11 ms·

LA Times and ads

434 points by catacombs 10y ago

an_account 10y ago
Does buying a subscription remove all these ads?
- cdransf 10y ago
  It likely just removes the pay wall. Even subscribers would likely benefit from using an ad blocker.
- mrj 10y ago
  No, but they don't give me grief about using an ad blocker..
- BrendanEich 10y ago
  No but you might get malware via a 3rd party exchange. https://www.extremetech.com/internet/220696-forbes-forces-readers-to-turn-off-ad-blockers-promptly-serves-malware https://www.extremetech.com/internet/220696-forbes-forces-re...
debt 10y ago
"They are also the most aggressive ad shoveling website I have ever seen. Their ad blocker blocker and paywall works, preventing me from reading articles." So their ad blocker blocker and their paywall kept you from reading the articles for free? Why don't you just pay them? It's just a shitty thing to do at this point. If they have high quality articles then what would require you to pay them? Do they need to be on Patreon or Kickstarter or something?
- Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
  Why would you reward a website for using dark patterns like autoplaying video ads, popups, 14 bloody GiB of data pushing ads and tracking and bullshit into your browser?
  - Buge 10y ago
    You're rewarding them for "the best political coverage in California". Also if the article is paywalled, why would anyone keep it open and let ads play? Either buy the subscription or leave (or try to bypass the paywall some other way).
  - lozaning 10y ago
    Are any of those really dark patterns? Annoying and shitty... sure. None of the above are meant to trick you, they're just a nuisance.
    - anigbrowl 10y ago
      And that is reason enough. If I am paying for something you better not treat me that way because I will stop paying.
    - anigbrowl 10y ago
      And that is reason enough. If I am paying for something you better not treat me that way because I will stop paying.
- siddboots 10y ago
  This particular article is not behind a paywall. Instead, it blocks readers who are using a) adblock, b) private browsing mode, or c) tracking protection. Their online subscription gives you access to more content, but they don't claim anywhere that they will let me browse with the above enabled even if I do pay.
rinze 10y ago
"An attentive eyeball! Fire at will to trigger consumption!"
smaili 10y ago
> That’s a timeline of 30 seconds of page activity about 5 minutes after the article was opened. To be clear, this timeline should be empty. Nothing should be loading. Maybe one short ping, maybe loading one extra ad. Instead the page requested 2000 resources totalling 5 megabytes in 30 seconds. It will keep making those requests as long as I leave the page open. 14 gigabytes a day. It's not quite clear if 14GB/day is an extrapolation based off the author's sample of 5 MB/30 seconds or if the author actually left the page open for all 24 hours. Regardless, that's quite a bit of data.
- Mtinie 10y ago
  Should be easy enough to confirm. I'll test it out tomorrow and see if they've changed something.
  - frozenport 10y ago
    What if it crashes the browser!
    - Mtinie 10y ago
      That in itself is an indication of something, no?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- NelsonMinar 10y ago
  Hi I'm the author. I did the naive extrapolation. 5 * 2 * 1440 = 14,400. Perhaps this number is not entirely accurate. The fact it is any larger than, say, 10 is the problem.
  - greglindahl 10y ago
    That's a terrible methodology, and makes the headline pretty inaccurate. (Edit: looks like the blog headline isn't inflammatory at the moment: did you change it, or did the HN poster insert the 24-hour figure?) I'm against bad ads as much as everyone else, but I don't think using a terrible methodology to criticize them is a good idea. Making clear what you measured would be much better, and actually leaving the thing open for 24 hours would be best.
drawkbox 10y ago
This is why data caps are bad. Left open all month that could be 400+ GB of data used on your plan. Ad networks are being subsidized by data caps and personal/business broadband costs. Maybe if ad serving went through the main host and their own bandwidth then maybe ad networks would have a reason to control this abuse of transfer.
- kr0 10y ago
  Thats actually a really smart idea. You get the benefit of ads but also pay for the bandwidth they consume the ad delivery network
- sundvor 10y ago
  My phone plan is 6GB/month. After that, I PAY. And they wonder why we use adblockers.
- cobookman 10y ago
  Or on the flip side. Data caps will make people care about how much data their site uses. Cause customers will stop using data heavy sites as they have economic insentive not to. Making the web all around faster as no more 10MiB webpages, and making the industry move back to server side rendering.
  - tedunangst 10y ago
    "total data transferred: X MB ($y.zz)" should be part of a browsers standard status bar.
    - vinnymac 10y ago
      I know we can easily get some info from chrome dev tools and chrome://net-internals/#bandwith. It would be convenient for users if someone put together an extension that would display this information by default, or alternatively browsers just had a setting we could turn on.
      - 10y ago
alrs 10y ago
Browse with w3m or elinks, problem solved.
- mcnaughtonrules 10y ago
  Elinks for the win
- rinze 10y ago
  Now that you mention elinks, do you know if development continues? I had a question the other day that I couldn't find answered anywhere, but it looks like the main mailing list is entirely lost (I tried to follow these links: http://elinks.or.cz/community.html http://elinks.or.cz/community.html).
  - watt 10y ago
    Just check their git activity. http://repo.or.cz/elinks.git/shortlog http://repo.or.cz/elinks.git/shortlog
- ue_ 10y ago
  Or Firefox/$free_software_browser with uBlock Origin + uMatrix, or NoScript.
  - mos_basik 10y ago
    >umatrix Apt name. Had never heard of it before your comment. After some looking around its github wiki from my phone, this looks... powerful. Wow. Same maintainer as ublock origin, right? +1 to my list of things to check out when I have a moment.
SwellJoe 10y ago
I resisted using an ad blocker for many years; I kinda felt like if I wanted to use a site, I should be willing to trade for seeing their ads. I've changed my tune a couple of years ago, and this is a (small) part of the reason (but a bigger part of it now that I know how crazy usage for ads has gotten). I'm on mobile data nearly 100% of the time most months. 14GB costs me $50-$70 (depending on which network I'm on, I have two) to download ("unlimited" plans actually aren't, when used as a hotspot, though T-Mobile now seems to actually have a mostly unlimited hotspot option, I haven't tried it yet). So, not only are ads intrusive, disrespectful of privacy, and generally of negative utility for me as a user...they're also ridiculously costly. So, yeah, I use an ad blocker. Oddly, I tried disabling it earlier today for an LA Times article (because of their blocker blocker), but it didn't correctly detect that I'd disabled it, so I closed it and went elsewhere. Now I know I should never disable ad block for LA Times, no matter how interesting the story seems.
