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I don't actually want to block ads. If you want to put a small text or image blurb anywhere on the page... Good for you. I'll gladly accept those on a webpage s

I don't actually want to block ads. If you want to put a small text or image blurb anywhere on the page... Good for you. I'll gladly accept those on a webpage so that the content creator can make a bit of cash. But these companies are intentionally blurring the lines between advertisement and digital surveillance. You don't need to collect everything about my operating system, browser, monitors, GPU, every click I make on every website I visit, etc. That's crossing a line of what "advertisement" means. So the more these "advertisers" work to blur those lines the more their "ads" will be blocked under the umbrella of those who don't want this level of pervasive tracking and surveillance.

giancarlostoro 7y ago
Yeah not to mention malware is often fed through ad services. I want context based ads. Context being the web page I am on not my life story. All it takes is one of these tech giants pulling a Equifax and who knows how much data spills over.
- ryacko 7y ago
  Domain-specific auctions was nice when it was done by Project Wonderful, but there is too much convenience in being able to push advertisements for the entire internet. Designing secure APIs that can’t be misused by a Cambridge Analytica or similar is a hard problem. Google Plus was “breached”.
  - giancarlostoro 7y ago
    To be fair I'm not even sure which companies I trust to do ads with. I guess I'll avoid ads on any of my websites. I do agree though, security of that scale is not an easy problem to solve.
  - efreak 7y ago
    Project Wonderful is the only ad network I have ever fully whitelisted. I've whitelisted specific networks on specific sites before, but Project Wonderful was not only acceptable to me, I actually occasionally found it useful on the webcomics I saw ads on, as it generally showed off the art style. I (almost) never saw ads for unrelated products, there were no videos, few ads were even animated. To me, Project Wonderful fulfilled the promise of 'relevant advertising' far more than the tracking ads currently do. General location- and demographic-targeted advertising can certainly be annoying, but is not offensive in the manner of tracking my browser history. I just hope ALPR/facial recognition/etc doesn't get combined with digital billboards to bring internet ads into physical locations.
jplayer01 7y ago
Yes, agreed. Ads are a great way to finance things where there is value in being accessible by everybody - I'm not happy about seeing podcast episodes locked behind Patreon walls, for example. While it's great these creators are gaining an additional revenue stream, it still means I or others are priced out of accessing their content. I don't have any natural right to access it, of course, but I prefer the open access ad-driven model over a marketplace where I have to pay every single podcast I listen to $5 a month. And hell, podcast ads weren't tracking and profiling me. I'd be happy to not use an adblocker, but the abuse of ads for tracking users and as a potential attack vector for malicious content means I'm leaving my adblocker up, no matter how much sites might beg.
- wybiral 7y ago
  Podcasts are a great example. They've had to do advertising the old fashion way, by market research and trying to figure out which ad campaigns are more effective without mass surveillance. Often they use the strategy of widespread name recognition, which is why you can probably think of a mattress brand, and a recruiting platform off the top of your head. That's effective advertisement without tracking.
  - jplayer01 7y ago
    A podcast is a podcast. Some of the podcasts I listen to have put a bunch of content behind a Patreon paywall. The distinction whether it's an RSS feed isn't meaningful. I still don't have access.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    You can subscribe to password protected podcasts in many players just by including the username and password in the url.
  - j605 7y ago
    Patreon gives you a private RSS feed so paid podcasts are indeed a possibility. It is similar to getting your private activity ATOM feed from Github for example.
  - 7y ago
deanclatworthy 7y ago
Agree. I’d go as far as forbidding embedded JS altogether which removes the attack vector for malware within advertising networks. The networks have proved time and time again they are not able to prevent distribution of malware, and this is the primary reason I use an adblocker. Maybe a new <ad /> tag which points to a resource which can only serve an image, video or text. Absolutely no scripting. Pass along only the advertiser ID and the bare minimum. The problem is it’s not in Google or Microsoft’s interest to implement this. This has to come from legislation at US gov level. So it’ll never happen. I’ll continue ad blocking.
- zrm 7y ago
  Another possibility would be to create ad blockers that do that, i.e. block third party javascript but not pure text or images. Then you get the same result, simple ads get through but ad scripts don't, so the people who use ads without scripts are the only ones who make money from them.
  - galangalalgol 7y ago
    umatrix does that, but third party is the problem. so many domains put their js on a separate domain. even if they own it.
    - SXX 7y ago
      There also websites that use CDN like CloudFront and sometimes their subdomains are changing quite often.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
