8 ms·

Has there been any serious thought / discussion about how the cat and mouse chase of the ads vs ad blockers is going to end? It would be interesting to see whe

by jackdh 7y ago

Has there been any serious thought / discussion about how the cat and mouse chase of the ads vs ad blockers is going to end? It would be interesting to see where we are in ten years.

eof 7y ago
Seems obvious without thought to me that it’s mostly moot. Very few people will be running machines like we have for the last 30-40 years, most will be on Android/iOS where ad blocking will be minimal. Savvy users will continue to block on machines that aren’t walled gardens and through pi-hole style blocking. I think the cat and mouse aspect will be completely overshadowed by tech giants continually neutering their users ability to block ads.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > most will be on Android/iOS where ad blocking will be minimal Safari on iOS allows for content blocking, and Firefox for Android allows users to install extensions.
  - danielg6 7y ago
    I guess your parent post should have given it some more thought lol
  - mattigames 7y ago
    On android many links are open in a Webview (e.g. opening links on Gmail app) and many ads come through webviews inside apps themselves (e.g. some ads inside the youtube app itself)
    - jimktrains2 7y ago
      You can install hostfile blocking on rooted android devices.
      - mattigames 7y ago
        We need a solution that works for the average Joe, rooting devices don't fall in that category.
  - eof 7y ago
    Safari on iOS allows limited content blocking. It doesn’t allow ad blocking anywhere else, which is most of the platform. And, I was referring to the future and trends rather than the current situation. System wide ad blocking used to be possible on iOS without jailbreaking, now it’s not. I expect in time google will go similar and change android APIs, or play store rules, to do similar.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      > It doesn’t allow ad blocking anywhere else, which is most of the platform. It also works inside apps adopting Safari View Controller.
kodablah 7y ago
Desktop-wise, I've often thought [evergreen] client-side tools would emerge for content extraction via local [headless] browser automation. It's something I've contemplated building myself.
- dillonmckay 7y ago
  Like gopher? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
- yoz-y 7y ago
  There is Weboob which might interest you http://weboob.org http://weboob.org
yellowapple 7y ago
I'm hoping in 10 years the world will have figured out that allowing arbitrary Turing-complete code to automatically run on one's personal machine is a terrifically terrible idea, and that the World Wide Web will instead orient itself around something that doesn't make security and privacy extraordinarily difficult to achieve (whether that's still HTML/CSS or something entirely new). At the very least, though, eventually advertising agencies will hopefully figure out that this sort of tracking is pointless; "newspaper-style" ads are more likely to actually engage with the people encountering those ads (since said ads would be selected based on the page content rather than the person reading that content). This is how DuckDuckGo's ads work; the sponsored results are selected entirely by the actual search query. If content-driven ads (plus affiliate links, but I somehow doubt that's enough of DDG's traffic to be a deciding factor here) is enough to pay for enough computational power (and the development team to run it) to serve up 30+ million queries a day, then there's no reason it can't be enough for any other site.
- laughinghan 7y ago
  With absolutely no disrespect intended, the hope that we'll forget about the WORA dream is delusional. WORA is inevitable and the Web, for all its flaws (and they are plentiful), is far and away the closest we've ever come. Even on mobile, which was a bit of a setback for the Web as WORA, JS has only been getting better over time. There's just no turning back the clock. Security-wise, I think the best we can hope for is more and more OS-like sandboxing and isolation, capability-based security, and other defense-in-depth measures. Privacy-wise, for defeating tracking and the like, ideally I'd hope for technical countermeasures to win the battle, but if we do end up having rely on legal measures, they have my full support, GDPR and CCPA included. (Random idea for a technical countermeasure against fingerprinting: have you heard of those projects trying to defeat behavioral tracking where, whenever you visit a page, it simultaneously opens a bunch of other random pages in the background, hidden from you, and simulates activity on them, the idea being that Facebook has no idea what actual websites you like to visit because it's lost in the noise? What if instead, whenever you visit a page, your browser or a plugin or a proxy or whatever opened the same page simultaneously in a bunch of hidden background windows, with a random configuration of audio enabled/disabled, user agent, screen resolution etc fingerprinted characteristics?)
lifeeeeee 7y ago
Neural networks scan the final rendered image of the page for ads and remove them. You can't dodge that.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  Sure you can, the same way TV shows have done it - by subtly incorporating it into the text of the article.
  - yoz-y 7y ago
    At that point I think most people wouldn't care. Nobody is offended because James Bond wears an Omega watch. When it is doing not so subtly then it becomes weird (e.g.: transformers)
    - chacha2 7y ago
      I am. I despise that. It's the worst kind of advertising.
      - brokenmachine 7y ago
        I don't mind it. In fact, I almost spat out my Coca Cola, I was so surprised that you would think that.
      - yoz-y 7y ago
        I am torn. On one side it is one of the most effective kind short of a direct referral by a friend. I can understand that if you despise the idea of advertising as a whole then it can be seen as manipulation. (Personally I don't mind) On the other hand I think that it is the one that blends the best and can even have some value. For example I can imagine that people enjoy a car heist movie more if actual cars that exist are being used as opposed to some made up stuff. In France there are laws against "accidental" advertising so in news and TV almost any brand will be taped over or blurred. It is actually way more jarring and ugly than just leaving it as it is. It is especially funny when you have the logo of national rail company, which is basically a gradient, blurred.
Gibbon1 7y ago
