86 ms·
Pornhub Bypasses Ad Blockers with WebSockets
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- FreeKill 10y agoPretty interesting. I don't really understand why PornHub or others put so much effort into getting around ad blockers, unless it's purely to pad their statistics when it comes to getting new Advertisers to partake or I guess even to try and trick people into accidental clicks etc. using shadier practices. You'd have to imagine that a visitor to their site, who has taken the time to actively setup and run an ad blocker, is probably the least likely user to actually click on an ad in the first place.
- josefresco 10y ago"purely to pad their statistics when it comes to getting new Advertisers" Ding ding ding. This describes advertising in general.
- troncheadle 10y agoIt is the broken incentivization killing media companies everywhere.
- 67726e 10y agoAren't some classes of ad payments based on impressions? Surely with high traffic it's worth it to get around the blocker if only for the impression.
- jrkatz 10y agoAdvertisers still pay for CPM ads based on what they're worth to the advertiser -- adding a million worthless eyeballs to the ad will work once, but the advertisers will note conversions fell and pay less for the slot in the future, for the most part. There'll probably be some lift from people who normally block ads but still might convert on an unblocked ad -- it remains to be seen if the lift will justify the engineering effort spent dodging the blockers.
- FreeKill 10y agoYeah, makes sense from that perspective. If your payments are based on eyeballs and not clicks or conversions, then absolutely I can see why they try to get around it...
- cmrdporcupine 10y agoYes CPM payment is based on impressions. But ultimately an advertiser will stop buying ads, or significantly lower the CPM, if they don't see click throughs (or better yet, conversions to product purchases, etc.) for those impressions. They keep track of the CTR (click through rate) and if that falls below a certain level they're going to evaluate why. I don't work in ads anymore, but I get the impression that that industry must be under the impression that CTRs and conversions are in fact dropping because of ad blockers, because there's a rash of new startups that work in the space around detecting and getting around ad blockers.
- pgt 10y agoAdBlockers are becoming more mainstream. I suspect shady practices that auto-click ads, which may be impacting their revenue. So even if you wouldn't click the ad, they may be losing out on padded clicks.
- jocose 10y agoGiven the nature of the subject matter I wonder if otherwise scrupulous users may actually click on and follow through with some of those adds. Sometimes porn doesn't play by the same rules as other markets.
- Thaxll 10y agoUntil everyone start using it.
- aibottle 10y agoWell large sites don't really care if you click - of course that's better - but simply displaying the ad already counts towards the CPM count. Oh and nobody said something about a click having to be intentional. Anyone can click on them by accident, which is easier if they are natively looking embedded. Also the adblock rates are already quite high [0]. I [0]: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-percentage-of-Internet-users-that-employ-AdBlock-Plus-or-similar-ad-blocking-plugins https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-percentage-of-Internet-use...
- touristtam 10y agoSo we should start a bot farm to click on ads on targeted website and sell that as a service? How do you market that, though?
- trjordan 10y agoYou'd be surprised. I'm not sure it's obvious that people on porn sites who install ad blocks aren't interested in porn ads. Alternatively, there are services that do well to advertise on PornHub that aren't porn: https://blog.eat24.com/how-to-advertise-on-a-porn-website/ https://blog.eat24.com/how-to-advertise-on-a-porn-website/
- philfrasty 10y agoThis article is pure gold: „We saw a huge spike in orders and app downloads during the time our ads were live, especially late at night when that insatiable desire for DP (double pepperoni) is at its most intense.“ xD
- jonwachob91 10y ago>>> You'd have to imagine that a visitor to their site, who has taken the time to actively setup and run an ad blocker, is probably the least likely user to actually click on an ad in the first place. Ad blockers are easily in the Early Majority right now, and it's becoming easier and more known about every day. It's dangerous to make such assumptions.
- user5994461 10y agoGotta adapt when adblocking is going over 50%. Too much money at play, can't be ignored ;)
- mfonda 10y agoMuch ad revenue comes from views, not clicks. Some quick back of the napkin math: - 21.2 billion visits in 2015 - Average of 9% of users using Ad Block - Let's assume an average CPM (amount paid per 1000 views) of $2.00 - Let's assume 0.01% of users use adblock That's ((21,000,000,000 * 9%) / 1000) * $2.00 = $3,780,000 in lost revenue due to adblock.
