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Ad Blocking: The Unnecessary Internet Apocalypse

37 points by cpeterso 11y ago

gdewilde 11y ago
Ad blockers prove you don't need advertisement to be a popular developer. And no, popup blockers didn't end the internet.
dmolony 11y ago
What a load of bollocks.
sveme 11y ago
One reason I'm using Adblockers and Ghostery is the immense number of trackers found on any website that are supposed to help in delivering personalized ads to any future website visit. Seriously, ad companies: Stop trying to show me personalized ads! Please, serve ads that have something to do with the stuff I'm looking at. When looking at a coding site, why do I have to see an advertisement for the jeans that I did not want to buy four days ago? Why not show me books/websites/hosters/whatever that are related to the coding problem I'm currently trying to solve? It used to be somwhat like that, years ago. We should all go back to that and stop tracking users with dozens of trackers, all connecting to their servers when loading a site, crumpling the speed with which I'm seeing the content.
- elorant 11y ago
  Please, serve ads that have something to do with the stuff I'm looking at. I second that. I couldn't agree more with this comment. I use to make a lot of searches for pharmaceutical products for one of my projects and then Google decides to show me tons of drug related ads regardless of the context of the site I'm currently visiting. It's frustrating to say the least. Like I don't have any other interests. But I'd like to hear from people hosting AdSense on their sites. Has profiling raised CTR rates significantly?
  - chimeracoder 11y ago
    > But I'd like to hear from people hosting AdSense on their sites. Has profiling raised CTR rates significantly? Probably hard to tell, since there are a lot of confounding variables. Most notably, conversion across the board has plummeted in recent years (I forget the exact percent, but I think it's about one third). So if you're a website funded by ads and your traffic has grown 10% since last year, you've actually taken a pay cut!
- kevincennis 11y ago
  As a consumer, I would love this. But my understanding is that most/many companies have found "retargeting" to be very effective. So it's annoying, but we also seem to respond to it. As long as that second part remains true, I don't think it's going away.
- jbob2000 11y ago
  It's useless to "serve ads that have something to do with the stuff I'm looking at". I read an article about smart thermostats the other day. I don't need a thermostat, I rent a shitty apartment! My HVAC is wrapped into my rent, I don't even care how much it costs. I saw an ad for bleach laundry detergent on YouTube, which I would never use because I listen to punk rock and don't own white anything. I've pretty much stopped watching TV because all they show are make-up and tampon commercials. The advertisers need trackers, otherwise they're just yelling into the void. It never used to be like this because people were pretty homogeneous. A few decades of globalization and multiculturalism have made us much more diverse, and an impossible target for generalized advertising. I'm not defending them, just pointing out the challenges product-makers and advertisers face.
  - joosters 11y ago
    I've pretty much stopped watching TV because all they show are make-up and tampon commercials. You base your TV viewing on the advertising?
    - PeterWhittaker 11y ago
      He's not alone: I cancelled cable a couple of years ago for two reasons, the cost (for little to no value), and the terrible UX of ad-funded viewing. Streamed shows with no ads, ah! Wonderful, good value, even at a higher price (Netflix, IMHO, is leaving money on the table).
- mpeg 11y ago
  Note that Ghostery will block trackers but they do sell your usage data themselves. Use privacy badger or a tracker-blocking list for your ad blocker if you're that concerned about privacy. On another note, as an ad person, context-aware ads are alive and well, for instance if you mention a specific thing in your Facebook updates you're more likely to see an ad for it. But the hard fact is that personalisation and retargeting works very, very well. The real mistake ad companies do is that you should not see that ad if you didn't want to buy the jeans (or you bought them on a different device), which is hard to guess but not impossible
  - sveme 11y ago
    Shouldn't that be off by opting out of Ghostrank? Personalisation does work to some degree, I can see that on Facebook. But especially in that place it tends to creep me out and I do make an effort to never visit Sponsored Content.
    - mpeg 11y ago
      Yes, I believe you should be fine if you opt out. Still, as much as I understand the need for Ghostery to monetise, I personally prefer to trust the EFF.
  - teaneedz 11y ago
    Ad targeting is alive and well only to those building it. Targeting via tracking does not work : http://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/ http://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/ Maybe someone fromThe Deck could comment on why their approach is better.
    - mpeg 11y ago
      "Targeting via tracking does not work" is a very bold claim. Better targeting is a selling point of billion-dollar ad tech companies, and retargeting just pushes more products. Some sorts of tracking are harmful, I don't like the current state of affairs either and cookie syncing is downright evil (the practice of calling a pixel from a third party domain to "sync" your first party cookie with theirs) and abused. I just don't think it's as black and white as some people make it sound, not all advertising is obnoxious and unwanted and as a consumer it's ultimately almost impossible to escape trackers completely (unless you expect consumers to run Tails and browse websites as static html)
- bad_user 11y ago
  As a full disclosure, I used to work on a platform for serving ads. For one, while certain websites or apps show a clear signal that can be used (e.g. coding, hence the user can be shown ads on coding tools), many other websites or apps are not giving a signal on preferences or intent, this besides the ads inventory being an issue. For example when you're reading political news, or when you're playing chess, what ad could you be shown that could be related to politics or chess? I can answer this - without a user profile, best case scenario is that you're shown something at random, with a disastrous conversion rate. And worst case scenario is ads being used for spreading pieces of propaganda on controversial issues and I remember for example how a certain gold mining company was attempting to manipulate with downright lies the viewers of certain YouTube videos that were criticizing their open-pit project. And because such ad spots are basically worthless, they can be bought for cheap. I'm personally all about privacy and the security of my data, being downright paranoid. But privacy is one thing, blocking ads is another. If you don't like ads, then don't use those services or websites. That's how you end up rewarding alternatives and personally I rewarded many alternatives that way. Even if you