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Ignoring the ethics and just looking at the technology, would the next step for content providers be to do the ad bidding and serving from the webserver itself?
by chillacy 11y ago
Ignoring the ethics and just looking at the technology, would the next step for content providers be to do the ad bidding and serving from the webserver itself? This way, ad blockers wouldn't be able to just block an ad serving domain. They could write custom filters for each website, but that increases the work for the adblock lists.
- pdkl95 11y agoAll a website would need to do is tunnel the entire site through a proxy that rewrites all of the asset and other same-site URLs so they are all the same type of synthetic token or hash. This would remove the ability to do host or URL based filtering, forcing ad blockers to download every URL and try to classify by content. This isn't even a particularly complicated change, and I've seen it done before (circa 1997). As for how this impacts the ability to play the current "ad bidding" game, that is trivially solved by 3rd (4th?) party proxies. Ad blockers can be inconvenienced even more by making the content unique every time it is sent by the proxy, preventing trivial matching by file hash. The end-game of this type of strategy is having the proxy serve up a single opaque block of WebAssembly code that renders the page to a <canvas> using custom and/or obfuscated font rendering. This is almost certainly a stupid way to run a website, but I expect people that feel they are under attack from ad blockers to fight back in any way they can. Some of them are already trying to make up "moral" arguments (and legal wishful-thinking) against the recent increase in ad blocking. Obviously this won't work in the long run, but people that feel they are under attack are not know for making rational decisions.