9 ms·

The Future of Ad Blocking: An Analytical Framework and New Techniques [pdf]

93 points by lainon 10y ago

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
d33 10y ago
"Our work refutes the belief that the battle between publishers and users is leading to a permanent arms race between the two parties, and presents a much more nuanced picture." "There is a significant need for follow-on technical work into the expansion of techniques that we have introduced as well as a debate on the ethics of ad blocking." Is there really a need for debase on the ethics of ad blocking at all? How could you defend presenting ads as being ethical at all? Do they really provide any value to our lives? I keep seeing it just as a waste of human attention and wondering what humanity would be like if we rejected the concept of spamming us with advertisements via every possible channel. Is it just me or we should stop accepting them and start working on building society where this is not accepted or at the very least, greatly excised?
- SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
  Well, ads currently are used to monetize part of your attention to pay for providing the service you're trying to use. If the ads all went away, so too might the service. So there is a debate if there's another viable economy (or even a better economy) than the ad-attention one. I personally am against ads because the way they operate now fundamentally damages the workings of capitalism as a resource allocation tool. There's a debate about the economics of ads, which sometimes takes on ethical dimensions.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - literallycancer 10y ago
    >Well, ads currently are used to monetize part of your attention to pay for providing the service you're trying to use. If the ads all went away, so too might the service. Yes. What's the issue?
- hvs 10y ago
  Do you feel this way about television?
  - nerdponx 10y ago
    Ads are the only reason I don't want to pay for TV. It's just not worth watching.
- libertine 10y ago
  From the moment that some ad sets you in contact with a product/service or a brand that brings value to you, it will become valuable to your life - on that particular moment. Else how would you reach out to your possible customers, that would find your product/service of great value to them? Do not fool yourself by saying that advertisement doesn't work... it does, and I bet it has influenced your decision plenty of times in your life - and I mean this in a positive way, not in a "mind controlling" way. The problem of spamming is just a matter of cheap distribution, a lot of inventory and the need to monetize free content.
  - csydas 10y ago
    Aside from a small outspoken few, I don't think that anyone is really arguing that advertising doesn't work. That's never been the contention, and the goal isn't to be completely rid of advertisements. The argument has been the annoyingness and frustrating way in which advertisements present themselves and constantly worm their way into your private life without your permission. It's advertising rings with exceptionally poor vetting allowing malicious ads through, no scrutiny applied. It's advertisers ignoring the expressed wishes of individuals who set Do Not Track, or installing adblockers; I will concede the latter often isn't much about philosophy and choice as it is about annoyance, but the site has the ability and choice to not provide content in that case - the sites and advertisers work to circumvent it. The problem with the idea of discussing advertisements in a sound way is that it's always been a discussion in bad faith on the side of advertisers. Think of every time there has been a major privacy breaking advertising and data collection tactic - the only reason these times stopped was because they got caught, not because someone inside thought "huh, this might not be a good idea to make an invasion of privacy." Look at the recent issues with Android based phones listening for silent beacons without user permission; a 40 page TOS on a phone does not constitute a fair warning, and courts have repeatedly upheld this position. Yes, I'm sure there are some "good" advertisers, but it's a poisoned landscape. The advertisements you see going to the majority of the web aren't from these good advertisers, and websites aren't interested in it either. There's money and incentive in crappy advertising and invading people's privacy. It's not "bringing value to customers", it's bringing value to advertisers and data hoarders while paying out a little to services, and these services are happy enough to lie to you about adblockers. Look at this pop-up from Bloomberg of all places: [1] It's a flat-out lie as to why they want you to unblock ads; the page renders perfectly fine and is perfectly reasonable without it, they just want you to see ads. It's not about creating value, it's about getting eyes on ads. Doesn't matter how, why, or what in many cases, just eyes and ears in contact with ads. Advertisers have dug a huge hole for themselves, and they're just digging deeper every time there is another upset over something advertisers do - they issue a stock apology, then do it all over again with a slightly different method. It's absurd, and the idea that somehow we need to meet advertisers half-way is equally absurd. There has not been a show of good faith from the advertising realm, even in the face of government regulation. It's complete disregard for everything in the name of a few bucks and more eyes and ears in contact with whoever happens to pay enough to get an ad there. Even with the hoards of data that they mine about people, you still get ridiculous advertisement patterns along the lines of "I see you just bought a washing machine. Here are washing machines you might want to buy!" There's no sense or reason, it's not advertising as a service, it's just spewing non-sense out there, and the amount of infrastructure, time, technology, and brainpower used to spew it out there is absolutely mind-boggling. [1] https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*nk9KdK0VXmLi3R2JWTmRNw.png https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*nk9KdK0VXmLi3R2JWT... Edit: Fixed a sentence where I forgot words: "huh, this might not be a good idea to make an invasion of privacy."