want to punish bad actors, you still give them the eyeballs, you still distribute those links to your friends, etc. The concept of voting with your wallet is basically broken. And contrary to the music and film industry that has pushed for DRM, this time people that block ads don't have the proper moral ground to stand on and also the industry is not going to go down without a fight. Consider that you can't block ads in mobile apps without having root privileges. This will turn out to be a whack-a-mole game and it won't last for long. Just wait until these websites will start to serve ads from their own domain, with ads being indistinguishable from the surrounding content ... oh wait, this is already happening ;-) Worst of all is that you end up hurting other people - from publishers, many of whom are already on the verge of bankruptcy, to people that will suffer the consequences even if they don't use ad-blockers, as the history of video gaming can teach us. Do you enjoy the DRM laden pay-to-win gaming industry that others have created for you? As personally I'm thankful that I've outgrown video games.
  - micampe 11y ago
    > ads being indistinguishable from the surrounding content I think this is an improvement, compared to the current situation of ads getting in the way of the content I want to read.
- eli 11y ago
  You want the ads to be better targeted for you but you don't want to be profiled or tracked? That is going to be difficult for most publishers. My company could do that because we sell our ads directly and approve each one by hand and therefore have our own sales and ad operations staff. A lot of sites don't have the resources or scale to do that though.
  - sveme 11y ago
    No. If I have to take up with ads, I want them to fit to the content I'm currently looking at, not stuff I looked at days ago. Paraphrasing another comment (though disagreeing with him), the probability that I'm interested in smart thermostats while I'm looking at content on smart thermostats is vastly larger than the probability of me being interested in jeans while I'm looking at content on smart thermostats.
    - eli 11y ago
      Unfortunately the dirty secret of ad targeting algorithms is that they don't actually work very well. Computers aren't good at understanding context. It's a hard problem. Google is better at it then most and, well, you've seen AdSense. It's just OK. Both consumers and advertisers are mostly aligned in that they want relevant ads. The idea that taking away information about the user is going to somehow make the ads better seems like a stretch.
      - kuschku 11y ago
        Well, there is a simple way to solve that: website owner and Ad creator both describe their site/Ad in categories with some hashtags. Just match based on those.
- mbubb 11y ago
  Please, serve ads that have something to do with the stuff I'm looking at. I understand your point and feel yr pain but: How do you do that without some sort of tracking? Advertising as well as the 'recommendation engines" in Netflix or Amazon track your clicks to see what you are interested in. Otherwise you get programmatic advertising. Which means you get beer ads during football games; luxury brands in the NYTimes Magazine; etc.
  - kuschku 11y ago
    Yes, exactly. Just do programmatic advertising. And select it manually, not through a shitty algorithm like Google does today.
kuschku 11y ago
Yes, exactly. I argued about this before: 𝗪𝗲 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝗽𝗿𝗶𝘃𝗮𝗰𝘆 There are trackers on every site, dozens of them. And they are all totally useless for advertising. If I watch a let's play on some game, ads for the game or similar games will half of the time lead to me buying it. Current tracking ads will show me an ad for something I bought a week ago next to the video, and one week later, after I have the game, I'll see ads for the game everywhere. 𝗪𝗲 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝗻𝗼𝗻-𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗿𝘂𝘀𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗮𝗱𝘀 If I load a website, I don't want to get a metaphorical – or for some people, quite realistic – epileptic shock. I want to be able to enjoy the content. The ads should be visible (not just plain text), but they should not be annoying or misleading. Don't put 20 ads looking like download buttons on a download page, or I'll stop recommending your page – or, worse, recommend people to install an AdBlock extension. 𝗘𝘅𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁 𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝘄𝗲 𝗱𝗼𝗻'𝘁 Obviously, this all only helps for affiliate-type ads, not for Brand Awareness. But for those, there is a far better solution, that is far more successful: Viral Marketing. Often, Brand Awareness works best through marketing that is fun to watch, fun to interact with. In that case, a minigame as ad in your Facebook stream, or a fun video on YouTube can be far more effective. Disclaimer: This is just my personal opinion.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  I recently read a book by Bob Hoffman, who runs a blog called the Ad Contrarian. It's a very funny book. He's an old-style TV/print ad guy who has been ranting about the stupidity of the online ad market for decades. He makes the point that the reason trad-ad gets so much money, is because everyone knows that ads are annoying. They're annoying on TV, they're annoying on radio and streaming services, they're annoying in cinemas, they're often annoying in print, and they're especially annoying online. In fact they're more annoying online than anywhere else, and less effective at selling stuff than ads in other media - because online ads are poorly targeted, poorly designed, poorly distributed, lacking in context, and generally nearly useless. All of which could have been changed - and it may or may not be too late now. I think it's worth reading the blog: http://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/ http://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/ (And no - I don't get affiliate income from that link.)
- coldpie 11y ago
  Who is "we"? I certainly don't want ads, intrusive or not. Ads are harmful and manipulative. They cause people to spend money they shouldn't be spending, or buy products they shouldn't be consuming.
deleted 11y ago
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cm2187 11y ago
The article doesn't even mention the word "tracking" a single time. To me ad blocking is primarily tracking blocking. And while advertising is a legitimate activity on a free website, tracking users across websites is certainly not. You only need a jpeg to serve an ad, not tons of javascript and supercookies.
- sarahprobono 11y ago
  "First party data" even almost has a better connotation.
- mbubb 11y ago
  Yes true. There is no way to have targeted advertising w/out tracking.
  - cm2187 11y ago
    You can. I can arrive on website with an http referrer that says I searched for "holidays in greece" on google. The website can do targetted ads and show me something about greece. What is not OK is that one hour earlier I was looking for details on a camera on a different website and to serve me an ad related to cameras. I don't mind the website I visit tracking me on their website and serving ads to me on thst basis. What I reject is cross-website tracking. In other words "first party tracking" is OK, "third party tracking" is not.
