21 ms·

The Ad Blocking Wars

185 points by msoad 11y ago

aikah 11y ago
As a musician, I remember 10/15 years ago what online medias told my kind "Adapt, go sell t-shirts". The irony.
- Kalium 11y ago
  As someone who has been involved in media production and online publishing, I'm wholly on board with "Adapt or die" here too.
tosseraccount 11y ago
Why don't sites just serve up the ads from their own domain?
- mschuster91 11y ago
  Because with own domains sites lose the ability of tracking. A central entity can track users across all websites where the entity has a tracking beacon, and target ads to a specific customer as a result. Tracking makes advertisements much, much more expensive and thus profitable.
  - tosseraccount 11y ago
    Can't their servers contact the mothership? And cache potential ads? I don't even mind the ads so much as the delay.
    - icebraining 11y ago
      Contacting the mothership doesn't help. The way it works is that an ad network loaded by site A sets a cookie with a new random ID. When you go to site B with the same ad network, since the ads are served from the same domain (the ad network's), it can read the cookie with the ID and link the two website visits. If ads came from the sites own domains, this wouldn't work.
      - tosseraccount 11y ago
        They know your domain, your IP address, your referer, your screen size, your OS, your browser version, your supported MIME types, your port number, your plugins, your ISP. That should be enough information for cooperating servers to target an ad.
        icebraining 11y ago
        Often yes, but that breaks easily. Referers are often not sent nowadays. Screen size and OS are often similar. Browsers now auto-update, so the versions are increasingly the same, along with plugins, which are getting rarer. Port numbers vary by connection, so you can't match them. IP address don't work well for people behind NAT, which is particularly common for mobile connections, which often have carrier-grade NAT[1], and for workplace/university/school networks. Say you have two users on Macbook Airs using auto-updating Chrome (which has bundled Flash) in the same office or university, and both came in through Google. Is this an unlikely scenario? Not really. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT
        jasode 11y ago
        >They know your domain, your IP address, [...] Yes, they can try to "fingerprint" your browser into a unique hash but that method is more reliable for desktops than mobile phones. Imagine a dozens of customers with identical iPhones sharing the wifi at Starbucks or the airport. (Everybody has the same ip address.) Sniffing for unique markers such as counting installed fonts and/or plugins isn't going to work on smartphones like it does on deskttops. Therefore, generating a cookie with an id is more reliable. Of course, people can negate that by configuring their phones to block cookies but it appears that most consumers don't do it (probably because it breaks other things such as banking, sports, etc websites.) Since advertising revenue from mobiles is growing faster than desktops, and in some cases exceeds it (Twitter mobile ads), it doesn't look like ad networks will favor fingerprinting over cookies. (That's not to say some sophisticated ad networks don't blend both techniques.)
        icebraining 11y ago
- pjc50 11y ago
  Fraud. The dozens of domains and tons of javascript are all there as part of an effort to establish that the ad has been served to a human who might concievably be a customer for the product, and not a robot or some sort of third world ad-viewing farm.
  - ino 11y ago
    That's true for click campaigns but what about view campaigns? Couldn't Samsung, now releasing their new phone, buy a website's entire ad space for a month or two, let's say techcrunch, and tell them to serve their new phone's ad themselves? Samsung is in for the eyeballs just like when they buy those huge outdoor ads, but even better, no intermediaries. The publisher would even optimize the HTML5 ads for loading and rendering speed, and have a selection of them so they could rotate them. I believe it could work well for physical items.
    - nitwit005 11y ago
      You're underestimating the general underhandedness of people. If I can sell all my website's ads once, why not try to sell them twice? Double my income. If Samsung's marketing people are in Korea, I'll show all Asian IP addresses their ad, and then show some other ad (or ads) to the rest of the world. Of course, Samsung may notice the low volume, so a better scheme is to also load their ad elsewhere, but placed on the page so it's not visible. If you look at the Javascript that gets served with the ads, there is generally a hunk of logic that tries to confirm the ad is genuinely visible, to try to deal with that last bit.
- gyardley 11y ago
  The biggest reason is that most publishers completely lack the ability to set up and manage an ad server. Next would probably be that the advertisers, fearing fraud, want the publishers to use a third-party ad server with reporting that they trust. Only after that comes concerns about behavioral targeting and tracking, and the absence of that affecting ad revenue. Finally, if they thought about it, they'd realize that ad blockers would just switch strategies and carry on blocking, so it hardly seems worth the effort.
  - corin_ 11y ago
    65% your second point, 25% your third point, 8% your fourth point and 2% your first point. (First point maybe higher in terms of number of publishers but not in terms of number of advert impressions across the internet) (My %s are obviously non-scientific.)
- 0942v8653 11y ago
  The lack of cross-site tracking makes the ads far less targeted, losing a good bit of the amount advertisers will pay for ads. Additionally, advertisers don't trust the logs of the site publishing the ads in the way they trust Google, further reducing the ad price. And adblockers already support hiding specific elements of the page, even if they don't involve making an HTTP request to a designated advertising domain. So people would stop using hosts files and start using proper browser extensions or HTTP proxies, and the ads would still be blocked (this could fix the iOS 9 content blocker problem, but not for long).
  - ubernostrum 11y ago
    Ironically, Mozilla solved this in a privacy-respecting way, and the internet went apeshit over it and demanded its removal from the browser. That whole "sponsored tiles" thing was actually incredibly thoughtfully designed: * Third parties provide tiles to Mozilla, who gets to vet them, etc. * Tiles get put into bundles hosted by Mozilla and carrying metadata which can be used to target. * The browser periodically downloads bundles of tiles and client-side, the browser decides based on browsing history and bundle metadata which tiles to display. Nowhere in this process did advertisers or even Mozilla get to know the browsing history of the end user. Nowhere in this process did advertisers or Mozilla get to know which sites in the browser history caused the decision to display a particular tile. All storage of history and decision-making on what to show was done client-side-only. The more I think about it, the more I think something like that needs to be discussed as a real alternative to how things are done now.
    - dredmorbius 11y ago
      Interesting, and thanks for posting that here. This points to a deeper problem, one not trivially solved via technology, of credibility. There've been several instances of technical solutions to problems for which I had a great deal of initial skepticism, some warranted, some less so. I was aware of both wireless networking and VOIP in the late 1990s, though neither broke through to mainstream for some years. Trust in the integrity of the underlying protocols being a chief concern (not entirely unwarranted). Challenge-response email anti-spam systems have a similar problem -- your CR system may be entirely legit, but other peoples' might well be spam-harvesting engines or otherwise bogus. Sponsored tiles requires a great deal of buy-in before it can gain mainstream acceptance. If there's a good description of the whole thing, might make for a good HN submission.
- swang 11y ago
  gets advertisers to agree to let website self-host ads, with access to click rates, etc spins up new server setups ad service spend couple days fidgeting with open source ad software ads deploy to subdomain ads.domain.com people start blocking ads.domain.com, assuming ads.<>.com wasn't already in your blocklist redeploys ads into domain.com/DEFINITELY_NOT_ADS people start blocking that URL its basically a cat and mouse game. most people don't have time for that. if you have a small client base though you can probably get away with selling a promo on a per month basis.
  - pixl97 11y ago
    >people start blocking that URL That part can be entirely generated on the fly. Even more so you could put important content in random generation parts to foil the people using blockers on occasion.
- caoilte 11y ago
  More likely to see ad companies (Google, Facebook) start serving sites.
- michaelbuckbee 11y ago
  From the blockers side, this doesn't really help as domain filtering is just the first step, then dom elements, url fragments and finally HTML identifiers (like being a standard ad image size). From the user privacy side it's also mixed as there are still large scale efforts to link up users across sites and devices.
  - majewsky 11y ago
    Depends on the application. I'm using uMatrix and always allow all content (including JS) that's served from the same domain. The problem for me really is tracking and visual clutter, and I assume that a first-party ad will not track me across domains and likely integrate well within the page layout. I'm fully aware though that I'm not the mean audience for adblocking.
    - dredmorbius 11y ago
      uMatrix isn't an ad-blocker. It uses ... a matrix ... of domains/hosts and content types to determine what is or isn't allowed to be presented/fetched by a client. Dedicated ad-blockers, such as uBlock Origin, apply heuristics which are specifically tuned to advertising signals -- hosts, domains, and, as noted in parent to your post, various HTML and other entity clues to advertising content.
      - majewsky 11y ago
        Well, even if it technically isn't an adblocker, it's a darn good one in practice. And it sets up domain blocking by default, probably using the same lists as uBlock Origin.
        dredmorbius 11y ago
        Yes, it's useful. No, it's not specific.
mschuster91 11y ago
Advertising is the maybe best example of Capitalism going raving mad. We consumers tell the media with every single installation of Adblock: fuck off, we don't want to be data-mined. We don't want to be interrupted every time we open a new tab that we might like a penis enlargement. And especially: WE CONSUMERS FUCKING HATE THE LIES OF ADVERTISING. Prior to the internet, people tended to actually believe what advertising told them (e.g. that smoking is good for your health)... now, thanks to the Internet, people can inform themselves and are ready to look through the veil of ads and see the shit. And we don't just turn on adblockers because ads are intrusive. We turn them on because we want to be free. Free of lies, free of bullshit, free of having proxy wars executed with us (e.g. Coke vs Pepsi, BK vs McD)... we want to live in peace of the non-stopping torrent of crap that screams "BUY BUY BUY" at us, every second. The sheer amount of advertising is Too Fucking Much. Just look back 50 years, how many ads an average Western person saw a day and how many today... I'd roughly guess that the amount of time a person had to spend with ads in the 60s in a year is about 1/12 of the time he has to waste (!) with ads now. There's only one solution for companies that will be long-term successful: create high-quality products that consumers can tell their friends about.