- Denzel 10y ago
  I feel differently. [1] And that's exactly why a debate is logical. One useful thing you can do to enter the debate... define what you believe an ad is and why. Oh and remember, when you're driving past those big ol' strip mall signs... you're looking at a physical advertisement of location. Maybe your definition differs, maybe it doesn't. Maybe you have a sound, logical argument for why it's different, or maybe you don't. A debate is a good faith effort in trying to understand another's viewpoint while arguing your own. And I understand your viewpoint, I hate what some ads have become, and yet I still don't use an ad-blocker because of my own personal values. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13964498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13964498
  - vespa_1933 10y ago
    Do you feel differently because you work for an org that makes money from selling ads? Not trying to be obnoxious but wouldn't it be simple for us to understand a pro-advertising position from such a person as no more complex as 'this is how I make my living'? How much of our society's brainpower should be allocated to gaming the internet for ad-clicks? That would be the real debate. Many brilliant technologists are being hijacked by the major ad-media corporations for what I think we can all agree is a trivial (if not pointless) task. This is what we should be debating.
    - Denzel 10y ago
      I can't take your ad-hominem attack on good faith.
      - majewsky 10y ago
        That may be an ad-hominem attack, but it's a justified one for once. Affiliations are a very relevant part to a moral discussion, so much that it has become commonplace for people to disclose their affiliations when they're engaging in moral discussions. Something that I haven't you seen doing yet, by the way.
        10y ago
- cgmg 10y ago
  How do you propose free services maintain themselves?
  - marssaxman 10y ago
    Collective volunteer labor worked fine before ads came along. Content was better, too.
    - chii 10y ago
      > volunteer this does not last, and is unlikely to scale beyond a certain point. Look how much trouble wikipedia is having with finances - so much so that they are spamming pages with donation pleas. I'm not saying that advertising is inevitable, but when value extraction from the consumer is low (such as a shitty site that people won't pay for, but will consume if free), advertising is the only viable way. If the argument is that such sites don't deserve to exist, then the arguments from both sides are just arguing different world views, and will not ever be resolved.
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  Arguably making it financially viable for the poor to use online services is a key upside to the ad industry. Probably the only one. I mean, as it is they have to figure out a way to get access but when they have it, the wealth of resources they can get without additional expense is huge. As a middle class individual, I'd prefer to pay for privacy which is why I opted to get FastMail. But for plenty of people in the world, that simply isn't a viable option.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
frik 10y ago
We need a future of advertising, a company that disrupts that sad state of ads. Leaner ads, less junk, bare pics, little JS, more trusted content, more generic content related to the page itself, less specific to the visitor and his browsing history. An ad about something I bought already last week on a completely unrelated site still freaks me out, and not only me. </r>
- manigandham 10y ago
  This already exists - our company has been doing this for years, amongst several others. The problem is a major global 12-figure industry with little oversight or regulation combined with tons of subpar talent and overloaded with politics. Until the major advertisers learn and want to do better, the (good) vendors, websites and users will suffer.
- snakeanus 10y ago
  We don't need advertising. Would be better if it just died.
pilooch 10y ago
Ads are targeted with machine learning, the only possible long term defence is fighting back with machine learning. It's already been done and both sides will still improve over the next few years. But in the end, much like spam, online ads will go away, automatically. On the tech side, using character based convolutional networks already frees the defense from writing endless rules, image ads can be nuked with another convnet, there's no technological lock.
FrozenVoid 10y ago
Eventually advertising will either 1.Merge with content: a single jpg/png render of a webpage + imagemaps for links. 2.Use canvas and emulate the browser output in it(webkit.js which creates a browser-within-browser contraption) 3.Require loading ads to function: some already merge functionality with ad javascripts. Since there is commercial pressure to have working ads, one of the methods will become commonplace eventually and will be really hard to filter(if at all possible). For #1 machine learning to recognize what an ad looks like and replace it with black rectangles or if imagemap block its coords, for #2/#3 there will be some sort of javascript filter/hijacker that would remove the ad code from content/emulated browser. But with WebAssembly these methods will not works, as content will become obfuscated binary stream which has to be decompiled& deobfuscated to even begin searching for offending "javascript"(essentially something like a virus pattern in binary).
- eddyg 10y ago
  The prospects of everything "bad" that will be done in the future via WebAssembly makes me cringe. It seems like it could be a major tipping point.
  - orangecat 10y ago
    WebAssembly bytecode is relatively simple; it shouldn't be any worse than dealing with obfuscated JS today.
    - FrozenVoid 10y ago
      It isn't a single javascript can map to many bytecodes streams. i.e. inserting dummy instructions, alternative code paths, etc, all the tricks malware uses to escape detection.
