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I used to work for a small company that did print (and web) medical journals targeted at dentists and dental professionals. We handled all the ads ourselves and

by Akujin 9y ago

I used to work for a small company that did print (and web) medical journals targeted at dentists and dental professionals. We handled all the ads ourselves and hosted the images on our server as any other image. This meant we were basically impervious to adblock. Except for the occasional iframe embedded ad that was given to us by the client we basically never had an issue with adblock. Same thing on a nightlife website I worked on. Ads hosted by others were blocked but our own hosted ads were never a problem. Granted our own ads also had zero chance of being hijacked by a bad actor since they were simple <a><img></a> ads. If only everyone did this we wouldn't be having this arms race.

vorpalhex 9y ago
Pretty much. If Ads were without JS and videos (or, at least autoplaying videos) I really wouldn't care. Hell, if they were relevant ads to the website, I'd probably even click on them and buy things occasionally. But when a modal pops up or I get redirected, or your ad floats over your content and tries to follow my scrolling not only are you not going to sell to me, but I'm going to leave your website.
- gwbas1c 9y ago
  Or ads that significantly slow loading, make the page jump around...
  - shakestheclown 9y ago
    90% of the reason I block ads on mobile is performance. Even on a newer phone, any news website takes forever to load all the junk and ads.
- hobarrera 9y ago
  > Hell, if they were relevant ads to the website I had to watch youtube without an adblocker recently for the first time pretty much ever. The ads were not only extremely irrelevant. They were extremely sexist, strongly offensive and discriminating. Without exception (note I'm not in the US, so these probably aren't the same you're seeing!). I was incredibly surprised that most of the population watching youtube was exposed to this daily but not completely outrage.
JetSpiegel 9y ago
If you handle the ads yourself Google doesn't get their middleman cut.
dorgo 9y ago
I don't know. For me it's as simple as right-click on the link and choose "block this item" from context menu. Ok, often I need to adjust the suggested css-selector to block the item permanentely. But the general rule is that I have full control over how websites are shown. It's more than just ad-blocking. I block menu panels or whole parts of websites which I don't use. On youtube, for example, I blocked everything except the video-frame. No comments, no logos, no headers, only video.
- Akujin 9y ago
  The images were being served through a PHP passthrough script at /media/$ID You would have no way of knowing if the image was an ad or part of the article content since they were all served through the same thing. No silly subdomains like ad.domain.com either.
  - JoshTriplett 9y ago
    > You would have no way of knowing if the image was an ad or part of the article content since they were all served through the same thing. No silly subdomains like ad.domain.com either. Still quite feasible to detect by size and styling.
    - ceejayoz 9y ago
      Not if they mimic the size/styling of, say, images in the articles.
      - JoshTriplett 9y ago
        If you make your ads look exactly like content, devaluing your actual content, then yes, you can mask ads more easily.
      - soared 9y ago
        That makes it a native ad and not a display ad, which can change the discussion quite a bit.
Houshalter 9y ago
I wonder if eventually ad companies will just host the content themselves. Or at least route it through their servers. The ads then get served through the same domain and can't be blocked that way. But that only defeats simple adblocks that blacklist domains. It's theoretically possible to make an adblock that detects ads through machine learning and removes them. Doesn't matter where they are hosted. But advertisers can run scripts to detect modifying the web page and stop it. So adblock would have to move to having a headless browser that renders the page, and then copies it and removes the ads. Then the advertisers would have to try to trick the machine learning itself. Adversarial machine learning is a thing, with neural networks trained to fool other neural networks. And images that are highly optimized to exploit subtle defects in other neural networks. As ML ad detection improves, the only way for ads to get past it will be to make ads that look more and more like real content, even to the human eye. Perhaps in the limit, ads and content will become completely indistinguishable.
- StephenConnell 9y ago
  Like popular music lyrics dropping brand names...
- kasey_junk 9y ago
  > I wonder if eventually ad companies will just host the content themselves. Or at least route it through their servers. The ads then get served through the same domain and can't be blocked that way. This is already happening. Further, embedding paid for content in the middle of original content at the server side is also already happening. > As ML ad detection improves, the only way for ads to get past it will be to make ads that look more and more like real content, even to the human eye. Perhaps in the limit, ads and content will become completely indistinguishable. This is also already happening. Brand placement deals are nothing new to advertising and they are basically table stakes to most content purveyors. The real question isn't if those things are going to happen, its how those sorts of deals will handle the analytics side of the equation. How will you prove that your instagram feed is the best place for the yoga pants provider to spend their marketing budget?
- cpeterso 9y ago
wvenable 9y ago
One my sites has always hosted our it's own ads; they're small images and some are just text. They all get blocked by modern ad blockers.
dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
The basic "problem" with this approach is that the customer (be it a client or an agency) can't be 100% sure if the view data you deliver them is correct, they can only count the clicks. If the ads are on your server and there is no external content involved, only you get the stats. It's not a problem only for in-house ads, or when the customer doesn't care about the views and is only interested in clicks.
cm2187 9y ago
And this would limit tracking of users across websites, which would be another benefit.
gwbas1c 9y ago
That's not the problem. The problem is ad networks where the publisher never even serves the ads. You vetted the ads before serving them; but other publishers do not.

