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For a very long time, I did not want to use ad blockers. I have used ads in the past to monetize some of my own projects, and I really did not want to stab the

by karterk 11y ago

For a very long time, I did not want to use ad blockers. I have used ads in the past to monetize some of my own projects, and I really did not want to stab the creators of quality content. However, last week I finally reversed my decision and started using ad blockers. Why? Frankly, many sites are just greedy. Banners were ugly enough (and I tolerated them) but many sites these days show ads that cover the content, and going as far as to hide the [x] button for a few seconds. And, I am not even talking about privacy and security issues. Businesses have to come up with better monetization strategies. Shoving ads on my face and making me accidentally click them is a net loss for everyone.

adamt 11y ago
I agree completely and like you for a long time I didn't use ad-blockers on morale grounds. Personally I don't get overly excited about the tracking/re-targeting, but what did bother me was how ridiculously intrusive the ads on some sites that totally destroyed my user experience, wasted my batteries and cellular data and at times prevented me from (on mobile) from getting to the content I actually wanted. With mobile it was also the stupid number of accidental clicks when scrolling, or pop ups with really small 'x' to close that and a non-zoomable viewport. Wasting my time (and somebody else's money) on ads I never wanted to click does't seem like a good or sustainable economic value add. Sometimes ads can be useful. On Google search sometimes the people who will pay for ads are sometimes a better signal than those that SEO their way to the top. Similarly I have discovered things of interest in Facebook & Twitter ads where they were relevant to me. It does seem that online advertising is in need of a bit of a 'reboot'.
- thirdsun 11y ago
  Same here - I'm not that concerned about targeted ads, but if it means significant consequences for my bandwidth, security, performance or simply being able to use the site as intended, well, then I don't seem to have a realistic choice. That said, I think there's room for an adblocker that focuses on ads that are too intrusive and whitelists decent, static ads automatically. Currently I do that manually on a per site basis.
  - freehunter 11y ago
    Adblock Plus does that. Ad networks can in some fashion request their ads be unblocked, and ABP does some sort of review (I'm not sure how it all works, I don't use it).
    - thirdsun 11y ago
      I'm not sure, but isn't that review process basically a transaction of money? As in buying your way out of being blocked? That's probably the last thing I'd want.
      - freehunter 11y ago
        Fair enough. I know I had heard something about them unblocking "non-intrusive ads" but didn't really pay attention to the details.
    - fucking_tragedy 11y ago
      Ad networks pay ABP to be whitelisted. That is their review process.
      - Karunamon 11y ago
        In fairness, they don't just whitelist any old ad, there's ostensibly a review and guidelines that must be followed, but at the end of the day, it's still a colossal conflict of interest.
- tomp 11y ago
  > On Google search sometimes the people who will pay for ads are sometimes a better signal than those that SEO their way to the top. Are they? If you have 2 products that sell for X, one company spends Y on ads and X - Y on product, the other spends X on product. It would seem that the second one should be SEOd (by good reviews and recommendations) to the top, and that would be the more important signal.
  - maaku 11y ago
    Too simplistic a model.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    For me an ad is a signal I don't want that product. Most of the time ads in search results are suboptimal compared to organic results anyway.
DanielBMarkham 11y ago
I both make a small amount of money from ads and also use AdBlocker. The thing is, I don't mind ads. The problem is that the people providing content should own and manage what ads they show me. This idea of allocating page space and then bidding it off? It only leads to click fraud, malware, and all sorts of other problems. Instead, write things I find useful, then provide me links -- text links -- to ways I might continue my investigation. Ads are fine when they help people. When we start focusing on the money instead of the experience, however, it all goes to crap. I don't think ads are something you can outsource if you want to be a quality content provider. They're just as important as any other content on the page. By the way, this also means that mostly-plain-text pages could work fine for both creators and consumers in the vast majority of cases.
- euske 11y ago
  This. I tend to think ads only work when people don't care or even notice them. If an ad annoys its viewers, it's already a failure of the ad and they don't deserve money, whether or not it's blocked. Many obscene ads failed silently. Ad blocking is just a visible part of their failure.
- daemin 11y ago
  You mean like in some of those fancy fashion magazines where the ads are actually part of the content that people buy. Yes that would be good for websites to do, but it also requires a dedicated ad department to organise it all, and consumers of that content that would want to buy the goods that are being sold.
  - Tyr42 11y ago
    Penney Arcade had good ads. They actually play the games that were advertised and it was also a stamp of approval.
    - milesvp 11y ago
