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Attack of the Ad Blockers
- nthitz 10y agoOpening the article Incognito in Chrome and examining the network tab, over 170 requests in total weighing in at around 4MB (for me anyway). That is one reason I choose to use adblockers.
- jlarocco 10y agoHilariously, the site opens a popup claiming that my ad-blocker may negatively impact the performance of the site. The pop-up is now blocked by my ad-blocker ;-)
- Blaaguuu 10y agoI believe it just said that ad-blockers will 'impact performance' - Which is technically correct... they didn't specify if it was negatively or positively ;)
- waterphone 10y ago> …which may adversely affect the performance and content…
- tux3 10y agoOr perhaps it would be more fair to say "Defense of the Ad Blockers".
- nfriedly 10y agoI've seen a lot of sites recently that either work around my ad blocker to still load ads or else pop up some other annoyance (e.g. Bloomberg). I'm starting to think about going back to noscript and just selectively enabling things.
- waterphone 10y agohttps://github.com/reek/anti-adblock-killer https://github.com/reek/anti-adblock-killer (if you use uBlock Origin, you can turn this on with just a checkbox)
- 21 10y agoSo then the question is, why is that not checked by default. I made my intention clear by installing the ad-blocker.
- waterphone 10y agoIt's only recently started to become a major issue. Perhaps it has been enabled by default more recently, I'm not sure—when I first installed it some time ago, I believe I enabled it manually as part of the setup process.
- angry-hacker 10y agoBecause it's not always reliable and can cause things not working properly. It's really easy to create ad block killers/popup modals etc. It's just that lately site owners have began fighting back. It's really interesting where it leads us, site owners and more importantly ad networks have been lazy trying to defeat adblock. Let the war behin I guess.
- elcapitan 10y agoThis made my day, thanks. I had to update my filter lists so that it retrieves the blocklist for that feature btw.
- chris_wot 10y agoIt would be great to have a service that looks at a website's DOM structure, then you download some rewrite rules and you literally only download content. Makes me wish you could go to HTTP and say: give me only the div's with the attribute "name" that equals "header" and "body" and all img tags with class "illustration".
- zipwitch 10y agoI find the mindset behind, "analysts estimated that ad blocking had cost web publishers nearly $22 billion in lost ad sales" to be both hilarious and terrifying. It's something right out of Max Headroom I watched as a kid, where having an off-switch on your TV was a crime.
- antisthenes 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
- ikeboy 10y agoBloomberg now has an adblock detector, although it incorrectly triggered on mobile chrome which doesn't even have adblockers.
- waterphone 10y ago> We noticed that you're using an ad blocker, which may adversely affect the performance and content on Bloomberg.com. For the best experience, please whitelist the site. The dishonesty of it saying that the adblocker will ("may") negatively affect the performance of the site, when it's in fact blocking an absurd number of requests unnecessary to the content people actually want to see, is astounding.
- ikeboy 10y agoEh, plenty of sites have broken on umatrix for me, and I need to go in and whitelist certain servers. Bloomberg for instance I needed to whitelist alternate bloomberg domains and disqus for comments.
- waterphone 10y agouMatrix isn't a typical consumer-friendly adblocker, it's a general purpose request blocker and explicitly warns that it will break many things. uBlock, AdBlock, etc., will generally not. Certain things do still break occasionally, but it's pretty rare and usually it's on a site that I don't actually care about. Disqus comments are blocked deliberately by most tracking blockers because Disqus tracks user behavior and discloses their data to third parties.
- chris_wot 10y agoWhich servers? And why should Bloomberg break if you block servers on different domains?
- ikeboy 10y agobbthat.com, bwbx.io. Both owned by bloomberg, and I've had articles break without them. Many other sites have cdns with different domains.
- bitJericho 10y agoI don't watch regular tv because of the ads either. It's time to change revenue models.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoThey tried all kinds of models. People rejected them for free stuff with ads. So, it's correct to build on the only thing that works for most content most of the time. The market is the problem. Here's a nice write-up on the beginnings: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advertising-is-the-internets-original-sin/376041/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advert...
- chris_wot 10y agoExcept that Netflix and even Apple iTunes show that if you price your content to be reasonable and allow people to actually choose what they want to watch, read or hear when they want to do so you can actually make a lot of money. And you don't have to show ads.
- jbooth 10y agoEvery WSJ article on HN has instructions to circumvent the pay wall as top comment. And it's not like we couldn't afford it.