- BenoitP 11y ago
  Do you believe there is space (as in: market space) for user controlled advertising? : Publisher gets a cut, for providing a place for the ad, having made the consumer come to it, and also for providing information on the consumer's interests. This is the current situation. But the consumer would get a cut too. For renting his pixels, his CPU, his internet connection, his eyes, his brain. He would get to veto types of ads he dislikes. He would get to say he only wants 30% of ads to be displayed (and let the crowd define these 30%). He could partitipate in surveys, share his buyings lists, share events of his life (ex moving to a new city), in exchange for better revenue, or deals. This (tiny) revenue really could help bootstrap microtransaction. On top of that, if the NYT can benefit from the microtransactions, the NYT will talk of such a program. Adoption could be boosted by all the news outlets. Would participate as a consumer? Do you think publisher, advertisers, announcers would participate too?
  - 11y ago
newman314 11y ago
There would not have been such a uptick of ad blocking software if advertisers had "self policed" just like the consumer ISP market so I have very little sympathy for them. You made your bed, deal with it. So I'm all for the FCC to come down much harder than before and advertisers to feel the pain, the lack of good privacy protection in the US will hopefully improve as a result of these events.
- mschuster91 11y ago
  > the lack of good privacy protection in the US will hopefully improve as a result of these events. Nope, it will be not. Facebook, Twitter and Google depend on lax privacy laws for their business, and the NSA/FBI/CIA/... depend on private companies mining and analyzing the data for them. Two very politically powerful entity groups that will do everything neccessary to prevent proper privacy on the Internet.
  - 13thLetter 11y ago
    Yup. And the people complaining about it will then obediently re-elect the politicians who give in to those groups. Nothing will change.
spodek 11y ago
Why should others control my monitor? If they detect my software and don't let me on their site, that's their prerogative, but my computer is my property, not theirs. If their business model requires them to control other people's computers, plenty of other entrepreneurs will be happy to overtake them in the market. Once they feel entitled to control my monitor, they start lobbying for laws to support them, making their readers their enemies, trying to force their business plan on others.
- timonovici 11y ago
  Things started to go downhill, and they consider themselves too big to die, too important for the current infrastructure. Any business will have this inertia - gripping their shaky hands on the past, and showing the fangs at the present and the grim future - it's like the will to survive of animals.
- spacehome 11y ago
  I agree. Their website is just a bitstream sent down the tube. How it's rendered is totally not their business. If I wanted to use Lynx to render everything in text or use that's my prerogative.
gyardley 11y ago
Online advertising is a perfect example of the tragedy of the commons, where that commons is the general public's attention. Any individual publisher or advertiser can do a little bit better by surpassing what the general public finds acceptable, but when enough of them do this some of the general public resorts to ad blockers - causing overall ad revenues to decline, which causes more publishers and advertisers to push the boundaries in search of higher revenue, which causes more people to install ad blockers... No matter how or what you feel about advertising and tracking, this cycle is well underway, and I believe it's no longer capable of being stopped. There's still short-term wins out there, but I'd be long-term bearish on anything involving ad tech or analytics, and structure your career accordingly.
- officialchicken 11y ago
  At the end of the day, we all agree that shining shit is their job. Media/Ad buyers and sellers need to realize that there are 2 issues (intrusive ads and tracking) at play, not one. The IAB can't deflect on "bad actors" too much longer and they know it - that campaign has run it's course. They have to correct their own behavior and not modify ours as they're naturally inclined to try.
  - PantaloonFlames 11y ago
    > we all agree that shining shit is their job. I don't know about that. I'm a consumer. I use the internet to search for things I'm considering for purchase. Tires for my automobile, landscaping services, holiday trips. After searching (and prior to adblock sw), I'd see ads related to my searches. They were relevant. Many (most?) ads are horsepucky and annoying. Some are not. I am not defending ad-based models for dissemination of information and news as the one true way. Just disagreeing with your extreme statement.
  - wlesieutre 11y ago
    Let's add a third: security. You can't let a 3rd party advertiser send arbitrary web content to your customers, and then just wash your hands of it and say "It wasn't us, it was the ad network" when it eventually gets used to deliver malware to your customers. It's like if you hired a housecleaning service and they told you "Whoops, looks like somebody took a dump on your living room floor. Not our fault though. It was a subcontractor."
colmvp 11y ago
Arguments seem to glaze over the ethics of advertising and imply that it's a benign, acceptable practice. Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, minimal usage of ad-supported apps). Quite frankly I'd rather have more subscriptions. I pay for Spotify, ad-free magazines on my Kindle, and local journalists (through Patreon). And that's good enough for me.
- old-gregg 11y ago
  They're already calling it a "disorder": http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1805733/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1805733/ The question is, if advertisement leads to more consumption, and excessive shopping is now a disease, how long before we start seeing people suing ad agencies for infecting them with such illness?
- seanwilson 11y ago
  > Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, minimal usage of ad-supported apps). How much are you really worried by this? Amazon know my purchasing history for over 5 years and the best they seem to do is show me offers for things similar to what I've already bought which I'm not going to buy again for a long time. I admit seeing brands and advertising will introduce a bias but I can't see how it would influence me much when for important/expensive purchases I usually do a lot of research first. I don't love advertising but if it's only unconsciously influencing me a tiny amount in return for many free services it doesn't really bother me.
  - tracker1 11y ago
    Do you have young children? It's far more noticeable in children under 10... but I see it at times in adults too. Just little points of perception that a little shift can mean significant gains to advertisers.
AndrewKemendo 11y ago
My thought is that we should be replicating the "pull" based commerce process of the shopping mall but doing it electronically. So instead of bombarding people with stuff they don't want in a context that doesn't make sense - ads for products on the sidelines of other unrelated content - we build a platform where people can get as close to the in person shopping experience as possible from their home. Obviously there are limitations to this from a tactile standpoint, but by and large consumers have shown that they don't really need that to such high fidelity.
- nitrogen 11y ago
  I like this idea, with the caveat that you need to ban paid placement within the virtual mall. I'd like a list of product categories in a nice hierarchy, and a list of products in random order. No games or manipulation.
- cpeterso 11y ago
  A few years ago, Mozilla Labs was prototyping a client-side API called "User Personalization" for users to express their interests or purchasing intent: https://blog.mozilla.org/labs/2013/07/a-user-personalization-proposal-for-firefox/ https://blog.mozilla.org/labs/2013/07/a-user-personalization...
- newman314 11y ago
  So... something like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bXJ_obaiYQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bXJ_obaiYQ It's scary just how much Minority Report has predicted has come true. It's almost like the movie gave advertisers a playbook.
joesmo 11y ago
I don't see this as an issue. I've been blocking ads on the web for over a dozen years and now somehow it's an issue? No, it's not. The publishers who can't make it in a world where people increasingly use ad blockers won't and the ones who figure out how to make it will. Economics 101. I've been waiting for this play to start for awhile--it's amusing--but I'm not really interested in reading about idiots who see this as a moral issue. The advertising industry has had a good dozen years to reign unchecked. They've gotten used to having nice things that shouldn't have been theirs. Now, either adapt or die. Truthfully, no one outside of the advertising industry cares either one way or another. It's possible nowadays to live an almost completely ad-free life. Outside of live sporting events and billboards, we have so many ad-free choices, that choosing something with advertising at this point has to be deliberate or simply out of laziness. The world of web advertising is gone just like many worlds that are now outdated: CDs, DVDs, etc. It's just a matter of time till the companies involved realize this. They're like the coyote who, chasing the roadrunner, has run off the cliff but hasn't looked down at the abyss yet and thus hasn't yet fallen. Google and Facebook will at some point realize they're in defiance of gravity and start plunging. Perhaps they can rescue themselves with native mobile apps or other closed ecosystem allowances, but on the open web, they are finished. I'm just amazed it took this long for the final act to start ...
- caoilte 11y ago
  You can't afford to be too complacent because ad agencies know this too and will come at you sideways - 2nd hand advertising is going to become a recognised thing. Advertisers reaching you and me through celebrities we respect, through hijacking friends or just through corrupting children.
  - byuu 11y ago