      This. It's the only website I've found that actually has ads relevant to the site, ads I want to see and am receptive for. My understanding from what I've gleaned from their blog, is that this really worked out for them (though PAX revenue now dwarfs their site revenue).
manachar 11y ago
My limit was reached a while ago when intrusive ads starting becoming the norm. My personal least favorite are ones that move the content of the page so I'm bouncing around trying to read the same paragraph and ones that somehow think my cursor hovering is sufficient reason to play sound or "expand" an ad. Monetization from advertising must be brutal if so much content is being displayed in worse and worse ways.
- Kesty 11y ago
  Monetization is not great, but I think the biggest culprit in this case is a mix of competition, ad agencies and classic greed. The number of impressions is limited and declining (moving from the desktop where you can put 15 ads on each page to the mobile where you have max 1 or 2 ads per page) and companies are fighting for the attention of the user while content providers try to squeeze as many adspaces they can in their pages to incrase/stabilize the declining CPM (cost per thousand impression), so they ask their ad agencies to create more inventive and engaging (attention grapping/annoying) banners. When they ask website to do their new and improved format, they usually get a no in response. Then they shove more money at the problem until some website can't say no anymore and accept the new format. Once someone else has accepted the others can't keep saying no or the company will only do banners with the competition that actually accept the new format, so everyone does. All new invasive formats usually start with clear and strict rules: only one each day, for a max of two per week. And we can show the ad to each users a maximum of twice a day. But this "rules" become progressively less strict as more and more companies want to purchase the new format that has a much higher cost and some ad manager will come to you faking sadness (while actually counting his cut behind his back) and say the magic words: "I don't like it either but it's how we paid your salaries and it's too much money to pass up." And this is how banner "standards" are born.
eveningcoffee 11y ago
I am with you in this. I saw that people around me started to use AdBlockers and I found first that it is not really fair from them. Until one of the news sites I regularly read was barely usable by always running on 100% CPU, which means it was not possible to open it on multiple tabs without making my computer fully unusable. And until Google started to use video ads in my region. I figured that it would be better for the local business to block the ads as if they cluelessly start to annoy me with their video ads, they would anger and loose one of their potential and possibly already loyal customer. Beside some of the ads had very questionable moral value. I would call this trend telefication - ad publishers want to control when people see ads and for how long. I think that this is not acceptable. PS. Paying for content is also not an option until there is an anonymous way to make a payment and the payments are minuscule. Otherwise we will have serious censorship issue.
- inanutshellus 11y ago
  I actually like seeing ads (though I wish they weren't coming from omniscient ad networks and were instead coming from the sites I was visiting). Content providers get money, I get free content. Nice. HTML5 Video Ads are what finally switched me to ad blockers. When people served static images and Adobe Flash videos, I could just disable auto-play of Flash, and voila, I see ads, but don't get obnoxious videos on random tabs. Now I have to block it all to get any peace. Auto-playing video ads is just bad etiquette.
  - bluejekyll 11y ago
    Safari at least added a disable all sound on a tab button. They should probably add or include video as an option too.
    - daemin 11y ago
      Yeah, Firefox has a mute tab button in each tab, but it still annoys me when all of a sudden I get some sound playing in the background for no reason.
team_doom 11y ago
I think this is the wrong way to approach this. You're essentially pirating content now. If you don't like the ads, stop using the site. It's that simple. To take it a step farther, send an email to customer service explaining WHY you're no longer using the site. This sends a much stronger message to them about what makes you unhappy with the service they provide.
- cm2187 11y ago
  I actually end up doing that with websites that block browsers with ad-blockers from viewing the content. It takes a while to change my habits but when they are changed there is no coming back to these sites.
  - team_doom 11y ago
    To me that comes off as "Hey, I'm angry you won't let me view your content without paying for it anymore". Obviously in this case paying for it is viewing/watching ads. Not trying to get high and mighty with anyone. The whole ad-block culture just screams entitlement to me and it bothers me a lot.
    - msandford 11y ago
      Who is entitled? People who want to view content and will make what they feel is a reasonable bargain to do so, or people who want to sell ads and will make unreasonable bargains to do so? If the initial html that loaded on the page also had the ads in it, it'd be much harder to block them and also make the experience of seeing those ads much less unpleasant. As it stands what people are doing is loading the initial html and saying "no thanks" to all of the follow-on stuff. There's two sides to every story.
      - team_doom 11y ago
