6 ms·

Killing the messenger: ad-blockers

65 points by fridek 10y ago

akerro 10y ago
Just open any Polish major website without adblock to understand why. +10 trackers, +20 ads per page, +6 social buttons per post.
- mamon 10y ago
  I agree, Polish websites are so cluttered with advertisments, some of them being pop-ups hiding the whole main page of initial load. Completly unusable without ad-blocker. BTW. The best ad-blocker I found so far is just uninstalling Flash plugin from your browser. HTML 5 is not so popular yet, so that helps a lot.
  - klibertp 10y ago
    In Chrome you can make it so that Flash is not loaded by default, but you can right-click on the unloaded Flash applet and make it load and run. I think it's somewhere in the settings.
    - majewsky 10y ago
      On Firefox, Flashblock does the same IIRC.
  - pipio21 10y ago
    You can disable it(flash, java). When you are interested you activate it, just for one time. That is what I do.
    - distances 10y ago
      Just as a random data point, I haven't had Flash for some years now and I think I haven't been missing anything. YouTube and other major video sites serve HTML5 video just fine.
  - imtringued 10y ago
    Firefox's flash version is no longer up to date and vSphere needs a newer one so I didn't even bother with it. I'm using chromium exclusively as a fallback for vSphere.
- rdslw 10y ago
  It's everywhere (Poles are just smart). THere is much more time & bandwidth on major content sites spend purely for ads than on content On slate: 60% ads on business insider: 75% on BBC: 65% Source: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/01/business/cost-of-mobile-ads.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/01/business/cost-... On mobile, i simply use firefox. It's the only browser on android which easily allows me to install adblock (ublock origin exactly). highly recommended.
  - akerro 10y ago
    On mobile I installed AdAway.
- ajuc 10y ago
  Regional newspaper sites are the worst. Every time I go there I feel dirty.
kalleboo 10y ago
> But the survey also found that very few people pay anything for online news—just 9% of people in English-speaking countries That's WAY higher than I expected
- erelde 10y ago
  9% of 500M would be 45.000.000 paying customers... I think that might be wrong...
- imtringued 10y ago
  It should instead be read as 1 in 10 readers is willing to pay for free content.
- falcolas 10y ago
  Agreed. I would think a 9% conversion rate would make any business man salivate. There's your whales, start targeting them.
spraak 10y ago
Is the title trying to say that ads are somehow messengers..?
- creshal 10y ago
  Probably trying to aim for a "shooting the messenger" pun, as in: Adblockers are killing content, not the shitty ad networks responsible for their rise.
  - fwn 10y ago
    ... or the people using it. The message would be "your ads are bad", the ad blocking stats are the messenger and the shooting consists of media trying to tackle adblockers instead of bad ads.
- dave2000 10y ago
  I'm guessing they mean the sites. People blocking ads are just the same as people skipping through ads on a vhs recording of TV, or going to the toilet/making a drink when the ads are on. Nobody likes ads.
Sylos 10y ago
Well, yeah, ad-blockers are among the best antivirus-software, speed up page-load times, reduce data usage, improve privacy and require roundabout 0 effort on the user's part. And except for ignorance of their existence or extreme benevolence, there's not a whole lot of reasons for users to not install ad-blockers. That the ad-industry has been flourishing for so long is actually more surprising to me...
- logicallee 10y ago
  Under your scheme web sites can themselves still have slow load times, high data usage, malicious payloads, and privacy implications such as profiling you based on your browser fingerprint - but you can actually get all of the benefits you mention (and more) by redirecting http traffic to 127.0.0.1 instead. The only thing you lose is content, but the same thing is true for web sites that disappear because they have no business model other than making content and displaying it along-side clearly marked advertising - it's not like you or anyone else wants to pay for content. Well, there is a middle ground - you can enjoy the slow page-loads, bad privacy, and all the other effects of visiting web sites, while also cutting out genuine content, through a second business model: make web sites replace their genuine content with indistinguishable shilling, and suddenly you have the best of both worlds: no clearly-marked advertising; slow page times; and no content! That's an interesting middle ground. Edit: got a downvote. In what way does 127.0.0.1 not strictly dominate a web site shilling with no genuine content? It is better in every conceivable way. It's also the future that you asked for, suggesting that web sites come up with a viable business model without any advertising. Or do you just want them to disappear?
  - throwaway2048 10y ago
    please don't post like this
    - logicallee 10y ago