- excalibur 10y ago
  I recently (past year) bit the bullet and began ad blocking myself. My primary concern is the recent proliferation of malicious content through the common ad networks. Supporting websites is great, but not at the expense of your own security.
  - noir_lord 10y ago
    I've been using adblockers since they where a thing (and DNS blocks longer than that) since back then you could rely on the adnetworks feeding your malware at some point. I'm trying to think if I've ever clicked an advert on the internet intentionally and it's probably under half a dozen accidentally.
    - andai 10y ago
      I wonder sometimes, with the amount these advertisers know about me, how come they don't know I don't click on ads? It would increase their profits to not target me.
lobster_johnson 10y ago
I develop software used by newspapers. This is a problem with the whole industry. It's amazing how much crap they load. These sites all use a third party "tag manager" (Google Tag Manager, Tealium, Piwik etc.) to manage the scripts they load: ads, analytics, trackers etc. The people who use the tag manager typically aren't techies, so they don't understand that adding another tag will cause the page to slow down. Typically I've seen a single newspaper use 3-4 different vendors for the exact same thing, such as analytics. They don't actually use all of them; who knows why they have multiple overlapping ones. Scripts are often badly written, and it's common to see lots of nonsensical errors spewed to the console. It's very annoying to debug your own stuff when you have that crap loaded, which typically comes from a header/footer combo provided by the customer.
- zkms 10y ago
  The worst type of ad on newspaper sites are the disgusting "chumboxes" (by scumsuckers like "taboola" or "outbrain") that orbit at the bottom of pages and serve up images meant to be as simultaneously repulsive and fascinating as possible: https://theawl.com/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum-de0b7a070a2d https://theawl.com/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum-de0b... As long as these pages have ads that display utterly gross images (if you doubt me, click the above link) that make goatse look like pure mindbleach, i'll keep blocking JS and ads.
  - eli 10y ago
    It made me sad when boingboing put one of those ad boxes on the site. I work in digital media. I get why publishers do it. But, sheesh, if you're resorting these ads that insult your audience in exchange for pennies, I think you need to reexamine your approach.
    - greglindahl 10y ago
      It's less then pennies per view. All of those trackers also pay less than pennies per view. Basically, if you have a legit business with any ability whatsoever to make decent revenue, there's no reason to have chumboxes or paying trackers on your site.
shams93 10y ago
Why I use the Android app TextBrowser
eXpl0it3r 10y ago
Do they offer an RSS feed? Does adding the article to Pocket or a similar service work?
inka 10y ago
"Their ad blocker blocker and paywall works, preventing me from reading articles." Well, Adblocker in Chrome seems to be blocking the ads on the page quite well. Some single requests are being logged after the page loads, but nothing as to what the article mentions.
tedunangst 10y ago
So in case you were looking for another reason to avoid the LA Times (or probably tronc papers in general), they're very spammy. I get tons of junk "newsletter" mail from them that I definitely didn't subscribe to, although they inevitably claim I did, and you can unsubscribe, but then they just invent new lists. And sell your address to others. Sample from only a few days ago. From: "San Diego Union-Tribune" <promotions@e.sandiegouniontribune.com> Subject: We are proud to offer you Moonlighting - Hire or be hired! Received: from mta953.e.latimes.com (mta953.e.latimes.com [8.7.44.159] [Blah blah bullshit about their proud partner promoting a soulless gig economy.] This email was delivered because you registered for Email Membership at utsandiego.com This is 100% false. I did create an account for latimes.com (who sent this shit) but not the San Diego paper. Not even close.
- wjossey 10y ago
  I whipped together https://getcovert.com https://getcovert.com to help address this problem for me. Currently it's a chrome plugin that allows me to generate a unique obfuscated "proxy" email address for sites I want to sign up for but don't want to expose my real email. If they ever sell it, redistribute it, or I want to shut them down, I just block that proxy email. It's barely an alpha project and needs a ton of work to be functional, but just know you're not the only one who finds this frustrating and unacceptable.
  - rinze 10y ago
    Isn't this solution similar to putting "+unique_string" before the @ part in (for example) Gmail addresses?
    - wjossey 10y ago
      Unfortunately no. Any advertiser / marketer worth their salt knows this already and often will just strip it out and bypass it in their marketing platform. Sorry to say, but that's not good at avoiding the issue as outlined above.
    - megous 10y ago
alistproducer2 10y ago
Another reason I keep JS turned off on my phone and most news sites on desktop. Seriously, try it.
mirimir 10y ago
Well, I can read the article in Firefox with Adblock Plus if I enable Reader View before the modal box opens :) Learned that trick here. Thanks, guys. Edit: Automatic Reader View add-on eliminates the race.
aftbit 10y ago
I actually installed uMatrix just so I could disable all cookies and Javascript on LA Times. No more ads or anti-ad-blocker.
jurassic 10y ago
Garbage like this is one of the many reasons I've gone back to print to a large extent. Printed magazines are amazing things, a superior experience and product in almost every way to reading online outlets. This whole ethical conflict over how to deal with invasive advertising while supporting the work goes away when you bought and paid already before you even start to read. Daily news doesn't fit into this philosophy that well (printed papers is too much bulk for me), but I get pretty much all the "breaking news" I need from Twitter. Stepping away from the 24 news cycle to sit with a piece of analysis from a weekly or monthly (or even quarterly!) magazine is a much better way for me to stay informed and support journalism. And as a bonus I don't have creepy ads follow me around the internet if I want to read a Socialist magazine, or a gun rights magazine, a bridal magazine, or whatever.
- symlinkk 10y ago
  you can buy digital subscriptions to many newspapers, including the LA Times
  - jurassic 10y ago
    I don't know about LA Times specifically but the digital product often still includes invasive user-tracking bandwidth-intensive advertising, just toned down to what people consider "acceptable" levels. For example, the NYT digital sub that I pay nearly $200/year for still serves me advertising. So ponying up the cash doesn't do much to address the concerns that are being raised all throughout this thread.
wjossey 10y ago