    Not to mention embedded advertising. Kevin Spacey on House of Cards: "is that a PS Vita you have there?" Anything from Hollywood: "Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, look it's an Apple. Apple." Aggregator: "New Java framework Zaxybar; The true cost of OOP abstraction; Link'dOut is hiring engineers; How ride-sharing is reshaping cities; Weekly Dealmaster; The myth of the 10000x programmer" Future news article: "Hundreds evacuated the area after the hurricane ravaged the eastern parts of $city. Thankfully, many had followed city officials' advice to stock up on Dasani water bottles and flashlights powered by Duracell long-lasting batteries, so the harm of no access to fresh water and power was greatly minimized. The local damage to crops was... (article continues)" This is not a war I want to keep escalating.
pasbesoin 11y ago
It used to be, that to research a purchase, you would have to buy a book, go to the library, etc. (And, of course, talk to family, friends, neighbors...) Newspapers and magazines were the "tablets", the "browser" already in front of us. Ads on those didn't move and shout at us (well, not aurally). And they gave us at least some idea of what was out there. And yes, they did "plant" impressions in our minds. TV and radio made (from my perspective) the ads more obnoxious. Something they continued to ramp up in an escalating war for attention. These were still one-way communications: Broadcast. Although, a "primitive" ad-blocking did arise there. Push-button presets on radios. And then, that device dreaded by advertisers: The TV remote control. And, ads started appearing across channels in the same timeslots. They became harder to escape, en masse if not in the individual. Except for "saturation" scheduling. And, suspected at least per some of my viewing and listening, synchronized slots across channels. These ads were seemingly more intrusive. LOOK at me! LISTEN to me! I will own your children's will -- and yours, despite your disclaiming, subliminally. And technology brought the next form of blocking: In addition to time-shifting, home recording devices allowed us to fast-forward, eventually to click past ads. Notice, here, the influence of advertisers. Ad-sensing software in VCR's (remember that?) was challenged and, where possible, crippled. The elusive "skip ahead" button was contested and crippled. I seem to remember that it worked somewhat well on my parents' Tivo. But, Comcast put the kibasch on that, and with their Comcast box they are back to fast-forwarding. Now, on the Internet, advertising is a two-way communication. Both overt and covert (e.g. analytics). It can also now serve multiple, covert purposes, e.g. malware. And... people are seeking to escape it. 1) Because they can initiate the communication, search out information, immediately, themselves. 2) Because the ads are actively hindering their attention, focus, and consumption of the information they are seeking. 3) Because the ads can actively screw them over. Are we going to get measures that "lock down" our devices and web delivery, to serve the roll of advertising? Or, are we going to alter the model in the face of this paradigm shift? Is that two way conversation going to be leveraged to better serve the consumer -- THEIR definition of better served? Or, are entrenched interests going to just keep shouting louder? Creeping more into our personal lives? Putting our data at risk? Locking down the Internet, for the sake of their money? Someone's going to find a way to leverage that two-way communication in a fashion that gets adopted. I reach back to one of my favorite tripes -- an accurate one: Opt-in. When people start opting in, of their own will, then you'll know you have something. It's not going to be based on trickery. It's going to have its foundation in being genuinely useful, for both/all sides. Finally, I'll say that I'm very glad for the open nature of Internet and Web design and protocols, up to this point. Leaving the smarts at the end-points has enabled this challenge to come forth. It's left "the small guy" with a good measure of control and choice. Up to this point. It is my client, and it will do what I want. So, I actually have the choice to opt-in. Now, give me something worth opting-in to.
palderson 11y ago
The objective of the entire ad industry is basically to determine what it is you're in the market for. Funnily enough, I'd have no problem telling someone/thing what I'm in the market for providing the offers received matched my specified criteria. On any given day of the week, we're all in the market for something, right down to a tube of toothpaste. I've always thought that if advertisers knew, from the source, what that item was, their focus would shift to the value of the offer versus today's focus on identifying potential buyers.
- timonovici 11y ago
  The problem is - every minute of every day, they'll show their wares, while I'm interested only seldom to buy things. Most people buy their toothpaste, brushes and toilet disinfectant at the supermarket, when they do their weekly shopping - why would I have to be bombarded with it constantly? It's like in those movies when they tie you down to a chair, forcibly open your eyes, and blast you with tormenting images. I never even once bought something I saw advertised online (in sidebars, for example), because I mostly think they are scams - my parents are more gullible though, and I feel bad for them, so I block their ads to protect them. Video reviews from some people I trust are other story.
kazinator 11y ago
Supposedly blocking ads is immoral because ads provide funding for the so called valuable content. Here is the thing though: most pages do not have any such content. One reason I don't want to see the ads because I didn't want to see the page in the first place. I only landed on the page because it's stuffed with keywords that duped the search engine indexer. The ads are part of the delay and bandwidth waste which stands between me ... and hitting the back button after seeing that it doesn't have what I'm looking for. Yes, dear Webmaster, your site will die without your ad revenue. But every visitor wishes for that outcome. If I could not only automatically suppress ads, but your entire page, I would gladly do that instead. As it stands, the blocking technology suppresses only half the garbage.
- bunderbunder 11y ago
  Sometimes I do go for the content. Oftentimes this is only to be unable to access it because all the ads bring my browser to its knees, or even crash it. Yeah, I suppose the makers of these ads would suggest the solution to this problem is that I spend a few hundred to a thousand bucks on some shiny new electronics. Funny how they manage to be both the cause of and the solution to the problem. Instead I use an adblocker. And I try to be choosy about which ads I block, so that it's only the really obnoxious ones that kill my battery life or are a thinly veiled vehicle for digging through my kitchen wastebin for fingernail clippings to collect. I feel no sense of guilt about this. If they don't want me accessing their site over this, and curating their ads to be less corrosive is not an option for whatever reason, then perhaps they can set up a special clickthrough agreement asking me to consent to abusive treatment before I view the content. Perhaps that will make it easier for us to negotiate a mutually satisfactory arrangement.
  - tracker1 11y ago
    Exactly, and why android desperately needs ad blocking ability... So many sites are downright unusable on mobile phones. I'm not a big apple fan, and definitely not into walled gardens... that said, I avoided even considering apple early on because I didn't like AT&T... not I'm considering an iPhone for my next phone, just so I can have ad blocking.
anotherevan 11y ago
“It’s the worst players in the web publishing world that’s driving this.” You mean it's only the 95% that is making the rest of you look bad?
Geekette 11y ago
Ah, the ad war wages on. I say no to ads because they exist in opposition to visually clean pages, no tracking, no malware. As a lot of online content falls under entertainment, if it came down to it, I'd be happy to unclutter my mind/reduce procrastination by restricting my browsing to non-essential content, rather than eat ads. Seems part of why the frenzy is heating up is that many media sites merely regurtitate news and do not produce any unique content, but are ad and tracker heavy. So, they stand to lose, even in better-case scenarios where some people are willing to pay for content they value.
hellbanTHIS 11y ago
I don't know why they don't just show what's on sale near me geographically. You know, two for one Kraft mac and cheese up at Publix. You'd never know that I might buy mac and cheese by data mining me, I don't even really like mac and cheese, but shit man two for one! The whole targeted advertising idea seems like something cooked up by computer programmers and doesn't seem to actually work on humans. But if ads showed me that toilet paper was on sale somewhere nearby, that's something I might whitelist.
- kbart 11y ago
  Yes! Now I have to to actively search for grocery and various small stuff sales on my local markets by visiting their sites one by one. The main problem with ads that they are irrelevant. If I did a research on Google before buying a new laptop, please, don't spam laptop ads for the next 6 months or so, I already have one, thanks, I don't buy them daily. Especially from sellers that don't ship to my country anyway.
samlinkl 11y ago
I'll be super interested to see where this goes. Every company capable of it that I know of is headed toward native advertising. Ads as part of their content. That might end up being an outcome the ad-blockers are ok with (i.e. it should at least force more integrated and possibly well-behaving ads)
noodlio 11y ago
If all ad methods hypothetically disappeared, what would be the alternatives for businesses to promote their services and goods?
- bediger4000 11y ago
  Word of mouth, which is what really works anyway? Good service, good products, both go a long, long way towards places I want to buy things. I mostly put items on my Amazon wish list when someone recommends them, not based on ads I see.
- jaredtking 11y ago
  SEO (the white hat kind) is one such alternative.
- tomp 11y ago
  Yellow pages? Somewhere you go search for the information you need, when you need it, with noone showing it down your throat. Examples are Amazon, Ebay, (ad-less) Google, ...
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  Funny you should ask.... If I'm looking for something to buy: 1. I'll search for it directly. In particular, I'm interested in solid reviews. This quite often means not giving much credence to review mills -- CNET, Yelp, etc., -- where the nature and intentions of reviewers are quite often suspect. Amazon have this problem as well, though to a very slightly lesser extent. 2. Map-based systems (OpenStreetMap, Google Maps) are often what I use when seeking a specific option locally. I suspect thes are underappreciated. 3. Classifieds systems. There's a reason Craigslist took off like it did, though its quality/relevance have been lagging for some time. It's still ground zero for housing ads. High quality recommendations mean a lot. I happened to be reading a blog through one of my rare unfiltered browsers, and realised it included book recommendations on the sidebar, for which the blog editor was highly qualified to offer assessments and endorsements. The state of advertising is so bad that I had missed these previously. The blog would be better off putting those recommendations into posts or other content less likely to be filtered. First time in quite literally years that I'd had the least sense of missing something.