    - mbubb 11y ago
      Sorry for the delayed response... I like the idea you present - just don't see how it would be implemented. Jotted some ideas. Need ot read and think more. I am sure this has been on HN - no tsure where I first saw it. But this is a very interesting critique: http://idlewords.com/talks/what_happens_next_will_amaze_you.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/what_happens_next_will_amaze_you.... my thoughts on your point: https://gist.github.com/mbubb/dedfbf427848a8d8fd3b https://gist.github.com/mbubb/dedfbf427848a8d8fd3b
amelius 11y ago
> Advertising (as everyone reading these words knows well) pays for the ability for nearly anyone around the world to type in any URL and have content of unimaginable variety appear on a screen. Advertising also subsidizes the cost of apps, which can take hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce, but are often free or low-priced. I find this a bit of a weird premise. Advertising can pay only for so much (at most a few cents per view). What if content owners want to be paid a little more? Should they suddenly change their complete income model? The answer should be: of course not! But currently the answer is: yes. In my view we should get rid of this strange incontinuity and get rid of ads altogether. Yes, it may mean we will pay for content, but at least it will give us privacy, a healthy market, no annoying ads, customer rights, and most of all, it may improve the quality of content. Also, don't forget that free content will also happily coexist with this model.
- gordjw 11y ago
  Exactly, there was a strong amateur community with excellent content before ads were anything more than blogrolls and cross linking. Without ads, maybe we lose some of the purely commercial sites, but I'm completely sure that strong communities will continue to exist without ads.
- markyc 11y ago
  why would paywalls give us privacy? if anything they can track us even more
  - untothebreach 11y ago
    This is very true. I think the distinction is consent, and choosing who you give up privacy for. When I visit a web page, I don't know whether the page is going to track me or not. By the time I find out, it is too late, my visit has already been recorded. When I give a publisher/content-creator/whatever money, I am agreeing to enter into a transaction with them, and I expect that they will have a record of that transaction.
    - markyc 11y ago
bsder 11y ago
> Our own IAB research found at least 34% of U.S. adults use ad blockers. Wow. That's really much higher than I would have expected.
- cpeterso 11y ago
  According to addons.mozilla.org, the number of Firefox users with ad blockers is much smaller: 7.93% Adblock Plus 0.84% NoScript 0.55% Ghostery 0.20% uBlock or uBlock Origin https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/compatibility/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/compatibility/
  - tired_man 11y ago
    likewise the number of firefox users.
soneca 11y ago
I stopped reading at the half of it, but this author is treating so many assumptions that I don't agree as universal truth that I find it intelectually dishonest and offending. What bothered me most: that to threat advertising industry on the internet is to threat democratic capitalism; that advertising is the only possible imaginable way to support good content creating and that consumer paying themselves for content is necessarily a bad thing. There are a lot of examples where the ad industry went too far and changes came for better(in form of new business models in general or government regulations). I think now of HBO, Netflix, Wikipedia, the bilboard proihibition in my city, São Paulo. Ultimately, the democratic capitalism is working and the "apocalypse" will only happen if people do not consider it a apocalypse at all. If people consider that adblocking is too much (the author opinion) then nothing much relevant will happen. The reason? Democratic capitalism helps us defend ourselves from guys with self-serving interests not shared by most people. He is writing this because he is being threatened by capitalism, not because something else is threating it.
- analog31 11y ago
  If anything, he is threatened by democracy.
- Drakim 11y ago
  Only though strict regulation and law against ad-blockers can the free market capitalism of democratic online publishing survive.
- radmuzom 11y ago
  > I stopped reading at the half of it To be fair, the author admits in the second half of the article that the industry has done things wrongly and proposes some solutions.
  - zamalek 11y ago
    Agreed. If advertising was implemented as the author suggests I doubt there would be any need for ad blockers. But we have popups, in-page popups ("sign up to our newsletter!"), blinking, flashing, audio and video. As realistic as the article is about the approach to advertising; that is never going to happen. If anything advertisers are going to be more aggressive as the market that does not run blockers diminishes. I'm guessing that eventually the internet is going to become unusable without blocker; at that point blockers will become de-facto and universal. Advertisers simply aren't learning.
empressplay 11y ago
Most people who don't have ad blockers don't read / process the majority of the junk ads that get displayed these days anyway. The only beneficiary of the current scheme are ad networks, charging for impressions -- advertisers may as well flush the money they spend on junk ads down the drain. If websites were forced to embed their own advertising, obtained directly from their own sponsors, those ads would reflect the amount of effort and cost involved, and more people would pay attention to them. Far from an apocalypse, there would be an enlightenment. Give me ads like I see in a national glossy magazine, give me ads like I see on network television, and I won't block them, maybe I'll even watch / read them. Give me junk ads and I will block them. It's really not a hard concept to understand.
crocal 11y ago
"The Ad Industry Needs to Disrupt the Disruptors". So, preventing pollution from unwanted and inappropriate ads is considered disruption? Wow. I call it housekeeping.
speeder 11y ago
I am from Brazil, internet bandwidth here is expensive, installed a blocker because ads, and the tracking requests, made navigation unbearably slow, some sites would have a 500KB page but need 10MB to track and load ads
arpa 11y ago
Boo-hoo. I tell you what - I remember when internet was ad free, and, boy, was it better by orders of magnitude. I say let the damn apocalypse happen. We'll all be better off not being the lucky 100,000th visitors.
- coldpie 11y ago
  Yeah, that's the thing. These sky-is-falling articles always complain that content on the Internet will end if advertising fails. Well, it won't. I put out content on my blog for free. I pay for a handful of sites that I use. I pay for products from websites that I enjoy. There are ways to put content on the web without harming your users. Maybe we'll have less content, or lower quality content, but frankly I would prefer that over the god-awful user experience that we have today.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 11y ago