- adrianN 10y ago
  Eventually we'll find a better way of paying for online content than with our attention or ads will become promoted content that is actually interesting to people. I don't think that advertisers can win an arms race with users. Eventually ads will be annoying enough that people look for different content, like many people do with TV today.
ravenstine 10y ago
We wouldn't need any of these techniques if advertisers weren't so abusive.(i know it's been said many times over) If you ever watch really old game shows like "What's My Line?", they sometimes show the same commercials from the 1950s; it's astounding to see commercials and promotions that are relatively short, not overtly distracting, and mostly focus on the merits of the product. If commercials were still like that, I'd probably still have a cable subscription, I might even be paying for Hulu, and I would even have adblock turned off. But the nature of the advertising industry is that if you give them an inch, they'll take a mile and then some. So while there is certainly a valid ethics debate around advertising and ad blocking, until the advertising industry changes their methodology that they've had in place long before ad blocking plugins were invented, I will have next to no sympathy for them no matter how unethical a piece of adblocking software might go. Though it's been said numerous times before, turning off adblock after having it on for a significant amount of time(e.g. to denormalize the prevalence of ads) is all the evidence one needs to see how completely messed up digital advertising still is. Fortunately, many YouTubers and a lot of podcasters have already figured out that the way to go for advertising revenue is not through AdSense or stock preroll ads, but through having hosts themselves endorse a product for a portion of the show(that they have supposedly tried themselves) and making up the rest through Patreon. This harkens back to how many radio shows used to be and, honestly, it works because it's not very repetitive and the fact that the host is speaking for it says something. The corporate world either doesn't understand or like this, and are still gung ho to ram advertising down our throats. Better than adblocking, I rather just don't pay for their overvalued media to begin with. I don't pay for cable, I rarely go to the movies or buy them, I don't pay for Hulu, and I support internet shows that don't rely on AdSense. Life is actually pretty good when you pull most of your plugs.
- literallycancer 10y ago
  Ethics are largely irrelevant here. The advertising industry will simply do what they have always done, which is the things shown by their models to bring the most revenue. Asking the advertising industry to be less manipulative is like asking casinos or supermarkets to stop employing behavioral psychologists to figure out the best ways to get people to spend money. >and the fact that the host is speaking for it says something In most cases (e.g. all except the ones where the host would mention the product even without any incentives), it just says that they value the money they get more than their viewers' attention.
soared 10y ago
I think adblockers will lead to something worse: extremely in-depth data harvesting. When publishers can no longer make money on ads, they will turn to companies offering them similar amounts of income ($1 per 1000 pageviews) for just placing a tracking pixel on the page. The pixel will just track absurd amounts of data, enough to justify the cost. My example is Ibotta [1]. You can your entire shopping receipt and they give you cash back for buying certain products. While these 'coupons' prompt you to buy a product, Ibotta's real profit comes from data harvesting. They create a profile that knows where you shop, what you buy, how often, how much you spend, where you live, etc. etc. This data can be sold to companies like P+G for marketing intelligence ('Who is actually buying our products, for how much, how often? etc') [1] https://ibotta.com/ https://ibotta.com/
- throwaway2048 10y ago
  ad-blockers can block tracking pixels just as easily. If they want to move it server side, well the same could be done with ads too, the problem is that website owners can then manipulate and defraud extremely easily.
  - soared 10y ago
    Ads can't be moved served nearly as easily as a single tracking pixel. Fraud on server side code is a good point, but that seems like a technical hurdle that could be solved.
ComodoHacker 10y ago
> But the model makes clear that no further escalation is possible. That is because active ad blocking runs at a higher privilege level than publisher code, so it cannot in turn be disabled — at best it can be evaded. This is arguable. HTML5 EME can be used to mix ads into video in realtime. EME must run in isolation, so even browser vendor can't implement neither active blocking, nor ad detection. Still banners also can be implemented as video elements.
- Mathnerd314 10y ago
  DRM is basically in the same boat as ads, the user / operating system has all the power. The code is running in a sandbox; it can do integrity/sanity checks of the sandbox, but if the emulation is good it can't look outside the sandbox to discourage "bad behavior" like blocking ads or recording the stream for later. To paraphrase an old thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8439165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8439165 > Nobody cares about cracking Widevine to extract 4 Mbps Netflix streams when Blu-ray rips are already available on the Pirate Bay. But Netflix's content, which people do care about, is being shared on torrent sites. DRM is effectively useless.
HedleyLamar 10y ago
If ads were served from the same domain the page came and integrated into the page so it didn't affect the navigation of the website or grab the navigation from you if you're trying to read the page, far fewer people would object. It would be like the way ads used to be in newspapers or magazines. You look at it, and if you're not interested, you turn the page.