      In case it wasn't clear, the fact that ad networks are separate is a historical relic. Technically, there is next to no impediment to the servers that serve content serving advertising content at the same time. So Sylos's point "ad-blockers are among the best antivirus-software, speed up page-load times, reduce data usage, improve privacy and require roundabout 0 effort on the user's part. And except for ignorance of their existence or extreme benevolence, there's not a whole lot of reasons for users to not install ad-blockers" actually is only a historical fluke, present in the short term only. Web sites themselves are technically able to do all of the things that Sylos mentions, without involving any off-server advertising. But web sites today have advertising that is clearly displayed. By aggressively blocking them, while saying that web sites' broken business model isn't the users' fault, you are encouraging two things: 1) Encouraging the ecosystem to make web sites serve advertising utilizing their own stack 2) Encouraging web sites to collect deep analytics from their visitors and share them directly. This is much worse than colecting advertising view information. 3) Paid shilling. This exists today and is called "native advertising." It is often indistinguishable from genuine content. As in, I don't know if I am consuming genuine content, or fake content. But the latter answers people's misguided calls for web sites to come up with an alternative model. It is very simple: today, web sites that are in the business of creating content and monetizing it using advertising networks are NOT in the business of personally collecting and selling deep analytics on their customers. They are also NOT in the business of creating shill content. This can change in the future. I wouldn't like it to.
zerr 10y ago
But it is good for actual companies/people who pay for ads, right? I mean, in the first place I wouldn't want to pay for showing my ad to someone who is not genuinely interested, thus is not a potential client. And it is in my interest that such people use ad-blockers.
- lgieron 10y ago
  Everyone is a potential client for Coca-Cola or other generic brands. And (the theory is that) even if you hate the ad, it will make you more likely to buy their brand vs competition.
  - fwn 10y ago
    Advertisers interest is rather diverse. While I see the brand value coca cola might aim at, I can also understand that advertising to the wrong user at the wrong time can hurt your wallet or your brand. An example would be check24. It's just a random German comparison webservice. However, as they produce unbelievable disturbing video ads I can't block, I passionately hate them.
    - imtringued 10y ago
      I'm wondering if they are as bad as their TV ads...
  - welterde 10y ago
    If I come across an particularly annoying ad I will try my best to remember that brand and buy the competitor out of spite (if there is no cheap generic store brand available anyway). Surely I am not the only one that does this.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      I do that too. That's why I e.g. never used Groupon - they've pissed me off with annoying ads, and that was even before they became controversial.
    - 10y ago
rdslw 10y ago
Greetings from Poland :) Even while inconvenient for me, I've switched on my android from chrome (which I also use on desktopt) to firefox because of one reason: you can install plugins (read ublock, adblock etc) on firefox for android. Since that day, mobile browsing is a BLISS !!! You can see here (and elsewhere) why: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/01/business/cost-of-mobile-ads.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/01/business/cost-...
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  The mobile ad scene is ridiculous. I'm about to switch from Chrome to Firefox just because of that stupid "ad network" that has some scripts which "escape their iframe" and keep redirecting half of the sites I view to what is presumably a malware download service.
- Fiahil 10y ago
  I'm also considering doing the same. Every single time I open a webpage on my phone it takes forever to load (even on a fast and reliable wi-fi) and I often cannot read anything until I have closed the cookie consent panel, the "install our app" modal, the full page autoplaying video ad, and the "subscribe to our newsletter" pop-up. It's like yelling insults to someone else while in an elevator.
  - distances 10y ago
    Also, I travel somewhat, and I have 400 MB roaming included per month. No way would I risk having some animated ad using this all up.
  - phatfish 10y ago
    A good choice, it has become more stable over the last few months. A while ago i had so many crashes it was unusable. I get less crashes now and the speed up from running uBlock Origin on my old S3 is very noticeable.
- ionised 10y ago
  I recommend 1) Self-Destructing Cookies and 2) HTTPS Everywhere on Firefox mobile too.
LeonM 10y ago
I am amazed the numbers are that low actually. Most sites become unusable without an adblocker as many mobile browsers simply crash when trying to load that many content. Also, the amount of data used by ads is overwhelming, and (at least in my country) mobile data limits are still from 1999. Since setting up a squid proxy with adblocker for my mobile devices, my mobile data usage dropped significantly, allowing me to switch to a cheaper data plan.
_Codemonkeyism 10y ago