ChrisNorstrom 11y ago
Time for advertising go (mostly) go away. - 10+ years of Google not giving a damn over all the "Fake Download Button" ads, "Click here to Play" ads, "fake Next Slide" ads and me un-installing malware my parents accidentally installed by clicking on those ads. - Google not giving a damn about fake clicks from competitors and bots when honest businesses purchase adwords. - Websites with 3mb of advertisements loading. - Video ads that start playing automatically. - The days when TechCrunch.com has almost 10mb of scripts loading (during the Sarah Lacy John Carr days). Yes. 10MB of all sorts of analytics and javascripts loading on TechCrunch. - Me paying $300 for a top banner ad and making NO sales of my Calendar ToDoCal on a design website. Then for the hell of it, paid $20 for a sidebar ad on porn network and get 2-3 paying customers from it. - Spending $200 in Google Adwords competiting with 20 other businesses for a $1.50 click that doesn't even turn into a customer. Yeah, we're pretty pissed at ads and the ad industry and they deserve exactly what they're going to get. Expulsion from people's lives. It's sad a lot of good content fueled by moderate ads will get caught up in it but. Hey, that's life. The moderates are punished by the actions of the extremes. All 7 computers in the house have ad blocker and will continue indefinitely. It's been storming for a while. Let it rain.
hodgesrm 11y ago
Most people probably would not install add blockers except that ad volume and lack of quality have reached the point where they make it difficult to browse the web. Installing an ad blocker is a necessary act of self defense. In my own case I installed Ghostery after finding that ads from particular websites reliably caused Chrome to crash or consume 100% of CPU on Mac OS X. www.sfgate.com was a particular offender but suffice it to say their numbers are legion. At some point enough is enough.
Pxtl 11y ago
Thinking it over, the end result if this arms-race is a death of sandboxing as advertisers will require back-end access to the service you're hosting so it's completely indistinguishable from your content. Any other proper isolation of ad content will be detected as ads.
- fernly 11y ago
  The real sins, the true annoyances and the routes for malware, come from ads brought in from off-site. Ad copy served directly from the domain to which you've gone are rarely a problem. But when that domain sublets part of their page to an agency, which in turn sells exposures to anybody including malware vendors, then you need to block. Your innocent visit to wanteddomain.com ends up with literally hundreds of scripts and images pulled in from tens of unrelated domains. So an ad-blocker needs only to block cross-domain calls to be effective _without affecting display of ads from the source domain at all_.
- millstone 11y ago
  Even if the ad is served by the service host, ad blockers can leverage machine learning or similar techniques to distinguish ads from content. I think the next step is that ads merge with content: so-called "native ads," submarine ads, etc. that are the content.
joolze 11y ago
What ad blocker leaves that message? "This ad has been removed." ? Mine just give connection errors in cute little boxes.
erikb 11y ago
ad blocking is such a simple topic. I don't know why they call it a war. War requires two nearly equal powers. Here we have the whole world who is willing to pay NOT to get free ads served, and then there are a few people who got free money in the past and now cry because they need to find a real job. Just find something people are willing to pay for, or go broke. It's your decision, the same as everybody elses. And for us it's also quite simple in my eyes. There are ads and we block them. There are ad-block-blockers and we just don't visit that page again. There is enough other content to read. If you don't believe it yet, have some faith. I avoid paywalls and ads since I was able to use a keyboard and never lacked stuff to read. (And in fact if you look at my amazon history you'll see that I actually pay quite a big percentage of my monthly income on written content, it's just not blogs I'm paying for) If you look at both paragraphs it's easy to see why there is no war. We don't need these content providers who push ads onto us that we don't want. So there is no way they can achieve their goal. They can fight as much as they want. The same as the copyright industry.
cm3 11y ago
Here's what the ad industry dreams of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits_%28Black_Mirror%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits_%28Blac...
blhack 11y ago
I don't understand where the disconnect for ads is. 1) I have money. I got the money specifically so that I could use it to buy things. 2) Give me options of things to buy, and I will buy them. 3) Show me things that are relevant to my interests, and I will probably buy those things. Advertisers seem to be failing (badly) at 3. Ads that I see are not only intrusive (full page CSS popovers have gotten to the point where I just disable javascript), but they're also irrelevant to me. WHy?
- brathouz 11y ago
  To help with #3, Google lets you help them fine-tune the ads they show you: https://www.google.com/settings/ads https://www.google.com/settings/ads
jonesb6 11y ago
Wait "war" sounds like it's an even fight. If I wanted to I could remove 90% of ads from my life RIGHT NOW. In fact I've already removed ~70% of them just by adding an ad blocker to my browser and by not having a tv (opting for streams etc).
alkonaut 11y ago
> ..."the Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing" That's the most awesome billionaire name I have ever seen.
- desdiv 11y ago
  Nominative determinism strikes again!
blubb-fish 11y ago
Most people wouldn't mind ads if they weren't animated and moving or popping up and down - that's simply distractive.
_Understated_ 11y ago
I felt compelled to create an account about this. A couple of years ago, here in the UK the Disney Junior channel started showing ads. My son was around 3 at the time. Prior to that we let him watch that channel and the Cbeebies channel (no ads on that one either) but when the ads came on between the Disney Junior shows we stopped watching it. Now we record stuff from it and when we play it back, it starts from the beginning of the show. I actually wrote to Disney in the UK about it (an actual, paper letter) and complained. The gist was that they had made several billion $ the year before and how much difference do they really think that these ads would make. I also quoted a few studies I found online at the time about the dangers too. When I sent the letter, I said to my wife that I bet they reply with something along the lines of "carefully chosen advertisers that fit with their guidelines" or other bullshit... lo and behold that was what their reply was all about. I emailed a reply to that letter with just a few words: "Cillit Bang? Really?". (yes, thats the kind of ads they are showing alongside the usual toys and stuff). I hate advertising: I am definitely not an advertisers target audience because I hate being "sold to"... I can decide I want something on my own and then make an informed decision about it without ads telling me this this is awesome! However, that isn't the main reason for my hatred towards them. The amount of psychology involved in ads now and the effect on children is the main reason. There is a Ted talk by Simon Sinek[1] which I would encourage everyone to watch and partly centers around this phrase: "People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it". Now the phrase seems innocuous enough but it means that a particular part of the brain is engaged when we see something and think "Man, I must have that"... but you probably can't actually rationalise it: You likely don't need it but you damn well want it! I am no scientist but I reckon the ad agencies know this and know how to hit those parts of the brain for maximum effect but as an intelligent adult, I can filter it out! I am not led by the nose. However, my fear is that children, with their sponge-like ability to absorb all kinds of stuff into their developing brains, can't, and don't know how to filter this out. Worse than that my fear is that their brain then adapts to that targetting becoming the norm, thereafter turning them into consumers to keep the wheel turning. I will not let that happen to my son. It scares me to be honest but I am not one of these get-the-government-involved types as I have chosen to not let him see adverts and that is enough regulation imo. That being said, he did see a few in the run up to Christmas and his reaction was as you would expect: It revolved around "I want that" to almost every ad (except girly ones of course :-). In addition, I block all online ads. All of them! I refuse point-blank to be tracked by anyone (within reason of course, I have an Amazon account... as an aside, has anyone else noticed that Amazon's You-Might-Be-Interested-In-This recommendation engine shows you the same stuff you already bought?) so I use uBlock Origin and NoScript. I do pay for a couple sites that appeal to me but I will not have my web experience ruined with pages shuffling about as ad content loads, or have drive-by javascript injections thrust upon me... [1] - https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action/transcript?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_insp...
proactivesvcs 11y ago
I think it's far past time to stop calling this "ad blocking". It's computer security. When a site like MSN continues using an advertising organisation that has already infected its readers, and get stung again by the same organisation, we should start using the correct language. It's not just a choice a person makes to keep their web browsing distraction-free: it is a necessary security precaution. What used to be "ad blocking" is now part of an anti-virus solution.
FollowSteph3 11y ago
I see it as a fundamental issue of who will pay for the content. For example the New York Times has to pay people to write articles. People do not want to pay to read the articles nor do they want ads. So how does the NYT pay its staff? Until we find a good answer this battle will continue. And for those of you who say you would pay, how many subscriptions are you currently paying for? How many paywalls have you tried to bypass? Paying for content just doesn't work because people are too use to free :(
dnlbyl 11y ago
I'm a subscriber to the NY Times. Out of curiosity I disabled Ghostery and reloaded this article's page. It took 5.5s to load the page and then almost 30 seconds to load the _49_ trackers/widgets/beacons etc. This all over a 25Mbps connection. Page load time with Ghostery installed; 1.08s. I want to support the sites I value, but I'm not going to stop using ad blockers anytime soon.
dk8996 11y ago
Display ads have a bunch of issues; bots, accidental clicks, and now ad blocking. I've worked for a large DSP and saw this first hand, even on closed platforms like Facebook there were bots. Change is coming, I think that content marketing will be a better option for brands to get their message out, esp on social media platforms (not via display ads).