I think ad blocking is a misnomer. What people are trying to do when blocking ads is prevent marketing people from spying on them. And the performance and resource consumption that comes from that. Personal opinion: Laws are needed to make what advertisers are doing illegal. Advertisers are spying on people to the extent where if the government did it they'd need a warrant.
- yoz-y 7y ago
  I disagree. The tech crowd is using adblockers to prevent spying and resource consumption. But majority of people running adblockers just don't want to see ads.
  - noobermin 7y ago
    I think the reality is more complicated. People sort of suspect being spied on, but it's hidden, not so real. It's abstract so if you ask any reasonable person, they'll say they don't like the spying, but few will take an impairment in function for something they use in order to avoid it because it seems somewhat distant.
  - BonesJustice 7y ago
    In most cases, I don’t think it’s ads as concept that’s the problem. If websites only had static ads in the sidebar, I question how many people would bother with ad blockers. But when ads block content; include flashing animations, audio, and video; and take up more layout space on a site than the actual content; then people have had enough.
    - umanwizard 7y ago
      Are you disagreeing with the person you replied to? Your tone suggests that you are, but the content of your post seems to being agreeing.
      - BonesJustice 7y ago
        I disagree that most people use ad blockers because they “don’t want to see [any] ads.” Meaning, if advertisers hadn’t built more and more intrusive ads and had stuck with static ads that don’t severely harm the UX, then I doubt most users would bother with ad blockers.
keithwinstein 7y ago
There's a passage of Carl Sagan's "Contact" that's on point and interesting to read 34 years later. The billionaire who helps to decode the Message (from outer space) and ends up building the working copy of the Machine made his fortune by selling tools to detect and block ads from television. There is some discussion of the technical cat-and-mouse game he has to play as advertisers try to make their content avoid detection and blend in with the regular programming. In this version of the future, the ad blockers eventually win and network television is destroyed. (The book also features networked computers and email ("telefax"), but the concept of ads appearing on them was still too futuristic for 1985.) https://books.google.com/books?id=Q6o51-W_z8MC&lpg=PP1&dq=google%20books%20contact&pg=PA223#v=onepage&q=adnix&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=Q6o51-W_z8MC&lpg=PP1&dq=go... Adnix and Preachnix were the essence of capitalist entrepreneurship, he argued repeatedly. The point of capitalism was supposed to be providing people with alternatives. "Well, the _absense_ of advertising is an alternative, I told them. There are huge advertising budgets only when there's no difference between the products. If the products really were different, people would buy the one that's better. Advertising teaches people not to trust their judgment. Advertising teaching people to be stupid. A strong country needs smart people. So Adnix is patriotic. The manufacturers can use some of their advertising budgets to improve their products. The consumer will benefit. Magazines and newspapers and direct mail business will boom, and that'll ease the pain in the ad agencies. I don't see what the problem is." Adnix, much more than the innumerable libel suits against the original commercial networks, led directly to their demise. For a while there was a small army of unemployed advertising executives...
- rocky1138 7y ago
  I feel that it may go the other way: that receiving communication from a source that is supported by ad revenue while knowingly and actively bypassing those same ads will be seen as theft. I fully expect lobbyists to push for this and see some success in the next 10 years.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    When people refuse to watch ads, there is theft going on, but it's theft from the advertisers by the media owners. The viewers aren't guilty of anything.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
hombre_fatal 7y ago
Adsense is just going to start providing content for you to inline into your site. Kind of like how https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/ https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/ is just a sequence of ads being flawlessly delivered to an ad-averse demographic that eats the ads up.
- usrusr 7y ago
  I find it outright puzzling that CDN edge servers have not morphed into ad splicers yet, that business seems so obvious to me. The closest to a "guessplanation" I can come up with for is not happening is that there might be trust issues (overreporting/underreporting impressions) in the triangle of publisher, ad-network and CDN/ad-splicer. But I'm not convinced at all that this would outweigh the anti add-blocker advantages.
  - icebraining 7y ago
    Until now, while most people don't use ad-blockers and browsers have accepted third-party cookies, there's an advantage to loading a resource from another domain, since an ID created and stored by doubleclick.net on site A could be read by doubleclick.net on site B, allowing for cross-domain tracking. As third-party cookies increasingly get blocked, I think we'll see that more and more.
    - usrusr 7y ago
      Site-independent cookies, right, that's the big one that would be lost. Thanks.
rodgerd 7y ago
Google control most mobile OSes, almost all of the web browser market, and have more or less taken over the web standards process. They've already won.
tunesmith 7y ago
Is there an ad blocker that interrupts/blocks your profile (the data that would normally be sent to the ad company), lets you edit/alter it, and allow the resultant profile to be sent to the ad company? As a consumer, I prefer relevant ads to irrelevant ads, and I might even prefer very relevant ads to no ads, but I don't want the ad companies to know stuff about me that isn't okay with me.
dorgo 7y ago
Tracking is more than just ads. A website owner wants to know who his visitors are. Where they come from. Which devices they use. Maybe he can support an other language, optimize for other devices, offer deals for a group of customers. But he doesn't want the risk to be fined by GDPR, so he skipps all this. Less optimisation, less/worse contacts - everybody lose.
- jimktrains2 7y ago
  I don't think most people have an issue with that single sites tracking usage on said site. (Also, much of that can be obtained with server logs.) This issue is cross domain tracking like we see with ad network that profile you over many different sites.

