> And there is no way to block the ads shown to you by Facebook or Google or Twitter in their own apps, especially not on mobile. This is not entirely true. AdBlock Plus for Android works at the system level.
- fwn 11y ago
  AFAIK abp does work by simulating a VPN on your system and therefore being able to block all resources channeled through this VPN. I don't know if that counts as system level. In comparison: Adaway (which needs root) edits the hosts file to block network requests on a system level.
z3t4 11y ago
The advertising market have been inflating for ten years now. Ten years ago one user would earn you an average of one usd per month, while you only get around 1 cent per user now. The same goes for advertisers, if your ad gets shown for ten thousand people, you can expect one lead. While ten years ago that would have been a hundred leads.
brianclements 11y ago
What bothers me the most about all these fertile sources for spam and ads to thrive (junk snail mail, telephone marketers, email spam, internet ads) is not just the malicious intent of most of it, but also the inefficiency of it all. A majority of Internet traffic is bots[1] costing electricity and time sorting through spam. Most of my snail mail by weight and size is trash every single day, waisting effort of an already underfunded and non-profitable USPS. Internet ads clutter up web interfaces and take up cycles in our browsers wasting time and making the delivery of information much less efficient. I feel as though in time, with all the physical and digital public services we have, 60% of infrastructure resources will go toward wasteful and nefarious services, 30% will go toward blocking and mitigating said services, and the remaining 10% will be human activity wondering why everything is so damn slow and expensive. [1]http://theweek.com/articles/454320/62-percent-all-web-traffic-comes-from-bots http://theweek.com/articles/454320/62-percent-all-web-traffi...
otabdeveloper1 11y ago
For all the people cheering on ad blockers: do you not realize that the _only_ result of wide-spread ad blocking is to drive smaller ad networks out of business and make Google into a monopoly? This is not a win for privacy or security on the Internet. Google is an order of magnitude worse offender compared to the small-time ad networks. And no, you cannot ad block Google. Good luck trying to block google.com cookies and access to *.google.com.
- interpol_p 11y ago
  Most ad blockers will block Google's ad network Doubleclick and Google search result ads, Gmail ads, by default. What do you mean when you say one cannot ad block Google?
- bambax 11y ago
  > you cannot ad block Google Why not? It may be difficult to stop google from tracking you, but if you don't ever see the consequences (as you're blocking their ads), it doesn't much matter does it?
  - cpeterso 11y ago
    I think the OP means that many websites rely on Google services and will stop working if you block google.com content or cookies.
bambax 11y ago
> In other words, even the most important and widely respected newspaper in the world is nowhere close to being healthily monetized, especially not by the small number of people who pay for it. It's not true that people won't pay for "content". People subscribe to Netflix, and still go to the theaters in droves (despite "piracy"). People buy games. And it's not even true that there's a problem with written content: people still buy books. People won't pay for news, which isn't the same thing as "content" in general. The reason people won't pay for news is because news have no inherent value. Reading the news is a way of passing time; it's more like glazing at trees and leaves in the wind (but much less enjoyable).
- logn 11y ago
  I would tend to agree. I took a news writing course in college. We got a bullet point list about newsworthiness: 1) proximity 2) recency 3) prominence... and a few others. They also taught us to write short paragraphs, short sentences, and use limited vocabulary. Further, you write stories in "inverted pyramid" style, where basically every sentence in an article is in decreasing order of importance, such that you can basically only read the first sentence of a story and know the whole thing. Given that, I think much of traditional news is pretty much replaced by twitter, youtube, facebook, blogs, etc. Your friends will do a good job of surfacing newsworthy stories. And reporting the facts is pretty easily done by tweeters, bloggers, and those capturing photos/video. Yet professional news writing about politics, weather, sports, and business will never go away because its crucial to society. Farmers need to know the weather. Vegas needs to know about sports scores. And investors need to know about business activity. All those groups will pay for that news. But investigative journalism, interviews, in-depth stories, and the like do have inherent value. I hope there are viable business models for people producing that content.
- Scarblac 11y ago
  There are good arguments for the view that news is actively bad for you: http://dobelli.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Avoid_News_Part1_TEXT.pdf http://dobelli.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Avoid_News_Par... (pdf).
  - 11y ago
interpol_p 11y ago