by Akujin 9y ago

vorpalhex 9y ago

Pretty much. If Ads were without JS and videos (or, at least autoplaying videos) I really wouldn't care. Hell, if they were relevant ads to the website, I'd probably even click on them and buy things occasionally. But when a modal pops up or I get redirected, or your ad floats over your content and tries to follow my scrolling not only are you not going to sell to me, but I'm going to leave your website.

gwbas1c 9y ago
Or ads that significantly slow loading, make the page jump around...
- shakestheclown 9y ago
  90% of the reason I block ads on mobile is performance. Even on a newer phone, any news website takes forever to load all the junk and ads.
hobarrera 9y ago
> Hell, if they were relevant ads to the website I had to watch youtube without an adblocker recently for the first time pretty much ever. The ads were not only extremely irrelevant. They were extremely sexist, strongly offensive and discriminating. Without exception (note I'm not in the US, so these probably aren't the same you're seeing!). I was incredibly surprised that most of the population watching youtube was exposed to this daily but not completely outrage.

JetSpiegel 9y ago

If you handle the ads yourself Google doesn't get their middleman cut.

dorgo 9y ago

I don't know. For me it's as simple as right-click on the link and choose "block this item" from context menu. Ok, often I need to adjust the suggested css-selector to block the item permanentely. But the general rule is that I have full control over how websites are shown. It's more than just ad-blocking. I block menu panels or whole parts of websites which I don't use. On youtube, for example, I blocked everything except the video-frame. No comments, no logos, no headers, only video.

Akujin 9y ago
The images were being served through a PHP passthrough script at /media/$ID You would have no way of knowing if the image was an ad or part of the article content since they were all served through the same thing. No silly subdomains like ad.domain.com either.
- JoshTriplett 9y ago
  > You would have no way of knowing if the image was an ad or part of the article content since they were all served through the same thing. No silly subdomains like ad.domain.com either. Still quite feasible to detect by size and styling.
  - ceejayoz 9y ago
    Not if they mimic the size/styling of, say, images in the articles.
    - JoshTriplett 9y ago
      If you make your ads look exactly like content, devaluing your actual content, then yes, you can mask ads more easily.
    - soared 9y ago
      That makes it a native ad and not a display ad, which can change the discussion quite a bit.

Houshalter 9y ago

I wonder if eventually ad companies will just host the content themselves. Or at least route it through their servers. The ads then get served through the same domain and can't be blocked that way. But that only defeats simple adblocks that blacklist domains. It's theoretically possible to make an adblock that detects ads through machine learning and removes them. Doesn't matter where they are hosted. But advertisers can run scripts to detect modifying the web page and stop it. So adblock would have to move to having a headless browser that renders the page, and then copies it and removes the ads. Then the advertisers would have to try to trick the machine learning itself. Adversarial machine learning is a thing, with neural networks trained to fool other neural networks. And images that are highly optimized to exploit subtle defects in other neural networks. As ML ad detection improves, the only way for ads to get past it will be to make ads that look more and more like real content, even to the human eye. Perhaps in the limit, ads and content will become completely indistinguishable.

StephenConnell 9y ago
Like popular music lyrics dropping brand names...
kasey_junk 9y ago
> I wonder if eventually ad companies will just host the content themselves. Or at least route it through their servers. The ads then get served through the same domain and can't be blocked that way. This is already happening. Further, embedding paid for content in the middle of original content at the server side is also already happening. > As ML ad detection improves, the only way for ads to get past it will be to make ads that look more and more like real content, even to the human eye. Perhaps in the limit, ads and content will become completely indistinguishable. This is also already happening. Brand placement deals are nothing new to advertising and they are basically table stakes to most content purveyors. The real question isn't if those things are going to happen, its how those sorts of deals will handle the analytics side of the equation. How will you prove that your instagram feed is the best place for the yoga pants provider to spend their marketing budget?
cpeterso 9y ago

wvenable 9y ago

One my sites has always hosted our it's own ads; they're small images and some are just text. They all get blocked by modern ad blockers.

dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago

The basic "problem" with this approach is that the customer (be it a client or an agency) can't be 100% sure if the view data you deliver them is correct, they can only count the clicks. If the ads are on your server and there is no external content involved, only you get the stats. It's not a problem only for in-house ads, or when the customer doesn't care about the views and is only interested in clicks.

cm2187 9y ago

And this would limit tracking of users across websites, which would be another benefit.

gwbas1c 9y ago

That's not the problem. The problem is ad networks where the publisher never even serves the ads. You vetted the ads before serving them; but other publishers do not.