For some months I try to not use ad blockers on one laptop (Dell XPS13 2016) after years of ad blocker usage. 1. I still hate how sometimes ads pop up where I click, often above videos. Might be intentional or might be download times of the ads (or might intentionally use the slower download of ads by placing them there). 2. While traveling with a limited mobile data plan, data was sucked up by video ads, reloading ads, ... the largest strain on my data plan was ads. 3. Many ads get larger and have sounds, which is painfully annoying. 4. Not yet been infected by an ad, but the anxiety is there. 5. Not scientific, but my feeling is power is significantly drained faster (checking some days with ad blocker on)
- davidgerard 10y ago
  Every time I set up on a new box I try browsing without an ad blocker. I lasted 23 hours last time.
aphextron 10y ago
Ad blocking will be a standard feature in every major browser within 5 years, and we will laugh at these days they way we did with pop-ups.
- nannal 10y ago
  Brave browser paving the path of the future.
- kalleboo 10y ago
  In Chrome, which run by Google, who make most of their money from ads? I can see Firefox doing it as standard. I think Apple are happy just allowing the ad-blocker extensions (and they got some publicity when they did that).
q5 10y ago
I have been seeing more and more discussion of fundamental issues occurring in the online advertising industry which are acknowledged to cause backlash which harms the bottom line (ad-blockers, decreased viewership, etc). The fact that these patterns are being spoken about to such a large audience - I have no link to the advertising industry and have seen loud messages from large publications outlining some issues: - Relevance: showing an ad of something you just searched on eBay on your news site was novel at first but over time people have learned to tune out because seeing your search for soccer ball while reading about terrorism just taught people to blank out the irrelevant ads. - Performance: tracking scripts, social sharing, multimedia ads. Refer to the series of VPAID Google+ posts outlining the detrimental effects of a single ad loaded into the user's view. Companies targeting contextualisation and performance, and accepting that users are no longer willing to accept the poor quality of current popular methods may be in the minority at the moment but the niche will most likely expand. They will be economically rewarded for investing their time into newer, more effective methods, and current popular methods will slowly be overtaken by those methods that obtain a better ROI. A good question is how long will the industry ignore the rising walls of ad-blocking? Walls seem a lot hard to take down than build in these types of situations. It would be wrong to expect people to turn off their ad-blockers because the industry pinky-swears not to overstep the boundaries again.
- JulianMorrison 10y ago
  > They will be economically rewarded for investing their time into newer, more effective methods The risk is, they won't. The overwhelming majority of awful, amoral advertisers may be closing the window of opportunity for the rare-as-unicorns respectful ones, because adblocking software doesn't distinguish.
  - q5 10y ago
    > adblocking software doesn't distinguish I think the "walls" of ad-blocking will be dismantled slowly and those who can prove their respectfulness will be whitelisted through the blockade.
nodepackagemgr 10y ago
It's a dead end. People in Poland won't really pay subscription fees, so the only way to monetize is through ads. Ads don't pay that much though, so they are packed in amounts that are beyond annoying for users. So they block. On the other hand, most people gather their daily news digest from one of the top news outlets, which in turn serve heaviest ads. So the most valuable customer is the average Joe who doesn't know ads can be blocked and doesn't really care.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > So the most valuable customer is the average Joe who doesn't know ads can be blocked and doesn't really care. Which outlines a great mission for us - to reach every average Joe and Jane and educate them that yes, ads can be blocked, and yes, their computer will be running much better and faster when they do it.
- ajuc 10y ago
  > People in Poland won't really pay subscription fees, so the only way to monetize is through ads. I thought that too, but I watch some starcraft matches on twitch, and many Polish-language casters have lots of subsriptions and some donations.
sleepychu 10y ago
Keep pushing. I've said this many times before, there will inevitably be some casualties in the war on intrusive ads but these might be necessary to convince advertisers to come back to us with a fair deal. Don't accept guilt-tripping, don't be pressured into allowing unlimited surveillance by private entities, traditional circulation based advertising which isn't a bare in terms of bandwidth or surveillance can and will work when users demand it.
jkot 10y ago
This industry is ripe for disruption by micro-payment system. I want to be able to surf, and make a small payment on every website I visit ($0.001). If system detects I actually used something (copy&paste, longer visit, scroll down, print bookmark), payment should be increased significantly. But it has to preserve privacy, be scam proof...
- iand 10y ago
  That will simply move the incentives towards publishers spreading their content over as many pages as possible to get more micropayments from you.
  - jkot 10y ago
    That is one of the problems which needs to be solved. Scammers are everywhere where money are.