    > Maybe we'll have less content, or lower quality content... If anything, the lowest-common-denominator low quality content seems to be the biggest earner as far as advertising is concerned. Whole industries are built around churning out pages full of nothing just to generate clicks! I'm not familiar with your blog, but if it's anything like the millions of other passionate personal blogs out there the content is probably orders of magnitude more useful and interesting than the output of the likes of Gawker or Buzzfeed...
JackC 11y ago
Glad to see I'm not the only one whose primary concern is tracking. I do not want you to build a dossier of everywhere I go on the web. I don't want to be tracked by dozens of shady javascript includes on each page, the way it is now. I don't want to be tracked by a nice efficient consortium either. Do not want. If the ad industry isn't ready to give up pervasive tracking, they're not facing up to the hard choices yet. And if they think the only way to support the modern web is with a massive database of everything everyone reads, then yeah, their apocalypse is coming.
- mbubb 11y ago
  Yes, succinctly put. The 'hard choice' though is between suffering though bad or irrelevant ads or being tracked. I do not think there is another way of targeting ads. We haven't evolved past the DoubleClick/ Google way of doing things. So no - I don't think the ad industry is capable of going away from pervasive tracking. I do not know how else they would do it.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 11y ago
    I think it's pretty easy to determine what someone is interested in at any given moment - base the ads on the actual content of the page! If I'm reading about some exotic location, show me ads for holidays to that destination. If I'm looking at web development stuff, show me ads for programming courses or hosting. I don't understand why the advertising industry fail to grasp this.
    - mbubb 11y ago
      Yes - I get your point. Actually targeting adverts based upon search came out of a similar crusade against spam in the late 90's. If you went to a website about exotic locations and asked for information - you would then get an avalanche of spam. Targetting started out as an (initially) less intrusive method.
liotier 11y ago
I can't wait for this apocalypse to happen ! To me, ad blocking is holy work - for twenty years I have been expending efforts above & beyond what would be strictly necessary for sufficient comfort... Ads invade my display real estate and the only reasonable response against that is of course jihad !
ifdefdebug 11y ago
> As abetted by for-profit technology companies, ad blocking is robbery, plain and simple My stand on this: 1) I have an ad blocker in place 2) Sites can detect my ad blocker and ask me to disable it before they show me content - I know it's feasible because I already saw that happening several times. 3) Then I can decide if I want to disable the blocker and see the content, or not. So if a site does not block it's content in response to me blocking their ads, I will assume they are fine with it. For sure I am not steeling the content because they basically provide it for free - as in free beer.
- eli 11y ago
  I think this is a little disingenuous. It's actually pretty difficult to detect ad blocking. The ad blockers actively try to evade detection and have special filters to interfere with detection code. It's true that some sites detect ad blocking with some success and there are commercial solutions being pitched to publishers for blocking the ad blockers, but it's a constant arms race where the publishers are at a technical disadvantage. (Consider that there's only so much they can do if they want their pages to be accessible on the web and crawled by google.) There should be an ad blocker that is as easy to detect on the server as it is to install for the user.
- pvdebbe 11y ago
  Yes. And in any case -- I haven't signed any agreements to view ads in the sites I visit. They have the right to deny adblockers, but also if they don't block us, it doesn't pose an ethical question.
meeper16 11y ago
The Ad industry is the new Record and Music industry. Figure out a new model, adapt or die.
- mbubb 11y ago
  Yes except that ad revenues are the lion's share of revenue for the companies that dominate the current internet.
  - meeper16 11y ago
    You're forgetting that the largest content companies are also the largest advertsising companies. For example, Google spends billions every quarter advertising. This is also why they maintained a $1Bil partnership with AOL believe it or not. Yahoo, Microsoft/Bing and the list goes on. All of their ad spending is part of what they consider TAC or Traffic Acquisition Costs.
    - mbubb 11y ago
      Yes, I agree - it is an ouroboros (or whatever you call that snake eating its own tail). Ad tech has a byzantine complexity that is as complex on the business side as it is on the tech side: http://www.lumapartners.com/resource-center/lumascapes-2/ http://www.lumapartners.com/resource-center/lumascapes-2/
  - SmellyGeekBoy 11y ago
    Google?
    - mbubb 11y ago
      In 2014, Google's ad revenue amounted to almost 59.06 billion US dollars. That year, advertising accounted for 89.5 percent of the online company's total revenues. http://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-revenue-of-google/ http://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-revenu...
imgabe 11y ago
I see this kind of moralizing as the last gasp of a dying business model. If a business can't convince people to pay for its product based on the merits, they try to shame customers into doing so by appealing to some supposed moral responsibility. Let's be real. Most people won't pay for content on the Internet because most content on the Internet is worthless. Its primary purpose is to waste time while procrastinating on doing something more important. Content that has an actual use - market research data, a well-written book explaining how to use a new technology, etc. - has no trouble finding customers who will pay for it. The rest has to rely on advertising. Since most ads have negative value to readers by actively obstructing the content they're trying to view or in extreme cases loading malicious software onto users' computers, they get blocked. If publishers want readers to view ads, the ads have to provide some sort of value. It's not like a billboard where you can put it somewhere that people can't help but see it.
AndrewKemendo 11y ago
Randall Rothenberg is president and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau ...which from wikipedia says is: "an advertising business organization that develops industry standards, conducts research, and provides legal support for the online advertising industry." His fear mongering at the end is a powerless cry into the wind.
deleted 11y ago
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37 points by cpeterso 11y ago