    It's for this sort of reason that I like Privacy Badger. It tries to block tracking and trackers algorithmically, rather than ads per se.
  - a1369209993 7y ago
    Such a ad blocker already exists; it's called NoScript.
Waterluvian 7y ago
Remember Gmail ads from like 2006? They were very minimal and on point. I was so optimistic thag the future of advertising was that.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Unfortunately they didn’t need to use JavaScript to track you because they already had access to a wealth of information about you from your email…
- nkozyra 7y ago
  This describes AdSense in general - the original point was some text ads. But as the article points out, we acclimate to stimulus, so any ad that's welcomed and successful will lose engagement over time. Which is why we get either very creative compelling advertising or advertising that attempts to trick us. The entire thing is fundamentally broken, of course, and nobody seems to have a monetization strategy beyond subscriptions or the perpetual cat and mouse game of blockers, blocker-blockers, blocker-blocker-blockers and so on. In an industry full of innovation the monetization aspect is stuck in the newspaper model created 150 years ago.
  - dvtrn 7y ago
    But as the article points out, we acclimate to stimulus, so any ad that's welcomed and successful will lose engagement over time. Which is why we get either very creative compelling advertising or advertising that attempts to trick us. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jYMQx2RuVs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jYMQx2RuVs Relevant (and somewhat humorously self-aware) take on the matter from youtube channel Wisecrack-which is a channel that likes to look at the deeply classically philosophical aspects of how we react and inform ourselves through the lens of modern media.
  - tomrod 7y ago
    You put your finger on the pulse of it. Ads give little net positive to society in general, because their sole value add is to inform. But with information acquisition cost drastically reduced due to good search engines, the value add becomes nil. So advertisers create company value by other modes. This is not a net good.
intopieces 7y ago
> I'll gladly accept those on a webpage so that the content creator can make a bit of cash. Why do you feel like your attention should be for sale? There should be no advertising on the web. Content should be free or cost money, and the cost should be transparent. Advertisements are just socially accepted psychological manipulation. We can do better.
- wybiral 7y ago
  That's a completely different discussion though. Personally I'm not offended by seeing a brand placement if it helps the content creator and is transparent (meaning I know it's an ad, and it's not collecting data about me). Bringing it to a physical example, if I walk into a store and see a product placement or physical sign advertisement, I'm not that offended by it. But if they started fingerprinting me and taking my picture under the premise of selling me more stuff... I'm offended by that.
  - RHSeeger 7y ago
    I mean... effectively, they are http://money.com/money/4506297/how-retailers-track-you/ http://money.com/money/4506297/how-retailers-track-you/
    - wybiral 7y ago
      I don't use any of the methods they mention there (although I know that they can use my credit card info to track me as well). But, yeah, I'm still offended by that. It doesn't justify the widespread behavior on the internet to me, they're both bad.
      - scomp 7y ago
        You may not use the CCTV in stores but I can assure you it is using you. Source: I set up this tracking for a retailer.
- la_barba 7y ago
  By "we" do you mean only people who agree with you? Or do you accept that in a democratic society there can be ads? Personally, I don't block ads on principle. I simply don't visit websites that feature blaring over the top ads or otherwise feature annoyances. When you block ads you are explicitly signalling that you are receiving something of value by visiting the website. I prefer to not send that signal.
dec0dedab0de 7y ago
Absolutely. If the content creator and the advertiser dont trust each other enough to have the ad be delivered from the same server as the content, then why would I trust them to run whatever code they want.
derefr 7y ago
> small Heh, do you really think that static ads would be a small portion of the page? Look at small local newspapers for what a business driven by revenue from non-targetable ads looks like. The ads take up more than half the page!
- backpropaganda 7y ago
  Small ads on the web are still more targeted than newspaper ads, since web ads appear on specific websites which are of interest to the user. If I visit a motorcycling forum, I should get motorcycling ads, and they can be effective even if they're small.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  The "news hole" was for a long time about 40% of a typical daily paper (ads being 60%). https://usa.usembassy.de/etexts/media/unfetter/press06.htm https://usa.usembassy.de/etexts/media/unfetter/press06.htm https://jimmycsays.com/2017/01/13/is-the-daily-newspaper-thin-yes-does-it-contain-significantly-less-space-for-news-photos-and-other-editorial-content-no/ https://jimmycsays.com/2017/01/13/is-the-daily-newspaper-thi...
tjpnz 7y ago
>I don't actually want to block ads. If you want to put a small text or image blurb anywhere on the page... Good for you. I'll gladly accept those on a webpage so that the content creator can make a bit of cash. I would be more than happy to accept that and I do see it from time to time. But I still won't be disabling my adblocker - allowing ads served from DoubleClick et el is just far too dangerous from both a security and privacy perspective. Even if they're not responsible for the actual ad content they're at the very least complicit in all of it.