  - NTripleOne 10y ago
    You mean like they already do? Like those 'slideshow' style articles that load a new set of ads with every 'slide'?
- tremon 10y ago
  Yes, Blendle is a step in the right direction. It includes the ability to demand a refund if you feel you've been baited. It also charges per article, not per page view -- although the prices are higher than what you quoted.
- mrweasel 10y ago
  Ideally the payment system would be in the browser. You deposit some amount the a payment provider, and newspapers sends a 402 Payment Required http code to the browser, when you land on an article.
- nothingbutslide 10y ago
  We at Scriber have created a micropayment platform for publishers: https://www.scriber.io/ https://www.scriber.io/ You can test the user experience of it by browsing our demo publication: http://www.getexplorerr.com/ http://www.getexplorerr.com/ We've put a lot of effort into making the UX as seamless as possible, trying to mirror the in-app purchase experience of native apps. We're also signed up for Stripe's Apple Pay on the web which should make the process even smoother.
mtgx 10y ago
I think even browsers such as Firefox should begin to offer an easily accessible adblock button. But instead of being enabled by default, it should be off by default for all websites. If the users are annoyed with a site's ads, then they can click to block them, and the preference is saved permanently until the user unblocks that site again. I believe this is exactly what Opera does now. Third-party tracking protection should be enabled by default.
- Kliment 10y ago
  This sounds like an excellent idea, except switch it on by default. You're describing ublock origin.
yoodenvranx 10y ago
More and more of the large German news pages are adding auto-playing videos to their websites and you find them even on their mobile websites. Think about that for a second... auto playing videos on mobile websites in a country with very expensive mobile contracts... Who thought that this might be a good idea?
netcan 10y ago
To me, ad blockers are a sign the web is working. Ethics comes up a bit when it comes to ad blockers. Sites make money from ads. Dont' they have a right to?.. I think if we're going to think about it in that sort of way, we need to sort out rights. The web means that servers can serve whatever they want. They have a "right" to send you pictures of clowns when you request their page, even if that page was a news site yesterday. They can also send you ads. The client has the "right" to do whatever they want with that page. They can use whichever browser they want. Display the content however they want using whatever software they want. They can read the code, execute the JS, selectively display the content.... That's the deal. Servers can send what they want. Clients can do whatever they want with whatever servers send them. Users are exercising their rights with adblockers. On the more practical side, it's interesting how the economics of this has evolved. In the beginning, online ads were pretty useless and worthless. The economic model around online ads collapsed with the 99 crash. Then Google (or really omniture) figured out how online ads could work. They cleverly used it to serve ads with a tiny, unobtrusive footprint and still make way more money than the dancing monkey ads from the 90s. We've been in rapid growth mode since, and the value of advertising stock is now through the roof. Now that online ads are valuable again, the incentives to go overboard are overwhelming. Even Google who made small and unobtrusive ads a core idea have crossed some big lines. They look at valuable search queries like "best divorce lawyer in Toronto" where every click is worth $50, all the clicks going to those worthless (free) organic results and aggressively trying to increase the share of clicks going to ads. Now, even if you search for a divorce lawyer by name, you will first scroll throught a page and a half (on mobile) of his competitors ads. This is unequivocally "obtrusive" in the sense that it puts less relevant content in more prominence than the relevant stuff. This time it's being driven by ads being valuable rather than worthless. Back to the rights thing... Ad blockers and the active right of users to reject certain content is a balancing force here. When a respectable news site, forces you through an ad before they load a page, autoplay a video and then pop up (or under) an affiliate link to aliexpress and dating for gold digger pages...
- zelos 10y ago
  Is there any way sites could force you to view their adverts? Short of forcing you to use some kind of custom browser, I can't think of anything. I guess you could say something like "enter the code shown somewhere in the middle of this video advert to read this content" or something? Even then you'd probably get browser extensions to scan the video and read the code.
mbrock 10y ago
I'll just keep reading public service news sites. The online presence of commercial news feels mostly stressful, incendiary, and yucky to me. That publishers don't understand or ignore the way their advertisements ruin the user experience and sell out our news reading habits is just another reason to consider commercial news as basically hostile.
douche 10y ago
It's not the easiest to setup, but the best way to block ads is with a block list in your hosts file. Even works across browsers.