by jackdh 7y ago

Has there been any serious thought / discussion about how the cat and mouse chase of the ads vs ad blockers is going to end? It would be interesting to see where we are in ten years.

eof 7y ago

Seems obvious without thought to me that it’s mostly moot. Very few people will be running machines like we have for the last 30-40 years, most will be on Android/iOS where ad blocking will be minimal. Savvy users will continue to block on machines that aren’t walled gardens and through pi-hole style blocking. I think the cat and mouse aspect will be completely overshadowed by tech giants continually neutering their users ability to block ads.

saagarjha 7y ago
> most will be on Android/iOS where ad blocking will be minimal Safari on iOS allows for content blocking, and Firefox for Android allows users to install extensions.
- danielg6 7y ago
  I guess your parent post should have given it some more thought lol
- mattigames 7y ago
  On android many links are open in a Webview (e.g. opening links on Gmail app) and many ads come through webviews inside apps themselves (e.g. some ads inside the youtube app itself)
  - jimktrains2 7y ago
    You can install hostfile blocking on rooted android devices.
    - mattigames 7y ago
      We need a solution that works for the average Joe, rooting devices don't fall in that category.
- eof 7y ago
  Safari on iOS allows limited content blocking. It doesn’t allow ad blocking anywhere else, which is most of the platform. And, I was referring to the future and trends rather than the current situation. System wide ad blocking used to be possible on iOS without jailbreaking, now it’s not. I expect in time google will go similar and change android APIs, or play store rules, to do similar.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > It doesn’t allow ad blocking anywhere else, which is most of the platform. It also works inside apps adopting Safari View Controller.

kodablah 7y ago

Desktop-wise, I've often thought [evergreen] client-side tools would emerge for content extraction via local [headless] browser automation. It's something I've contemplated building myself.