185 points by msoad 11y ago

aikah 11y ago

As a musician, I remember 10/15 years ago what online medias told my kind "Adapt, go sell t-shirts". The irony.

Kalium 11y ago
As someone who has been involved in media production and online publishing, I'm wholly on board with "Adapt or die" here too.

tosseraccount 11y ago

Why don't sites just serve up the ads from their own domain?

mschuster91 11y ago
Because with own domains sites lose the ability of tracking. A central entity can track users across all websites where the entity has a tracking beacon, and target ads to a specific customer as a result. Tracking makes advertisements much, much more expensive and thus profitable.
- tosseraccount 11y ago
  Can't their servers contact the mothership? And cache potential ads? I don't even mind the ads so much as the delay.
  - icebraining 11y ago
    Contacting the mothership doesn't help. The way it works is that an ad network loaded by site A sets a cookie with a new random ID. When you go to site B with the same ad network, since the ads are served from the same domain (the ad network's), it can read the cookie with the ID and link the two website visits. If ads came from the sites own domains, this wouldn't work.
    - tosseraccount 11y ago
      They know your domain, your IP address, your referer, your screen size, your OS, your browser version, your supported MIME types, your port number, your plugins, your ISP. That should be enough information for cooperating servers to target an ad.
      - icebraining 11y ago
        Often yes, but that breaks easily. Referers are often not sent nowadays. Screen size and OS are often similar. Browsers now auto-update, so the versions are increasingly the same, along with plugins, which are getting rarer. Port numbers vary by connection, so you can't match them. IP address don't work well for people behind NAT, which is particularly common for mobile connections, which often have carrier-grade NAT[1], and for workplace/university/school networks. Say you have two users on Macbook Airs using auto-updating Chrome (which has bundled Flash) in the same office or university, and both came in through Google. Is this an unlikely scenario? Not really. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT
      - jasode 11y ago
        >They know your domain, your IP address, [...] Yes, they can try to "fingerprint" your browser into a unique hash but that method is more reliable for desktops than mobile phones. Imagine a dozens of customers with identical iPhones sharing the wifi at Starbucks or the airport. (Everybody has the same ip address.) Sniffing for unique markers such as counting installed fonts and/or plugins isn't going to work on smartphones like it does on deskttops. Therefore, generating a cookie with an id is more reliable. Of course, people can negate that by configuring their phones to block cookies but it appears that most consumers don't do it (probably because it breaks other things such as banking, sports, etc websites.) Since advertising revenue from mobiles is growing faster than desktops, and in some cases exceeds it (Twitter mobile ads), it doesn't look like ad networks will favor fingerprinting over cookies. (That's not to say some sophisticated ad networks don't blend both techniques.)
        icebraining 11y ago
pjc50 11y ago
Fraud. The dozens of domains and tons of javascript are all there as part of an effort to establish that the ad has been served to a human who might concievably be a customer for the product, and not a robot or some sort of third world ad-viewing farm.
- ino 11y ago
  That's true for click campaigns but what about view campaigns? Couldn't Samsung, now releasing their new phone, buy a website's entire ad space for a month or two, let's say techcrunch, and tell them to serve their new phone's ad themselves? Samsung is in for the eyeballs just like when they buy those huge outdoor ads, but even better, no intermediaries. The publisher would even optimize the HTML5 ads for loading and rendering speed, and have a selection of them so they could rotate them. I believe it could work well for physical items.
  - nitwit005 11y ago
    You're underestimating the general underhandedness of people. If I can sell all my website's ads once, why not try to sell them twice? Double my income. If Samsung's marketing people are in Korea, I'll show all Asian IP addresses their ad, and then show some other ad (or ads) to the rest of the world. Of course, Samsung may notice the low volume, so a better scheme is to also load their ad elsewhere, but placed on the page so it's not visible. If you look at the Javascript that gets served with the ads, there is generally a hunk of logic that tries to confirm the ad is genuinely visible, to try to deal with that last bit.
gyardley 11y ago
The biggest reason is that most publishers completely lack the ability to set up and manage an ad server. Next would probably be that the advertisers, fearing fraud, want the publishers to use a third-party ad server with reporting that they trust. Only after that comes concerns about behavioral targeting and tracking, and the absence of that affecting ad revenue. Finally, if they thought about it, they'd realize that ad blockers would just switch strategies and carry on blocking, so it hardly seems worth the effort.
- corin_ 11y ago
  65% your second point, 25% your third point, 8% your fourth point and 2% your first point. (First point maybe higher in terms of number of publishers but not in terms of number of advert impressions across the internet) (My %s are obviously non-scientific.)
0942v8653 11y ago
The lack of cross-site tracking makes the ads far less targeted, losing a good bit of the amount advertisers will pay for ads. Additionally, advertisers don't trust the logs of the site publishing the ads in the way they trust Google, further reducing the ad price. And adblockers already support hiding specific elements of the page, even if they don't involve making an HTTP request to a designated advertising domain. So people would stop using hosts files and start using proper browser extensions or HTTP proxies, and the ads would still be blocked (this could fix the iOS 9 content blocker problem, but not for long).
- ubernostrum 11y ago
  Ironically, Mozilla solved this in a privacy-respecting way, and the internet went apeshit over it and demanded its removal from the browser. That whole "sponsored tiles" thing was actually incredibly thoughtfully designed: * Third parties provide tiles to Mozilla, who gets to vet them, etc. * Tiles get put into bundles hosted by Mozilla and carrying metadata which can be used to target. * The browser periodically downloads bundles of tiles and client-side, the browser decides based on browsing history and bundle metadata which tiles to display. Nowhere in this process did advertisers or even Mozilla get to know the browsing history of the end user. Nowhere in this process did advertisers or Mozilla get to know which sites in the browser history caused the decision to display a particular tile. All storage of history and decision-making on what to show was done client-side-only. The more I think about it, the more I think something like that needs to be discussed as a real alternative to how things are done now.
  - dredmorbius 11y ago
    Interesting, and thanks for posting that here. This points to a deeper problem, one not trivially solved via technology, of credibility. There've been several instances of technical solutions to problems for which I had a great deal of initial skepticism, some warranted, some less so. I was aware of both wireless networking and VOIP in the late 1990s, though neither broke through to mainstream for some years. Trust in the integrity of the underlying protocols being a chief concern (not entirely unwarranted). Challenge-response email anti-spam systems have a similar problem -- your CR system may be entirely legit, but other peoples' might well be spam-harvesting engines or otherwise bogus. Sponsored tiles requires a great deal of buy-in before it can gain mainstream acceptance. If there's a good description of the whole thing, might make for a good HN submission.
swang 11y ago
gets advertisers to agree to let website self-host ads, with access to click rates, etc spins up new server setups ad service spend couple days fidgeting with open source ad software ads deploy to subdomain ads.domain.com people start blocking ads.domain.com, assuming ads.<>.com wasn't already in your blocklist redeploys ads into domain.com/DEFINITELY_NOT_ADS people start blocking that URL its basically a cat and mouse game. most people don't have time for that. if you have a small client base though you can probably get away with selling a promo on a per month basis.
- pixl97 11y ago
  >people start blocking that URL That part can be entirely generated on the fly. Even more so you could put important content in random generation parts to foil the people using blockers on occasion.
caoilte 11y ago
More likely to see ad companies (Google, Facebook) start serving sites.
michaelbuckbee 11y ago
From the blockers side, this doesn't really help as domain filtering is just the first step, then dom elements, url fragments and finally HTML identifiers (like being a standard ad image size). From the user privacy side it's also mixed as there are still large scale efforts to link up users across sites and devices.
- majewsky 11y ago
  Depends on the application. I'm using uMatrix and always allow all content (including JS) that's served from the same domain. The problem for me really is tracking and visual clutter, and I assume that a first-party ad will not track me across domains and likely integrate well within the page layout. I'm fully aware though that I'm not the mean audience for adblocking.
  - dredmorbius 11y ago
    uMatrix isn't an ad-blocker. It uses ... a matrix ... of domains/hosts and content types to determine what is or isn't allowed to be presented/fetched by a client. Dedicated ad-blockers, such as uBlock Origin, apply heuristics which are specifically tuned to advertising signals -- hosts, domains, and, as noted in parent to your post, various HTML and other entity clues to advertising content.
    - majewsky 11y ago
      Well, even if it technically isn't an adblocker, it's a darn good one in practice. And it sets up domain blocking by default, probably using the same lists as uBlock Origin.
      - dredmorbius 11y ago
        Yes, it's useful. No, it's not specific.

mschuster91 11y ago

Advertising is the maybe best example of Capitalism going raving mad. We consumers tell the media with every single installation of Adblock: fuck off, we don't want to be data-mined. We don't want to be interrupted every time we open a new tab that we might like a penis enlargement. And especially: WE CONSUMERS FUCKING HATE THE LIES OF ADVERTISING. Prior to the internet, people tended to actually believe what advertising told them (e.g. that smoking is good for your health)... now, thanks to the Internet, people can inform themselves and are ready to look through the veil of ads and see the shit. And we don't just turn on adblockers because ads are intrusive. We turn them on because we want to be free. Free of lies, free of bullshit, free of having proxy wars executed with us (e.g. Coke vs Pepsi, BK vs McD)... we want to live in peace of the non-stopping torrent of crap that screams "BUY BUY BUY" at us, every second. The sheer amount of advertising is Too Fucking Much. Just look back 50 years, how many ads an average Western person saw a day and how many today... I'd roughly guess that the amount of time a person had to spend with ads in the 60s in a year is about 1/12 of the time he has to waste (!) with ads now. There's only one solution for companies that will be long-term successful: create high-quality products that consumers can tell their friends about.