dwighttk 7y ago
Except those little unobtrusive ads are easy to ignore and hardly anyone clicks on them so no one will pay anything for them. Also there’s no way to verify the clicks that do happen are genuine.
_Understated_ 7y ago
I have no issue with static, contextual ads (I had this conversation on here the other day in fact). Imagine reading something about, say, a particular lawnmower and the article has a link to that lawnmower at the top as an ad from Flymo with a discount. No tracking just a link to buy it with a tracking Id in the URL or something. Can someone answer me this: Are there studies, not funded by those who benefit from mass-tracking, that show the benefit of all this data-gathering to show ads? Or that show it doesn't work perhaps? My gut tells me the difference in success rate is minimal and couldn't possibly justify the data collection but I'd love to be proven wrong. At this time, I believe the whole scheme to be a con. (there, I said it!)
- drawnwren 7y ago
  I agree with your sentiment, but there is far too much money in ad tracking for it to be ineffective. Internet advertising is a very metrics-driven enterprise
- pixelrevision 7y ago
  The online ad industry is super shady and is getting much worse since google and facebook have started eating their lunch. But it would be very hard to pull data collection out of this business model. If company a puts the lawnmower ad up and only reports clicks and company b reports the percentage of men aged 35-40 company b will eventually put company a out of business. Content providers have to run what ads will actually make them money so they’re going to go with networks where companies actually buy ads. The only way this cycle is going to get stopped is with serious pushback either from consumers, technology or laws.
phjesusthatguy3 7y ago
I actually want to block ads. If you want to put a small text or image blurb anywhere on the page... I don't want to see it. I'd rather people stop whoring me out and start standing up for what they believe in. And now I have the tools to do so.
ibudiallo 7y ago
The one place I thought ads were relevant was on google search. After all, I was searching for the product they are advertising. But the line started to blur when they decided to remove that yellow background that tells me the result is an ad. Now, it's a 11px font that spells ad. That's the only indicator. For myself, I created a single use extension that turns google ads background to yellow[1]. I'm fine with ads on Google search, as long as I know they are ads. [1]: https://github.com/ibudiallo/gadlight https://github.com/ibudiallo/gadlight
- garmaine 7y ago
  Well that, and the fact that it actually says “Advertisement.”
  - GordonS 7y ago
    No, as the parent mentioned, it says "Ad". As this is so short, I also find it easy to miss this It's clear Google removed the previously obvious demarcation between ads and results specifically to make it less obvious. I'd prefer a different background colour (like the parent's extension), but it would also help a bit if it said "Advertisement" instead of "Ad".
mook 7y ago
I didn't want to block ads either; originally I just used policeman / uMatrix. Unfortunately Google analytics broke pages (because some pages required all scripts to load before rendering anything), so I had to switch to uBlock Origin with its extra Google analytics shim.
jrvarela56 7y ago
If you are fine with ads so that content creators make money, where do you draw the line? How much money should they make? Having more data about you allows them to pick out 'better' ads and make more money. Wether this money goes to ad networks or content creators depends on how much leverage one has over the other.
- charonn0 7y ago
  It's not a question of how much money they make, but how they make it. An advertisement should be a one-way channel from the publisher to the audience. If information is flowing in the other direction (particularly if without the audience member's express permission) then it's become something more than an advertisement and that's a good place to draw the line.
Spooky23 7y ago
Agreed. I occasionally buy newspapers for ads. I decided a few years ago to disable ad blocking for awhile. The result was frankly, a parade of shit. Google was probably best at showing the occasional relevant ad, mostly in GMail. Beyond that, the automated crap that does the targeting tends to hit the lowest common denominator topic. What I actually do online barely registered, but if my kid used my laptop, it would immediately take over the ad experience.
kelnos 7y ago
I do want to block ads. I hate advertising in all its forms. I despise the psychological games that advertisers play with our minds. If I could wear a pair of contact lenses that blocked out billboards and other kinds of non-digital advertising, I would do so in a heartbeat.
- KozmoNau7 7y ago
  There are certain pieces of classical music I cannot hear without immediately thinking of the product it was used to advertise. It's maddening that advertisers can be allowed to destroy culture like that.
  - schoen 7y ago
    I found it astonishing that the song "Look What They've Done to My Song, Ma" (which is seemingly about corruption of art) was later licensed for commercials for oatmeal and a hotel chain... complete with modified lyrics! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Have_They_Done_to_My_Song_Ma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Have_They_Done_to_My_Song...