- touristtam 10y agoYou've got to love this logic: If I have not bought your product, you haven't lost a sale, You have not made one. You don't lose something you don't have to begin with. This is a very disingenius way to present reality, and suits well the manipulative frame of mind from the advertisment industry.
- geofft 10y agoSomeone in the Chrome bug report found the complainer's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-cameron-6380541 https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-cameron-6380541 "I am recovering over $1,000,000 / quarter in lost revenue from Adblock for my current employer. I have designed and implemented multiple strategies to combat Adblock. Would you like to know more?"
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mcescalante 10y agoFor anyone who uses uBlock Origin (and if you don't, I highly recommend it), there is a companion plugin for WebSockets that I recently stumbled upon and am enjoying https://github.com/gorhill/uBO-WebSocket https://github.com/gorhill/uBO-WebSocket The article also notes that uBlock and ABP have both shipped "workarounds", in the typical cat and mouse fashion
- ryuuchin 10y agoThe workarounds are reliant on filter lists to remain up to date. You can also just block websocket completely by adding the following to your filters (provided you're not using websockets for anything else): ||*$websocket,important You could actually use this method to create a whitelist by removing the "important" argument then creating a whitelist using the correct syntax.
- noir_lord 10y agoYep an "Off by default: This site is requesting to use WebSockets" approach would be the best solution.
- chipperyman573 10y agoThe problem is that non-techie users have started to use adblock (even my grandma had adblock on her laptop). Obviously HN users would be able to look at a page, think "Oh, a websocket could be used to provide real-time updates on vote counts" (for example), and allow it. But a regular user would see a scary warning and just close out of it.
- Klathmon 10y agoMaybe try paying for the content through their plan that allows you to pay without seeing any ads? I get that this is a porn site we are talking about here, but why is "just pay for it" never discussed in these kinds of submissions? Why is it always "how do we keep getting all this content for free without paying" and not "why can't they make it easier to pay" or "how else can I pay for this without losing security or anonymity"?
- teach 10y agoLooks like another example of porn companies pushing the envelope with technology. They were accepting credit cards online before virtually anyone. In fact, I think most innovations in technology come from either the military, video games or porn.
- swalsh 10y agoAh the classic MVP
- spacemanmatt 10y agoI regret that I have but one upvote to give to this post. But it's completely true that those are the classic 3.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ethbro 10y agoThere are so many definitions of that in this context.
- erelde 10y agoI knew Microsoft was involved somehow.
- takdi 10y agoNot really. Pornhub is very late in tech. Their website is a lot buggy. A lot of thumbnails don't load. They were very late on HD. And you can't even pay with bitcoin. It would be perfect for pornsite. And their is still no Netflix equivalent for porn which is very expensive when you compare to a normal show which is a lot more expensive to make
- user5994461 10y agoHow could there be there be a NetFlix for porn??? Everything is already available for free.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- 0xmohit 10y agoNo wonder they are getting smarter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12846537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12846537
- philfrasty 10y ago„22nd highest trafficked website in the world“ madness!
- throwaway1974 10y agoDon't they own a series of large sites?
- philfrasty 10y agoYup... pretty impressive portfolio TBH https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MindGeek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MindGeek
- peterkelly 10y agoSeems they're looking for PHP developers... I don't think I'd be comfortable telling my friends and family that's what I do all day
- the8472 10y agoPornhub Bypasses Chrome Ad Blockers with WebSockets. Firefox request filter APIs do cover websockets for example.
- catdog 10y agoThis should be made more clear. It seems that Chrome is generally behind in that regard, e.g. for a long time it wasn't even possible at all for an addon to block requests.
- fab13n 10y agoChrome is a browser offered for free by what's essentially an advertising company. How could we expect it to be on the cutting edge of the fight against advertising? They only tolerate ad-blocking plugins as long as it's necessary to retain power users. For instance, they aren't tolerated on Android.
- cyborgx7 10y agoThey aren't tolerated on Android because they are pre-installed on Android and therefore in a position of power. As the Android market-share grows, though, the chances of an anti-trust suit in that arena increase.