I have been reflecting on this problem a lot over the past six months since I left the ad tech industry after four and a half years. These posts always sadden me, because I recognize the importance and value that advertising brings to web startups and the level of innovation and growth that it has enabled. I have a hypothesis on how we can reduce the number of these types of ads, while also not harming advertisers or publishers in terms of reach and revenue. I believe that we are in an advertising death-spiral. Sites are adding additional impression opportunities and ad placements. This is triggering higher numbers of impressions available to programmatic buyers. The additional number of available impressions is devaluing the impressions (we're flooding the market), which has led to a perpetual decrease in CPMs every year. This leads to publishers pushing higher "engagement" ads, which users just find terribly annoying, as well as more ad units. The cycle repeats, repeats, and repeats, just so both sides can "stay effective" with regards to whatever metrics they are measuring against. My belief is that the LA times does not need N ad placements per article. They probably only need one. We don't need to junk up quality news organizations with taboola and the other "content" recommendation platforms. We quite literally need a détente. LA Times goes down to one ad placement per article. LA Times advertiser is guaranteed viewability (high placement in the article, for example), and 100% share of voice. The "impact" of that ad increases, with the overall decrease in other "noise". The cost also goes up, but commiserate with the increased value. Both sides likely end up making / paying the same amount of money, with likely the same level of impact for the advertiser, but they reduce the pain on the user, which they should both care about deeply. I'd like to believe this is an opportunity from a business perspective. I believe that someone could demonstrate this value, in some way, to both sides of the market. The advertiser would need fewer impressions to achieve the same level of value / impact of their ads, which also has the side benefit of reducing additional costs around TPAT tracking, analytics costs, general tracking costs, etc., which are often priced on a CPM basis (so, fewer CPMs lowers their bill). The publisher would potentially see better engagement from their users, fewer ad blocks, and a higher quality experience. I think for the sake of newspapers and advertisers alike, some way to make this reality makes this an idea worth solving.
- jccalhoun 10y ago
  Fox tv tried a similar thing a few years ago. Dollhouse and Fringe had fewer commercials. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/business/media/13adco.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/business/media/13adco.html After one season they went back to the same amount of commercials as other shows. https://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/fox-scraps-remote-free-tv/comment-page-1/ https://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/fox-scraps...
stvnbn 10y ago
https://pi-hole.net/ https://pi-hole.net/ Turn your raspberry into an ad-blocker. I just want to spread the word out and make the world a better place.
- mp3geek 10y ago
  Not enough, using "host files" won't protect from websocket/blob/webrtc/base64 injections.
good_vibes 10y ago
The data points for my hypothesis just keep connecting. edit: so I know, why does something this innocent get downvoted? I don't understand what I did wrong.
- andai 10y ago
  ???
  - good_vibes 10y ago
    This is more of a note to self for future reference.
- andai 10y ago
  I think it's more like, you didn't do anything right! It sounds mysterious and all, but does not really benefit anybody else.
  - good_vibes 10y ago
    In that case, HN should brighten up. Cynicism for it's own sake rarely leads to innovation. Thinking based upon First Principles and original insight does correlate with innovation. This will get downvoted probably because it hurt someone's ego but it's true if you look the history of science and technology.
    - andai 10y ago
      I mean, if your note-to-self system is leaving cryptic comments, you should probably invest in finding something more appropriate. I'm very happy with Notational Velocity at the moment (not sure about cross platform solutions, but I think most systems do similar things nowadays).
manigandham 10y ago
I work in adtech. The reason this happens is because of poor dev knowledge/resources by most publishers (although shouldn't be a problem with LA Times) and because the ad industry has perverse incentives combined with absolutely no oversight or enforcement. 99% of these companies are in business by running as many impressions/clicks/whatever "engagements" as possible regardless of user experience so we end up with this tragedy of the commons.
kccqzy 10y ago
I'm a frequent visitor of L.A. Times and I've already learnt to press Cmd+. as soon as all the content I want has been loaded.
bogomipz 10y ago
Does anyone know if you have a paid subscription does the LA Times still insist on sending you 14 gigs of ad data?
danbruc 10y ago
But how many users would actually be willing to pay for the content they consume in order to get rid of ads and tracking and excessive data volume consumption? And how much would they be willing to pay? It seems like they would have to be willing to pay at least an amount comparable to the average ad revenue per user and page view, whatever that actually is. Just blocking ads is certainly justifiable in the current situation, but it also certainly not sustainable if the ad blocker installation base keeps growing. And buying subscriptions for all sites is not really an option either. It becomes quite expensive pretty quickly, especially if you want the see only a few articles per month on each site but do so on many sites.
- anigbrowl 10y ago
  Lots would if it weren't so inconvenient. I read articles from maybe 100 different news sources in a typical month but realistically I don't want 100 newspaper and magazine subscriptions, or 100 different subscription offers or website accounts. Why isn't there something like a Netflix for News that just gives me news free of visual cruft and takes care of distributing the revenue from what I read in approximately accurate portions to the content providers, not to mention a seamless interface for socially rating and categorizing news? Newspaper/magazine subscriptions made sense when newspapers were heavily local and magazines were periodicals. Neither condition really obtains any more and having multiple subscriptions is not worth the overhead for even a small number of publications. The last time I made the mistake of subscribing to a magazine I also saw a huge increase in junk mail for several years afterwards. GFTO of my mailbox with that shit.
  - danbruc 10y ago
    Lots would if it weren't so inconvenient. I am not really sure about that. About 10 % of all Internet users are currently using an ad blocker. So 90 % are okay with ads or don't care or whatever. Further I would estimate that users would have to pay between $5 and $10 per month to pay for the content they consume to provide an income for sites comparable to that of ads. Maybe 1 % of the ad blocker users - number pulled out of thin air - would be willing to replace their ad blocker with a monthly payment of $10 if this would would work frictionless, if you could magically convince the entire Internet to create some Netflix equivalent. In the end that would be 0.1 % of the Internet users which seems not really a huge incentive to bring such a Netflix equivalent into existence.