- alexandercrohde 7y ago
  Agreed. I would go so far as to vote for a representative who wanted to pass a law restricting what is legal advertisement. I believe undisclosed ads should be illegal, I would ban music in ads, I would ban color in ads, I would ban sexuality in advertisement, I would ban appeals to emotions in ads. If a product truly makes the life of the purchaser better, then no gimmicks are needed to sell it.
  - nkrisc 7y ago
    I would also ban all "puffery" in advertising, a.k.a. lies that are ok because they're unverifiable.
  - okr 7y ago
    And yet we try to appeal to others ratio or emotion with arguments in discussions like these. So that that they buy in to our ideas. We persuade, it is good to be charismastic and seducing too. And if someone famous writes or speaks, someone we adore, we listen more careful. In the end it matters, that we can find enough people to vote for that one guy, to give him or her the power, that bans or controls behaviour, that we just used ourselves. Meh. Its all blurry lines.
j_m_b 7y ago
This sounds like such a rational comment, but it is based on the naive idea that ads can be effectively targeted simply based on content. You're never going to have ads that people are willing to pay for (i.e. a certain threshold click-through rate) without some sort of direct targeting. For example, you can't tell if your article on basic car maintenance is being read by a 30 year old male who might be interested in a beer ad or a 30 year old female with two kids who might be more interested in a new iphone cover.
- lttlrck 7y ago
  Direct targeting basic car maintenance alone covers a lot of ground doesn’t it? cars, spares and consumables, accessories, tools, car shows, workshop equipment, vacuum cleaners, mechanical things in general and diy... it’s endless. Edit: ok endless is hyperbole, but content targeting is hardly useless.
- lolinder 7y ago
  When I turned 25 I started getting nothing but hard soda ads from YouTube. I don't drink. I went and disabled personalized advertising, and for the first time in years I started seeing ads that tempted me to click through, ads from tech companies about tech. Why the difference? Because YouTube started showing me ads related to the content I'm actually watching rather than based on their faulty neural network profile of me. Obviously this is just one anecdote, but it's illustrative of the point: don't try to advertise either beer or iPhone covers on a car maintenance site. If I'm on a car maintenance site, you know all you need to know about where my interests are at that exact moment. Why try to hijack my attention (difficult when I'm trying to solve a car problem) when you could instead subtly redirect my attention to an ad for a local mechanic?
  - chronic84920 7y ago
    > Why try to hijack my attention (difficult when I'm trying to solve a car problem) when you could instead subtly redirect my attention to an ad for a local mechanic? If there's only space for one ad, do they show you an ad for tools, exterior mechanic, engine mechanic, or a new car ad? All are valid options for both you and the advertiser. This is where invasively tracking your online behavior can help you.
karmelapple 7y ago
Not to mention the extra resources being eaten by all this JS. When I leave a typical website with lots of ads and tracking open, I can see the energy usage averaging much higher in Activity Monitor on my Mac, even in Safari and with some basic ad blocking on. I imagine folks serving up the JS have figured out ways around whatever simple blocking tech I have. If their JS wouldn’t eat up so much battery, I’d mind a lot less, since I leave tons of tabs open.
wnevets 7y ago
>I don't actually want to block ads. If you want to put a small text or image blurb anywhere on the page... Good for you. I'll gladly accept those on a webpage so that the content creator can make a bit of cash. For years I allowed google text ads because of non invasion and distracting they were. However the of amount tracking taking place forced me to also disable them.
Gibbon1 7y ago
> But these companies are intentionally blurring the lines between advertisement and digital surveillance. That's what I've been harping on. I'm not blocking ads, I'm trying to protect my privacy and keep ad companies from effectively DoSing my browser. Nothing about 'ad blockers' prevent advertisers from showing ordinary magazine style ads.
a3n 7y ago
Exactly this is why I block, and I also would not object to your "less intrusive" ad. I would still block, but I wouldn't mind at all seeing such a static, self-served ad.
fouc 7y ago
We need to abolish user agents. At the most, a universal web versioning or a "release timestamp" would be sufficient. This is the first step to reducing fingerprinting, remove distinctions between different browsers and only have the level of web version or timestamp they can support.
hermitdev 7y ago
What pisses me off is the intrusiveness of the ads. Auto playing video or audio. The amount of malware attacking browser zero days. Until that goes away, I'm going to run a layer of adblockers. That's a problem the ad networks introduced and allowed. It's not on me, as an end user, to fix. You serve me auto playing audio, video, and malware? I'm going continue to block you until you fix that.
AlexanderNull 7y ago
If it makes you feel any better, we're only collecting GPU info so we can identify you when you've "forgotten" to accept cookies. It's only like we're lifting your finger prints from discarded coffee cups, no biggie. (adtech developer)
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