93 points by lainon 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

d33 10y ago

"Our work refutes the belief that the battle between publishers and users is leading to a permanent arms race between the two parties, and presents a much more nuanced picture." "There is a significant need for follow-on technical work into the expansion of techniques that we have introduced as well as a debate on the ethics of ad blocking." Is there really a need for debase on the ethics of ad blocking at all? How could you defend presenting ads as being ethical at all? Do they really provide any value to our lives? I keep seeing it just as a waste of human attention and wondering what humanity would be like if we rejected the concept of spamming us with advertisements via every possible channel. Is it just me or we should stop accepting them and start working on building society where this is not accepted or at the very least, greatly excised?

SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
Well, ads currently are used to monetize part of your attention to pay for providing the service you're trying to use. If the ads all went away, so too might the service. So there is a debate if there's another viable economy (or even a better economy) than the ad-attention one. I personally am against ads because the way they operate now fundamentally damages the workings of capitalism as a resource allocation tool. There's a debate about the economics of ads, which sometimes takes on ethical dimensions.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- literallycancer 10y ago
  >Well, ads currently are used to monetize part of your attention to pay for providing the service you're trying to use. If the ads all went away, so too might the service. Yes. What's the issue?
hvs 10y ago
Do you feel this way about television?
- nerdponx 10y ago
  Ads are the only reason I don't want to pay for TV. It's just not worth watching.
libertine 10y ago
From the moment that some ad sets you in contact with a product/service or a brand that brings value to you, it will become valuable to your life - on that particular moment. Else how would you reach out to your possible customers, that would find your product/service of great value to them? Do not fool yourself by saying that advertisement doesn't work... it does, and I bet it has influenced your decision plenty of times in your life - and I mean this in a positive way, not in a "mind controlling" way. The problem of spamming is just a matter of cheap distribution, a lot of inventory and the need to monetize free content.
- csydas 10y ago
  Aside from a small outspoken few, I don't think that anyone is really arguing that advertising doesn't work. That's never been the contention, and the goal isn't to be completely rid of advertisements. The argument has been the annoyingness and frustrating way in which advertisements present themselves and constantly worm their way into your private life without your permission. It's advertising rings with exceptionally poor vetting allowing malicious ads through, no scrutiny applied. It's advertisers ignoring the expressed wishes of individuals who set Do Not Track, or installing adblockers; I will concede the latter often isn't much about philosophy and choice as it is about annoyance, but the site has the ability and choice to not provide content in that case - the sites and advertisers work to circumvent it. The problem with the idea of discussing advertisements in a sound way is that it's always been a discussion in bad faith on the side of advertisers. Think of every time there has been a major privacy breaking advertising and data collection tactic - the only reason these times stopped was because they got caught, not because someone inside thought "huh, this might not be a good idea to make an invasion of privacy." Look at the recent issues with Android based phones listening for silent beacons without user permission; a 40 page TOS on a phone does not constitute a fair warning, and courts have repeatedly upheld this position. Yes, I'm sure there are some "good" advertisers, but it's a poisoned landscape. The advertisements you see going to the majority of the web aren't from these good advertisers, and websites aren't interested in it either. There's money and incentive in crappy advertising and invading people's privacy. It's not "bringing value to customers", it's bringing value to advertisers and data hoarders while paying out a little to services, and these services are happy enough to lie to you about adblockers. Look at this pop-up from Bloomberg of all places: [1] It's a flat-out lie as to why they want you to unblock ads; the page renders