dillonmckay 7y ago
Like gopher? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
yoz-y 7y ago
There is Weboob which might interest you http://weboob.org http://weboob.org

yellowapple 7y ago

I'm hoping in 10 years the world will have figured out that allowing arbitrary Turing-complete code to automatically run on one's personal machine is a terrifically terrible idea, and that the World Wide Web will instead orient itself around something that doesn't make security and privacy extraordinarily difficult to achieve (whether that's still HTML/CSS or something entirely new). At the very least, though, eventually advertising agencies will hopefully figure out that this sort of tracking is pointless; "newspaper-style" ads are more likely to actually engage with the people encountering those ads (since said ads would be selected based on the page content rather than the person reading that content). This is how DuckDuckGo's ads work; the sponsored results are selected entirely by the actual search query. If content-driven ads (plus affiliate links, but I somehow doubt that's enough of DDG's traffic to be a deciding factor here) is enough to pay for enough computational power (and the development team to run it) to serve up 30+ million queries a day, then there's no reason it can't be enough for any other site.

laughinghan 7y ago
With absolutely no disrespect intended, the hope that we'll forget about the WORA dream is delusional. WORA is inevitable and the Web, for all its flaws (and they are plentiful), is far and away the closest we've ever come. Even on mobile, which was a bit of a setback for the Web as WORA, JS has only been getting better over time. There's just no turning back the clock. Security-wise, I think the best we can hope for is more and more OS-like sandboxing and isolation, capability-based security, and other defense-in-depth measures. Privacy-wise, for defeating tracking and the like, ideally I'd hope for technical countermeasures to win the battle, but if we do end up having rely on legal measures, they have my full support, GDPR and CCPA included. (Random idea for a technical countermeasure against fingerprinting: have you heard of those projects trying to defeat behavioral tracking where, whenever you visit a page, it simultaneously opens a bunch of other random pages in the background, hidden from you, and simulates activity on them, the idea being that Facebook has no idea what actual websites you like to visit because it's lost in the noise? What if instead, whenever you visit a page, your browser or a plugin or a proxy or whatever opened the same page simultaneously in a bunch of hidden background windows, with a random configuration of audio enabled/disabled, user agent, screen resolution etc fingerprinted characteristics?)

lifeeeeee 7y ago

Neural networks scan the final rendered image of the page for ads and remove them. You can't dodge that.

ceejayoz 7y ago
Sure you can, the same way TV shows have done it - by subtly incorporating it into the text of the article.
- yoz-y 7y ago
  At that point I think most people wouldn't care. Nobody is offended because James Bond wears an Omega watch. When it is doing not so subtly then it becomes weird (e.g.: transformers)
  - chacha2 7y ago
    I am. I despise that. It's the worst kind of advertising.
    - brokenmachine 7y ago
      I don't mind it. In fact, I almost spat out my Coca Cola, I was so surprised that you would think that.
    - yoz-y 7y ago
      I am torn. On one side it is one of the most effective kind short of a direct referral by a friend. I can understand that if you despise the idea of advertising as a whole then it can be seen as manipulation. (Personally I don't mind) On the other hand I think that it is the one that blends the best and can even have some value. For example I can imagine that people enjoy a car heist movie more if actual cars that exist are being used as opposed to some made up stuff. In France there are laws against "accidental" advertising so in news and TV almost any brand will be taped over or blurred. It is actually way more jarring and ugly than just leaving it as it is. It is especially funny when you have the logo of national rail company, which is basically a gradient, blurred.

Gibbon1 7y ago

I think ad blocking is a misnomer. What people are trying to do when blocking ads is prevent marketing people from spying on them. And the performance and resource consumption that comes from that. Personal opinion: Laws are needed to make what advertisers are doing illegal. Advertisers are spying on people to the extent where if the government did it they'd need a warrant.

yoz-y 7y ago
I disagree. The tech crowd is using adblockers to prevent spying and resource consumption. But majority of people running adblockers just don't want to see ads.
- noobermin 7y ago
  I think the reality is more complicated. People sort of suspect being spied on, but it's hidden, not so real. It's abstract so if you ask any reasonable person, they'll say they don't like the spying, but few will take an impairment in function for something they use in order to avoid it because it seems somewhat distant.
- BonesJustice 7y ago
  In most cases, I don’t think it’s ads as concept that’s the problem. If websites only had static ads in the sidebar, I question how many people would bother with ad blockers. But when ads block content; include flashing animations, audio, and video; and take up more layout space on a site than the actual content; then people have had enough.
  - umanwizard 7y ago
    Are you disagreeing with the person you replied to? Your tone suggests that you are, but the content of your post seems to being agreeing.
    - BonesJustice 7y ago
      I disagree that most people use ad blockers because they “don’t want to see [any] ads.” Meaning, if advertisers hadn’t built more and more intrusive ads and had stuck with static ads that don’t severely harm the UX, then I doubt most users would bother with ad blockers.