Ad blockers prove you don't need advertisement to be a popular developer. And no, popup blockers didn't end the internet.

dmolony 11y ago

What a load of bollocks.

sveme 11y ago

One reason I'm using Adblockers and Ghostery is the immense number of trackers found on any website that are supposed to help in delivering personalized ads to any future website visit. Seriously, ad companies: Stop trying to show me personalized ads! Please, serve ads that have something to do with the stuff I'm looking at. When looking at a coding site, why do I have to see an advertisement for the jeans that I did not want to buy four days ago? Why not show me books/websites/hosters/whatever that are related to the coding problem I'm currently trying to solve? It used to be somwhat like that, years ago. We should all go back to that and stop tracking users with dozens of trackers, all connecting to their servers when loading a site, crumpling the speed with which I'm seeing the content.

elorant 11y ago
Please, serve ads that have something to do with the stuff I'm looking at. I second that. I couldn't agree more with this comment. I use to make a lot of searches for pharmaceutical products for one of my projects and then Google decides to show me tons of drug related ads regardless of the context of the site I'm currently visiting. It's frustrating to say the least. Like I don't have any other interests. But I'd like to hear from people hosting AdSense on their sites. Has profiling raised CTR rates significantly?
- chimeracoder 11y ago
  > But I'd like to hear from people hosting AdSense on their sites. Has profiling raised CTR rates significantly? Probably hard to tell, since there are a lot of confounding variables. Most notably, conversion across the board has plummeted in recent years (I forget the exact percent, but I think it's about one third). So if you're a website funded by ads and your traffic has grown 10% since last year, you've actually taken a pay cut!
kevincennis 11y ago
As a consumer, I would love this. But my understanding is that most/many companies have found "retargeting" to be very effective. So it's annoying, but we also seem to respond to it. As long as that second part remains true, I don't think it's going away.
jbob2000 11y ago
It's useless to "serve ads that have something to do with the stuff I'm looking at". I read an article about smart thermostats the other day. I don't need a thermostat, I rent a shitty apartment! My HVAC is wrapped into my rent, I don't even care how much it costs. I saw an ad for bleach laundry detergent on YouTube, which I would never use because I listen to punk rock and don't own white anything. I've pretty much stopped watching TV because all they show are make-up and tampon commercials. The advertisers need trackers, otherwise they're just yelling into the void. It never used to be like this because people were pretty homogeneous. A few decades of globalization and multiculturalism have made us much more diverse, and an impossible target for generalized advertising. I'm not defending them, just pointing out the challenges product-makers and advertisers face.
- joosters 11y ago
  I've pretty much stopped watching TV because all they show are make-up and tampon commercials. You base your TV viewing on the advertising?
  - PeterWhittaker 11y ago
    He's not alone: I cancelled cable a couple of years ago for two reasons, the cost (for little to no value), and the terrible UX of ad-funded viewing. Streamed shows with no ads, ah! Wonderful, good value, even at a higher price (Netflix, IMHO, is leaving money on the table).
mpeg 11y ago
Note that Ghostery will block trackers but they do sell your usage data themselves. Use privacy badger or a tracker-blocking list for your ad blocker if you're that concerned about privacy. On another note, as an ad person, context-aware ads are alive and well, for instance if you mention a specific thing in your Facebook updates you're more likely to see an ad for it. But the hard fact is that personalisation and retargeting works very, very well. The real mistake ad companies do is that you should not see that ad if you didn't want to buy the jeans (or you bought them on a different device), which is hard to guess but not impossible
- sveme 11y ago
  Shouldn't that be off by opting out of Ghostrank? Personalisation does work to some degree, I can see that on Facebook. But especially in that place it tends to creep me out and I do make an effort to never visit Sponsored Content.
  - mpeg 11y ago
    Yes, I believe you should be fine if you opt out. Still, as much as I understand the need for Ghostery to monetise, I personally prefer to trust the EFF.
- teaneedz 11y ago
  Ad targeting is alive and well only to those building it. Targeting via tracking does not work : http://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/ http://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/ Maybe someone fromThe Deck could comment on why their approach is better.
  - mpeg 11y ago
    "Targeting via tracking does not work" is a very bold claim. Better targeting is a selling point of billion-dollar ad tech companies, and retargeting just pushes more products. Some sorts of tracking are harmful, I don't like the current state of affairs either and cookie syncing is downright evil (the practice of calling a pixel from a third party domain to "sync" your first party cookie with theirs) and abused. I just don't think it's as black and white as some people make it sound, not all advertising is obnoxious and unwanted and as a consumer it's ultimately almost impossible to escape trackers completely (unless you expect consumers to run Tails and browse websites as static html)
bad_user 11y ago
As a full disclosure, I used to work on a platform for serving ads. For one, while certain websites or apps show a clear signal that can be used (e.g. coding, hence the user can be shown ads on coding tools), many other websites or apps are not giving a signal on preferences or intent, this besides the ads inventory being an issue. For example when you're reading political news, or when you're playing chess, what ad could you be shown that could be related to politics or chess? I can answer this - without a user profile, best case scenario is that you're shown something at random, with a disastrous conversion rate. And worst case scenario is ads being used for spreading pieces of propaganda on controversial issues and I remember for example how a certain gold mining company was attempting to manipulate with downright lies the viewers of certain YouTube videos that were criticizing their open-pit project. And because such ad spots are basically worthless, they can be bought for cheap. I'm personally all about privacy and the security of my data, being downright paranoid. But privacy is one thing, blocking ads is another. If you don't like ads, then don't use those services or websites. That's how you end up rewarding alternatives and personally I rewarded many alternatives that way. Even if you want to punish bad actors, you still give them the eyeballs, you still distribute those links to your friends, etc. The concept of voting with your wallet is basically broken. And contrary to the music and film industry that has pushed for DRM, this time people that block ads don't have the proper moral ground to stand on and also the industry is not going to go down without a fight. Consider that you can't block ads in mobile apps without having root privileges. This will turn out to be a whack-a-mole game and it won't last for long. Just wait until these websites will start to serve ads from their own domain, with ads being indistinguishable from the surrounding content ... oh wait, this is already happening ;-) Worst of all is that you end up hurting other people - from publishers, many of whom are already on the verge of bankruptcy, to people that will suffer the consequences even if they don't use ad-blockers, as the history of video gaming can teach us. Do you enjoy the DRM laden pay-to-win gaming industry that others have created for you? As personally I'm thankful that I've outgrown video games.
- micampe 11y ago
  > ads being indistinguishable from the surrounding content I think this is an improvement, compared to the current situation of ads getting in the way of the content I want to read.
eli 11y ago
You want the ads to be better targeted for you but you don't want to be profiled or tracked? That is going to be difficult for most publishers. My company could do that because we sell our ads directly and approve each one by hand and therefore have our own sales and ad operations staff. A lot of sites don't have the resources or scale to do that though.
- sveme 11y ago
  No. If I have to take up with ads, I want them to fit to the content I'm currently looking at, not stuff I looked at days ago. Paraphrasing another comment (though disagreeing with him), the probability that I'm interested in smart thermostats while I'm looking at content on smart thermostats is vastly larger than the probability of me being interested in jeans while I'm looking at content on smart thermostats.
  - eli 11y ago
    Unfortunately the dirty secret of ad targeting algorithms is that they don't actually work very well. Computers aren't good at understanding context. It's a hard problem. Google is better at it then most and, well, you've seen AdSense. It's just OK. Both consumers and advertisers are mostly aligned in that they want relevant ads. The idea that taking away information about the user is going to somehow make the ads better seems like a stretch.
    - kuschku 11y ago
      Well, there is a simple way to solve that: website owner and Ad creator both describe their site/Ad in categories with some hashtags. Just match based on those.
mbubb 11y ago
Please, serve ads that have something to do with the stuff I'm looking at. I understand your point and feel yr pain but: How do you do that without some sort of tracking? Advertising as well as the 'recommendation engines" in Netflix or Amazon track your clicks to see what you are interested in. Otherwise you get programmatic advertising. Which means you get beer ads during football games; luxury brands in the NYTimes Magazine; etc.
- kuschku 11y ago
  Yes, exactly. Just do programmatic advertising. And select it manually, not through a shitty algorithm like Google does today.