perfectly fine and is perfectly reasonable without it, they just want you to see ads. It's not about creating value, it's about getting eyes on ads. Doesn't matter how, why, or what in many cases, just eyes and ears in contact with ads. Advertisers have dug a huge hole for themselves, and they're just digging deeper every time there is another upset over something advertisers do - they issue a stock apology, then do it all over again with a slightly different method. It's absurd, and the idea that somehow we need to meet advertisers half-way is equally absurd. There has not been a show of good faith from the advertising realm, even in the face of government regulation. It's complete disregard for everything in the name of a few bucks and more eyes and ears in contact with whoever happens to pay enough to get an ad there. Even with the hoards of data that they mine about people, you still get ridiculous advertisement patterns along the lines of "I see you just bought a washing machine. Here are washing machines you might want to buy!" There's no sense or reason, it's not advertising as a service, it's just spewing non-sense out there, and the amount of infrastructure, time, technology, and brainpower used to spew it out there is absolutely mind-boggling. [1] https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*nk9KdK0VXmLi3R2JWTmRNw.png https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*nk9KdK0VXmLi3R2JWT... Edit: Fixed a sentence where I forgot words: "huh, this might not be a good idea to make an invasion of privacy."
Denzel 10y ago
I feel differently. [1] And that's exactly why a debate is logical. One useful thing you can do to enter the debate... define what you believe an ad is and why. Oh and remember, when you're driving past those big ol' strip mall signs... you're looking at a physical advertisement of location. Maybe your definition differs, maybe it doesn't. Maybe you have a sound, logical argument for why it's different, or maybe you don't. A debate is a good faith effort in trying to understand another's viewpoint while arguing your own. And I understand your viewpoint, I hate what some ads have become, and yet I still don't use an ad-blocker because of my own personal values. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13964498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13964498
- vespa_1933 10y ago
  Do you feel differently because you work for an org that makes money from selling ads? Not trying to be obnoxious but wouldn't it be simple for us to understand a pro-advertising position from such a person as no more complex as 'this is how I make my living'? How much of our society's brainpower should be allocated to gaming the internet for ad-clicks? That would be the real debate. Many brilliant technologists are being hijacked by the major ad-media corporations for what I think we can all agree is a trivial (if not pointless) task. This is what we should be debating.
  - Denzel 10y ago
    I can't take your ad-hominem attack on good faith.
    - majewsky 10y ago
      That may be an ad-hominem attack, but it's a justified one for once. Affiliations are a very relevant part to a moral discussion, so much that it has become commonplace for people to disclose their affiliations when they're engaging in moral discussions. Something that I haven't you seen doing yet, by the way.
      - 10y ago
cgmg 10y ago
How do you propose free services maintain themselves?
- marssaxman 10y ago
  Collective volunteer labor worked fine before ads came along. Content was better, too.
  - chii 10y ago
    > volunteer this does not last, and is unlikely to scale beyond a certain point. Look how much trouble wikipedia is having with finances - so much so that they are spamming pages with donation pleas. I'm not saying that advertising is inevitable, but when value extraction from the consumer is low (such as a shitty site that people won't pay for, but will consume if free), advertising is the only viable way. If the argument is that such sites don't deserve to exist, then the arguments from both sides are just arguing different world views, and will not ever be resolved.
ocdtrekkie 10y ago
Arguably making it financially viable for the poor to use online services is a key upside to the ad industry. Probably the only one. I mean, as it is they have to figure out a way to get access but when they have it, the wealth of resources they can get without additional expense is huge. As a middle class individual, I'd prefer to pay for privacy which is why I opted to get FastMail. But for plenty of people in the world, that simply isn't a viable option.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