65 points by fridek 10y ago

Just open any Polish major website without adblock to understand why. +10 trackers, +20 ads per page, +6 social buttons per post.

mamon 10y ago
I agree, Polish websites are so cluttered with advertisments, some of them being pop-ups hiding the whole main page of initial load. Completly unusable without ad-blocker. BTW. The best ad-blocker I found so far is just uninstalling Flash plugin from your browser. HTML 5 is not so popular yet, so that helps a lot.
- klibertp 10y ago
  In Chrome you can make it so that Flash is not loaded by default, but you can right-click on the unloaded Flash applet and make it load and run. I think it's somewhere in the settings.
  - majewsky 10y ago
    On Firefox, Flashblock does the same IIRC.
- pipio21 10y ago
  You can disable it(flash, java). When you are interested you activate it, just for one time. That is what I do.
  - distances 10y ago
    Just as a random data point, I haven't had Flash for some years now and I think I haven't been missing anything. YouTube and other major video sites serve HTML5 video just fine.
- imtringued 10y ago
  Firefox's flash version is no longer up to date and vSphere needs a newer one so I didn't even bother with it. I'm using chromium exclusively as a fallback for vSphere.
rdslw 10y ago
It's everywhere (Poles are just smart). THere is much more time & bandwidth on major content sites spend purely for ads than on content On slate: 60% ads on business insider: 75% on BBC: 65% Source: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/01/business/cost-of-mobile-ads.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/01/business/cost-... On mobile, i simply use firefox. It's the only browser on android which easily allows me to install adblock (ublock origin exactly). highly recommended.
- akerro 10y ago
  On mobile I installed AdAway.
ajuc 10y ago
Regional newspaper sites are the worst. Every time I go there I feel dirty.

kalleboo 10y ago

> But the survey also found that very few people pay anything for online news—just 9% of people in English-speaking countries That's WAY higher than I expected

erelde 10y ago
9% of 500M would be 45.000.000 paying customers... I think that might be wrong...
imtringued 10y ago
It should instead be read as 1 in 10 readers is willing to pay for free content.
falcolas 10y ago
Agreed. I would think a 9% conversion rate would make any business man salivate. There's your whales, start targeting them.

spraak 10y ago

Is the title trying to say that ads are somehow messengers..?

creshal 10y ago
Probably trying to aim for a "shooting the messenger" pun, as in: Adblockers are killing content, not the shitty ad networks responsible for their rise.
- fwn 10y ago
  ... or the people using it. The message would be "your ads are bad", the ad blocking stats are the messenger and the shooting consists of media trying to tackle adblockers instead of bad ads.
dave2000 10y ago
I'm guessing they mean the sites. People blocking ads are just the same as people skipping through ads on a vhs recording of TV, or going to the toilet/making a drink when the ads are on. Nobody likes ads.

Sylos 10y ago

Well, yeah, ad-blockers are among the best antivirus-software, speed up page-load times, reduce data usage, improve privacy and require roundabout 0 effort on the user's part. And except for ignorance of their existence or extreme benevolence, there's not a whole lot of reasons for users to not install ad-blockers. That the ad-industry has been flourishing for so long is actually more surprising to me...