deleted 10y ago
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anigbrowl 10y ago
They are also the most aggressive ad shoveling website I have ever seen. Their ad blocker blocker and paywall works, preventing me from reading articles. It keeps working even when I have my ad blocker turned off. Obviously I must have some anti-tracking extension still enabled that it dislikes, but I'm not willing to spend that much time troubleshooting my browser. It's baffling to me, because the LAT is one newspaper I'd consider a digital subscription to, but as this article says the advertising/marketing people have clearly won out over the editorial, so fuck'em until that changes.
- tedunangst 10y ago
  I would discourage you from getting a subscription for other reasons, but will note that subscribers don't get grief about ad blockers.
deleted 10y ago
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donohoe 10y ago
I see this all the time. No regard for mobile users that are paying for data plans. To me the big reason to have ad-blocker is data, not just UX. I'm focused on getting a mobile article page down from 20+ seconds on 4G with 300+ requests and page-weight of 2MB+ (mostly ads). Right now, on CI environment it is averaging 2.1s, 350K in size, <45 requests, and no ads in the initial view. Sadly, Hearst doesn't own the LAT so it won't help them.
- x0x0 10y ago
  Since you're paying them nothing at all, it's not exactly like you're a customer, is it? I'm not sure why regard for people offering to pay them nothing at all would be a high priority for the LA Times, but ymmv.
mp3geek 10y ago
Sites will use the disguise of "Native Ads" to make these links look like standard web page links, and they'll do every attempt to avoid being blocked or hidden. Using base64 images, websocket/blob: injections, third-party scripts, natively hosting the images on the site and using also webRTC to also inject. Its a long fight of countering/re-countering, and until website developers listen to its users these type of ads aren't acceptable. /Fanboy from Easylist here
Mtinie 10y ago
Watching the requests, there's a huge number of mixed content warnings in the console. Attempting to hit https://www.latimes.com https://www.latimes.com to remove the reason for all of those failed requests triggers Firefox to throw a certificate error. Could all of this be a side effect of a certificate that has gone bad? > www.latimes.com uses an invalid security certificate. > > The certificate is only valid for the following names: > .akamaihd.net, .akamaihd-staging.net, .akamaized-staging.net, .akamaized.net, a248.e.akamai.net
- Mtinie 10y ago
  Folllow-up question. Do Doubleclick ads typically employ a cache control policy of "no-cache, must-revalidate"?
leoh 10y ago
I've noticed that if you are running an ad-blocker and disable JavaScript (i.e. from the Chrome debugger), you can view the page just fine.
jankotek 10y ago
Hit Esc (or Cancel) button to stop JavaScript execution. Works well since Netscape 3.x
intrasight 10y ago
I visited the article he mentioned had had no issues. Ads and videos and everything from third-party sites were blocked and all I had was the text of the article. I think the author has got to tune his ad blocking tech. Edit: uBlock Origin blocked 20 third-party domains. Totally typical of web sites these days.
- NelsonMinar 10y ago
  I use uBlock Origin too, and the LA Times definitely detects I'm using it and puts a big uncloseable popup demanding I turn it off. I think it only does this after repeated visits though, not the first.
  - intrasight 10y ago
    Do you block all third-party resources?
    - NelsonMinar 10y ago
      I don't think so. I have not extensively reconfigured uBlock Origin. What setting are you thinking is relevant? BTW, this custom filter rule seems to work around the LA Times blocker blocker. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13567527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13567527
      - intrasight 10y ago
        You have to enabled "advanced user". Then on the "third-party" line you can select to block. Be forewarned that your browsing experience will default to a mid-1990s experience as you'll likely have no JS nor CSS since those are now often served by different domains. But for each domain you can now select which third-party sites to enable and then persist those settings. I have Firefox setup this way. In Chrome I have a default uBlock Origin install, so it is not so aggressive with filtering. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Advanced-user-features https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Advanced-user-feature...
jbclements 10y ago
so, as someone who keeps meaning to try it out but hasn't yet: how does Brave do with this site?
- jbclements 10y ago
  self-reply: just tried it. It does well. Alarmingly well. so sad to have to choose between Brendan Eich and Mozilla. :(
  - BrendanEich 10y ago
    No need to be alarmed. I have four browsers running rn on my mbp. Could have more but I run out of physical memory too often!
BuffaloBagel 10y ago
So glad to see others complaining about this. I am totally dismayed at the sluggishness of LAtimes.com. It was usable with an adblocker turned on but since being forced to turn it off recently the only computer I can use it on is a dual xeon with 32G memory and a modern gaming card and even then it's a struggle. I'm shocked that the this kind of botched hackery can exist at a major newspaper. It's ugly bad.
dba7dba 10y ago
First, did others see this HN post? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13956807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13956807 RJ Reynolds recruiting guideline SPECIFICALLY wanted sales (or marketing) people with 2.8-3.1 GPA. NO wonder so many ad server tags by the sales/marketing types are FULL or errors. Anyhow, the very first time I experience a Mac computer crash HARD was when I opened NYT.com. Yes NYT.com. It was a typical Mon morning, around year 2011. I got into office, got coffee, tapped keyboard the Mac Keyboard to wake up my iMac and proceeded to open the website I opened every morning, nyt.com. I noticed some flash based ad doing some fancy thing in the top banner. But whatever. I continue doing my thing. Wait what? My iMac is frozen. iMac! This can't be true. I frantically pound on keyboard but nothing works. Out of desperation, I finger it. When it comes back up, I slowly bring things up one at a time. And I realize it was the NYT.com's flashy flash ad that caused the crash. When I upgraded my slightly outdated Flash plugin in my Firebox, I could view the nyt.com homepage without my iMac freezing. I could HEAR the mechanical HD in my iMac grinding and CPU widget showing CPU spiking when I open nyt.com homepage. Because of an ad on NYT.com, I'm pretty sure millions of people experienced their computer crash on that Mon morning.
imgabe 10y ago
I find sending LA times articles to Instapaper manages to get me a readable copy of the article. It's a bit more of a hassle, but worthwhile if the article looks really interesting.
chiefalchemist 10y ago
Clearly, there's got to be a better way. The question is, will we find it before my "unlimited" data tops out?