My personal reason for using an ad blocker is the infrastructure. There is nothing wrong with ads. But there is something deeply wrong with ad networks and automated ad placement. Giving up a square of your website to some company to place whatever the hell they deem relevant is the reason I dislike web ads. I go to a website to read their content, not what Doubleclick thinks I should see based on my creepy user profile. So if content creators curate and produce ads in partnership with advertisers (whose products they must actually, you know, like enough to want to promote to their readers) then maybe people will find ads less offensive. Instead of seeing ads for malware, or a private medical condition, or the towels they were just browsing on Amazon in a separate tab. Great content creators don't use an algorithm and analytics-generated user profiles to determine what content to serve individual users, they just publish what they think their readers will like. Why not do the same for ads?
cpeterso 11y ago
Are there any studies that show whether cross-site user tracking actually increases ad click-through rates? An advertiser can already intuit a lot about a reader from the current web site or search terms without tracking their activity on other sites. The most relevant ads I've seen were from Feedly and Twitter, who have their own profiles based on RSS feeds or Twitter accounts I follow.
sireat 11y ago
Anecdotal evidence: I was shocked how quickly web degenerates when you disable adblocking. Start with a reputable major news site, click on one business clickbait article -> a bit sleazy but still somewhat readable site opens -> click on different clickbait article -> sleazier site opens with a lousy article -> click again on ad -> full blown video popup ad extravaganza for rather unsavory business opportunities. I shudder to think what would have happened if I had chosen to read about medicine or sex. So in some ways online advertising has the same problem that fashion industry does. The immediate suppliers might be decent but a few steps down you get into OSHA nightmares exported overseas. The problem is that incentives encourage this sleaziness no matter what high moral standards A,G,F,M, et al profess publicly.
sigma2015 11y ago
There are so many premises wrong here - it hurts: 1. The majority of people in fact doesn't care about being tracked - "hackers" (and also myself) do care though - but that's a minority. 2. Most people like good advertisement. 3. It's wrong to just naturally assume that ads have to be annoying. A discreet, not-moving, not-animated ad is not bothering anybody. 4. Just as most people aren't willing to pay for content they aren't willing to pay for the maintenance of ad blockers - which is why the devs of those ABs will (and as a matter of fact) already offer whitelisting for money. [http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/02/over-300-businesses-now-whitelisted-on-adblock-plus-10-pay-to-play/ http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/02/over-300-businesses-...] 5. More and more web-sites will simply deny access to their content if ad blocking is detected. 6. The HN people's perspective on ads is in each and every way not that of the majority of people potentially clicking ads. We are not the driving force. --- The equilibrium will be Ad Blockers that white list benevolent and discreet ads - advertisement as an income source will become less attractive but it won't go away. Also Ad Blocking depends on detectable code or ad servers. If the ad dissemination technology shifts accordingly then Ad Blockers simply won't be able to detect ads any longer.
a3n 11y ago
I'm mainly talking about news outlets, and mainly the premiers like NYT and major regionals. Those outlets claim, probably rightly so, that they can't survive on subscriptions alone, they need ads. But on the web, what that means is "we can't survive unless we degrade your web experience and violate your privacy by selling you to ad networks." We're all focused on the ad side, and "how can we make money selling exactly what we've always sold without ads." Maybe selling news is not a viable business on the web. Ad blockers are not just evidence that we don't like ads as they are now, but also evidence that "we don't want to pay for what you're selling us. What you're selling us isn't worth it." Maybe a premier outlet like the NYT should be more than a news outlet. Maybe also an education outlet. NYT especially (and other premiers) already have people who do excellent research, writing, presentation, web development and data analysis. They have all the tools for education, they just aren't deploying them that way. In classrooms, teachers sometimes try to incorporate current events into lessons. Turn that on its head. But don't fall into the trap of replicating "the classroom," or courses, online. This would need some pretty serious innovation. Would I subscribe to something like that? Hell yeah. I'd even accept ads, but not active privacy gouging ads, just static text and images served from the first party domain. Don't do something new, only to fuck it up with old. Premier news outlets could be so much more that just another trap for ad viewing. They have really smart people, trapped in their employers' outdated business models.
a3n 11y ago
Is there a way that I, as a consumer, could sell ads to ad networks that would be "viewed" (i.e. consume resources) by content outlets? Maybe they could be so resource intensive that admins would feel compelled to review logs, and the log content would somehow have enough information that an admin would buy a shoe. Maybe http headers sent to content outlets could have ads. Maybe something magic and really creative, I don't know. You could even customize part of the message. One part from the advertiser, and one part from me, "Please do me a solid and stop blocking my ads to you. I need the ad revenue to help pay for my broadband fees."
- a3n 11y ago
  Maybe just make it a habit to send email to every human address I can find at a site, and load the message up with ads. Although the ads might not be seen, if people at the content site themselves are using adblockers.