kuschku 11y ago

Yes, exactly. I argued about this before: 𝗪𝗲 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝗽𝗿𝗶𝘃𝗮𝗰𝘆 There are trackers on every site, dozens of them. And they are all totally useless for advertising. If I watch a let's play on some game, ads for the game or similar games will half of the time lead to me buying it. Current tracking ads will show me an ad for something I bought a week ago next to the video, and one week later, after I have the game, I'll see ads for the game everywhere. 𝗪𝗲 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝗻𝗼𝗻-𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗿𝘂𝘀𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗮𝗱𝘀 If I load a website, I don't want to get a metaphorical – or for some people, quite realistic – epileptic shock. I want to be able to enjoy the content. The ads should be visible (not just plain text), but they should not be annoying or misleading. Don't put 20 ads looking like download buttons on a download page, or I'll stop recommending your page – or, worse, recommend people to install an AdBlock extension. 𝗘𝘅𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁 𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝘄𝗲 𝗱𝗼𝗻'𝘁 Obviously, this all only helps for affiliate-type ads, not for Brand Awareness. But for those, there is a far better solution, that is far more successful: Viral Marketing. Often, Brand Awareness works best through marketing that is fun to watch, fun to interact with. In that case, a minigame as ad in your Facebook stream, or a fun video on YouTube can be far more effective. Disclaimer: This is just my personal opinion.

TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
I recently read a book by Bob Hoffman, who runs a blog called the Ad Contrarian. It's a very funny book. He's an old-style TV/print ad guy who has been ranting about the stupidity of the online ad market for decades. He makes the point that the reason trad-ad gets so much money, is because everyone knows that ads are annoying. They're annoying on TV, they're annoying on radio and streaming services, they're annoying in cinemas, they're often annoying in print, and they're especially annoying online. In fact they're more annoying online than anywhere else, and less effective at selling stuff than ads in other media - because online ads are poorly targeted, poorly designed, poorly distributed, lacking in context, and generally nearly useless. All of which could have been changed - and it may or may not be too late now. I think it's worth reading the blog: http://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/ http://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/ (And no - I don't get affiliate income from that link.)
coldpie 11y ago
Who is "we"? I certainly don't want ads, intrusive or not. Ads are harmful and manipulative. They cause people to spend money they shouldn't be spending, or buy products they shouldn't be consuming.