LA Times and ads

434 points by catacombs 10y ago

an_account 10y ago

Does buying a subscription remove all these ads?

cdransf 10y ago
It likely just removes the pay wall. Even subscribers would likely benefit from using an ad blocker.
mrj 10y ago
No, but they don't give me grief about using an ad blocker..
BrendanEich 10y ago
No but you might get malware via a 3rd party exchange. https://www.extremetech.com/internet/220696-forbes-forces-readers-to-turn-off-ad-blockers-promptly-serves-malware https://www.extremetech.com/internet/220696-forbes-forces-re...

debt 10y ago

"They are also the most aggressive ad shoveling website I have ever seen. Their ad blocker blocker and paywall works, preventing me from reading articles." So their ad blocker blocker and their paywall kept you from reading the articles for free? Why don't you just pay them? It's just a shitty thing to do at this point. If they have high quality articles then what would require you to pay them? Do they need to be on Patreon or Kickstarter or something?

Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
Why would you reward a website for using dark patterns like autoplaying video ads, popups, 14 bloody GiB of data pushing ads and tracking and bullshit into your browser?
- Buge 10y ago
  You're rewarding them for "the best political coverage in California". Also if the article is paywalled, why would anyone keep it open and let ads play? Either buy the subscription or leave (or try to bypass the paywall some other way).
- lozaning 10y ago
  Are any of those really dark patterns? Annoying and shitty... sure. None of the above are meant to trick you, they're just a nuisance.
  - anigbrowl 10y ago
    And that is reason enough. If I am paying for something you better not treat me that way because I will stop paying.
  - anigbrowl 10y ago
    And that is reason enough. If I am paying for something you better not treat me that way because I will stop paying.
siddboots 10y ago
This particular article is not behind a paywall. Instead, it blocks readers who are using a) adblock, b) private browsing mode, or c) tracking protection. Their online subscription gives you access to more content, but they don't claim anywhere that they will let me browse with the above enabled even if I do pay.

rinze 10y ago

"An attentive eyeball! Fire at will to trigger consumption!"

smaili 10y ago

> That’s a timeline of 30 seconds of page activity about 5 minutes after the article was opened. To be clear, this timeline should be empty. Nothing should be loading. Maybe one short ping, maybe loading one extra ad. Instead the page requested 2000 resources totalling 5 megabytes in 30 seconds. It will keep making those requests as long as I leave the page open. 14 gigabytes a day. It's not quite clear if 14GB/day is an extrapolation based off the author's sample of 5 MB/30 seconds or if the author actually left the page open for all 24 hours. Regardless, that's quite a bit of data.

Mtinie 10y ago
Should be easy enough to confirm. I'll test it out tomorrow and see if they've changed something.
- frozenport 10y ago
  What if it crashes the browser!
  - Mtinie 10y ago
    That in itself is an indication of something, no?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
NelsonMinar 10y ago
Hi I'm the author. I did the naive extrapolation. 5 * 2 * 1440 = 14,400. Perhaps this number is not entirely accurate. The fact it is any larger than, say, 10 is the problem.
- greglindahl 10y ago
  That's a terrible methodology, and makes the headline pretty inaccurate. (Edit: looks like the blog headline isn't inflammatory at the moment: did you change it, or did the HN poster insert the 24-hour figure?) I'm against bad ads as much as everyone else, but I don't think using a terrible methodology to criticize them is a good idea. Making clear what you measured would be much better, and actually leaving the thing open for 24 hours would be best.

drawkbox 10y ago

This is why data caps are bad. Left open all month that could be 400+ GB of data used on your plan. Ad networks are being subsidized by data caps and personal/business broadband costs. Maybe if ad serving went through the main host and their own bandwidth then maybe ad networks would have a reason to control this abuse of transfer.

kr0 10y ago
Thats actually a really smart idea. You get the benefit of ads but also pay for the bandwidth they consume the ad delivery network
sundvor 10y ago
My phone plan is 6GB/month. After that, I PAY. And they wonder why we use adblockers.
cobookman 10y ago
Or on the flip side. Data caps will make people care about how much data their site uses. Cause customers will stop using data heavy sites as they have economic insentive not to. Making the web all around faster as no more 10MiB webpages, and making the industry move back to server side rendering.
- tedunangst 10y ago
  "total data transferred: X MB ($y.zz)" should be part of a browsers standard status bar.
  - vinnymac 10y ago
    I know we can easily get some info from chrome dev tools and chrome://net-internals/#bandwith. It would be convenient for users if someone put together an extension that would display this information by default, or alternatively browsers just had a setting we could turn on.
    - 10y ago

alrs 10y ago

Browse with w3m or elinks, problem solved.

mcnaughtonrules 10y ago
Elinks for the win
rinze 10y ago
Now that you mention elinks, do you know if development continues? I had a question the other day that I couldn't find answered anywhere, but it looks like the main mailing list is entirely lost (I tried to follow these links: http://elinks.or.cz/community.html http://elinks.or.cz/community.html).
- watt 10y ago
  Just check their git activity. http://repo.or.cz/elinks.git/shortlog http://repo.or.cz/elinks.git/shortlog
ue_ 10y ago
Or Firefox/$free_software_browser with uBlock Origin + uMatrix, or NoScript.
- mos_basik 10y ago
  >umatrix Apt name. Had never heard of it before your comment. After some looking around its github wiki from my phone, this looks... powerful. Wow. Same maintainer as ublock origin, right? +1 to my list of things to check out when I have a moment.