75 points by cpeterso 11y ago

As a possibility, a model whereby advertisers pay both content providers and readers for viewing ads. I can imagine a system where before viewing expensive content (your next ultradeep NYT analysis I really want to read) I'm given a choice to view an ad (video, audio or picture) on one of the topics I'm interested in and be paid say $0.001. There are ad processors, let's say 2 or 3 major ones A, B and C, with whom I have an account. NYT hires one or two of them to give readers reasonable choices of what kind of ads to view and pay both ways. I'm registered with A and C with interests in cars, musical instruments and hiking equipment (in fact they may be priced differently), NYT supports A and B, which is fine, I'll be paid by A this time. I may of course change my preferences over time. This will make ads even more expensive for the advertisers, but will at the same time improve relevance. In fact advertisers may compete for keywords/interests just like they do with Google Ads.

chc 11y ago
What is the point of a system that pays people less than a cent?
- mojuba 11y ago
  Right, that part needs some improvements. I'm thinking, advertisers might compete for viewers by paying more for a given keyword, i.e. the prices are not fixed and the highest bidder wins the viewer. Another question is whether these ads are skippable or not. Can I skip the ad, go straight to the article and not be paid? Maybe content providers could decide.
  - gregmac 11y ago
    > Can I skip the ad, go straight to the article and not be paid? Maybe content providers could decide. I think the content providers would argue that you getting the content is your form of 'payment' for seeing the ad. So if you skip it, why should they give you the content anyway?
    - mojuba 11y ago
      Some content providers may choose to allow that, because it's in their interest to deliver content to more readers, be more popular. Let's not forget, the whole point of journalism is to reach out to more readers. How the journalist's job is paid exactly is secondary really, as long as it's legal of course. So let's say 1% of my readers choose to view the ad, get paid for it and get the advertiser pay me too. I might be fine with that. I'll have more readers then who'd spread the word about (and directly link to) my awesome blog/magazine.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  The point is that lots of cents make up a sizeable income. The problem is that processing 'a cent' or a fraction of one costs more than you'll end up getting and nobody - to date - has been able to create a functioning micro payments system with associated wallet to gain sufficient adoption to make it work. It's a combination of a technology problem with a chicken-and-the-egg problem.
cpeterso 11y ago
Ad networks use real-time bidding to auction banner ad space as the page loads. (I imagine that's part of the reason it can take so damn long for some news sites to load.) Why can't the user (or their user agent) take part in this same auction? If I'm will to pay $0.02 per page view on nytimes.com, but advertisers are only willing to pay $0.01 then I should be able to win the auction.
- ariwilson 11y ago
  So, exactly this: https://contributor.google.com/u/0/ https://contributor.google.com/u/0/ You even have control over who gets your money: http://i.imgur.com/4Vuuefm.png http://i.imgur.com/4Vuuefm.png
  - cpeterso 11y ago
    Interesting! I thought Google Contributor was more of a direct micropayment system for content, but from that link it looks like real-time bidding.
- tomlor 11y ago
  That's a slick idea and one you could actually execute with some amount of success today. The basic idea would be that you could sign up for an advertiser account on a DSP (Demand Side Platform), create a retargeting audience, cookie your own web browser cache to place yourself in your retargeting audience, and then buy ads against that audience - ie yourself. That would be essentially the same thing this guy did to his roommate: http://mysocialsherpa.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roommate-with-targeted-facebook-ads/ http://mysocialsherpa.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-...

mintplant 11y ago

I don't want ad companies tracking me. Ad companies have roundly demonstrated that I can no longer trust them to show me ads without tracking. Sorry, but I'm not switching off that blocker. Maybe if the history of the internet had taken a different course. But now it's too late -- the well's been poisoned, and advertisers and publishers have only themselves to blame. Pointing the finger at the users doesn't do anything to repair this lost trust. Ad-blocking, insofar as it contributes to the decimation of advertising revenues, will hasten this exodus to the platforms. And there is no way to block the ads shown to you by Facebook or Google or Twitter in their own apps, especially not on mobile. Aside: There absolutely are ways to block ads within apps. There are already Android apps that accomplish this to various extents, and I'm sure they'll only get more sophisticated to match any migration of users to mobile.

rhizome 11y ago
One thing Doc Searls points out is how direct marketing stole online advertising from Madison Ave. http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2015/09/08/if-marketing-listened-to-markets-theyd-hear-what-ad-blocking-is-telling-them/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2015/09/08/if-marketing-lis...
a_e_k 11y ago
Tracking is one thing that bothers me. The other are video ads that hijack my speakers and sap my bandwidth, pop over ads that hijack my screen focus, etc. Those are where I draw the line. I don't use explicit ad blockers, but I do run with NoScript and Cookie Controller. Simple, well-behaved banner and sidebar ads are fine. Overly aggressive ads get killed.
calgoo 11y ago
I do DNS Hijacking on my own network for known trackers and ad networks. On my mobile devices i have an active connection home to filter the data. It kinda works... Im now looking at building the DNS filter into an app that i can load on a raspPI or a old laptop to handle all blocking and integration with addBlock lists.