giancarlostoro 7y ago

Yeah not to mention malware is often fed through ad services. I want context based ads. Context being the web page I am on not my life story. All it takes is one of these tech giants pulling a Equifax and who knows how much data spills over.

ryacko 7y ago
Domain-specific auctions was nice when it was done by Project Wonderful, but there is too much convenience in being able to push advertisements for the entire internet. Designing secure APIs that can’t be misused by a Cambridge Analytica or similar is a hard problem. Google Plus was “breached”.
- giancarlostoro 7y ago
  To be fair I'm not even sure which companies I trust to do ads with. I guess I'll avoid ads on any of my websites. I do agree though, security of that scale is not an easy problem to solve.
- efreak 7y ago
  Project Wonderful is the only ad network I have ever fully whitelisted. I've whitelisted specific networks on specific sites before, but Project Wonderful was not only acceptable to me, I actually occasionally found it useful on the webcomics I saw ads on, as it generally showed off the art style. I (almost) never saw ads for unrelated products, there were no videos, few ads were even animated. To me, Project Wonderful fulfilled the promise of 'relevant advertising' far more than the tracking ads currently do. General location- and demographic-targeted advertising can certainly be annoying, but is not offensive in the manner of tracking my browser history. I just hope ALPR/facial recognition/etc doesn't get combined with digital billboards to bring internet ads into physical locations.

jplayer01 7y ago

Yes, agreed. Ads are a great way to finance things where there is value in being accessible by everybody - I'm not happy about seeing podcast episodes locked behind Patreon walls, for example. While it's great these creators are gaining an additional revenue stream, it still means I or others are priced out of accessing their content. I don't have any natural right to access it, of course, but I prefer the open access ad-driven model over a marketplace where I have to pay every single podcast I listen to $5 a month. And hell, podcast ads weren't tracking and profiling me. I'd be happy to not use an adblocker, but the abuse of ads for tracking users and as a potential attack vector for malicious content means I'm leaving my adblocker up, no matter how much sites might beg.

wybiral 7y ago
Podcasts are a great example. They've had to do advertising the old fashion way, by market research and trying to figure out which ad campaigns are more effective without mass surveillance. Often they use the strategy of widespread name recognition, which is why you can probably think of a mattress brand, and a recruiting platform off the top of your head. That's effective advertisement without tracking.
- jplayer01 7y ago
  A podcast is a podcast. Some of the podcasts I listen to have put a bunch of content behind a Patreon paywall. The distinction whether it's an RSS feed isn't meaningful. I still don't have access.
- scarface74 7y ago
  You can subscribe to password protected podcasts in many players just by including the username and password in the url.
- j605 7y ago
  Patreon gives you a private RSS feed so paid podcasts are indeed a possibility. It is similar to getting your private activity ATOM feed from Github for example.
- 7y ago

deanclatworthy 7y ago

Agree. I’d go as far as forbidding embedded JS altogether which removes the attack vector for malware within advertising networks. The networks have proved time and time again they are not able to prevent distribution of malware, and this is the primary reason I use an adblocker. Maybe a new <ad /> tag which points to a resource which can only serve an image, video or text. Absolutely no scripting. Pass along only the advertiser ID and the bare minimum. The problem is it’s not in Google or Microsoft’s interest to implement this. This has to come from legislation at US gov level. So it’ll never happen. I’ll continue ad blocking.

zrm 7y ago
Another possibility would be to create ad blockers that do that, i.e. block third party javascript but not pure text or images. Then you get the same result, simple ads get through but ad scripts don't, so the people who use ads without scripts are the only ones who make money from them.
- galangalalgol 7y ago
  umatrix does that, but third party is the problem. so many domains put their js on a separate domain. even if they own it.
  - SXX 7y ago
    There also websites that use CDN like CloudFront and sometimes their subdomains are changing quite often.
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
  It's for this sort of reason that I like Privacy Badger. It tries to block tracking and trackers algorithmically, rather than ads per se.
- a1369209993 7y ago
  Such a ad blocker already exists; it's called NoScript.