SwellJoe 10y ago

I resisted using an ad blocker for many years; I kinda felt like if I wanted to use a site, I should be willing to trade for seeing their ads. I've changed my tune a couple of years ago, and this is a (small) part of the reason (but a bigger part of it now that I know how crazy usage for ads has gotten). I'm on mobile data nearly 100% of the time most months. 14GB costs me $50-$70 (depending on which network I'm on, I have two) to download ("unlimited" plans actually aren't, when used as a hotspot, though T-Mobile now seems to actually have a mostly unlimited hotspot option, I haven't tried it yet). So, not only are ads intrusive, disrespectful of privacy, and generally of negative utility for me as a user...they're also ridiculously costly. So, yeah, I use an ad blocker. Oddly, I tried disabling it earlier today for an LA Times article (because of their blocker blocker), but it didn't correctly detect that I'd disabled it, so I closed it and went elsewhere. Now I know I should never disable ad block for LA Times, no matter how interesting the story seems.

excalibur 10y ago
I recently (past year) bit the bullet and began ad blocking myself. My primary concern is the recent proliferation of malicious content through the common ad networks. Supporting websites is great, but not at the expense of your own security.
- noir_lord 10y ago
  I've been using adblockers since they where a thing (and DNS blocks longer than that) since back then you could rely on the adnetworks feeding your malware at some point. I'm trying to think if I've ever clicked an advert on the internet intentionally and it's probably under half a dozen accidentally.
  - andai 10y ago
    I wonder sometimes, with the amount these advertisers know about me, how come they don't know I don't click on ads? It would increase their profits to not target me.

lobster_johnson 10y ago

I develop software used by newspapers. This is a problem with the whole industry. It's amazing how much crap they load. These sites all use a third party "tag manager" (Google Tag Manager, Tealium, Piwik etc.) to manage the scripts they load: ads, analytics, trackers etc. The people who use the tag manager typically aren't techies, so they don't understand that adding another tag will cause the page to slow down. Typically I've seen a single newspaper use 3-4 different vendors for the exact same thing, such as analytics. They don't actually use all of them; who knows why they have multiple overlapping ones. Scripts are often badly written, and it's common to see lots of nonsensical errors spewed to the console. It's very annoying to debug your own stuff when you have that crap loaded, which typically comes from a header/footer combo provided by the customer.

zkms 10y ago
The worst type of ad on newspaper sites are the disgusting "chumboxes" (by scumsuckers like "taboola" or "outbrain") that orbit at the bottom of pages and serve up images meant to be as simultaneously repulsive and fascinating as possible: https://theawl.com/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum-de0b7a070a2d https://theawl.com/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum-de0b... As long as these pages have ads that display utterly gross images (if you doubt me, click the above link) that make goatse look like pure mindbleach, i'll keep blocking JS and ads.
- eli 10y ago
  It made me sad when boingboing put one of those ad boxes on the site. I work in digital media. I get why publishers do it. But, sheesh, if you're resorting these ads that insult your audience in exchange for pennies, I think you need to reexamine your approach.
  - greglindahl 10y ago
    It's less then pennies per view. All of those trackers also pay less than pennies per view. Basically, if you have a legit business with any ability whatsoever to make decent revenue, there's no reason to have chumboxes or paying trackers on your site.

shams93 10y ago

Why I use the Android app TextBrowser

eXpl0it3r 10y ago

Do they offer an RSS feed? Does adding the article to Pocket or a similar service work?

inka 10y ago

"Their ad blocker blocker and paywall works, preventing me from reading articles." Well, Adblocker in Chrome seems to be blocking the ads on the page quite well. Some single requests are being logged after the page loads, but nothing as to what the article mentions.

tedunangst 10y ago

So in case you were looking for another reason to avoid the LA Times (or probably tronc papers in general), they're very spammy. I get tons of junk "newsletter" mail from them that I definitely didn't subscribe to, although they inevitably claim I did, and you can unsubscribe, but then they just invent new lists. And sell your address to others. Sample from only a few days ago. From: "San Diego Union-Tribune" <promotions@e.sandiegouniontribune.com> Subject: We are proud to offer you Moonlighting - Hire or be hired! Received: from mta953.e.latimes.com (mta953.e.latimes.com [8.7.44.159] [Blah blah bullshit about their proud partner promoting a soulless gig economy.] This email was delivered because you registered for Email Membership at utsandiego.com This is 100% false. I did create an account for latimes.com (who sent this shit) but not the San Diego paper. Not even close.

wjossey 10y ago
I whipped together https://getcovert.com https://getcovert.com to help address this problem for me. Currently it's a chrome plugin that allows me to generate a unique obfuscated "proxy" email address for sites I want to sign up for but don't want to expose my real email. If they ever sell it, redistribute it, or I want to shut them down, I just block that proxy email. It's barely an alpha project and needs a ton of work to be functional, but just know you're not the only one who finds this frustrating and unacceptable.
- rinze 10y ago
  Isn't this solution similar to putting "+unique_string" before the @ part in (for example) Gmail addresses?
  - wjossey 10y ago
    Unfortunately no. Any advertiser / marketer worth their salt knows this already and often will just strip it out and bypass it in their marketing platform. Sorry to say, but that's not good at avoiding the issue as outlined above.
  - megous 10y ago

alistproducer2 10y ago

Another reason I keep JS turned off on my phone and most news sites on desktop. Seriously, try it.

mirimir 10y ago

Well, I can read the article in Firefox with Adblock Plus if I enable Reader View before the modal box opens :) Learned that trick here. Thanks, guys. Edit: Automatic Reader View add-on eliminates the race.

aftbit 10y ago

I actually installed uMatrix just so I could disable all cookies and Javascript on LA Times. No more ads or anti-ad-blocker.

jurassic 10y ago

Garbage like this is one of the many reasons I've gone back to print to a large extent. Printed magazines are amazing things, a superior experience and product in almost every way to reading online outlets. This whole ethical conflict over how to deal with invasive advertising while supporting the work goes away when you bought and paid already before you even start to read. Daily news doesn't fit into this philosophy that well (printed papers is too much bulk for me), but I get pretty much all the "breaking news" I need from Twitter. Stepping away from the 24 news cycle to sit with a piece of analysis from a weekly or monthly (or even quarterly!) magazine is a much better way for me to stay informed and support journalism. And as a bonus I don't have creepy ads follow me around the internet if I want to read a Socialist magazine, or a gun rights magazine, a bridal magazine, or whatever.

symlinkk 10y ago
you can buy digital subscriptions to many newspapers, including the LA Times
- jurassic 10y ago
  I don't know about LA Times specifically but the digital product often still includes invasive user-tracking bandwidth-intensive advertising, just toned down to what people consider "acceptable" levels. For example, the NYT digital sub that I pay nearly $200/year for still serves me advertising. So ponying up the cash doesn't do much to address the concerns that are being raised all throughout this thread.