Animats 11y ago

Maybe the ad-heavy Internet was just a phase. Business models come and go. Craigslist killed newspaper classifieds as a business. Ad blockers may kill web ads as a business.

venomsnake 11y ago
And we slide into closed and centralized places ... that is scary.
- anonymousab 11y ago
  Or people continue to provide compelling content for free, if only more temporarily.
- Animats 11y ago
  Every business will still have a web site for their own products and services. Amazon won't have a problem. Wikipedia will go on. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Economist are already pay sites, and they're almost the only news sites with actual reporters. Pay TV will continue to fund news networks, which will have sites with additional content to get people to watch their TV. All we'll lose are the millions of bottom-feeder sites which take content in, hang ads on it, and hope to get paid. No big loss.
  - thedz 11y ago
    As the article mentions, 40% of NY Times' revenue is still provided by advertising.
  - dingaling 11y ago
    > and The Economist are already pay sites, and they're almost the only news sites with actual reporters. The Economist doesn't actually have on-staff reporters, they rely on correspondents around the World who sell their articles either ad hoc or on a commission basis. They do have staff who write editorials, but not the news articles. The Economist is also happy to ( try to ) utterly bombard me with ads on their website despite being a subscriber. They even had a crawl-up SUBSCRIBE NOW! ad at one point when I was logged-in.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

ipsin 11y ago

Given the date and the description of blocking ad banners specifically, my guess is that they were talking about an ad-blocking proxy like Internet Junkbuster. These proxies weren't as easy to install as browser extensions, but they did a good job of blocking ads, and I remember similar conversations about The Future of Ad Blocking at the time.

venomsnake 11y ago

I don't run ad blocker since 2009. I just got that good at ignoring ads. F12 + delete offending element works wonders for the most annoying stuff. And there are always hosts files.

mintplant 11y ago
I would consider a specially-crafted hosts file a form of ad blocking.

windlep 11y ago

Would've been nice if the article had pointed out that ad-networks have become a popular way to distribute trojans and malware using Flash exploits (though I'm sure when Flash is gone, ppl will keep finding other browser exploits ad's can exploit).

Jerry2 11y ago

About a year or so ago, my dad called me out of the blue and told me that my mom was crying because "internet ads were following her and making her anxious". Earlier that day, she came from a doctor and ended up searching for a medical condition on a famous search website. After that, she started seeing ads for various bullshit remedies all across the internet. Almost every website she visited, showed her same types of ads. Even when she wanted to forget and take her mind of it, she couldn't because these ads were constantly reminding her of it. She got so disgusted that she quit using the web for the rest of the day and cried. I guided them on how to install ad blocking addons and how to change default search engines (she now uses Startpage) But we couldn't easily block it on iPad so the solution was to switch the search engine and clear cookies. All these companies that make money off tracking people and are selling search results really need to rethink their business models. PS: She also wrote an email to Tim Cook complaining about this and got a reply from someone that they will "look into it". I'm glad Apple will now a provide solution to block these kinds of things on an iPad.

mojuba 11y ago
I'm sorry but how do you know it was the search website that sold information? It could as well be the first web site that she opened that happened to be on the same ad network as other related web sites she visited. Just guessing.
- ipsin 11y ago
  I agree with your point, but to the user it can feel like a violation of privacy, and at that point it's not particularly important who's doing it. Whether it's the faceless search engine or the faceless retargeting company, the net result is that something you thought was personal and private feels less so.
- hueving 11y ago
  Said search website was probably google. If that's the case they don't have to sell it, they just use it to target ads from their own network. If you search something on Google it will follow you like the plague.
11y ago

oconnore 11y ago

Another possibility is that people will learn to care about what they read, and learn that it costs something. We don't have to tip, either. Also, I'm sorry, but I'm never going to login to Facebook to read the Economist, and I stopped using Twitter's mobile app when they introduced sponsored content.

eru 11y ago
> We don't have to tip, either. And in Australia, we don't.

mtgentry 11y ago

Why don't more publishers try to detect the ad blockers with stuff like this? https://github.com/sitexw/FuckAdBlock https://github.com/sitexw/FuckAdBlock And then they could throw up a page that says "Sorry, AdBlock must be disabled to view this content"

eru 11y ago
Ad blockers could become smarter in return.
- mtgentry 11y ago
  I see, so as long as the code can be looked at, it can be circumvented?
  - MichaelGG 11y ago
    No. So long the code is executing on an uncontrolled device, then you cannot guarantee it'll execute how you intended. So if you make a device, like an iPad, seal it to prevent hardware tampering, and ensure no user-triggerable bugs exist, you're all set. There's also remote attestation, like Intel SGX might start to bring. But on existing general-compute devices like PCs, it's a hopeless battle.
    - eru 11y ago
      And even on a sealed iPad, a user could just use a piece of cardboard to cover the portion of the screen showing the ad.
  - gregmac 11y ago
    In a way. An extreme could be not loading content until the ad is loaded, and there is some type of check to verify that it did actually load (not blocked). If someone is determined enough, they could simulate the ad being loaded (eg, maybe it actually IS even loaded, but the DOM element is hidden in one of dozen different ways which the ad-loaded-verification code doesn't check for). Essentially the problem boils down to running code (HTML, Javascript, CSS, and even Flash) in an untrusted environment (the user's browser). The site sends the user bits of data to be displayed, but there's ultimately no way to know if the user's browser ACTUALLY displays those in the browser window, let alone to the user's eyeballs. As a content provider, you can get very, very clever, but you can never get to 100%, and there will always be a motivated user to work on an adblocker that circumvents everything. It's really not any different from DRM (as someone else in thread pointed out). The movie/music/TV/games industry has spent billions of dollars coming up with various schemes of DRM, yet you can still download basically anything (stripped of its DRM, of course) within days of release, if not earlier.