logicallee 10y ago
Under your scheme web sites can themselves still have slow load times, high data usage, malicious payloads, and privacy implications such as profiling you based on your browser fingerprint - but you can actually get all of the benefits you mention (and more) by redirecting http traffic to 127.0.0.1 instead. The only thing you lose is content, but the same thing is true for web sites that disappear because they have no business model other than making content and displaying it along-side clearly marked advertising - it's not like you or anyone else wants to pay for content. Well, there is a middle ground - you can enjoy the slow page-loads, bad privacy, and all the other effects of visiting web sites, while also cutting out genuine content, through a second business model: make web sites replace their genuine content with indistinguishable shilling, and suddenly you have the best of both worlds: no clearly-marked advertising; slow page times; and no content! That's an interesting middle ground. Edit: got a downvote. In what way does 127.0.0.1 not strictly dominate a web site shilling with no genuine content? It is better in every conceivable way. It's also the future that you asked for, suggesting that web sites come up with a viable business model without any advertising. Or do you just want them to disappear?
- throwaway2048 10y ago
  please don't post like this
  - logicallee 10y ago
    In case it wasn't clear, the fact that ad networks are separate is a historical relic. Technically, there is next to no impediment to the servers that serve content serving advertising content at the same time. So Sylos's point "ad-blockers are among the best antivirus-software, speed up page-load times, reduce data usage, improve privacy and require roundabout 0 effort on the user's part. And except for ignorance of their existence or extreme benevolence, there's not a whole lot of reasons for users to not install ad-blockers" actually is only a historical fluke, present in the short term only. Web sites themselves are technically able to do all of the things that Sylos mentions, without involving any off-server advertising. But web sites today have advertising that is clearly displayed. By aggressively blocking them, while saying that web sites' broken business model isn't the users' fault, you are encouraging two things: 1) Encouraging the ecosystem to make web sites serve advertising utilizing their own stack 2) Encouraging web sites to collect deep analytics from their visitors and share them directly. This is much worse than colecting advertising view information. 3) Paid shilling. This exists today and is called "native advertising." It is often indistinguishable from genuine content. As in, I don't know if I am consuming genuine content, or fake content. But the latter answers people's misguided calls for web sites to come up with an alternative model. It is very simple: today, web sites that are in the business of creating content and monetizing it using advertising networks are NOT in the business of personally collecting and selling deep analytics on their customers. They are also NOT in the business of creating shill content. This can change in the future. I wouldn't like it to.

zerr 10y ago

But it is good for actual companies/people who pay for ads, right? I mean, in the first place I wouldn't want to pay for showing my ad to someone who is not genuinely interested, thus is not a potential client. And it is in my interest that such people use ad-blockers.

lgieron 10y ago
Everyone is a potential client for Coca-Cola or other generic brands. And (the theory is that) even if you hate the ad, it will make you more likely to buy their brand vs competition.
- fwn 10y ago
  Advertisers interest is rather diverse. While I see the brand value coca cola might aim at, I can also understand that advertising to the wrong user at the wrong time can hurt your wallet or your brand. An example would be check24. It's just a random German comparison webservice. However, as they produce unbelievable disturbing video ads I can't block, I passionately hate them.
  - imtringued 10y ago
    I'm wondering if they are as bad as their TV ads...
- welterde 10y ago
  If I come across an particularly annoying ad I will try my best to remember that brand and buy the competitor out of spite (if there is no cheap generic store brand available anyway). Surely I am not the only one that does this.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    I do that too. That's why I e.g. never used Groupon - they've pissed me off with annoying ads, and that was even before they became controversial.
  - 10y ago

rdslw 10y ago

Greetings from Poland :) Even while inconvenient for me, I've switched on my android from chrome (which I also use on desktopt) to firefox because of one reason: you can install plugins (read ublock, adblock etc) on firefox for android. Since that day, mobile browsing is a BLISS !!! You can see here (and elsewhere) why: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/01/business/cost-of-mobile-ads.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/01/business/cost-...

TeMPOraL 10y ago
The mobile ad scene is ridiculous. I'm about to switch from Chrome to Firefox just because of that stupid "ad network" that has some scripts which "escape their iframe" and keep redirecting half of the sites I view to what is presumably a malware download service.
Fiahil 10y ago
I'm also considering doing the same. Every single time I open a webpage on my phone it takes forever to load (even on a fast and reliable wi-fi) and I often cannot read anything until I have closed the cookie consent panel, the "install our app" modal, the full page autoplaying video ad, and the "subscribe to our newsletter" pop-up. It's like yelling insults to someone else while in an elevator.
- distances 10y ago
  Also, I travel somewhat, and I have 400 MB roaming included per month. No way would I risk having some animated ad using this all up.
- phatfish 10y ago
  A good choice, it has become more stable over the last few months. A while ago i had so many crashes it was unusable. I get less crashes now and the speed up from running uBlock Origin on my old S3 is very noticeable.
ionised 10y ago
I recommend 1) Self-Destructing Cookies and 2) HTTPS Everywhere on Firefox mobile too.

LeonM 10y ago

I am amazed the numbers are that low actually. Most sites become unusable without an adblocker as many mobile browsers simply crash when trying to load that many content. Also, the amount of data used by ads is overwhelming, and (at least in my country) mobile data limits are still from 1999. Since setting up a squid proxy with adblocker for my mobile devices, my mobile data usage dropped significantly, allowing me to switch to a cheaper data plan.