wjossey 10y ago

I have been reflecting on this problem a lot over the past six months since I left the ad tech industry after four and a half years. These posts always sadden me, because I recognize the importance and value that advertising brings to web startups and the level of innovation and growth that it has enabled. I have a hypothesis on how we can reduce the number of these types of ads, while also not harming advertisers or publishers in terms of reach and revenue. I believe that we are in an advertising death-spiral. Sites are adding additional impression opportunities and ad placements. This is triggering higher numbers of impressions available to programmatic buyers. The additional number of available impressions is devaluing the impressions (we're flooding the market), which has led to a perpetual decrease in CPMs every year. This leads to publishers pushing higher "engagement" ads, which users just find terribly annoying, as well as more ad units. The cycle repeats, repeats, and repeats, just so both sides can "stay effective" with regards to whatever metrics they are measuring against. My belief is that the LA times does not need N ad placements per article. They probably only need one. We don't need to junk up quality news organizations with taboola and the other "content" recommendation platforms. We quite literally need a détente. LA Times goes down to one ad placement per article. LA Times advertiser is guaranteed viewability (high placement in the article, for example), and 100% share of voice. The "impact" of that ad increases, with the overall decrease in other "noise". The cost also goes up, but commiserate with the increased value. Both sides likely end up making / paying the same amount of money, with likely the same level of impact for the advertiser, but they reduce the pain on the user, which they should both care about deeply. I'd like to believe this is an opportunity from a business perspective. I believe that someone could demonstrate this value, in some way, to both sides of the market. The advertiser would need fewer impressions to achieve the same level of value / impact of their ads, which also has the side benefit of reducing additional costs around TPAT tracking, analytics costs, general tracking costs, etc., which are often priced on a CPM basis (so, fewer CPMs lowers their bill). The publisher would potentially see better engagement from their users, fewer ad blocks, and a higher quality experience. I think for the sake of newspapers and advertisers alike, some way to make this reality makes this an idea worth solving.

jccalhoun 10y ago
Fox tv tried a similar thing a few years ago. Dollhouse and Fringe had fewer commercials. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/business/media/13adco.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/business/media/13adco.html After one season they went back to the same amount of commercials as other shows. https://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/fox-scraps-remote-free-tv/comment-page-1/ https://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/fox-scraps...

stvnbn 10y ago

https://pi-hole.net/ https://pi-hole.net/ Turn your raspberry into an ad-blocker. I just want to spread the word out and make the world a better place.

mp3geek 10y ago
Not enough, using "host files" won't protect from websocket/blob/webrtc/base64 injections.

good_vibes 10y ago

The data points for my hypothesis just keep connecting. edit: so I know, why does something this innocent get downvoted? I don't understand what I did wrong.

andai 10y ago
???
- good_vibes 10y ago
  This is more of a note to self for future reference.
andai 10y ago
I think it's more like, you didn't do anything right! It sounds mysterious and all, but does not really benefit anybody else.
- good_vibes 10y ago
  In that case, HN should brighten up. Cynicism for it's own sake rarely leads to innovation. Thinking based upon First Principles and original insight does correlate with innovation. This will get downvoted probably because it hurt someone's ego but it's true if you look the history of science and technology.
  - andai 10y ago
    I mean, if your note-to-self system is leaving cryptic comments, you should probably invest in finding something more appropriate. I'm very happy with Notational Velocity at the moment (not sure about cross platform solutions, but I think most systems do similar things nowadays).

manigandham 10y ago

I work in adtech. The reason this happens is because of poor dev knowledge/resources by most publishers (although shouldn't be a problem with LA Times) and because the ad industry has perverse incentives combined with absolutely no oversight or enforcement. 99% of these companies are in business by running as many impressions/clicks/whatever "engagements" as possible regardless of user experience so we end up with this tragedy of the commons.

kccqzy 10y ago

I'm a frequent visitor of L.A. Times and I've already learnt to press Cmd+. as soon as all the content I want has been loaded.

bogomipz 10y ago

Does anyone know if you have a paid subscription does the LA Times still insist on sending you 14 gigs of ad data?

danbruc 10y ago

But how many users would actually be willing to pay for the content they consume in order to get rid of ads and tracking and excessive data volume consumption? And how much would they be willing to pay? It seems like they would have to be willing to pay at least an amount comparable to the average ad revenue per user and page view, whatever that actually is. Just blocking ads is certainly justifiable in the current situation, but it also certainly not sustainable if the ad blocker installation base keeps growing. And buying subscriptions for all sites is not really an option either. It becomes quite expensive pretty quickly, especially if you want the see only a few articles per month on each site but do so on many sites.

anigbrowl 10y ago
Lots would if it weren't so inconvenient. I read articles from maybe 100 different news sources in a typical month but realistically I don't want 100 newspaper and magazine subscriptions, or 100 different subscription offers or website accounts. Why isn't there something like a Netflix for News that just gives me news free of visual cruft and takes care of distributing the revenue from what I read in approximately accurate portions to the content providers, not to mention a seamless interface for socially rating and categorizing news? Newspaper/magazine subscriptions made sense when newspapers were heavily local and magazines were periodicals. Neither condition really obtains any more and having multiple subscriptions is not worth the overhead for even a small number of publications. The last time I made the mistake of subscribing to a magazine I also saw a huge increase in junk mail for several years afterwards. GFTO of my mailbox with that shit.
- danbruc 10y ago
  Lots would if it weren't so inconvenient. I am not really sure about that. About 10 % of all Internet users are currently using an ad blocker. So 90 % are okay with ads or don't care or whatever. Further I would estimate that users would have to pay between $5 and $10 per month to pay for the content they consume to provide an income for sites comparable to that of ads. Maybe 1 % of the ad blocker users - number pulled out of thin air - would be willing to replace their ad blocker with a monthly payment of $10 if this would would work frictionless, if you could magically convince the entire Internet to create some Netflix equivalent. In the end that would be 0.1 % of the Internet users which seems not really a huge incentive to bring such a Netflix equivalent into existence.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

anigbrowl 10y ago

They are also the most aggressive ad shoveling website I have ever seen. Their ad blocker blocker and paywall works, preventing me from reading articles. It keeps working even when I have my ad blocker turned off. Obviously I must have some anti-tracking extension still enabled that it dislikes, but I'm not willing to spend that much time troubleshooting my browser. It's baffling to me, because the LAT is one newspaper I'd consider a digital subscription to, but as this article says the advertising/marketing people have clearly won out over the editorial, so fuck'em until that changes.