BenoitP 11y ago
Do you believe there is space (as in: market space) for user controlled advertising? : Publisher gets a cut, for providing a place for the ad, having made the consumer come to it, and also for providing information on the consumer's interests. This is the current situation. But the consumer would get a cut too. For renting his pixels, his CPU, his internet connection, his eyes, his brain. He would get to veto types of ads he dislikes. He would get to say he only wants 30% of ads to be displayed (and let the crowd define these 30%). He could partitipate in surveys, share his buyings lists, share events of his life (ex moving to a new city), in exchange for better revenue, or deals. This (tiny) revenue really could help bootstrap microtransaction. On top of that, if the NYT can benefit from the microtransactions, the NYT will talk of such a program. Adoption could be boosted by all the news outlets. Would participate as a consumer? Do you think publisher, advertisers, announcers would participate too?
- 11y ago

newman314 11y ago

There would not have been such a uptick of ad blocking software if advertisers had "self policed" just like the consumer ISP market so I have very little sympathy for them. You made your bed, deal with it. So I'm all for the FCC to come down much harder than before and advertisers to feel the pain, the lack of good privacy protection in the US will hopefully improve as a result of these events.

mschuster91 11y ago
> the lack of good privacy protection in the US will hopefully improve as a result of these events. Nope, it will be not. Facebook, Twitter and Google depend on lax privacy laws for their business, and the NSA/FBI/CIA/... depend on private companies mining and analyzing the data for them. Two very politically powerful entity groups that will do everything neccessary to prevent proper privacy on the Internet.
- 13thLetter 11y ago
  Yup. And the people complaining about it will then obediently re-elect the politicians who give in to those groups. Nothing will change.

spodek 11y ago

Why should others control my monitor? If they detect my software and don't let me on their site, that's their prerogative, but my computer is my property, not theirs. If their business model requires them to control other people's computers, plenty of other entrepreneurs will be happy to overtake them in the market. Once they feel entitled to control my monitor, they start lobbying for laws to support them, making their readers their enemies, trying to force their business plan on others.

timonovici 11y ago
Things started to go downhill, and they consider themselves too big to die, too important for the current infrastructure. Any business will have this inertia - gripping their shaky hands on the past, and showing the fangs at the present and the grim future - it's like the will to survive of animals.
spacehome 11y ago
I agree. Their website is just a bitstream sent down the tube. How it's rendered is totally not their business. If I wanted to use Lynx to render everything in text or use that's my prerogative.

gyardley 11y ago

Online advertising is a perfect example of the tragedy of the commons, where that commons is the general public's attention. Any individual publisher or advertiser can do a little bit better by surpassing what the general public finds acceptable, but when enough of them do this some of the general public resorts to ad blockers - causing overall ad revenues to decline, which causes more publishers and advertisers to push the boundaries in search of higher revenue, which causes more people to install ad blockers... No matter how or what you feel about advertising and tracking, this cycle is well underway, and I believe it's no longer capable of being stopped. There's still short-term wins out there, but I'd be long-term bearish on anything involving ad tech or analytics, and structure your career accordingly.

officialchicken 11y ago
At the end of the day, we all agree that shining shit is their job. Media/Ad buyers and sellers need to realize that there are 2 issues (intrusive ads and tracking) at play, not one. The IAB can't deflect on "bad actors" too much longer and they know it - that campaign has run it's course. They have to correct their own behavior and not modify ours as they're naturally inclined to try.
- PantaloonFlames 11y ago
  > we all agree that shining shit is their job. I don't know about that. I'm a consumer. I use the internet to search for things I'm considering for purchase. Tires for my automobile, landscaping services, holiday trips. After searching (and prior to adblock sw), I'd see ads related to my searches. They were relevant. Many (most?) ads are horsepucky and annoying. Some are not. I am not defending ad-based models for dissemination of information and news as the one true way. Just disagreeing with your extreme statement.
- wlesieutre 11y ago
  Let's add a third: security. You can't let a 3rd party advertiser send arbitrary web content to your customers, and then just wash your hands of it and say "It wasn't us, it was the ad network" when it eventually gets used to deliver malware to your customers. It's like if you hired a housecleaning service and they told you "Whoops, looks like somebody took a dump on your living room floor. Not our fault though. It was a subcontractor."

colmvp 11y ago

Arguments seem to glaze over the ethics of advertising and imply that it's a benign, acceptable practice. Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, minimal usage of ad-supported apps). Quite frankly I'd rather have more subscriptions. I pay for Spotify, ad-free magazines on my Kindle, and local journalists (through Patreon). And that's good enough for me.

old-gregg 11y ago
They're already calling it a "disorder": http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1805733/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1805733/ The question is, if advertisement leads to more consumption, and excessive shopping is now a disease, how long before we start seeing people suing ad agencies for infecting them with such illness?
seanwilson 11y ago
> Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, minimal usage of ad-supported apps). How much are you really worried by this? Amazon know my purchasing history for over 5 years and the best they seem to do is show me offers for things similar to what I've already bought which I'm not going to buy again for a long time. I admit seeing brands and advertising will introduce a bias but I can't see how it would influence me much when for important/expensive purchases I usually do a lot of research first. I don't love advertising but if it's only unconsciously influencing me a tiny amount in return for many free services it doesn't really bother me.
- tracker1 11y ago
  Do you have young children? It's far more noticeable in children under 10... but I see it at times in adults too. Just little points of perception that a little shift can mean significant gains to advertisers.

AndrewKemendo 11y ago

My thought is that we should be replicating the "pull" based commerce process of the shopping mall but doing it electronically. So instead of bombarding people with stuff they don't want in a context that doesn't make sense - ads for products on the sidelines of other unrelated content - we build a platform where people can get as close to the in person shopping experience as possible from their home. Obviously there are limitations to this from a tactile standpoint, but by and large consumers have shown that they don't really need that to such high fidelity.

nitrogen 11y ago
I like this idea, with the caveat that you need to ban paid placement within the virtual mall. I'd like a list of product categories in a nice hierarchy, and a list of products in random order. No games or manipulation.
cpeterso 11y ago
A few years ago, Mozilla Labs was prototyping a client-side API called "User Personalization" for users to express their interests or purchasing intent: https://blog.mozilla.org/labs/2013/07/a-user-personalization-proposal-for-firefox/ https://blog.mozilla.org/labs/2013/07/a-user-personalization...
newman314 11y ago
So... something like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bXJ_obaiYQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bXJ_obaiYQ It's scary just how much Minority Report has predicted has come true. It's almost like the movie gave advertisers a playbook.

joesmo 11y ago

I don't see this as an issue. I've been blocking ads on the web for over a dozen years and now somehow it's an issue? No, it's not. The publishers who can't make it in a world where people increasingly use ad blockers won't and the ones who figure out how to make it will. Economics 101. I've been waiting for this play to start for awhile--it's amusing--but I'm not really interested in reading about idiots who see this as a moral issue. The advertising industry has had a good dozen years to reign unchecked. They've gotten used to having nice things that shouldn't have been theirs. Now, either adapt or die. Truthfully, no one outside of the advertising industry cares either one way or another. It's possible nowadays to live an almost completely ad-free life. Outside of live sporting events and billboards, we have so many ad-free choices, that choosing something with advertising at this point has to be deliberate or simply out of laziness. The world of web advertising is gone just like many worlds that are now outdated: CDs, DVDs, etc. It's just a matter of time till the companies involved realize this. They're like the coyote who, chasing the roadrunner, has run off the cliff but hasn't looked down at the abyss yet and thus hasn't yet fallen. Google and Facebook will at some point realize they're in defiance of gravity and start plunging. Perhaps they can rescue themselves with native mobile apps or other closed ecosystem allowances, but on the open web, they are finished. I'm just amazed it took this long for the final act to start ...

caoilte 11y ago
You can't afford to be too complacent because ad agencies know this too and will come at you sideways - 2nd hand advertising is going to become a recognised thing. Advertisers reaching you and me through celebrities we respect, through hijacking friends or just through corrupting children.
- byuu 11y ago
  Not to mention embedded advertising. Kevin Spacey on House of Cards: "is that a PS Vita you have there?" Anything from Hollywood: "Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, look it's an Apple. Apple." Aggregator: "New Java framework Zaxybar; The true cost of OOP abstraction; Link'dOut is hiring engineers; How ride-sharing is reshaping cities; Weekly Dealmaster; The myth of the 10000x programmer" Future news article: "Hundreds evacuated the area after the hurricane ravaged the eastern parts of $city. Thankfully, many had followed city officials' advice to stock up on Dasani water bottles and flashlights powered by Duracell long-lasting batteries, so the harm of no access to fresh water and power was greatly minimized. The local damage to crops was... (article continues)" This is not a war I want to keep escalating.