        I don't disagree with the fact that ads could be better served more safely and more securely. And I agree that the experience could be better. That's where my comment about writing an email to explain ones unhappiness with the user experience comes in. I work in information security and we do see a lot of malware infections from compromised ad servers. The idea of a website serving ads themselves, instead of relying on a call to an ad network, is good. It means big changes to how advertising works though. The advertisers would have to give customers the ads for them to embed into the page and would need some sort of guarantee that the customer wouldn't change the ads and would pull them down when it was time to do so. I can't think of a way to check this stuff automatically that doesn't involve a call to an advertisers server, which is the whole problem to begin with.
cm2187 11y ago
I might agree that preventing ads from displaying is immoral but tracking users across websites is even more immoral. And since I cannot rely on websites to behave, ad-blockers are actually re-introducing morality into browsing by blocking the tracking.
- sokoloff 11y ago
  They block one vector of tracking. They don't block CDN-based tracking: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/11/30/a-new-type-of-tracking-akamais-pixel-free-technology/ http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/11/30/a-new-type-of-trackin... (note the juxtaposition of "new" and "2010")
  - cm2187 11y ago
    Looks like akamai needs to be added to my blockers list.
    - iand 11y ago
      Don't forget Google's free hosting of Javascript libraries and webfonts. The cost of serving those is recouped by dropping a cookie on you. Also Google DNS can give them great insight into domain popularity.
      - cm2187 11y ago
        Yeah but there are no cookie in DNS queries. Tracking by IP is a lot more toothless than tracking by cookies / super-cookies.
        pdkl95 11y ago
        IP based tracking still works most of the time. Dynamic IPs change very infrequently, and NAT combines IPs in physically (and often socially) close groups. It isn't perfect, but a lot of those requests can probably be mapped back to those cookies. Google's entire business is based on building large database of tracking (and other) information; obviously their DNS is just another data source. Just skip the recursive resolvers and run a local caching DNS server that starts from the root zones.
arjie 11y ago
And which are these websites that are using these dirty tricks?
- echelon 11y ago
  Almost 70% of the websites linked from Reddit that I click through. Many links from HN are also guilty of this. When I'm on mobile, I frequently click on ads by mistake when I'm trying to scroll. It's unintentional on my part, but I feel the web developers and ad networks are colluding to make this happen.
  - thecatspaw 11y ago
    sounds like the dark-pattern bait & switch
- fucking_tragedy 11y ago
  How many people have a venereal disease? 20%? Doesn't mean I'm going to get fucked by ad networks without protection. It's not worth the risk.
FussyZeus 11y ago
The last three viral infections I've had on my PC's have come from advertisements on websites. I generally will whitelist a select few websites that I trust to not destroy my computer and to not run irritating ads, but at the end of the day this is my damn computer, not the ad companies. If I don't feel like running their code then I can make my machine not do that and there isn't jack they can do about it. Oh no I can't read about the Model 3 on New York Times? Then I'll go read about it on LA Times, or Huffington Post, or any one of the ten thousand other news sources no doubt covering it.
- chrisseaton 11y ago
  How does an advert deliver a virus? Are these genuine remote native code execution vulnerabilities in browsers? Or just breaking the sandbox somehow and using internal browser APIs? Isn't what you need a security patch for your browser rather than an advert blocker?
  - a3n 11y ago
    I don't know how it's done, but it happens. Forbes Shuts Down Ads Serving Malware http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/09/22/forbes-website-served-malware/#39407b513748 http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/09/22/forbes...
    - chrisseaton 11y ago
      I don't know how it's done either, and I've heard about them a few times. It seems somewhat unlikely that there is a remote code execution vulnerability being exploited only by adverts that hasn't been urgently fixed by the browsers. If there genuinely is an exploit, an advert blocker isn't enough as you could put it on any website as well. Therefore I wonder if it's possible that someone has a mis-informed definition of viruses and really it's something a little different, such as a simple link to actively download malware.
      - ceejayoz 11y ago
wslh 11y ago
> Businesses have to come up with better monetization strategies. I don't like Ads but possibly there is no general way to monetize content and this is the problem. With lot of freely available value on Internet it is really difficult to convert it to $$$.
- tremon 11y ago
  there is no general way to monetize content Then, according to the laws of capital dynamics, that content should die out.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    Which is why sites like the Sydney Morning Herald are utterly screwing themselves over. Seriously, go to the SMH now, and check out your ad-blocker. There will be about 60 blocked ads and sites. Then check out the headlines - all click-bait. Ironically they now have a 30 article a month limit (easily bypassed by switching to private mode in your browser) which actively reduces their ad revenue and messes up their statistics tracking when people switch to private browsing... In the meantime, Fairfax have been progressively cutting staff. Before it was outsourcing subeditors to New Zealand (and it shows, there are an unbelievable number of unreadable sentences, along with grammar and spelling errors - even in their headlines they show on their main page!) and now they are about to shed more than 100 jobs in actual journalism. I once subscribed to the SMH, but then the quality got so bad that I just cancelled. They can't even get their comments section right - it's barely usable, and they don't even get threading reasonably correct.