wmt 11y ago

Damn, that article took a strange leap with discussing what better ads would be. Somehow it entirely skipped the possibility that more ads might resemble the ads of the most successful advertisers of the web (like google, facebook, twitter) and instead leaped on a dystopian slope where all ads are served by the content platforms of those companies. Saying that twitter, google or facebook ads cannot be blocked is just bogus. People use them on normal web browsers that quite easily could block them. The reason they're not blocked is that it's not worth the hassle, because the ads are clean, small and polite. You know, better ads. Such better ads are not patented, and switching to pleasant text ads like the industry leaders leaders did would make ad blockers a marginal phenomenon.

001sky 11y ago
Such better ads are not patented, and switching to pleasant text ads like the industry leaders leaders did would make ad blockers a marginal phenomenon. The risk is that advertising would also become a marginal phenomenon.
- a3n 11y ago
  It's amazing to me that so many smart minds in content outlets can't figure out a way to make money other than ads, particular privacy invading ads. It's been said often enough and long enough to sound tired, but we really are products, not customers. The entity that a content outlet cares about is the ad networks. NOT you. The content is just a bug zapper meant to attract you in.
  - tertius 11y ago
    "It's amazing to me that so many smart minds in content outlets can't figure out a way to make money other than ads" There are many ways, but nothing that is as profitable.

axefrog 11y ago

I was always a defender of a site's right to use advertising in lieu of any better way to pay for its content. As someone who'd had stabs in the past at making content sites with useful content, I understood that it was a case of etiquette. If you want to read my content, do me the courtesy of allowing an unobtrusive text ad to exist off to the side. On that basis, I never blocked ads. Sometimes the ads were even interesting. I use an ad blocker now. Too many abuses of my willingness to let the publishers show me ads and I eventually just got sick of it. Where the line was crossed for me included: - Videos (or audio) autoplaying over the top of my own music; especially when they're in some other tab, halfway down the page, forcing me to go hunting to figure out where the sound was coming from - Links commandeered by popup launchers; especially when they cancel the original click, or load my link in a new tab and override the current tab with the ad popup, which often resulted in me accidentally leaving the ad tab open while I closed the tab I actually wanted. - Hover ads that activate because I was careless enough to not pay precise attention to the location of my mouse pointer - Page content scroll positions jerking up and down as ads appear or disappear (usually just the former) - Overlay ads appearing on top of content I'm trying to read, and in particular those which make the close button either hard to see, unresponsive when clicked, or which respond as though I've clicked the ad itself - Content that just won't display because it's blocked by ad resources that have stalled while loading And so forth. I'll stand up for publisher's rights, but only to a point. Eventually the noise and bad behaviour just becomes too much.

jimworm 11y ago

It's possible that some advertising will merge in with regular content and become covertly invasive over the long term. Publishers become credibility farms, where credibility is built using real articles and sold via "propaganda" pieces. One possible example is the Wired tennis physics link posted recently [0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10210808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10210808

mahranch 11y ago

The author gets one thing massively wrong. So do the reddit commentors they quote. The quote: "Ad blockers could end up saving the ad industry from its worst excesses. If blocking becomes widespread, the ad industry will be pushed to produce ads that are simpler, less invasive and far more transparent about the way they’re handling our data" Oh? And how are you so sure they won't go the other direction? Because that's where I'd place my money in a heart beat. Adblockers rely on blocking requests to known ad networks and affiliates. If the ads are instead served up locally, from the site the person is visiting itself, it can't block the ads. Ad blockers are 100% ineffective in those instances. A company like google or any other major ad network just needs to create some sort of back-end, plugin or server side program that serves up ads from the domain you're visiting. The ad blocker wouldn't know if it's a picture of a cat or an ad for Netflix since it's all coming from randomsite.com Several smaller companies have already started doing this and it could very well signal the end of ad blockers if it becomes widespread and adopted by the big players (specifically adsense). The one thing I don't see is ad companies becoming more transparent & open. That's silly to even think about since it's less profitable alternative. The companies that don't do this will cannibalize the ones that do since they'll be shooting themselves in the foot. No, I see ad companies becoming more clever. As far as content creators go, I don't even know how this is a debate. Just how entitled are people nowadays? Is this why they call millennials the entitled generation? If someone creates content, and wants people to see an ad for Pepsi before you can consume that content, that is the creators prerogative, not yours. End of story. There's no further argument here. I don't know why people think everything should be free. Nothing is free, everything is subsidized by something.