Waterluvian 7y ago

Remember Gmail ads from like 2006? They were very minimal and on point. I was so optimistic thag the future of advertising was that.

saagarjha 7y ago
Unfortunately they didn’t need to use JavaScript to track you because they already had access to a wealth of information about you from your email…
nkozyra 7y ago
This describes AdSense in general - the original point was some text ads. But as the article points out, we acclimate to stimulus, so any ad that's welcomed and successful will lose engagement over time. Which is why we get either very creative compelling advertising or advertising that attempts to trick us. The entire thing is fundamentally broken, of course, and nobody seems to have a monetization strategy beyond subscriptions or the perpetual cat and mouse game of blockers, blocker-blockers, blocker-blocker-blockers and so on. In an industry full of innovation the monetization aspect is stuck in the newspaper model created 150 years ago.
- dvtrn 7y ago
  But as the article points out, we acclimate to stimulus, so any ad that's welcomed and successful will lose engagement over time. Which is why we get either very creative compelling advertising or advertising that attempts to trick us. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jYMQx2RuVs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jYMQx2RuVs Relevant (and somewhat humorously self-aware) take on the matter from youtube channel Wisecrack-which is a channel that likes to look at the deeply classically philosophical aspects of how we react and inform ourselves through the lens of modern media.
- tomrod 7y ago
  You put your finger on the pulse of it. Ads give little net positive to society in general, because their sole value add is to inform. But with information acquisition cost drastically reduced due to good search engines, the value add becomes nil. So advertisers create company value by other modes. This is not a net good.

intopieces 7y ago

> I'll gladly accept those on a webpage so that the content creator can make a bit of cash. Why do you feel like your attention should be for sale? There should be no advertising on the web. Content should be free or cost money, and the cost should be transparent. Advertisements are just socially accepted psychological manipulation. We can do better.

wybiral 7y ago
That's a completely different discussion though. Personally I'm not offended by seeing a brand placement if it helps the content creator and is transparent (meaning I know it's an ad, and it's not collecting data about me). Bringing it to a physical example, if I walk into a store and see a product placement or physical sign advertisement, I'm not that offended by it. But if they started fingerprinting me and taking my picture under the premise of selling me more stuff... I'm offended by that.
- RHSeeger 7y ago
  I mean... effectively, they are http://money.com/money/4506297/how-retailers-track-you/ http://money.com/money/4506297/how-retailers-track-you/
  - wybiral 7y ago
    I don't use any of the methods they mention there (although I know that they can use my credit card info to track me as well). But, yeah, I'm still offended by that. It doesn't justify the widespread behavior on the internet to me, they're both bad.
    - scomp 7y ago
      You may not use the CCTV in stores but I can assure you it is using you. Source: I set up this tracking for a retailer.
la_barba 7y ago
By "we" do you mean only people who agree with you? Or do you accept that in a democratic society there can be ads? Personally, I don't block ads on principle. I simply don't visit websites that feature blaring over the top ads or otherwise feature annoyances. When you block ads you are explicitly signalling that you are receiving something of value by visiting the website. I prefer to not send that signal.

dec0dedab0de 7y ago

Absolutely. If the content creator and the advertiser dont trust each other enough to have the ad be delivered from the same server as the content, then why would I trust them to run whatever code they want.

derefr 7y ago

> small Heh, do you really think that static ads would be a small portion of the page? Look at small local newspapers for what a business driven by revenue from non-targetable ads looks like. The ads take up more than half the page!

backpropaganda 7y ago
Small ads on the web are still more targeted than newspaper ads, since web ads appear on specific websites which are of interest to the user. If I visit a motorcycling forum, I should get motorcycling ads, and they can be effective even if they're small.
dredmorbius 7y ago
The "news hole" was for a long time about 40% of a typical daily paper (ads being 60%). https://usa.usembassy.de/etexts/media/unfetter/press06.htm https://usa.usembassy.de/etexts/media/unfetter/press06.htm https://jimmycsays.com/2017/01/13/is-the-daily-newspaper-thin-yes-does-it-contain-significantly-less-space-for-news-photos-and-other-editorial-content-no/ https://jimmycsays.com/2017/01/13/is-the-daily-newspaper-thi...

tjpnz 7y ago

>I don't actually want to block ads. If you want to put a small text or image blurb anywhere on the page... Good for you. I'll gladly accept those on a webpage so that the content creator can make a bit of cash. I would be more than happy to accept that and I do see it from time to time. But I still won't be disabling my adblocker - allowing ads served from DoubleClick et el is just far too dangerous from both a security and privacy perspective. Even if they're not responsible for the actual ad content they're at the very least complicit in all of it.

dwighttk 7y ago

Except those little unobtrusive ads are easy to ignore and hardly anyone clicks on them so no one will pay anything for them. Also there’s no way to verify the clicks that do happen are genuine.