- zanny 11y ago
  Sure there is. I have a creative skill to make information. If anyone in the world wants that information, they can pay me to make it, and then after that I've already been paid, I can release it CC0 and let the world go nuts with it. The problems of online DRM / ad ridden websites / etc are all attempts to after the fact monetize information using obsolete IP policy while acting like there is any scarcity to it at all after its made. A lot of people hear that first paragraph and go on a tirade about getting your brand out, but... that is the same problem, in practice, with either form of funding the creation of information, and is technically its own problem set. You need an audience whether you want people paying you up front to make it at fixed cost or try to use state granted monopolies to extort people for money after the fact.
nulbyte 11y ago
I believe you hit the nail on the head: greed. This was my tipping point. When sites got so greedy that they stopped caring if anyone read their content, I stopped caring if they got paid for obtrusive ads. Even Google has designed some horrendous ads, especially the Nexus ad that grabs swipes on mobile, keeping you from scrolling past it. If the ads stuck to the meatverse-equivalent style of static but attractive, I would be fine. But the overwhelming majority overwhelms the reader with animation, transitions, cover-ups, pop-over, pop-up, pop-under—how many pops do we need before we have enough?! And publishers have restored to covering up their just to force interactivity, so you can click through them and see more ads. Why is there a Read More link on this recipe page? Obviously I want to read more, that's why I visited this page! It boils down to greed. The bar has been set so low to attract more and more advertisers to make more money. Frankly, if someone were ingenious enough to inflate the price for plain publisher-hosted ads, one to a page, that didn't overwhelm the reader, I'm pretty sure that person would soon be rich.
- eli 11y ago
  Is it fair to call it "greed" if these sites aren't making much money, even with all the aggressive ad units? You need to have an extremely popular site with uncommonly low overhead to be very profitable just off of banner ads.
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    Then why do they bother?
    - spacehome 11y ago
      Yea, I'm ready for websites who can't find a viable monetization strategy to just go bankrupt already and stop blaming me for their shitty business plan.
      - eli 11y ago
        You won't miss them? Quite a few of the sites I enjoy are struggling to remain ad supported and I would be sad if they can't find a way to make it work.
InclinedPlane 11y ago
Exactly. I support makers and creators and artists. I back kickstarters. I have patreon subscriptions. I buy music and books and swag from artists I like a lot, especially those that I think need the most support. And sometimes I volunteer my time and skills. All in all I've spent or donated tens of thousands of dollars either in cash or time throughout the years to the arts. Meanwhile, I spent 20 years browsing the web without an ad blocker. Since I've started using one last year, it's led to a much better experience. Yet still, there are people who think that I should be burdened with some moral obligation to suffer advertising, for things that I will never buy, being shoved in my face in order to consume content. As though the business models of every single content creator on the planet were my personal problem. No, I do my part, and more. I've paid my advertising dues as well, and I'm done. If you don't like that you can go fuck yourself. You should be spending your time urging content creators to fix their broken business models, or helping them to do so, not moralizing about fucking advertising.
lallysingh 11y ago
I don't use ad blockers, but I do just hit the 'back' button when I see a site that's ad-unreadable. I don't feel that I'm missing anything of quality this way. I have a flash blocker on, which I think ends up doing 90% of what I would want an ad blocker for when combined with my 'back it up on bad ads' policy.
Cypher 11y ago
Sounds like the internet is going back to the early 2000s with mass popups? and auto playing sounds?. I recall the banner ad that made me learn how to edit my host files. It'd play a sound of a bee buzzing away on loop. I learnt how to edit host files pretty quickly, never looked back. Threw TV out soon over a decade ago too. Native ads are on the rise, that's the next wave.
pmichaud 11y ago
I think it's unfair to call it greed. It feels like a strawman dismissal. It's actually hard to make money from content, and the best content creators almost certainly aren't also the best monetizers. So people do the default thing. The default thing is ads. And the problem is that ads don't work very well, and they are working less and less well as time goes on because people are acclimating to them like a war of escalation. To squeeze small a bit of money out of content, you run ads that are increasingly obtrusive. If they aren't, they don't make any money at all. There's a huge market opportunity here. It's not greed, it's an obvious outcome of incentives.
johnward 11y ago
I was in the same camp as you until a few weeks ago. I finally gave in. Found that ublock origin doesn't block many types of ads though.