tedunangst 10y ago
I would discourage you from getting a subscription for other reasons, but will note that subscribers don't get grief about ad blockers.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

donohoe 10y ago

I see this all the time. No regard for mobile users that are paying for data plans. To me the big reason to have ad-blocker is data, not just UX. I'm focused on getting a mobile article page down from 20+ seconds on 4G with 300+ requests and page-weight of 2MB+ (mostly ads). Right now, on CI environment it is averaging 2.1s, 350K in size, <45 requests, and no ads in the initial view. Sadly, Hearst doesn't own the LAT so it won't help them.

x0x0 10y ago
Since you're paying them nothing at all, it's not exactly like you're a customer, is it? I'm not sure why regard for people offering to pay them nothing at all would be a high priority for the LA Times, but ymmv.

mp3geek 10y ago

Sites will use the disguise of "Native Ads" to make these links look like standard web page links, and they'll do every attempt to avoid being blocked or hidden. Using base64 images, websocket/blob: injections, third-party scripts, natively hosting the images on the site and using also webRTC to also inject. Its a long fight of countering/re-countering, and until website developers listen to its users these type of ads aren't acceptable. /Fanboy from Easylist here

Mtinie 10y ago

Watching the requests, there's a huge number of mixed content warnings in the console. Attempting to hit https://www.latimes.com https://www.latimes.com to remove the reason for all of those failed requests triggers Firefox to throw a certificate error. Could all of this be a side effect of a certificate that has gone bad? > www.latimes.com uses an invalid security certificate. > > The certificate is only valid for the following names: > .akamaihd.net, .akamaihd-staging.net, .akamaized-staging.net, .akamaized.net, a248.e.akamai.net

Mtinie 10y ago
Folllow-up question. Do Doubleclick ads typically employ a cache control policy of "no-cache, must-revalidate"?

leoh 10y ago

I've noticed that if you are running an ad-blocker and disable JavaScript (i.e. from the Chrome debugger), you can view the page just fine.

jankotek 10y ago

Hit Esc (or Cancel) button to stop JavaScript execution. Works well since Netscape 3.x

intrasight 10y ago

I visited the article he mentioned had had no issues. Ads and videos and everything from third-party sites were blocked and all I had was the text of the article. I think the author has got to tune his ad blocking tech. Edit: uBlock Origin blocked 20 third-party domains. Totally typical of web sites these days.

NelsonMinar 10y ago
I use uBlock Origin too, and the LA Times definitely detects I'm using it and puts a big uncloseable popup demanding I turn it off. I think it only does this after repeated visits though, not the first.
- intrasight 10y ago
  Do you block all third-party resources?
  - NelsonMinar 10y ago
    I don't think so. I have not extensively reconfigured uBlock Origin. What setting are you thinking is relevant? BTW, this custom filter rule seems to work around the LA Times blocker blocker. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13567527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13567527
    - intrasight 10y ago
      You have to enabled "advanced user". Then on the "third-party" line you can select to block. Be forewarned that your browsing experience will default to a mid-1990s experience as you'll likely have no JS nor CSS since those are now often served by different domains. But for each domain you can now select which third-party sites to enable and then persist those settings. I have Firefox setup this way. In Chrome I have a default uBlock Origin install, so it is not so aggressive with filtering. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Advanced-user-features https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Advanced-user-feature...

jbclements 10y ago

so, as someone who keeps meaning to try it out but hasn't yet: how does Brave do with this site?

jbclements 10y ago
self-reply: just tried it. It does well. Alarmingly well. so sad to have to choose between Brendan Eich and Mozilla. :(
- BrendanEich 10y ago
  No need to be alarmed. I have four browsers running rn on my mbp. Could have more but I run out of physical memory too often!

BuffaloBagel 10y ago

So glad to see others complaining about this. I am totally dismayed at the sluggishness of LAtimes.com. It was usable with an adblocker turned on but since being forced to turn it off recently the only computer I can use it on is a dual xeon with 32G memory and a modern gaming card and even then it's a struggle. I'm shocked that the this kind of botched hackery can exist at a major newspaper. It's ugly bad.

dba7dba 10y ago

First, did others see this HN post? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13956807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13956807 RJ Reynolds recruiting guideline SPECIFICALLY wanted sales (or marketing) people with 2.8-3.1 GPA. NO wonder so many ad server tags by the sales/marketing types are FULL or errors. Anyhow, the very first time I experience a Mac computer crash HARD was when I opened NYT.com. Yes NYT.com. It was a typical Mon morning, around year 2011. I got into office, got coffee, tapped keyboard the Mac Keyboard to wake up my iMac and proceeded to open the website I opened every morning, nyt.com. I noticed some flash based ad doing some fancy thing in the top banner. But whatever. I continue doing my thing. Wait what? My iMac is frozen. iMac! This can't be true. I frantically pound on keyboard but nothing works. Out of desperation, I finger it. When it comes back up, I slowly bring things up one at a time. And I realize it was the NYT.com's flashy flash ad that caused the crash. When I upgraded my slightly outdated Flash plugin in my Firebox, I could view the nyt.com homepage without my iMac freezing. I could HEAR the mechanical HD in my iMac grinding and CPU widget showing CPU spiking when I open nyt.com homepage. Because of an ad on NYT.com, I'm pretty sure millions of people experienced their computer crash on that Mon morning.

imgabe 10y ago

I find sending LA times articles to Instapaper manages to get me a readable copy of the article. It's a bit more of a hassle, but worthwhile if the article looks really interesting.

chiefalchemist 10y ago

Clearly, there's got to be a better way. The question is, will we find it before my "unlimited" data tops out?