_Understated_ 7y ago

I have no issue with static, contextual ads (I had this conversation on here the other day in fact). Imagine reading something about, say, a particular lawnmower and the article has a link to that lawnmower at the top as an ad from Flymo with a discount. No tracking just a link to buy it with a tracking Id in the URL or something. Can someone answer me this: Are there studies, not funded by those who benefit from mass-tracking, that show the benefit of all this data-gathering to show ads? Or that show it doesn't work perhaps? My gut tells me the difference in success rate is minimal and couldn't possibly justify the data collection but I'd love to be proven wrong. At this time, I believe the whole scheme to be a con. (there, I said it!)

drawnwren 7y ago
I agree with your sentiment, but there is far too much money in ad tracking for it to be ineffective. Internet advertising is a very metrics-driven enterprise
pixelrevision 7y ago
The online ad industry is super shady and is getting much worse since google and facebook have started eating their lunch. But it would be very hard to pull data collection out of this business model. If company a puts the lawnmower ad up and only reports clicks and company b reports the percentage of men aged 35-40 company b will eventually put company a out of business. Content providers have to run what ads will actually make them money so they’re going to go with networks where companies actually buy ads. The only way this cycle is going to get stopped is with serious pushback either from consumers, technology or laws.

phjesusthatguy3 7y ago

I actually want to block ads. If you want to put a small text or image blurb anywhere on the page... I don't want to see it. I'd rather people stop whoring me out and start standing up for what they believe in. And now I have the tools to do so.

ibudiallo 7y ago

The one place I thought ads were relevant was on google search. After all, I was searching for the product they are advertising. But the line started to blur when they decided to remove that yellow background that tells me the result is an ad. Now, it's a 11px font that spells ad. That's the only indicator. For myself, I created a single use extension that turns google ads background to yellow[1]. I'm fine with ads on Google search, as long as I know they are ads. [1]: https://github.com/ibudiallo/gadlight https://github.com/ibudiallo/gadlight

garmaine 7y ago
Well that, and the fact that it actually says “Advertisement.”
- GordonS 7y ago
  No, as the parent mentioned, it says "Ad". As this is so short, I also find it easy to miss this It's clear Google removed the previously obvious demarcation between ads and results specifically to make it less obvious. I'd prefer a different background colour (like the parent's extension), but it would also help a bit if it said "Advertisement" instead of "Ad".

mook 7y ago

I didn't want to block ads either; originally I just used policeman / uMatrix. Unfortunately Google analytics broke pages (because some pages required all scripts to load before rendering anything), so I had to switch to uBlock Origin with its extra Google analytics shim.

jrvarela56 7y ago

If you are fine with ads so that content creators make money, where do you draw the line? How much money should they make? Having more data about you allows them to pick out 'better' ads and make more money. Wether this money goes to ad networks or content creators depends on how much leverage one has over the other.

charonn0 7y ago
It's not a question of how much money they make, but how they make it. An advertisement should be a one-way channel from the publisher to the audience. If information is flowing in the other direction (particularly if without the audience member's express permission) then it's become something more than an advertisement and that's a good place to draw the line.

Spooky23 7y ago

Agreed. I occasionally buy newspapers for ads. I decided a few years ago to disable ad blocking for awhile. The result was frankly, a parade of shit. Google was probably best at showing the occasional relevant ad, mostly in GMail. Beyond that, the automated crap that does the targeting tends to hit the lowest common denominator topic. What I actually do online barely registered, but if my kid used my laptop, it would immediately take over the ad experience.

kelnos 7y ago

I do want to block ads. I hate advertising in all its forms. I despise the psychological games that advertisers play with our minds. If I could wear a pair of contact lenses that blocked out billboards and other kinds of non-digital advertising, I would do so in a heartbeat.