by karterk 11y ago

adamt 11y ago

I agree completely and like you for a long time I didn't use ad-blockers on morale grounds. Personally I don't get overly excited about the tracking/re-targeting, but what did bother me was how ridiculously intrusive the ads on some sites that totally destroyed my user experience, wasted my batteries and cellular data and at times prevented me from (on mobile) from getting to the content I actually wanted. With mobile it was also the stupid number of accidental clicks when scrolling, or pop ups with really small 'x' to close that and a non-zoomable viewport. Wasting my time (and somebody else's money) on ads I never wanted to click does't seem like a good or sustainable economic value add. Sometimes ads can be useful. On Google search sometimes the people who will pay for ads are sometimes a better signal than those that SEO their way to the top. Similarly I have discovered things of interest in Facebook & Twitter ads where they were relevant to me. It does seem that online advertising is in need of a bit of a 'reboot'.

thirdsun 11y ago
Same here - I'm not that concerned about targeted ads, but if it means significant consequences for my bandwidth, security, performance or simply being able to use the site as intended, well, then I don't seem to have a realistic choice. That said, I think there's room for an adblocker that focuses on ads that are too intrusive and whitelists decent, static ads automatically. Currently I do that manually on a per site basis.
- freehunter 11y ago
  Adblock Plus does that. Ad networks can in some fashion request their ads be unblocked, and ABP does some sort of review (I'm not sure how it all works, I don't use it).
  - thirdsun 11y ago
    I'm not sure, but isn't that review process basically a transaction of money? As in buying your way out of being blocked? That's probably the last thing I'd want.
    - freehunter 11y ago
      Fair enough. I know I had heard something about them unblocking "non-intrusive ads" but didn't really pay attention to the details.
  - fucking_tragedy 11y ago
    Ad networks pay ABP to be whitelisted. That is their review process.
    - Karunamon 11y ago
      In fairness, they don't just whitelist any old ad, there's ostensibly a review and guidelines that must be followed, but at the end of the day, it's still a colossal conflict of interest.
tomp 11y ago
> On Google search sometimes the people who will pay for ads are sometimes a better signal than those that SEO their way to the top. Are they? If you have 2 products that sell for X, one company spends Y on ads and X - Y on product, the other spends X on product. It would seem that the second one should be SEOd (by good reviews and recommendations) to the top, and that would be the more important signal.
- maaku 11y ago
  Too simplistic a model.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  For me an ad is a signal I don't want that product. Most of the time ads in search results are suboptimal compared to organic results anyway.

DanielBMarkham 11y ago

I both make a small amount of money from ads and also use AdBlocker. The thing is, I don't mind ads. The problem is that the people providing content should own and manage what ads they show me. This idea of allocating page space and then bidding it off? It only leads to click fraud, malware, and all sorts of other problems. Instead, write things I find useful, then provide me links -- text links -- to ways I might continue my investigation. Ads are fine when they help people. When we start focusing on the money instead of the experience, however, it all goes to crap. I don't think ads are something you can outsource if you want to be a quality content provider. They're just as important as any other content on the page. By the way, this also means that mostly-plain-text pages could work fine for both creators and consumers in the vast majority of cases.

euske 11y ago
This. I tend to think ads only work when people don't care or even notice them. If an ad annoys its viewers, it's already a failure of the ad and they don't deserve money, whether or not it's blocked. Many obscene ads failed silently. Ad blocking is just a visible part of their failure.
daemin 11y ago
You mean like in some of those fancy fashion magazines where the ads are actually part of the content that people buy. Yes that would be good for websites to do, but it also requires a dedicated ad department to organise it all, and consumers of that content that would want to buy the goods that are being sold.
- Tyr42 11y ago
  Penney Arcade had good ads. They actually play the games that were advertised and it was also a stamp of approval.
  - milesvp 11y ago
    This. It's the only website I've found that actually has ads relevant to the site, ads I want to see and am receptive for. My understanding from what I've gleaned from their blog, is that this really worked out for them (though PAX revenue now dwarfs their site revenue).

manachar 11y ago

My limit was reached a while ago when intrusive ads starting becoming the norm. My personal least favorite are ones that move the content of the page so I'm bouncing around trying to read the same paragraph and ones that somehow think my cursor hovering is sufficient reason to play sound or "expand" an ad. Monetization from advertising must be brutal if so much content is being displayed in worse and worse ways.