pasbesoin 11y ago

It used to be, that to research a purchase, you would have to buy a book, go to the library, etc. (And, of course, talk to family, friends, neighbors...) Newspapers and magazines were the "tablets", the "browser" already in front of us. Ads on those didn't move and shout at us (well, not aurally). And they gave us at least some idea of what was out there. And yes, they did "plant" impressions in our minds. TV and radio made (from my perspective) the ads more obnoxious. Something they continued to ramp up in an escalating war for attention. These were still one-way communications: Broadcast. Although, a "primitive" ad-blocking did arise there. Push-button presets on radios. And then, that device dreaded by advertisers: The TV remote control. And, ads started appearing across channels in the same timeslots. They became harder to escape, en masse if not in the individual. Except for "saturation" scheduling. And, suspected at least per some of my viewing and listening, synchronized slots across channels. These ads were seemingly more intrusive. LOOK at me! LISTEN to me! I will own your children's will -- and yours, despite your disclaiming, subliminally. And technology brought the next form of blocking: In addition to time-shifting, home recording devices allowed us to fast-forward, eventually to click past ads. Notice, here, the influence of advertisers. Ad-sensing software in VCR's (remember that?) was challenged and, where possible, crippled. The elusive "skip ahead" button was contested and crippled. I seem to remember that it worked somewhat well on my parents' Tivo. But, Comcast put the kibasch on that, and with their Comcast box they are back to fast-forwarding. Now, on the Internet, advertising is a two-way communication. Both overt and covert (e.g. analytics). It can also now serve multiple, covert purposes, e.g. malware. And... people are seeking to escape it. 1) Because they can initiate the communication, search out information, immediately, themselves. 2) Because the ads are actively hindering their attention, focus, and consumption of the information they are seeking. 3) Because the ads can actively screw them over. Are we going to get measures that "lock down" our devices and web delivery, to serve the roll of advertising? Or, are we going to alter the model in the face of this paradigm shift? Is that two way conversation going to be leveraged to better serve the consumer -- THEIR definition of better served? Or, are entrenched interests going to just keep shouting louder? Creeping more into our personal lives? Putting our data at risk? Locking down the Internet, for the sake of their money? Someone's going to find a way to leverage that two-way communication in a fashion that gets adopted. I reach back to one of my favorite tripes -- an accurate one: Opt-in. When people start opting in, of their own will, then you'll know you have something. It's not going to be based on trickery. It's going to have its foundation in being genuinely useful, for both/all sides. Finally, I'll say that I'm very glad for the open nature of Internet and Web design and protocols, up to this point. Leaving the smarts at the end-points has enabled this challenge to come forth. It's left "the small guy" with a good measure of control and choice. Up to this point. It is my client, and it will do what I want. So, I actually have the choice to opt-in. Now, give me something worth opting-in to.

palderson 11y ago

The objective of the entire ad industry is basically to determine what it is you're in the market for. Funnily enough, I'd have no problem telling someone/thing what I'm in the market for providing the offers received matched my specified criteria. On any given day of the week, we're all in the market for something, right down to a tube of toothpaste. I've always thought that if advertisers knew, from the source, what that item was, their focus would shift to the value of the offer versus today's focus on identifying potential buyers.

timonovici 11y ago
The problem is - every minute of every day, they'll show their wares, while I'm interested only seldom to buy things. Most people buy their toothpaste, brushes and toilet disinfectant at the supermarket, when they do their weekly shopping - why would I have to be bombarded with it constantly? It's like in those movies when they tie you down to a chair, forcibly open your eyes, and blast you with tormenting images. I never even once bought something I saw advertised online (in sidebars, for example), because I mostly think they are scams - my parents are more gullible though, and I feel bad for them, so I block their ads to protect them. Video reviews from some people I trust are other story.

kazinator 11y ago

Supposedly blocking ads is immoral because ads provide funding for the so called valuable content. Here is the thing though: most pages do not have any such content. One reason I don't want to see the ads because I didn't want to see the page in the first place. I only landed on the page because it's stuffed with keywords that duped the search engine indexer. The ads are part of the delay and bandwidth waste which stands between me ... and hitting the back button after seeing that it doesn't have what I'm looking for. Yes, dear Webmaster, your site will die without your ad revenue. But every visitor wishes for that outcome. If I could not only automatically suppress ads, but your entire page, I would gladly do that instead. As it stands, the blocking technology suppresses only half the garbage.

bunderbunder 11y ago
Sometimes I do go for the content. Oftentimes this is only to be unable to access it because all the ads bring my browser to its knees, or even crash it. Yeah, I suppose the makers of these ads would suggest the solution to this problem is that I spend a few hundred to a thousand bucks on some shiny new electronics. Funny how they manage to be both the cause of and the solution to the problem. Instead I use an adblocker. And I try to be choosy about which ads I block, so that it's only the really obnoxious ones that kill my battery life or are a thinly veiled vehicle for digging through my kitchen wastebin for fingernail clippings to collect. I feel no sense of guilt about this. If they don't want me accessing their site over this, and curating their ads to be less corrosive is not an option for whatever reason, then perhaps they can set up a special clickthrough agreement asking me to consent to abusive treatment before I view the content. Perhaps that will make it easier for us to negotiate a mutually satisfactory arrangement.
- tracker1 11y ago
  Exactly, and why android desperately needs ad blocking ability... So many sites are downright unusable on mobile phones. I'm not a big apple fan, and definitely not into walled gardens... that said, I avoided even considering apple early on because I didn't like AT&T... not I'm considering an iPhone for my next phone, just so I can have ad blocking.

anotherevan 11y ago

“It’s the worst players in the web publishing world that’s driving this.” You mean it's only the 95% that is making the rest of you look bad?

Geekette 11y ago

Ah, the ad war wages on. I say no to ads because they exist in opposition to visually clean pages, no tracking, no malware. As a lot of online content falls under entertainment, if it came down to it, I'd be happy to unclutter my mind/reduce procrastination by restricting my browsing to non-essential content, rather than eat ads. Seems part of why the frenzy is heating up is that many media sites merely regurtitate news and do not produce any unique content, but are ad and tracker heavy. So, they stand to lose, even in better-case scenarios where some people are willing to pay for content they value.

hellbanTHIS 11y ago

I don't know why they don't just show what's on sale near me geographically. You know, two for one Kraft mac and cheese up at Publix. You'd never know that I might buy mac and cheese by data mining me, I don't even really like mac and cheese, but shit man two for one! The whole targeted advertising idea seems like something cooked up by computer programmers and doesn't seem to actually work on humans. But if ads showed me that toilet paper was on sale somewhere nearby, that's something I might whitelist.

kbart 11y ago
Yes! Now I have to to actively search for grocery and various small stuff sales on my local markets by visiting their sites one by one. The main problem with ads that they are irrelevant. If I did a research on Google before buying a new laptop, please, don't spam laptop ads for the next 6 months or so, I already have one, thanks, I don't buy them daily. Especially from sellers that don't ship to my country anyway.

samlinkl 11y ago

I'll be super interested to see where this goes. Every company capable of it that I know of is headed toward native advertising. Ads as part of their content. That might end up being an outcome the ad-blockers are ok with (i.e. it should at least force more integrated and possibly well-behaving ads)

noodlio 11y ago

If all ad methods hypothetically disappeared, what would be the alternatives for businesses to promote their services and goods?

bediger4000 11y ago
Word of mouth, which is what really works anyway? Good service, good products, both go a long, long way towards places I want to buy things. I mostly put items on my Amazon wish list when someone recommends them, not based on ads I see.
jaredtking 11y ago
SEO (the white hat kind) is one such alternative.
tomp 11y ago
Yellow pages? Somewhere you go search for the information you need, when you need it, with noone showing it down your throat. Examples are Amazon, Ebay, (ad-less) Google, ...
dredmorbius 11y ago
Funny you should ask.... If I'm looking for something to buy: 1. I'll search for it directly. In particular, I'm interested in solid reviews. This quite often means not giving much credence to review mills -- CNET, Yelp, etc., -- where the nature and intentions of reviewers are quite often suspect. Amazon have this problem as well, though to a very slightly lesser extent. 2. Map-based systems (OpenStreetMap, Google Maps) are often what I use when seeking a specific option locally. I suspect thes are underappreciated. 3. Classifieds systems. There's a reason Craigslist took off like it did, though its quality/relevance have been lagging for some time. It's still ground zero for housing ads. High quality recommendations mean a lot. I happened to be reading a blog through one of my rare unfiltered browsers, and realised it included book recommendations on the sidebar, for which the blog editor was highly qualified to offer assessments and endorsements. The state of advertising is so bad that I had missed these previously. The blog would be better off putting those recommendations into posts or other content less likely to be filtered. First time in quite literally years that I'd had the least sense of missing something.