keithwinstein 7y ago

There's a passage of Carl Sagan's "Contact" that's on point and interesting to read 34 years later. The billionaire who helps to decode the Message (from outer space) and ends up building the working copy of the Machine made his fortune by selling tools to detect and block ads from television. There is some discussion of the technical cat-and-mouse game he has to play as advertisers try to make their content avoid detection and blend in with the regular programming. In this version of the future, the ad blockers eventually win and network television is destroyed. (The book also features networked computers and email ("telefax"), but the concept of ads appearing on them was still too futuristic for 1985.) https://books.google.com/books?id=Q6o51-W_z8MC&lpg=PP1&dq=google%20books%20contact&pg=PA223#v=onepage&q=adnix&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=Q6o51-W_z8MC&lpg=PP1&dq=go... Adnix and Preachnix were the essence of capitalist entrepreneurship, he argued repeatedly. The point of capitalism was supposed to be providing people with alternatives. "Well, the _absense_ of advertising is an alternative, I told them. There are huge advertising budgets only when there's no difference between the products. If the products really were different, people would buy the one that's better. Advertising teaches people not to trust their judgment. Advertising teaching people to be stupid. A strong country needs smart people. So Adnix is patriotic. The manufacturers can use some of their advertising budgets to improve their products. The consumer will benefit. Magazines and newspapers and direct mail business will boom, and that'll ease the pain in the ad agencies. I don't see what the problem is." Adnix, much more than the innumerable libel suits against the original commercial networks, led directly to their demise. For a while there was a small army of unemployed advertising executives...

rocky1138 7y ago
I feel that it may go the other way: that receiving communication from a source that is supported by ad revenue while knowingly and actively bypassing those same ads will be seen as theft. I fully expect lobbyists to push for this and see some success in the next 10 years.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  When people refuse to watch ads, there is theft going on, but it's theft from the advertisers by the media owners. The viewers aren't guilty of anything.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

hombre_fatal 7y ago

Adsense is just going to start providing content for you to inline into your site. Kind of like how https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/ https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/ is just a sequence of ads being flawlessly delivered to an ad-averse demographic that eats the ads up.

usrusr 7y ago
I find it outright puzzling that CDN edge servers have not morphed into ad splicers yet, that business seems so obvious to me. The closest to a "guessplanation" I can come up with for is not happening is that there might be trust issues (overreporting/underreporting impressions) in the triangle of publisher, ad-network and CDN/ad-splicer. But I'm not convinced at all that this would outweigh the anti add-blocker advantages.
- icebraining 7y ago
  Until now, while most people don't use ad-blockers and browsers have accepted third-party cookies, there's an advantage to loading a resource from another domain, since an ID created and stored by doubleclick.net on site A could be read by doubleclick.net on site B, allowing for cross-domain tracking. As third-party cookies increasingly get blocked, I think we'll see that more and more.
  - usrusr 7y ago
    Site-independent cookies, right, that's the big one that would be lost. Thanks.

rodgerd 7y ago

Google control most mobile OSes, almost all of the web browser market, and have more or less taken over the web standards process. They've already won.

tunesmith 7y ago

Is there an ad blocker that interrupts/blocks your profile (the data that would normally be sent to the ad company), lets you edit/alter it, and allow the resultant profile to be sent to the ad company? As a consumer, I prefer relevant ads to irrelevant ads, and I might even prefer very relevant ads to no ads, but I don't want the ad companies to know stuff about me that isn't okay with me.

dorgo 7y ago

Tracking is more than just ads. A website owner wants to know who his visitors are. Where they come from. Which devices they use. Maybe he can support an other language, optimize for other devices, offer deals for a group of customers. But he doesn't want the risk to be fined by GDPR, so he skipps all this. Less optimisation, less/worse contacts - everybody lose.

jimktrains2 7y ago
I don't think most people have an issue with that single sites tracking usage on said site. (Also, much of that can be obtained with server logs.) This issue is cross domain tracking like we see with ad network that profile you over many different sites.