KozmoNau7 7y ago
There are certain pieces of classical music I cannot hear without immediately thinking of the product it was used to advertise. It's maddening that advertisers can be allowed to destroy culture like that.
- schoen 7y ago
  I found it astonishing that the song "Look What They've Done to My Song, Ma" (which is seemingly about corruption of art) was later licensed for commercials for oatmeal and a hotel chain... complete with modified lyrics! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Have_They_Done_to_My_Song_Ma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Have_They_Done_to_My_Song...
alexandercrohde 7y ago
Agreed. I would go so far as to vote for a representative who wanted to pass a law restricting what is legal advertisement. I believe undisclosed ads should be illegal, I would ban music in ads, I would ban color in ads, I would ban sexuality in advertisement, I would ban appeals to emotions in ads. If a product truly makes the life of the purchaser better, then no gimmicks are needed to sell it.
- nkrisc 7y ago
  I would also ban all "puffery" in advertising, a.k.a. lies that are ok because they're unverifiable.
- okr 7y ago
  And yet we try to appeal to others ratio or emotion with arguments in discussions like these. So that that they buy in to our ideas. We persuade, it is good to be charismastic and seducing too. And if someone famous writes or speaks, someone we adore, we listen more careful. In the end it matters, that we can find enough people to vote for that one guy, to give him or her the power, that bans or controls behaviour, that we just used ourselves. Meh. Its all blurry lines.

j_m_b 7y ago

This sounds like such a rational comment, but it is based on the naive idea that ads can be effectively targeted simply based on content. You're never going to have ads that people are willing to pay for (i.e. a certain threshold click-through rate) without some sort of direct targeting. For example, you can't tell if your article on basic car maintenance is being read by a 30 year old male who might be interested in a beer ad or a 30 year old female with two kids who might be more interested in a new iphone cover.

lttlrck 7y ago
Direct targeting basic car maintenance alone covers a lot of ground doesn’t it? cars, spares and consumables, accessories, tools, car shows, workshop equipment, vacuum cleaners, mechanical things in general and diy... it’s endless. Edit: ok endless is hyperbole, but content targeting is hardly useless.
lolinder 7y ago
When I turned 25 I started getting nothing but hard soda ads from YouTube. I don't drink. I went and disabled personalized advertising, and for the first time in years I started seeing ads that tempted me to click through, ads from tech companies about tech. Why the difference? Because YouTube started showing me ads related to the content I'm actually watching rather than based on their faulty neural network profile of me. Obviously this is just one anecdote, but it's illustrative of the point: don't try to advertise either beer or iPhone covers on a car maintenance site. If I'm on a car maintenance site, you know all you need to know about where my interests are at that exact moment. Why try to hijack my attention (difficult when I'm trying to solve a car problem) when you could instead subtly redirect my attention to an ad for a local mechanic?
- chronic84920 7y ago
  > Why try to hijack my attention (difficult when I'm trying to solve a car problem) when you could instead subtly redirect my attention to an ad for a local mechanic? If there's only space for one ad, do they show you an ad for tools, exterior mechanic, engine mechanic, or a new car ad? All are valid options for both you and the advertiser. This is where invasively tracking your online behavior can help you.

karmelapple 7y ago

Not to mention the extra resources being eaten by all this JS. When I leave a typical website with lots of ads and tracking open, I can see the energy usage averaging much higher in Activity Monitor on my Mac, even in Safari and with some basic ad blocking on. I imagine folks serving up the JS have figured out ways around whatever simple blocking tech I have. If their JS wouldn’t eat up so much battery, I’d mind a lot less, since I leave tons of tabs open.

wnevets 7y ago

>I don't actually want to block ads. If you want to put a small text or image blurb anywhere on the page... Good for you. I'll gladly accept those on a webpage so that the content creator can make a bit of cash. For years I allowed google text ads because of non invasion and distracting they were. However the of amount tracking taking place forced me to also disable them.

Gibbon1 7y ago

> But these companies are intentionally blurring the lines between advertisement and digital surveillance. That's what I've been harping on. I'm not blocking ads, I'm trying to protect my privacy and keep ad companies from effectively DoSing my browser. Nothing about 'ad blockers' prevent advertisers from showing ordinary magazine style ads.

a3n 7y ago

Exactly this is why I block, and I also would not object to your "less intrusive" ad. I would still block, but I wouldn't mind at all seeing such a static, self-served ad.

fouc 7y ago

We need to abolish user agents. At the most, a universal web versioning or a "release timestamp" would be sufficient. This is the first step to reducing fingerprinting, remove distinctions between different browsers and only have the level of web version or timestamp they can support.

hermitdev 7y ago

What pisses me off is the intrusiveness of the ads. Auto playing video or audio. The amount of malware attacking browser zero days. Until that goes away, I'm going to run a layer of adblockers. That's a problem the ad networks introduced and allowed. It's not on me, as an end user, to fix. You serve me auto playing audio, video, and malware? I'm going continue to block you until you fix that.

AlexanderNull 7y ago

If it makes you feel any better, we're only collecting GPU info so we can identify you when you've "forgotten" to accept cookies. It's only like we're lifting your finger prints from discarded coffee cups, no biggie. (adtech developer)

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