- catdog 10y agoExactly, I'm not surprised at all. ;)
- JulianMorrison 10y agoFirefox on Android has ad-blockers.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- sickbeard 10y agoMaybe people wouldn't use adblockers if their ads were elegantly integrated with their content (as opposed to opening hidden pages in the background and messing with navigation). You reap what you sow
- fastball 10y agoWell, we are moving towards promoted/sponsored content in lieu of ads, so probably in the not distant future we might start seeing more product placement, etc. Female Pornstar: Yes! Harder! Male Pornstar: Gimme a sec, I need to replenish my electrolytes with a big gulp of Brawndo!
- codezero 10y agoThat would be pretty entertaining. Realistically they could do a lot of product placement for sex toys, lube, condoms, and things that fit the target demographic :)
- criddell 10y agoI think I still would. I skip commercials on my DVR and change radio stations in my car when an ad comes on. Using an ad blocker feels the same to me.
- d0ugie 10y agoThey call this native advertising, where you think you're reading a piece of journalism, you're a few paragraphs in and suddenly it hits you that the article was written to conceal an advertisement, and you feel intellectually violated. From http://adage.com/article/media/york-times-debuts-native-ad-units-dell/290973/ http://adage.com/article/media/york-times-debuts-native-ad-u... > Times staff pitched story ideas to Dell. One of Dell's first paid posts delves into the topic of millennials in the workplace. The author is a freelancer that the Times contracted, according to Ms. Losee. The millennial generation is among four topics Dell customers are interested in learning more about, she said. A Times editor -- not from its newsroom, but instead part of an internal "content studio" -- pitched ideas to Dell around these topics that weren't related to Dell products. Dell approved the story ideas, which the Times farmed out to freelancers.
- cyborgx7 10y agoThe Mindgeek employee arguing[1] against adding WebSocket blocking capabilities to the Chrome API linked in the post is a fun read. Sounds like the ad industry is starting to get a little desperate. [1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=129353#c58 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=129353...
- joatmon-snoo 10y agoThe hostility is beautiful.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- quirkafleeg 10y agoLooks like another case of the old myth about porn innovating or "pushing" technology, as usual with nothing to back it up.
- unethical_ban 10y agoHe literally gave a case (from memory) about the industry being an early adopter of technology. Not every anecdote needs a citation. Where's your citation about it being a myth? Man, posts like this are so prevalent on HN. Why can't people stop and think about whether their words are useful to the conversation?
- idlewords 10y agoAnother tired accusation about negativity on HN, with no examples.
- wernercd 10y agoAnother tired accusation about tired accusations about negativity on HN... We have achieved irony inception.
- ionised 10y agoThe example was the post he responded to.
- quirkafleeg 10y ago
- danso 10y agoHave to give the MindGeek employee credit for participating in the bug thread and being upfront about his employer [0] [0] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=129353#c72 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=129353...
- ChristianBundy 10y agoIt's probably worth mentioning that they were called out previously[0]. [0] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=129353#c61 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=129353...
- geofft 10y agoI don't think he's being up-front - the phrase "As a for-profit organization" refers to AdBlock Plus and the insinuation that ABP is trying to monetize blocking WebSockets in contrast to the user's preferences, not to the author's organization. (Or maybe I'm just missing the sarcasm in your comment)
- danso 10y agoNo sarcasm, I misread the statement (though to be fair, it was his grammatical error). I wonder why he even chimed in? Before his comment in August, the thread was inactive for 1.5 months (and the bug report was unfilled for 4 years). Also interested in how a user in the thread knew that he worked for Mindgeek...if I'm reading this right [0], this Websockets thread was his first message. [0] https://bugs.chromium.org/u/3552224858/updates https://bugs.chromium.org/u/3552224858/updates
- joe_momma 10y agoOh yah, well what if I had javascript disabled altogether?
- cm3 10y agoPresumably the site in question wouldn't be functional then, but it would solve it.