Kesty 11y ago
Monetization is not great, but I think the biggest culprit in this case is a mix of competition, ad agencies and classic greed. The number of impressions is limited and declining (moving from the desktop where you can put 15 ads on each page to the mobile where you have max 1 or 2 ads per page) and companies are fighting for the attention of the user while content providers try to squeeze as many adspaces they can in their pages to incrase/stabilize the declining CPM (cost per thousand impression), so they ask their ad agencies to create more inventive and engaging (attention grapping/annoying) banners. When they ask website to do their new and improved format, they usually get a no in response. Then they shove more money at the problem until some website can't say no anymore and accept the new format. Once someone else has accepted the others can't keep saying no or the company will only do banners with the competition that actually accept the new format, so everyone does. All new invasive formats usually start with clear and strict rules: only one each day, for a max of two per week. And we can show the ad to each users a maximum of twice a day. But this "rules" become progressively less strict as more and more companies want to purchase the new format that has a much higher cost and some ad manager will come to you faking sadness (while actually counting his cut behind his back) and say the magic words: "I don't like it either but it's how we paid your salaries and it's too much money to pass up." And this is how banner "standards" are born.

eveningcoffee 11y ago

I am with you in this. I saw that people around me started to use AdBlockers and I found first that it is not really fair from them. Until one of the news sites I regularly read was barely usable by always running on 100% CPU, which means it was not possible to open it on multiple tabs without making my computer fully unusable. And until Google started to use video ads in my region. I figured that it would be better for the local business to block the ads as if they cluelessly start to annoy me with their video ads, they would anger and loose one of their potential and possibly already loyal customer. Beside some of the ads had very questionable moral value. I would call this trend telefication - ad publishers want to control when people see ads and for how long. I think that this is not acceptable. PS. Paying for content is also not an option until there is an anonymous way to make a payment and the payments are minuscule. Otherwise we will have serious censorship issue.

inanutshellus 11y ago
I actually like seeing ads (though I wish they weren't coming from omniscient ad networks and were instead coming from the sites I was visiting). Content providers get money, I get free content. Nice. HTML5 Video Ads are what finally switched me to ad blockers. When people served static images and Adobe Flash videos, I could just disable auto-play of Flash, and voila, I see ads, but don't get obnoxious videos on random tabs. Now I have to block it all to get any peace. Auto-playing video ads is just bad etiquette.
- bluejekyll 11y ago
  Safari at least added a disable all sound on a tab button. They should probably add or include video as an option too.
  - daemin 11y ago
    Yeah, Firefox has a mute tab button in each tab, but it still annoys me when all of a sudden I get some sound playing in the background for no reason.

team_doom 11y ago

I think this is the wrong way to approach this. You're essentially pirating content now. If you don't like the ads, stop using the site. It's that simple. To take it a step farther, send an email to customer service explaining WHY you're no longer using the site. This sends a much stronger message to them about what makes you unhappy with the service they provide.

cm2187 11y ago
I actually end up doing that with websites that block browsers with ad-blockers from viewing the content. It takes a while to change my habits but when they are changed there is no coming back to these sites.
- team_doom 11y ago
  To me that comes off as "Hey, I'm angry you won't let me view your content without paying for it anymore". Obviously in this case paying for it is viewing/watching ads. Not trying to get high and mighty with anyone. The whole ad-block culture just screams entitlement to me and it bothers me a lot.
  - msandford 11y ago
    Who is entitled? People who want to view content and will make what they feel is a reasonable bargain to do so, or people who want to sell ads and will make unreasonable bargains to do so? If the initial html that loaded on the page also had the ads in it, it'd be much harder to block them and also make the experience of seeing those ads much less unpleasant. As it stands what people are doing is loading the initial html and saying "no thanks" to all of the follow-on stuff. There's two sides to every story.
    - team_doom 11y ago
      I don't disagree with the fact that ads could be better served more safely and more securely. And I agree that the experience could be better. That's where my comment about writing an email to explain ones unhappiness with the user experience comes in. I work in information security and we do see a lot of malware infections from compromised ad servers. The idea of a website serving ads themselves, instead of relying on a call to an ad network, is good. It means big changes to how advertising works though. The advertisers would have to give customers the ads for them to embed into the page and would need some sort of guarantee that the customer wouldn't change the ads and would pull them down when it was time to do so. I can't think of a way to check this stuff automatically that doesn't involve a call to an advertisers server, which is the whole problem to begin with.