frik 10y ago

We need a future of advertising, a company that disrupts that sad state of ads. Leaner ads, less junk, bare pics, little JS, more trusted content, more generic content related to the page itself, less specific to the visitor and his browsing history. An ad about something I bought already last week on a completely unrelated site still freaks me out, and not only me. </r>

manigandham 10y ago
This already exists - our company has been doing this for years, amongst several others. The problem is a major global 12-figure industry with little oversight or regulation combined with tons of subpar talent and overloaded with politics. Until the major advertisers learn and want to do better, the (good) vendors, websites and users will suffer.
snakeanus 10y ago
We don't need advertising. Would be better if it just died.

pilooch 10y ago

Ads are targeted with machine learning, the only possible long term defence is fighting back with machine learning. It's already been done and both sides will still improve over the next few years. But in the end, much like spam, online ads will go away, automatically. On the tech side, using character based convolutional networks already frees the defense from writing endless rules, image ads can be nuked with another convnet, there's no technological lock.

FrozenVoid 10y ago

Eventually advertising will either 1.Merge with content: a single jpg/png render of a webpage + imagemaps for links. 2.Use canvas and emulate the browser output in it(webkit.js which creates a browser-within-browser contraption) 3.Require loading ads to function: some already merge functionality with ad javascripts. Since there is commercial pressure to have working ads, one of the methods will become commonplace eventually and will be really hard to filter(if at all possible). For #1 machine learning to recognize what an ad looks like and replace it with black rectangles or if imagemap block its coords, for #2/#3 there will be some sort of javascript filter/hijacker that would remove the ad code from content/emulated browser. But with WebAssembly these methods will not works, as content will become obfuscated binary stream which has to be decompiled& deobfuscated to even begin searching for offending "javascript"(essentially something like a virus pattern in binary).

eddyg 10y ago
The prospects of everything "bad" that will be done in the future via WebAssembly makes me cringe. It seems like it could be a major tipping point.
- orangecat 10y ago
  WebAssembly bytecode is relatively simple; it shouldn't be any worse than dealing with obfuscated JS today.
  - FrozenVoid 10y ago
    It isn't a single javascript can map to many bytecodes streams. i.e. inserting dummy instructions, alternative code paths, etc, all the tricks malware uses to escape detection.
adrianN 10y ago
Eventually we'll find a better way of paying for online content than with our attention or ads will become promoted content that is actually interesting to people. I don't think that advertisers can win an arms race with users. Eventually ads will be annoying enough that people look for different content, like many people do with TV today.