- rurban 10y agopornhub and other sites happily detect my adblocks, but still cannot serve any ads via websockets, because I use a proper /etc/hosts file from http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/zero/ http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/zero/
- itsmemattchung 10y agoWhoa, such a simple and effective method by overriding the hosts file. Any idea how this file is kept up-to-date? Presumably new endpoints are constantly being rolled out; I wonder how the author of this file discovers the new hosts.
- satbyy 10y agoI've set up a cronjob to pull the latest hosts file from Steven's aggregated list https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts
- schmich 10y agoA couple months ago I put together a Docker image for just this. It's based on dnsmasq and Steven Black's hosts list, and it automatically updates the list daily: https://github.com/schmich/purify https://github.com/schmich/purify I run it on a cheap Digital Ocean machine, and my home router is setup to forward all DNS traffic to it. Any connected clients, phones included, automatically get the blocking capability.
- johnpowell 10y agoYou can email them new stuff and they add it pretty quickly to the list. I have sent in about 20 domains that are mostly mackeeper related and they get added within a few days. The person that cares is really nice and seems to appreciate the help.
- miahi 10y agoThere's also http://www.shallalist.de/ http://www.shallalist.de/ (nicely categorized), I use it with SquidGuard but it can be also be quite easily transformed to a hosts file.
- agentgt 10y agoSome what relevant story... Many years back I worked for a software company where we had traditional IT guys. One of the IT guys was really nice moral guy. One of the things he did to keep our WAN connection speedy was monitor the firewalls and routers and do traffic shaping/shaving/balancing. He showed me once how much traffic was going to porn sites on the company WAN (he knew I wouldn't tell anyone). It was quite impressive... at times it was 35%. Now he could have been dick and found out which workers were looking at stuff but he did not and I remember distinctly his reasons were something like: "everyday I see the smoker crowd take 30 minute smoke breaks and all kinds of employees waste time and resources... but porn like coffee and cigarettes might actually help some people get work done..."
- kilroy123 10y agoWho the hell would watch porn at work!? I find this utterly bizarre. It is some exec having a wank in his office with the doors closed? Maybe I'm just the weirdo for not jerking it at work?
- agentgt 10y agoI had a couple of theories at the time who was doing it: * The sales team was predominately young college guys. I often saw these guys IMing links back and forth. * The consulting team often VPN tunneled in. I remember distinctly that IT could never get the routing on the VPN right such that internet traffic would not go through the VPN. That is they would VPN and think... hmm I'm alone in a hotel and leave the VPN client on.
- acdha 10y agoAt a previous workplace, that telework laptops were definitely a problem: someone senior broke policy by letting their teenage son use it, which was first noticed from the heavy P2P traffic over the VPN but the excuse was accepted when the porn browsing continued while the exec was in the office explaining.
- majani 10y ago
- dedalus 10y agoI thought PageFair used the same approach and adblock plus actually does block websocket traffic to certain domains..
- rajeshp1986 10y agoThere are many news sites which do Adblocker detection. I guess this is a known trick by many people in the industry and they are not doing anything here.
- hoorayimhelping 10y agoThe referral of this link is for reddit programming. Mods might want to change that to help out the author understand where their traffic is coming from.
- edibleEnergy 10y agohehe thanks, I felt kind of bad putting any sort of utm tags on the blog in the first place. I posted it to r/programming and somebody reposted it to hn. The tracking tag doesn't matter to me anyways. I'm just glad people found the writeup interesting :)
- PromisedLAN 10y agoHas anyone else been experiencing redirects at kickass.cd? I have ublock origin but it still occurs.
- the_duke 10y agoI'm much more concerned with a new ad blocking circumvention technique that has emerged on plenty of sites in the recent months: Open the actual link you are clicking on in a new tab, and change the current page's location to some advertising page. They even randomize when a link opens in a new tab, so you can't just close the page automatically, but have to wait for the result. It drives me crazy. --- I do love how the MindGeek guy got called out on the bug tracker, though.
- hayksaakian 10y agoYou're talking about the "pop under" ad format
- rosstex 10y agoAnd uBlock Origin blocks WebSockets with the "uBlock Origin WebSocket" extension :) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin-websocket/pgdnlhfefecpicbbihgmbmffkjpaplco https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin-webs...