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cm2187 11y ago

The article doesn't even mention the word "tracking" a single time. To me ad blocking is primarily tracking blocking. And while advertising is a legitimate activity on a free website, tracking users across websites is certainly not. You only need a jpeg to serve an ad, not tons of javascript and supercookies.

sarahprobono 11y ago
"First party data" even almost has a better connotation.
mbubb 11y ago
Yes true. There is no way to have targeted advertising w/out tracking.
- cm2187 11y ago
  You can. I can arrive on website with an http referrer that says I searched for "holidays in greece" on google. The website can do targetted ads and show me something about greece. What is not OK is that one hour earlier I was looking for details on a camera on a different website and to serve me an ad related to cameras. I don't mind the website I visit tracking me on their website and serving ads to me on thst basis. What I reject is cross-website tracking. In other words "first party tracking" is OK, "third party tracking" is not.
  - mbubb 11y ago
    Sorry for the delayed response... I like the idea you present - just don't see how it would be implemented. Jotted some ideas. Need ot read and think more. I am sure this has been on HN - no tsure where I first saw it. But this is a very interesting critique: http://idlewords.com/talks/what_happens_next_will_amaze_you.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/what_happens_next_will_amaze_you.... my thoughts on your point: https://gist.github.com/mbubb/dedfbf427848a8d8fd3b https://gist.github.com/mbubb/dedfbf427848a8d8fd3b

amelius 11y ago

> Advertising (as everyone reading these words knows well) pays for the ability for nearly anyone around the world to type in any URL and have content of unimaginable variety appear on a screen. Advertising also subsidizes the cost of apps, which can take hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce, but are often free or low-priced. I find this a bit of a weird premise. Advertising can pay only for so much (at most a few cents per view). What if content owners want to be paid a little more? Should they suddenly change their complete income model? The answer should be: of course not! But currently the answer is: yes. In my view we should get rid of this strange incontinuity and get rid of ads altogether. Yes, it may mean we will pay for content, but at least it will give us privacy, a healthy market, no annoying ads, customer rights, and most of all, it may improve the quality of content. Also, don't forget that free content will also happily coexist with this model.

gordjw 11y ago
Exactly, there was a strong amateur community with excellent content before ads were anything more than blogrolls and cross linking. Without ads, maybe we lose some of the purely commercial sites, but I'm completely sure that strong communities will continue to exist without ads.
markyc 11y ago
why would paywalls give us privacy? if anything they can track us even more
- untothebreach 11y ago
  This is very true. I think the distinction is consent, and choosing who you give up privacy for. When I visit a web page, I don't know whether the page is going to track me or not. By the time I find out, it is too late, my visit has already been recorded. When I give a publisher/content-creator/whatever money, I am agreeing to enter into a transaction with them, and I expect that they will have a record of that transaction.
  - markyc 11y ago

bsder 11y ago

> Our own IAB research found at least 34% of U.S. adults use ad blockers. Wow. That's really much higher than I would have expected.

cpeterso 11y ago
According to addons.mozilla.org, the number of Firefox users with ad blockers is much smaller: 7.93% Adblock Plus 0.84% NoScript 0.55% Ghostery 0.20% uBlock or uBlock Origin https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/compatibility/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/compatibility/
- tired_man 11y ago
  likewise the number of firefox users.

soneca 11y ago

I stopped reading at the half of it, but this author is treating so many assumptions that I don't agree as universal truth that I find it intelectually dishonest and offending. What bothered me most: that to threat advertising industry on the internet is to threat democratic capitalism; that advertising is the only possible imaginable way to support good content creating and that consumer paying themselves for content is necessarily a bad thing. There are a lot of examples where the ad industry went too far and changes came for better(in form of new business models in general or government regulations). I think now of HBO, Netflix, Wikipedia, the bilboard proihibition in my city, São Paulo. Ultimately, the democratic capitalism is working and the "apocalypse" will only happen if people do not consider it a apocalypse at all. If people consider that adblocking is too much (the author opinion) then nothing much relevant will happen. The reason? Democratic capitalism helps us defend ourselves from guys with self-serving interests not shared by most people. He is writing this because he is being threatened by capitalism, not because something else is threating it.

analog31 11y ago
If anything, he is threatened by democracy.
Drakim 11y ago
Only though strict regulation and law against ad-blockers can the free market capitalism of democratic online publishing survive.
radmuzom 11y ago
> I stopped reading at the half of it To be fair, the author admits in the second half of the article that the industry has done things wrongly and proposes some solutions.
- zamalek 11y ago
  Agreed. If advertising was implemented as the author suggests I doubt there would be any need for ad blockers. But we have popups, in-page popups ("sign up to our newsletter!"), blinking, flashing, audio and video. As realistic as the article is about the approach to advertising; that is never going to happen. If anything advertisers are going to be more aggressive as the market that does not run blockers diminishes. I'm guessing that eventually the internet is going to become unusable without blocker; at that point blockers will become de-facto and universal. Advertisers simply aren't learning.

empressplay 11y ago

Most people who don't have ad blockers don't read / process the majority of the junk ads that get displayed these days anyway. The only beneficiary of the current scheme are ad networks, charging for impressions -- advertisers may as well flush the money they spend on junk ads down the drain. If websites were forced to embed their own advertising, obtained directly from their own sponsors, those ads would reflect the amount of effort and cost involved, and more people would pay attention to them. Far from an apocalypse, there would be an enlightenment. Give me ads like I see in a national glossy magazine, give me ads like I see on network television, and I won't block them, maybe I'll even watch / read them. Give me junk ads and I will block them. It's really not a hard concept to understand.

crocal 11y ago

"The Ad Industry Needs to Disrupt the Disruptors". So, preventing pollution from unwanted and inappropriate ads is considered disruption? Wow. I call it housekeeping.

speeder 11y ago

I am from Brazil, internet bandwidth here is expensive, installed a blocker because ads, and the tracking requests, made navigation unbearably slow, some sites would have a 500KB page but need 10MB to track and load ads

arpa 11y ago

Boo-hoo. I tell you what - I remember when internet was ad free, and, boy, was it better by orders of magnitude. I say let the damn apocalypse happen. We'll all be better off not being the lucky 100,000th visitors.

coldpie 11y ago
Yeah, that's the thing. These sky-is-falling articles always complain that content on the Internet will end if advertising fails. Well, it won't. I put out content on my blog for free. I pay for a handful of sites that I use. I pay for products from websites that I enjoy. There are ways to put content on the web without harming your users. Maybe we'll have less content, or lower quality content, but frankly I would prefer that over the god-awful user experience that we have today.
- SmellyGeekBoy 11y ago
  > Maybe we'll have less content, or lower quality content... If anything, the lowest-common-denominator low quality content seems to be the biggest earner as far as advertising is concerned. Whole industries are built around churning out pages full of nothing just to generate clicks! I'm not familiar with your blog, but if it's anything like the millions of other passionate personal blogs out there the content is probably orders of magnitude more useful and interesting than the output of the likes of Gawker or Buzzfeed...