ChrisNorstrom 11y ago

Time for advertising go (mostly) go away. - 10+ years of Google not giving a damn over all the "Fake Download Button" ads, "Click here to Play" ads, "fake Next Slide" ads and me un-installing malware my parents accidentally installed by clicking on those ads. - Google not giving a damn about fake clicks from competitors and bots when honest businesses purchase adwords. - Websites with 3mb of advertisements loading. - Video ads that start playing automatically. - The days when TechCrunch.com has almost 10mb of scripts loading (during the Sarah Lacy John Carr days). Yes. 10MB of all sorts of analytics and javascripts loading on TechCrunch. - Me paying $300 for a top banner ad and making NO sales of my Calendar ToDoCal on a design website. Then for the hell of it, paid $20 for a sidebar ad on porn network and get 2-3 paying customers from it. - Spending $200 in Google Adwords competiting with 20 other businesses for a $1.50 click that doesn't even turn into a customer. Yeah, we're pretty pissed at ads and the ad industry and they deserve exactly what they're going to get. Expulsion from people's lives. It's sad a lot of good content fueled by moderate ads will get caught up in it but. Hey, that's life. The moderates are punished by the actions of the extremes. All 7 computers in the house have ad blocker and will continue indefinitely. It's been storming for a while. Let it rain.

hodgesrm 11y ago

Most people probably would not install add blockers except that ad volume and lack of quality have reached the point where they make it difficult to browse the web. Installing an ad blocker is a necessary act of self defense. In my own case I installed Ghostery after finding that ads from particular websites reliably caused Chrome to crash or consume 100% of CPU on Mac OS X. www.sfgate.com was a particular offender but suffice it to say their numbers are legion. At some point enough is enough.

Pxtl 11y ago

Thinking it over, the end result if this arms-race is a death of sandboxing as advertisers will require back-end access to the service you're hosting so it's completely indistinguishable from your content. Any other proper isolation of ad content will be detected as ads.

fernly 11y ago
The real sins, the true annoyances and the routes for malware, come from ads brought in from off-site. Ad copy served directly from the domain to which you've gone are rarely a problem. But when that domain sublets part of their page to an agency, which in turn sells exposures to anybody including malware vendors, then you need to block. Your innocent visit to wanteddomain.com ends up with literally hundreds of scripts and images pulled in from tens of unrelated domains. So an ad-blocker needs only to block cross-domain calls to be effective _without affecting display of ads from the source domain at all_.
millstone 11y ago
Even if the ad is served by the service host, ad blockers can leverage machine learning or similar techniques to distinguish ads from content. I think the next step is that ads merge with content: so-called "native ads," submarine ads, etc. that are the content.

joolze 11y ago

What ad blocker leaves that message? "This ad has been removed." ? Mine just give connection errors in cute little boxes.

erikb 11y ago

ad blocking is such a simple topic. I don't know why they call it a war. War requires two nearly equal powers. Here we have the whole world who is willing to pay NOT to get free ads served, and then there are a few people who got free money in the past and now cry because they need to find a real job. Just find something people are willing to pay for, or go broke. It's your decision, the same as everybody elses. And for us it's also quite simple in my eyes. There are ads and we block them. There are ad-block-blockers and we just don't visit that page again. There is enough other content to read. If you don't believe it yet, have some faith. I avoid paywalls and ads since I was able to use a keyboard and never lacked stuff to read. (And in fact if you look at my amazon history you'll see that I actually pay quite a big percentage of my monthly income on written content, it's just not blogs I'm paying for) If you look at both paragraphs it's easy to see why there is no war. We don't need these content providers who push ads onto us that we don't want. So there is no way they can achieve their goal. They can fight as much as they want. The same as the copyright industry.

cm3 11y ago

Here's what the ad industry dreams of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits_%28Black_Mirror%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits_%28Blac...

blhack 11y ago

I don't understand where the disconnect for ads is. 1) I have money. I got the money specifically so that I could use it to buy things. 2) Give me options of things to buy, and I will buy them. 3) Show me things that are relevant to my interests, and I will probably buy those things. Advertisers seem to be failing (badly) at 3. Ads that I see are not only intrusive (full page CSS popovers have gotten to the point where I just disable javascript), but they're also irrelevant to me. WHy?

brathouz 11y ago
To help with #3, Google lets you help them fine-tune the ads they show you: https://www.google.com/settings/ads https://www.google.com/settings/ads

jonesb6 11y ago

Wait "war" sounds like it's an even fight. If I wanted to I could remove 90% of ads from my life RIGHT NOW. In fact I've already removed ~70% of them just by adding an ad blocker to my browser and by not having a tv (opting for streams etc).

alkonaut 11y ago

> ..."the Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing" That's the most awesome billionaire name I have ever seen.

desdiv 11y ago
Nominative determinism strikes again!

blubb-fish 11y ago

Most people wouldn't mind ads if they weren't animated and moving or popping up and down - that's simply distractive.

_Understated_ 11y ago

I felt compelled to create an account about this. A couple of years ago, here in the UK the Disney Junior channel started showing ads. My son was around 3 at the time. Prior to that we let him watch that channel and the Cbeebies channel (no ads on that one either) but when the ads came on between the Disney Junior shows we stopped watching it. Now we record stuff from it and when we play it back, it starts from the beginning of the show. I actually wrote to Disney in the UK about it (an actual, paper letter) and complained. The gist was that they had made several billion $ the year before and how much difference do they really think that these ads would make. I also quoted a few studies I found online at the time about the dangers too. When I sent the letter, I said to my wife that I bet they reply with something along the lines of "carefully chosen advertisers that fit with their guidelines" or other bullshit... lo and behold that was what their reply was all about. I emailed a reply to that letter with just a few words: "Cillit Bang? Really?". (yes, thats the kind of ads they are showing alongside the usual toys and stuff). I hate advertising: I am definitely not an advertisers target audience because I hate being "sold to"... I can decide I want something on my own and then make an informed decision about it without ads telling me this this is awesome! However, that isn't the main reason for my hatred towards them. The amount of psychology involved in ads now and the effect on children is the main reason. There is a Ted talk by Simon Sinek[1] which I would encourage everyone to watch and partly centers around this phrase: "People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it". Now the phrase seems innocuous enough but it means that a particular part of the brain is engaged when we see something and think "Man, I must have that"... but you probably can't actually rationalise it: You likely don't need it but you damn well want it! I am no scientist but I reckon the ad agencies know this and know how to hit those parts of the brain for maximum effect but as an intelligent adult, I can filter it out! I am not led by the nose. However, my fear is that children, with their sponge-like ability to absorb all kinds of stuff into their developing brains, can't, and don't know how to filter this out. Worse than that my fear is that their brain then adapts to that targetting becoming the norm, thereafter turning them into consumers to keep the wheel turning. I will not let that happen to my son. It scares me to be honest but I am not one of these get-the-government-involved types as I have chosen to not let him see adverts and that is enough regulation imo. That being said, he did see a few in the run up to Christmas and his reaction was as you would expect: It revolved around "I want that" to almost every ad (except girly ones of course :-). In addition, I block all online ads. All of them! I refuse point-blank to be tracked by anyone (within reason of course, I have an Amazon account... as an aside, has anyone else noticed that Amazon's You-Might-Be-Interested-In-This recommendation engine shows you the same stuff you already bought?) so I use uBlock Origin and NoScript. I do pay for a couple sites that appeal to me but I will not have my web experience ruined with pages shuffling about as ad content loads, or have drive-by javascript injections thrust upon me... [1] - https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action/transcript?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_insp...

proactivesvcs 11y ago

I think it's far past time to stop calling this "ad blocking". It's computer security. When a site like MSN continues using an advertising organisation that has already infected its readers, and get stung again by the same organisation, we should start using the correct language. It's not just a choice a person makes to keep their web browsing distraction-free: it is a necessary security precaution. What used to be "ad blocking" is now part of an anti-virus solution.

FollowSteph3 11y ago

I see it as a fundamental issue of who will pay for the content. For example the New York Times has to pay people to write articles. People do not want to pay to read the articles nor do they want ads. So how does the NYT pay its staff? Until we find a good answer this battle will continue. And for those of you who say you would pay, how many subscriptions are you currently paying for? How many paywalls have you tried to bypass? Paying for content just doesn't work because people are too use to free :(

dnlbyl 11y ago

I'm a subscriber to the NY Times. Out of curiosity I disabled Ghostery and reloaded this article's page. It took 5.5s to load the page and then almost 30 seconds to load the _49_ trackers/widgets/beacons etc. This all over a 25Mbps connection. Page load time with Ghostery installed; 1.08s. I want to support the sites I value, but I'm not going to stop using ad blockers anytime soon.

dk8996 11y ago

Display ads have a bunch of issues; bots, accidental clicks, and now ad blocking. I've worked for a large DSP and saw this first hand, even on closed platforms like Facebook there were bots. Change is coming, I think that content marketing will be a better option for brands to get their message out, esp on social media platforms (not via display ads).