- api 10y agoAds will win the arms race. There's a clear economic model and "black hats" always have the advantage due to instant feedback on the success of attacks (REPL-like instant feedback learning vs. speculation). The problem is the economic model of the web, or lack thereof. Ad blockers evade that problem.
- wintom 10y agoI know there will be a lot of heat on me fro HN users about ads but here goes anyway: Ads are pretty bad right now but the reality is that the internet without ads would not be a useful internet. Half of the tools and the things you use all of the time could not exist without ad revenue. The reverse of this is that Ad Blockers are much worse than the ads. They have become the Mafia of the internet! Did you know that as a company looking to bypass adblockers you can pay ad blockers to whitelist you? That is extortion money! Google and Facebook pay. The little guys looking to aquire customers now have to pay for the ads by impression and when their ads are blocked have zero chance of showing. I know you may not care but we are heading down to an internet where the ads are now becoming content and we are basically reading nothing but junk. The junk went from one section of the page to now being the page. Advertising has existed as long as media has and as such will never go away. There is advertising on pay to view channels like cable, companies want to sell to you and they wont just disappear. Lets stop this, lets get rid of the ad blockers and lets force the advertising companies to be responsible with their technology, not drain our batteries, not sell our personal info and we will have a much better internet.
- milcron 10y ago> Did you know that as a company looking to bypass adblockers you can pay ad blockers to whitelist you? That is extortion money! Adblock does this, but to my knowledge uBlock does not.
- wintom 10y agoThat is a terrible thing and it highlights the wild west that is internet advertising right now. Much like TV ads, internet ads have to be responsible but there has to be a place for them or dont be surprised when this sort of thing happens.
- blahi 10y agoAdblock didn't do it in the beginning either :) Just like utorrent became popular because bitcommet became slow and clunky. Have you looked at utorrent lately?
- awqrre 10y agoI haven't seen any ads on xhamster.com which I think is the same company?
- LargeCompanies 10y agoThose online pirate movie streaming sites figured a way to bypass ad block in September or so. Considering what type of site it is (the biggest one) it doesn't bother too bad; a few pop ups here and there. If they start amping up that number then I will be googling for a better ad block.
- intrasight 10y agoI see so many comments which boil down to "either buy a subscription or be willing to have ads shown". But here's the reality. Even if you pay for a subscription, you still see ads. And worse, you still have code from 3rd parties, whom you didn't invite, running on your computer. I bet if you took a survey of the HN community, the majority would say they have no problem with 1st-party ads (how about simple inline images) of a quality commensurate with the quality of the publication.
- epmatsw 10y agoTo be real, any time you visit any site you're running 3rd party code you didn't invite. NPM modules, random scripts from CDNs or stored off in a /libs directory, hardly any sites are built entirely on code hosted or written by the party running that site. Ads get a bad rap, but if you're running JS on the modern web it's not even the biggest culprit.
- intrasight 10y agoTrue, but when I say "3rd party code" I was specifically referring to code coming from a 3rd party server and therefore not under the control of the 1st party. If the site I visit hosts the code then I trust it because I trust the 1st party (not saying that's necessarily a good idea, but it's my current philosophy). I have uBlock Origin set to block any 3rd party requests, so I do have to explicitly "invite" any such code/resources. And you can tell uBlock to remember those invites. This feature has made the web bearable again.
- INTPenis 10y agoI was on pornhub last night and didn't see any ads. ;) Could it be that noscript will block this if you are forced to whitelist each video by clicking it before it plays?
- touristtam 10y agoIf we are talking about the same extension, then it is down to the way noscript blanket block the scripts on the page.
- INTPenis 10y agoI noticed recently that yes they do have some sort of connection between the JS required to play certain videos and the JS required to show ads. And the latest from pornhub is actually that noscript cannot simply allow the video window, it refused to play until I allowed one of the domains on the page temporarily, then the ads came up and the video would play. It's not rocket science, it's obvious that people will eventually defeat noscript. But I think pornhub stands out a bit as being especially nerdy and bleeding edge.
- aq3cn 10y agoI hear porn industry complain about internet piracy. So that could be their next target after ad-blockers. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/porn-piracy/ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/porn-piracy/