JackC 11y ago

Glad to see I'm not the only one whose primary concern is tracking. I do not want you to build a dossier of everywhere I go on the web. I don't want to be tracked by dozens of shady javascript includes on each page, the way it is now. I don't want to be tracked by a nice efficient consortium either. Do not want. If the ad industry isn't ready to give up pervasive tracking, they're not facing up to the hard choices yet. And if they think the only way to support the modern web is with a massive database of everything everyone reads, then yeah, their apocalypse is coming.

mbubb 11y ago
Yes, succinctly put. The 'hard choice' though is between suffering though bad or irrelevant ads or being tracked. I do not think there is another way of targeting ads. We haven't evolved past the DoubleClick/ Google way of doing things. So no - I don't think the ad industry is capable of going away from pervasive tracking. I do not know how else they would do it.
- SmellyGeekBoy 11y ago
  I think it's pretty easy to determine what someone is interested in at any given moment - base the ads on the actual content of the page! If I'm reading about some exotic location, show me ads for holidays to that destination. If I'm looking at web development stuff, show me ads for programming courses or hosting. I don't understand why the advertising industry fail to grasp this.
  - mbubb 11y ago
    Yes - I get your point. Actually targeting adverts based upon search came out of a similar crusade against spam in the late 90's. If you went to a website about exotic locations and asked for information - you would then get an avalanche of spam. Targetting started out as an (initially) less intrusive method.

liotier 11y ago

I can't wait for this apocalypse to happen ! To me, ad blocking is holy work - for twenty years I have been expending efforts above & beyond what would be strictly necessary for sufficient comfort... Ads invade my display real estate and the only reasonable response against that is of course jihad !

ifdefdebug 11y ago

> As abetted by for-profit technology companies, ad blocking is robbery, plain and simple My stand on this: 1) I have an ad blocker in place 2) Sites can detect my ad blocker and ask me to disable it before they show me content - I know it's feasible because I already saw that happening several times. 3) Then I can decide if I want to disable the blocker and see the content, or not. So if a site does not block it's content in response to me blocking their ads, I will assume they are fine with it. For sure I am not steeling the content because they basically provide it for free - as in free beer.

eli 11y ago
I think this is a little disingenuous. It's actually pretty difficult to detect ad blocking. The ad blockers actively try to evade detection and have special filters to interfere with detection code. It's true that some sites detect ad blocking with some success and there are commercial solutions being pitched to publishers for blocking the ad blockers, but it's a constant arms race where the publishers are at a technical disadvantage. (Consider that there's only so much they can do if they want their pages to be accessible on the web and crawled by google.) There should be an ad blocker that is as easy to detect on the server as it is to install for the user.
pvdebbe 11y ago
Yes. And in any case -- I haven't signed any agreements to view ads in the sites I visit. They have the right to deny adblockers, but also if they don't block us, it doesn't pose an ethical question.

meeper16 11y ago

The Ad industry is the new Record and Music industry. Figure out a new model, adapt or die.

mbubb 11y ago
Yes except that ad revenues are the lion's share of revenue for the companies that dominate the current internet.
- meeper16 11y ago
  You're forgetting that the largest content companies are also the largest advertsising companies. For example, Google spends billions every quarter advertising. This is also why they maintained a $1Bil partnership with AOL believe it or not. Yahoo, Microsoft/Bing and the list goes on. All of their ad spending is part of what they consider TAC or Traffic Acquisition Costs.
  - mbubb 11y ago
    Yes, I agree - it is an ouroboros (or whatever you call that snake eating its own tail). Ad tech has a byzantine complexity that is as complex on the business side as it is on the tech side: http://www.lumapartners.com/resource-center/lumascapes-2/ http://www.lumapartners.com/resource-center/lumascapes-2/
- SmellyGeekBoy 11y ago
  Google?
  - mbubb 11y ago
    In 2014, Google's ad revenue amounted to almost 59.06 billion US dollars. That year, advertising accounted for 89.5 percent of the online company's total revenues. http://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-revenue-of-google/ http://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-revenu...

imgabe 11y ago

I see this kind of moralizing as the last gasp of a dying business model. If a business can't convince people to pay for its product based on the merits, they try to shame customers into doing so by appealing to some supposed moral responsibility. Let's be real. Most people won't pay for content on the Internet because most content on the Internet is worthless. Its primary purpose is to waste time while procrastinating on doing something more important. Content that has an actual use - market research data, a well-written book explaining how to use a new technology, etc. - has no trouble finding customers who will pay for it. The rest has to rely on advertising. Since most ads have negative value to readers by actively obstructing the content they're trying to view or in extreme cases loading malicious software onto users' computers, they get blocked. If publishers want readers to view ads, the ads have to provide some sort of value. It's not like a billboard where you can put it somewhere that people can't help but see it.

AndrewKemendo 11y ago

Randall Rothenberg is president and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau ...which from wikipedia says is: "an advertising business organization that develops industry standards, conducts research, and provides legal support for the online advertising industry." His fear mongering at the end is a powerless cry into the wind.

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