ravenstine 10y ago

We wouldn't need any of these techniques if advertisers weren't so abusive.(i know it's been said many times over) If you ever watch really old game shows like "What's My Line?", they sometimes show the same commercials from the 1950s; it's astounding to see commercials and promotions that are relatively short, not overtly distracting, and mostly focus on the merits of the product. If commercials were still like that, I'd probably still have a cable subscription, I might even be paying for Hulu, and I would even have adblock turned off. But the nature of the advertising industry is that if you give them an inch, they'll take a mile and then some. So while there is certainly a valid ethics debate around advertising and ad blocking, until the advertising industry changes their methodology that they've had in place long before ad blocking plugins were invented, I will have next to no sympathy for them no matter how unethical a piece of adblocking software might go. Though it's been said numerous times before, turning off adblock after having it on for a significant amount of time(e.g. to denormalize the prevalence of ads) is all the evidence one needs to see how completely messed up digital advertising still is. Fortunately, many YouTubers and a lot of podcasters have already figured out that the way to go for advertising revenue is not through AdSense or stock preroll ads, but through having hosts themselves endorse a product for a portion of the show(that they have supposedly tried themselves) and making up the rest through Patreon. This harkens back to how many radio shows used to be and, honestly, it works because it's not very repetitive and the fact that the host is speaking for it says something. The corporate world either doesn't understand or like this, and are still gung ho to ram advertising down our throats. Better than adblocking, I rather just don't pay for their overvalued media to begin with. I don't pay for cable, I rarely go to the movies or buy them, I don't pay for Hulu, and I support internet shows that don't rely on AdSense. Life is actually pretty good when you pull most of your plugs.

literallycancer 10y ago
Ethics are largely irrelevant here. The advertising industry will simply do what they have always done, which is the things shown by their models to bring the most revenue. Asking the advertising industry to be less manipulative is like asking casinos or supermarkets to stop employing behavioral psychologists to figure out the best ways to get people to spend money. >and the fact that the host is speaking for it says something In most cases (e.g. all except the ones where the host would mention the product even without any incentives), it just says that they value the money they get more than their viewers' attention.

soared 10y ago

I think adblockers will lead to something worse: extremely in-depth data harvesting. When publishers can no longer make money on ads, they will turn to companies offering them similar amounts of income ($1 per 1000 pageviews) for just placing a tracking pixel on the page. The pixel will just track absurd amounts of data, enough to justify the cost. My example is Ibotta [1]. You can your entire shopping receipt and they give you cash back for buying certain products. While these 'coupons' prompt you to buy a product, Ibotta's real profit comes from data harvesting. They create a profile that knows where you shop, what you buy, how often, how much you spend, where you live, etc. etc. This data can be sold to companies like P+G for marketing intelligence ('Who is actually buying our products, for how much, how often? etc') [1] https://ibotta.com/ https://ibotta.com/

throwaway2048 10y ago
ad-blockers can block tracking pixels just as easily. If they want to move it server side, well the same could be done with ads too, the problem is that website owners can then manipulate and defraud extremely easily.
- soared 10y ago
  Ads can't be moved served nearly as easily as a single tracking pixel. Fraud on server side code is a good point, but that seems like a technical hurdle that could be solved.

ComodoHacker 10y ago

> But the model makes clear that no further escalation is possible. That is because active ad blocking runs at a higher privilege level than publisher code, so it cannot in turn be disabled — at best it can be evaded. This is arguable. HTML5 EME can be used to mix ads into video in realtime. EME must run in isolation, so even browser vendor can't implement neither active blocking, nor ad detection. Still banners also can be implemented as video elements.

Mathnerd314 10y ago
DRM is basically in the same boat as ads, the user / operating system has all the power. The code is running in a sandbox; it can do integrity/sanity checks of the sandbox, but if the emulation is good it can't look outside the sandbox to discourage "bad behavior" like blocking ads or recording the stream for later. To paraphrase an old thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8439165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8439165 > Nobody cares about cracking Widevine to extract 4 Mbps Netflix streams when Blu-ray rips are already available on the Pirate Bay. But Netflix's content, which people do care about, is being shared on torrent sites. DRM is effectively useless.

HedleyLamar 10y ago

If ads were served from the same domain the page came and integrated into the page so it didn't affect the navigation of the website or grab the navigation from you if you're trying to read the page, far fewer people would object. It would be like the way ads used to be in newspapers or magazines. You look at it, and if you're not interested, you turn the page.