mintplant 11y ago
If the ads are instead served up locally, from the site the person is visiting itself, it can't block the ads. Why not? I don't see why an ad blocker couldn't identify and block certain URL schemes/patterns, common scripts, or element structures. Also -- doesn't cross-site tracking rely on third-party cookies from a shared (separate) domain?
- cpeterso 11y ago

buffoon 11y ago

I love the mantra of "the web is supported by advertising" that every one of these sorts of articles at least quotes. It's not. Shitty business models are supported by advertising. There are plenty of us who provide non-advertising driven services that are profitable and can afford transit costs. As for blocking, the technology allows it so I will use it. If it doesn't allow it, I have no ethical qualms about breaking it until it does. If I'm paying for the portal device be it tablet, desktop, smartphone, TV, I will be in control of it. If it's subsidy-driven, their funeral.

sangnoir 11y ago
> Shitty business models are supported by advertising. Just because you do not like it doesn't make it a shitty business model: most sports are supported by advertising (e.g. NFL, UEFA). Endorsement deals, sponsoring teams/stadia/leagues and TV rights are just various forms of advertising. TV shows are also funded by advertising, as is most journalism that is not state-funded (a.ka. propaganda).
- buffoon 11y ago
  TV doesn't have ad blockers though.
  - tertius 11y ago
    Tivo?
jgianakopoulos 11y ago
The mantra? This is how the majority of the web is monetized. It's not a mantra, it's a fact. People contribute content to the web and you pay with viewing ads. I don't know how you can rationalize that as being a "shitty" business model just because you purchase a device that is capable of connecting to the internet. If what you really mean to say is that it's a bad business model because people like yourself can install ad-blocking software and consume content without paying for it, then I see what you're saying although you come off as entitled and naive.

Nkdo 11y ago

This is why I encourage all the people I know, who aren't great with computers, to use adblockers: http://i.imgur.com/dzwaKhI.png http://i.imgur.com/dzwaKhI.png Saw that ad for what is borderline malware on a fresh install of windows 10 while trying out Microsoft Edge to see what it's worth as a browser. It's a google ad (you can always spot them through the X button), on a popular website. As long as google doesn't do any real policing on what is permissible in their adnetworks, it will always be a user's right to protect himself. Television and newspapers have higher standards for ads, at least in my country. This was also a reminder that Edge will not be a real browser until Microsoft adds the possibility of using an adblocker. No extensions, no deal.

MertsA 11y ago
That little triangle looking logo in the to right is the AdChoices logo, Google has that on everything going through AdSense but just because AdSense -> AdChoices does not mean that AdChoices -> AdSense. That advertisement is actually an AdSense ad in this case but not everything you see with that logo is AdSense.
cpeterso 11y ago
Microsoft announced earlier this year an IE feature called "SmartScreen Filter" that is supposed to detect and block misleading or malicious ads. I assume Edge has this feature, too, but from the blog post (and your experience) it sounds like it is disabled by default. http://blogs.technet.com/b/mmpc/archive/2015/04/28/cleaning-up-misleading-advertisements.aspx http://blogs.technet.com/b/mmpc/archive/2015/04/28/cleaning-...

dombili 11y ago

Content providers (from ad networks to movie studios) need to realise that you can only go so far. Ads have become more than ads. They track you wherever you go, not just online but offline too and people are starting to realise how intrusive this is. Most people are reasonable. A lot of articles have been publish about how terrible ads are but if you show them in a tasteful and a non-intrusive way (meaning that they don't track the user), they can be very successful. Podcasts have been getting more and more popular everyday and I listen to a lot of them. I almost never skip any podcast ads even though I've heard most of them before because they feel more authentic (mostly because it's read by someone whose opinion I trust) and they're not intrusive at all. It seems like a good trade of to listen to them while getting great entertaining/informative content for free and I might get a good deal on something I might be interested in (since they mostly offer promo codes). If I'm listening to a podcast on technology, I get to hear Hover's ad spot, for example. That's interesting to me because as someone who's interested in listening to a podcast about technology, it's possible that I already manage a couple of domains and I might not be happy with my registrar (then again, who is). They're generically targeted ads. While on the websites, cookies follow me wherever I go, sometimes even when I delete them and my information is sold by companies I trust as a user because they're greedy and some other party want my information just so they can put ads in front of my face. When I try to block these, I'm called unethical because I'm taking food off the table of the writers. There's a middle way here but I don't think ad networks ever going to realise this the same way movie studios haven't realised you can't solve piracy problem by adding more and more DRM. Don't be intrusive. Don't fuck up the UX. Don't bother me. I don't mind removing my ad blocker and see ads if that means I'll support the websites I visit. But ad networks are greedy and I fear this is only going to make them become more intrusive because of how easy (and now probably widely reached) ad blockers are going to become. And even if they do realise their mistake and make ads less intrusive both for privacy and UX reasons, no one will be there to realise that because everybody will be using ad blockers.