cm2187 11y ago

I might agree that preventing ads from displaying is immoral but tracking users across websites is even more immoral. And since I cannot rely on websites to behave, ad-blockers are actually re-introducing morality into browsing by blocking the tracking.

sokoloff 11y ago
They block one vector of tracking. They don't block CDN-based tracking: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/11/30/a-new-type-of-tracking-akamais-pixel-free-technology/ http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/11/30/a-new-type-of-trackin... (note the juxtaposition of "new" and "2010")
- cm2187 11y ago
  Looks like akamai needs to be added to my blockers list.
  - iand 11y ago
    Don't forget Google's free hosting of Javascript libraries and webfonts. The cost of serving those is recouped by dropping a cookie on you. Also Google DNS can give them great insight into domain popularity.
    - cm2187 11y ago
      Yeah but there are no cookie in DNS queries. Tracking by IP is a lot more toothless than tracking by cookies / super-cookies.
      - pdkl95 11y ago
        IP based tracking still works most of the time. Dynamic IPs change very infrequently, and NAT combines IPs in physically (and often socially) close groups. It isn't perfect, but a lot of those requests can probably be mapped back to those cookies. Google's entire business is based on building large database of tracking (and other) information; obviously their DNS is just another data source. Just skip the recursive resolvers and run a local caching DNS server that starts from the root zones.

arjie 11y ago

And which are these websites that are using these dirty tricks?

echelon 11y ago
Almost 70% of the websites linked from Reddit that I click through. Many links from HN are also guilty of this. When I'm on mobile, I frequently click on ads by mistake when I'm trying to scroll. It's unintentional on my part, but I feel the web developers and ad networks are colluding to make this happen.
- thecatspaw 11y ago
  sounds like the dark-pattern bait & switch
fucking_tragedy 11y ago
How many people have a venereal disease? 20%? Doesn't mean I'm going to get fucked by ad networks without protection. It's not worth the risk.

FussyZeus 11y ago

The last three viral infections I've had on my PC's have come from advertisements on websites. I generally will whitelist a select few websites that I trust to not destroy my computer and to not run irritating ads, but at the end of the day this is my damn computer, not the ad companies. If I don't feel like running their code then I can make my machine not do that and there isn't jack they can do about it. Oh no I can't read about the Model 3 on New York Times? Then I'll go read about it on LA Times, or Huffington Post, or any one of the ten thousand other news sources no doubt covering it.

chrisseaton 11y ago
How does an advert deliver a virus? Are these genuine remote native code execution vulnerabilities in browsers? Or just breaking the sandbox somehow and using internal browser APIs? Isn't what you need a security patch for your browser rather than an advert blocker?
- a3n 11y ago
  I don't know how it's done, but it happens. Forbes Shuts Down Ads Serving Malware http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/09/22/forbes-website-served-malware/#39407b513748 http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/09/22/forbes...
  - chrisseaton 11y ago
    I don't know how it's done either, and I've heard about them a few times. It seems somewhat unlikely that there is a remote code execution vulnerability being exploited only by adverts that hasn't been urgently fixed by the browsers. If there genuinely is an exploit, an advert blocker isn't enough as you could put it on any website as well. Therefore I wonder if it's possible that someone has a mis-informed definition of viruses and really it's something a little different, such as a simple link to actively download malware.
    - ceejayoz 11y ago

wslh 11y ago

> Businesses have to come up with better monetization strategies. I don't like Ads but possibly there is no general way to monetize content and this is the problem. With lot of freely available value on Internet it is really difficult to convert it to $$$.

tremon 11y ago
there is no general way to monetize content Then, according to the laws of capital dynamics, that content should die out.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- chris_wot 11y ago
  Which is why sites like the Sydney Morning Herald are utterly screwing themselves over. Seriously, go to the SMH now, and check out your ad-blocker. There will be about 60 blocked ads and sites. Then check out the headlines - all click-bait. Ironically they now have a 30 article a month limit (easily bypassed by switching to private mode in your browser) which actively reduces their ad revenue and messes up their statistics tracking when people switch to private browsing... In the meantime, Fairfax have been progressively cutting staff. Before it was outsourcing subeditors to New Zealand (and it shows, there are an unbelievable number of unreadable sentences, along with grammar and spelling errors - even in their headlines they show on their main page!) and now they are about to shed more than 100 jobs in actual journalism. I once subscribed to the SMH, but then the quality got so bad that I just cancelled. They can't even get their comments section right - it's barely usable, and they don't even get threading reasonably correct.
zanny 11y ago
Sure there is. I have a creative skill to make information. If anyone in the world wants that information, they can pay me to make it, and then after that I've already been paid, I can release it CC0 and let the world go nuts with it. The problems of online DRM / ad ridden websites / etc are all attempts to after the fact monetize information using obsolete IP policy while acting like there is any scarcity to it at all after its made. A lot of people hear that first paragraph and go on a tirade about getting your brand out, but... that is the same problem, in practice, with either form of funding the creation of information, and is technically its own problem set. You need an audience whether you want people paying you up front to make it at fixed cost or try to use state granted monopolies to extort people for money after the fact.