- angry-hacker 10y agoExactly. Top comment is always how to bypass the paywall and the readers here are wealthy than average. Having everything behind paywall would make the content available for selected few. How would HN even work if everything is paywalled?
- nickpsecurity 10y agoI believe the academics' comments in the Elselvier threads show how it would work. Hint: it wouldn't. ;)
- 0x0 10y agoWith all the malwaretising going around on even "reputable" networks, using an adblocker is simply a basic step for maintaining enduser security, much like antivirus software. "Attack of the malware blockers" would be a more accurate title.
- Johnny555 10y agoIf publishers would get together and come up with a single micropayment system, I'd gladly pay them 10 cents or so for each article -- the same revenue that they'd get from the ads I'm blocking. But I'm not going to give out my credit card number to dozens of sites where I can "pay just a few dollars per month" to access their content. I don't want an annual subscription that renews automatically, and I'm probably not going to look at another article on that site for weeks, months or maybe never, so I don't want to pay dollars for an article that they are willing to show me for a few pennies worth of ad revenue -- just let me give them the pennies directly.
- vthallam 10y agoYes! That should be like a netflix for content websites or where you could buy credits which works on all major publications and can be spend as you like.
- mmcclure 10y agoYou might be interested in Blendle: http://blendle.com http://blendle.com
- vthallam 10y agoThis looks great. signed up for beta. Thanks:)
- Johnny555 10y agoI think if it were a Netflix for content websites, I'd pay one low monthly fee to have unlimited views of second rate websites. If I want to read big-name articles, for a bit more money, they'll ship me paper copies of the articles I want to view, but I'd have to return them when I'm done.
- yegle 10y agoYou are looking for https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/
- brownbat 10y agoThe most useless survey in the world finds that most people use adblockers "in order to block ads." Great article, but c'mon, maybe don't offer a tautology as a survey response.
- JadeNB 10y agoIt's an obvious conclusion, but I'm not sure that it's a tautology. The name of something doesn't define what it is, only tries to describe it. As others have pointed out, it is, for example, perfectly possible to be interested in an adblocker mainly from a security point of view, without taking any position on ads themselves.
- mschuster91 10y agoThe solution is so obvious, at least for big media outlets who complain the most: INSOURCE YOUR ADVERTISING. This means: no external services to track the f..k out of your users, and you yourself provide a platform for bidders to upload banner images or plaintext ads (Google Adsense-like) to. Benefits, aside from making it harder for people to ad-block: 1) you don't hand over a sizable chunk of your ad income to middlemen with incentives for fraud (they charge the advertiser, but claim fraud towards you and keep the change) 2) you can be (relatively) sure that your site doesn't get a nasty Google penalty for serving malware. Is there any (F)OSS/SaaS platform available for an individual to provide such a platform for bidders? edit: I forgot offering paid content and referral links (Amazon!), these can be worth quite a chunk of money if your site is popular enough.
- jlarocco 10y agoThat would be very expensive, requires a huge amount of work and maintenance, and at the end of the day it's unlikely to change anything.
- mschuster91 10y agoYet we see that, thanks to adblockers, 3rd party advertising, tracking and data milking won't work for much longer. I give the ad industry, especially the fraudsters, not much longer than two years, given the rising trend of adblockers. Native ads are the only way that's left, and turns out that the big media houses usually already have an ad acquisition and disposition department for print ads.
- chris_wot 10y agoOho so now they are claiming that net neutrality is being violated? So basically publishers are attempting to expand "neutrality" to not transit paths but onto end-points. I do hope that Springer disables their firewalls, virus scanners and spam filters. Could be a boon to sci-hub once their systems are compromised and all their data leaked...
- Pulce 10y agoI use Ad Blockers because - for me - find something browsing the web is like run into a street artist performing while I'm walking around my city. Often the artist didn't contribute to build the city in which he's performing (taxes, etc...). He is just using an already crowded street. I don't wont to be obligated to be distracted by commercial ads. Off course, after seeing the performance I'll be happy to donate some money or to support the artist in some way.
- abiox 10y agointeresting that the survey didn't have the option "to protect myself". malware is a thing. ad blockers wouldn't be as pervasive if the ad industry was less user-hostile and more discerning of it's clientele.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- anotherevan 10y agoThey are not ad blockers, they are HTML firewalls.
- 112233 10y agoThat's why HEVC screen content coding extensions are so important. They enable you to present your web content as a video of someone scrolling the article page, with no loss of advertisement quality.