greenleafjacob 11y ago

Have we hit peak ads? [1] [1]: http://peakads.org/images/Peak_Ads.pdf http://peakads.org/images/Peak_Ads.pdf

PhasmaFelis 11y ago

> And there is no way to block the ads shown to you by Facebook or Google or Twitter in their own apps, especially not on mobile. This is not entirely true. AdBlock Plus for Android works at the system level.

fwn 11y ago
AFAIK abp does work by simulating a VPN on your system and therefore being able to block all resources channeled through this VPN. I don't know if that counts as system level. In comparison: Adaway (which needs root) edits the hosts file to block network requests on a system level.

z3t4 11y ago

The advertising market have been inflating for ten years now. Ten years ago one user would earn you an average of one usd per month, while you only get around 1 cent per user now. The same goes for advertisers, if your ad gets shown for ten thousand people, you can expect one lead. While ten years ago that would have been a hundred leads.

brianclements 11y ago

What bothers me the most about all these fertile sources for spam and ads to thrive (junk snail mail, telephone marketers, email spam, internet ads) is not just the malicious intent of most of it, but also the inefficiency of it all. A majority of Internet traffic is bots[1] costing electricity and time sorting through spam. Most of my snail mail by weight and size is trash every single day, waisting effort of an already underfunded and non-profitable USPS. Internet ads clutter up web interfaces and take up cycles in our browsers wasting time and making the delivery of information much less efficient. I feel as though in time, with all the physical and digital public services we have, 60% of infrastructure resources will go toward wasteful and nefarious services, 30% will go toward blocking and mitigating said services, and the remaining 10% will be human activity wondering why everything is so damn slow and expensive. [1]http://theweek.com/articles/454320/62-percent-all-web-traffic-comes-from-bots http://theweek.com/articles/454320/62-percent-all-web-traffi...

otabdeveloper1 11y ago

For all the people cheering on ad blockers: do you not realize that the _only_ result of wide-spread ad blocking is to drive smaller ad networks out of business and make Google into a monopoly? This is not a win for privacy or security on the Internet. Google is an order of magnitude worse offender compared to the small-time ad networks. And no, you cannot ad block Google. Good luck trying to block google.com cookies and access to *.google.com.

interpol_p 11y ago
Most ad blockers will block Google's ad network Doubleclick and Google search result ads, Gmail ads, by default. What do you mean when you say one cannot ad block Google?
bambax 11y ago
> you cannot ad block Google Why not? It may be difficult to stop google from tracking you, but if you don't ever see the consequences (as you're blocking their ads), it doesn't much matter does it?
- cpeterso 11y ago
  I think the OP means that many websites rely on Google services and will stop working if you block google.com content or cookies.

bambax 11y ago

> In other words, even the most important and widely respected newspaper in the world is nowhere close to being healthily monetized, especially not by the small number of people who pay for it. It's not true that people won't pay for "content". People subscribe to Netflix, and still go to the theaters in droves (despite "piracy"). People buy games. And it's not even true that there's a problem with written content: people still buy books. People won't pay for news, which isn't the same thing as "content" in general. The reason people won't pay for news is because news have no inherent value. Reading the news is a way of passing time; it's more like glazing at trees and leaves in the wind (but much less enjoyable).

logn 11y ago
I would tend to agree. I took a news writing course in college. We got a bullet point list about newsworthiness: 1) proximity 2) recency 3) prominence... and a few others. They also taught us to write short paragraphs, short sentences, and use limited vocabulary. Further, you write stories in "inverted pyramid" style, where basically every sentence in an article is in decreasing order of importance, such that you can basically only read the first sentence of a story and know the whole thing. Given that, I think much of traditional news is pretty much replaced by twitter, youtube, facebook, blogs, etc. Your friends will do a good job of surfacing newsworthy stories. And reporting the facts is pretty easily done by tweeters, bloggers, and those capturing photos/video. Yet professional news writing about politics, weather, sports, and business will never go away because its crucial to society. Farmers need to know the weather. Vegas needs to know about sports scores. And investors need to know about business activity. All those groups will pay for that news. But investigative journalism, interviews, in-depth stories, and the like do have inherent value. I hope there are viable business models for people producing that content.
Scarblac 11y ago
There are good arguments for the view that news is actively bad for you: http://dobelli.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Avoid_News_Part1_TEXT.pdf http://dobelli.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Avoid_News_Par... (pdf).
- 11y ago

interpol_p 11y ago

My personal reason for using an ad blocker is the infrastructure. There is nothing wrong with ads. But there is something deeply wrong with ad networks and automated ad placement. Giving up a square of your website to some company to place whatever the hell they deem relevant is the reason I dislike web ads. I go to a website to read their content, not what Doubleclick thinks I should see based on my creepy user profile. So if content creators curate and produce ads in partnership with advertisers (whose products they must actually, you know, like enough to want to promote to their readers) then maybe people will find ads less offensive. Instead of seeing ads for malware, or a private medical condition, or the towels they were just browsing on Amazon in a separate tab. Great content creators don't use an algorithm and analytics-generated user profiles to determine what content to serve individual users, they just publish what they think their readers will like. Why not do the same for ads?