_Codemonkeyism 10y ago

For some months I try to not use ad blockers on one laptop (Dell XPS13 2016) after years of ad blocker usage. 1. I still hate how sometimes ads pop up where I click, often above videos. Might be intentional or might be download times of the ads (or might intentionally use the slower download of ads by placing them there). 2. While traveling with a limited mobile data plan, data was sucked up by video ads, reloading ads, ... the largest strain on my data plan was ads. 3. Many ads get larger and have sounds, which is painfully annoying. 4. Not yet been infected by an ad, but the anxiety is there. 5. Not scientific, but my feeling is power is significantly drained faster (checking some days with ad blocker on)

davidgerard 10y ago
Every time I set up on a new box I try browsing without an ad blocker. I lasted 23 hours last time.

aphextron 10y ago

Ad blocking will be a standard feature in every major browser within 5 years, and we will laugh at these days they way we did with pop-ups.

nannal 10y ago
Brave browser paving the path of the future.
kalleboo 10y ago
In Chrome, which run by Google, who make most of their money from ads? I can see Firefox doing it as standard. I think Apple are happy just allowing the ad-blocker extensions (and they got some publicity when they did that).

q5 10y ago

I have been seeing more and more discussion of fundamental issues occurring in the online advertising industry which are acknowledged to cause backlash which harms the bottom line (ad-blockers, decreased viewership, etc). The fact that these patterns are being spoken about to such a large audience - I have no link to the advertising industry and have seen loud messages from large publications outlining some issues: - Relevance: showing an ad of something you just searched on eBay on your news site was novel at first but over time people have learned to tune out because seeing your search for soccer ball while reading about terrorism just taught people to blank out the irrelevant ads. - Performance: tracking scripts, social sharing, multimedia ads. Refer to the series of VPAID Google+ posts outlining the detrimental effects of a single ad loaded into the user's view. Companies targeting contextualisation and performance, and accepting that users are no longer willing to accept the poor quality of current popular methods may be in the minority at the moment but the niche will most likely expand. They will be economically rewarded for investing their time into newer, more effective methods, and current popular methods will slowly be overtaken by those methods that obtain a better ROI. A good question is how long will the industry ignore the rising walls of ad-blocking? Walls seem a lot hard to take down than build in these types of situations. It would be wrong to expect people to turn off their ad-blockers because the industry pinky-swears not to overstep the boundaries again.

JulianMorrison 10y ago
> They will be economically rewarded for investing their time into newer, more effective methods The risk is, they won't. The overwhelming majority of awful, amoral advertisers may be closing the window of opportunity for the rare-as-unicorns respectful ones, because adblocking software doesn't distinguish.
- q5 10y ago
  > adblocking software doesn't distinguish I think the "walls" of ad-blocking will be dismantled slowly and those who can prove their respectfulness will be whitelisted through the blockade.

nodepackagemgr 10y ago

It's a dead end. People in Poland won't really pay subscription fees, so the only way to monetize is through ads. Ads don't pay that much though, so they are packed in amounts that are beyond annoying for users. So they block. On the other hand, most people gather their daily news digest from one of the top news outlets, which in turn serve heaviest ads. So the most valuable customer is the average Joe who doesn't know ads can be blocked and doesn't really care.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
> So the most valuable customer is the average Joe who doesn't know ads can be blocked and doesn't really care. Which outlines a great mission for us - to reach every average Joe and Jane and educate them that yes, ads can be blocked, and yes, their computer will be running much better and faster when they do it.
ajuc 10y ago
> People in Poland won't really pay subscription fees, so the only way to monetize is through ads. I thought that too, but I watch some starcraft matches on twitch, and many Polish-language casters have lots of subsriptions and some donations.

sleepychu 10y ago

Keep pushing. I've said this many times before, there will inevitably be some casualties in the war on intrusive ads but these might be necessary to convince advertisers to come back to us with a fair deal. Don't accept guilt-tripping, don't be pressured into allowing unlimited surveillance by private entities, traditional circulation based advertising which isn't a bare in terms of bandwidth or surveillance can and will work when users demand it.

jkot 10y ago

This industry is ripe for disruption by micro-payment system. I want to be able to surf, and make a small payment on every website I visit ($0.001). If system detects I actually used something (copy&paste, longer visit, scroll down, print bookmark), payment should be increased significantly. But it has to preserve privacy, be scam proof...