nulbyte 11y ago

I believe you hit the nail on the head: greed. This was my tipping point. When sites got so greedy that they stopped caring if anyone read their content, I stopped caring if they got paid for obtrusive ads. Even Google has designed some horrendous ads, especially the Nexus ad that grabs swipes on mobile, keeping you from scrolling past it. If the ads stuck to the meatverse-equivalent style of static but attractive, I would be fine. But the overwhelming majority overwhelms the reader with animation, transitions, cover-ups, pop-over, pop-up, pop-under—how many pops do we need before we have enough?! And publishers have restored to covering up their just to force interactivity, so you can click through them and see more ads. Why is there a Read More link on this recipe page? Obviously I want to read more, that's why I visited this page! It boils down to greed. The bar has been set so low to attract more and more advertisers to make more money. Frankly, if someone were ingenious enough to inflate the price for plain publisher-hosted ads, one to a page, that didn't overwhelm the reader, I'm pretty sure that person would soon be rich.

eli 11y ago
Is it fair to call it "greed" if these sites aren't making much money, even with all the aggressive ad units? You need to have an extremely popular site with uncommonly low overhead to be very profitable just off of banner ads.
- chris_wot 11y ago
  Then why do they bother?
  - spacehome 11y ago
    Yea, I'm ready for websites who can't find a viable monetization strategy to just go bankrupt already and stop blaming me for their shitty business plan.
    - eli 11y ago
      You won't miss them? Quite a few of the sites I enjoy are struggling to remain ad supported and I would be sad if they can't find a way to make it work.

InclinedPlane 11y ago

Exactly. I support makers and creators and artists. I back kickstarters. I have patreon subscriptions. I buy music and books and swag from artists I like a lot, especially those that I think need the most support. And sometimes I volunteer my time and skills. All in all I've spent or donated tens of thousands of dollars either in cash or time throughout the years to the arts. Meanwhile, I spent 20 years browsing the web without an ad blocker. Since I've started using one last year, it's led to a much better experience. Yet still, there are people who think that I should be burdened with some moral obligation to suffer advertising, for things that I will never buy, being shoved in my face in order to consume content. As though the business models of every single content creator on the planet were my personal problem. No, I do my part, and more. I've paid my advertising dues as well, and I'm done. If you don't like that you can go fuck yourself. You should be spending your time urging content creators to fix their broken business models, or helping them to do so, not moralizing about fucking advertising.

lallysingh 11y ago

I don't use ad blockers, but I do just hit the 'back' button when I see a site that's ad-unreadable. I don't feel that I'm missing anything of quality this way. I have a flash blocker on, which I think ends up doing 90% of what I would want an ad blocker for when combined with my 'back it up on bad ads' policy.

Cypher 11y ago

Sounds like the internet is going back to the early 2000s with mass popups? and auto playing sounds?. I recall the banner ad that made me learn how to edit my host files. It'd play a sound of a bee buzzing away on loop. I learnt how to edit host files pretty quickly, never looked back. Threw TV out soon over a decade ago too. Native ads are on the rise, that's the next wave.

pmichaud 11y ago

I think it's unfair to call it greed. It feels like a strawman dismissal. It's actually hard to make money from content, and the best content creators almost certainly aren't also the best monetizers. So people do the default thing. The default thing is ads. And the problem is that ads don't work very well, and they are working less and less well as time goes on because people are acclimating to them like a war of escalation. To squeeze small a bit of money out of content, you run ads that are increasingly obtrusive. If they aren't, they don't make any money at all. There's a huge market opportunity here. It's not greed, it's an obvious outcome of incentives.

johnward 11y ago

I was in the same camp as you until a few weeks ago. I finally gave in. Found that ublock origin doesn't block many types of ads though.