cpeterso 11y ago

Are there any studies that show whether cross-site user tracking actually increases ad click-through rates? An advertiser can already intuit a lot about a reader from the current web site or search terms without tracking their activity on other sites. The most relevant ads I've seen were from Feedly and Twitter, who have their own profiles based on RSS feeds or Twitter accounts I follow.

sireat 11y ago

Anecdotal evidence: I was shocked how quickly web degenerates when you disable adblocking. Start with a reputable major news site, click on one business clickbait article -> a bit sleazy but still somewhat readable site opens -> click on different clickbait article -> sleazier site opens with a lousy article -> click again on ad -> full blown video popup ad extravaganza for rather unsavory business opportunities. I shudder to think what would have happened if I had chosen to read about medicine or sex. So in some ways online advertising has the same problem that fashion industry does. The immediate suppliers might be decent but a few steps down you get into OSHA nightmares exported overseas. The problem is that incentives encourage this sleaziness no matter what high moral standards A,G,F,M, et al profess publicly.

sigma2015 11y ago

There are so many premises wrong here - it hurts: 1. The majority of people in fact doesn't care about being tracked - "hackers" (and also myself) do care though - but that's a minority. 2. Most people like good advertisement. 3. It's wrong to just naturally assume that ads have to be annoying. A discreet, not-moving, not-animated ad is not bothering anybody. 4. Just as most people aren't willing to pay for content they aren't willing to pay for the maintenance of ad blockers - which is why the devs of those ABs will (and as a matter of fact) already offer whitelisting for money. [http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/02/over-300-businesses-now-whitelisted-on-adblock-plus-10-pay-to-play/ http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/02/over-300-businesses-...] 5. More and more web-sites will simply deny access to their content if ad blocking is detected. 6. The HN people's perspective on ads is in each and every way not that of the majority of people potentially clicking ads. We are not the driving force. --- The equilibrium will be Ad Blockers that white list benevolent and discreet ads - advertisement as an income source will become less attractive but it won't go away. Also Ad Blocking depends on detectable code or ad servers. If the ad dissemination technology shifts accordingly then Ad Blockers simply won't be able to detect ads any longer.

a3n 11y ago

I'm mainly talking about news outlets, and mainly the premiers like NYT and major regionals. Those outlets claim, probably rightly so, that they can't survive on subscriptions alone, they need ads. But on the web, what that means is "we can't survive unless we degrade your web experience and violate your privacy by selling you to ad networks." We're all focused on the ad side, and "how can we make money selling exactly what we've always sold without ads." Maybe selling news is not a viable business on the web. Ad blockers are not just evidence that we don't like ads as they are now, but also evidence that "we don't want to pay for what you're selling us. What you're selling us isn't worth it." Maybe a premier outlet like the NYT should be more than a news outlet. Maybe also an education outlet. NYT especially (and other premiers) already have people who do excellent research, writing, presentation, web development and data analysis. They have all the tools for education, they just aren't deploying them that way. In classrooms, teachers sometimes try to incorporate current events into lessons. Turn that on its head. But don't fall into the trap of replicating "the classroom," or courses, online. This would need some pretty serious innovation. Would I subscribe to something like that? Hell yeah. I'd even accept ads, but not active privacy gouging ads, just static text and images served from the first party domain. Don't do something new, only to fuck it up with old. Premier news outlets could be so much more that just another trap for ad viewing. They have really smart people, trapped in their employers' outdated business models.

a3n 11y ago

Is there a way that I, as a consumer, could sell ads to ad networks that would be "viewed" (i.e. consume resources) by content outlets? Maybe they could be so resource intensive that admins would feel compelled to review logs, and the log content would somehow have enough information that an admin would buy a shoe. Maybe http headers sent to content outlets could have ads. Maybe something magic and really creative, I don't know. You could even customize part of the message. One part from the advertiser, and one part from me, "Please do me a solid and stop blocking my ads to you. I need the ad revenue to help pay for my broadband fees."

a3n 11y ago
Maybe just make it a habit to send email to every human address I can find at a site, and load the message up with ads. Although the ads might not be seen, if people at the content site themselves are using adblockers.