iand 10y ago
That will simply move the incentives towards publishers spreading their content over as many pages as possible to get more micropayments from you.
- jkot 10y ago
  That is one of the problems which needs to be solved. Scammers are everywhere where money are.
- NTripleOne 10y ago
  You mean like they already do? Like those 'slideshow' style articles that load a new set of ads with every 'slide'?
tremon 10y ago
Yes, Blendle is a step in the right direction. It includes the ability to demand a refund if you feel you've been baited. It also charges per article, not per page view -- although the prices are higher than what you quoted.
mrweasel 10y ago
Ideally the payment system would be in the browser. You deposit some amount the a payment provider, and newspapers sends a 402 Payment Required http code to the browser, when you land on an article.
nothingbutslide 10y ago
We at Scriber have created a micropayment platform for publishers: https://www.scriber.io/ https://www.scriber.io/ You can test the user experience of it by browsing our demo publication: http://www.getexplorerr.com/ http://www.getexplorerr.com/ We've put a lot of effort into making the UX as seamless as possible, trying to mirror the in-app purchase experience of native apps. We're also signed up for Stripe's Apple Pay on the web which should make the process even smoother.

mtgx 10y ago

I think even browsers such as Firefox should begin to offer an easily accessible adblock button. But instead of being enabled by default, it should be off by default for all websites. If the users are annoyed with a site's ads, then they can click to block them, and the preference is saved permanently until the user unblocks that site again. I believe this is exactly what Opera does now. Third-party tracking protection should be enabled by default.

Kliment 10y ago
This sounds like an excellent idea, except switch it on by default. You're describing ublock origin.

yoodenvranx 10y ago

More and more of the large German news pages are adding auto-playing videos to their websites and you find them even on their mobile websites. Think about that for a second... auto playing videos on mobile websites in a country with very expensive mobile contracts... Who thought that this might be a good idea?

netcan 10y ago

To me, ad blockers are a sign the web is working. Ethics comes up a bit when it comes to ad blockers. Sites make money from ads. Dont' they have a right to?.. I think if we're going to think about it in that sort of way, we need to sort out rights. The web means that servers can serve whatever they want. They have a "right" to send you pictures of clowns when you request their page, even if that page was a news site yesterday. They can also send you ads. The client has the "right" to do whatever they want with that page. They can use whichever browser they want. Display the content however they want using whatever software they want. They can read the code, execute the JS, selectively display the content.... That's the deal. Servers can send what they want. Clients can do whatever they want with whatever servers send them. Users are exercising their rights with adblockers. On the more practical side, it's interesting how the economics of this has evolved. In the beginning, online ads were pretty useless and worthless. The economic model around online ads collapsed with the 99 crash. Then Google (or really omniture) figured out how online ads could work. They cleverly used it to serve ads with a tiny, unobtrusive footprint and still make way more money than the dancing monkey ads from the 90s. We've been in rapid growth mode since, and the value of advertising stock is now through the roof. Now that online ads are valuable again, the incentives to go overboard are overwhelming. Even Google who made small and unobtrusive ads a core idea have crossed some big lines. They look at valuable search queries like "best divorce lawyer in Toronto" where every click is worth $50, all the clicks going to those worthless (free) organic results and aggressively trying to increase the share of clicks going to ads. Now, even if you search for a divorce lawyer by name, you will first scroll throught a page and a half (on mobile) of his competitors ads. This is unequivocally "obtrusive" in the sense that it puts less relevant content in more prominence than the relevant stuff. This time it's being driven by ads being valuable rather than worthless. Back to the rights thing... Ad blockers and the active right of users to reject certain content is a balancing force here. When a respectable news site, forces you through an ad before they load a page, autoplay a video and then pop up (or under) an affiliate link to aliexpress and dating for gold digger pages...

zelos 10y ago
Is there any way sites could force you to view their adverts? Short of forcing you to use some kind of custom browser, I can't think of anything. I guess you could say something like "enter the code shown somewhere in the middle of this video advert to read this content" or something? Even then you'd probably get browser extensions to scan the video and read the code.

mbrock 10y ago

I'll just keep reading public service news sites. The online presence of commercial news feels mostly stressful, incendiary, and yucky to me. That publishers don't understand or ignore the way their advertisements ruin the user experience and sell out our news reading habits is just another reason to consider commercial news as basically hostile.

douche 10y ago

It's not the easiest to setup, but the best way to block ads is with a block list in your hosts file. Even works across browsers.