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Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

186 points by GraemeL 7y ago

jsjddbbwj 7y ago
I miss the days when barely anybody blocked ads. Those of us who did didn't have to worry with defeating anti ad block systems.
- gjsman-1000 7y ago
  uBlock Origin is shockingly competent at defeating those "please turn off your adblocker" warnings.
  - sp332 7y ago
    Is this with default settings, or did you add another filter list for those?
  - Karunamon 7y ago
    On most sites, at least. There are a few out there that go well out of their way to be annoying. Facebook likes to construct their ad text out of multiple randomly-named divs. TVTropes uses randomized IDs on their ad popover.
    - boring_twenties 7y ago
      They seem to do this for more than just straight ads. I use uBlock Origin to filter out the "Stories" div. It comes back every week or two.
  - bilegeek 7y ago
    And if uBO doesn't cut the mustard, you can set up Nano Defender to work in tandem detecting this stuff, though it is a manual setup. Though I personally can't tell how effective it is, since I also run Bypass-Paywalls and uMatrix, so I don't know how much credit to give to those extensions.
  - asdff 7y ago
    Sometimes it breaks a site and needs fine tuning of the settings, but its easy enough, and I've never found an ad or paywall or cookie popup or anything that I couldn't zap away.
- kemotep 7y ago
  Before I used an ad blocker I encountered a lot of malvertisting[0]. Now that I use an ad blocker and set it them up for friends and family random virus attacks, bluescreens, and other types of issues are a thing of the past. I understand not all advertising agencies are responsible for this behavior but when these types of attacks can occur on mainstream websites such as Forbes[1], I frankly cannot trust any ad network to not infect my computer. [0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising [1]:https://www.engadget.com/2016/01/08/you-say-advertising-i-say-block-that-malware/ https://www.engadget.com/2016/01/08/you-say-advertising-i-sa...
  - asdff 7y ago
    I'd take the little minigame ads that gave you a virus over the blatant propaganda that appears today, to be honest.
- joe_the_user 7y ago
  The only blocking I do is turning off video autoplay in firefox (that sites like Tumbler somehow get around). Yet the Washington Post blocks me as using an ad-blocker, possibly because I'm using Linux, possibly because of no autoplay. But altogether, it seems like anit-adblock efforts are going to start having more and more collateral damage.
mrspeaker 7y ago
Great article! It's funny to finally see ad blockers go "mainstream". My dystopian-future fear is that that Web Assembly will be the end of ad blocking (and the end of a web of connected web sites). Big sites will eventually convert to essentially "a web browser inside a web browser" so they have total control over the content and how it's displayed. Then ad blocking (and other customization) will be limited to "the analog hole" - trying to image detect or OCR things. I hope I'm wrong, but I've also been asked countless times over the years to "stop people copy/pasting our text" and "stop people seeing our code" and "stop people downloading our images"... the browser-in-a-browser feels inevitable!
- BiteCode_dev 7y ago
  Yes, but doing so, they will lose the ability to be indexed, searched, archived and linked to. Like during the flash era. Which in turn will start a new trend of website that are "open". It's a cycle.
  - karatestomp 7y ago
    Plenty of sites already give Google something different from what they show everyone else, right?
    - Karunamon 7y ago
      I thought that was an offense that would get one either severely de-ranked or delisted from search outright?
      - karatestomp 7y ago
        What do paywalled sites do, then? They don't seem to have a problem ranking just fine.
        Karunamon 7y ago
        They show the abstract or the same bit of the headline and maybe a paragraph you see when hitting the page. Googlebot doesn't get the full text.
notRobot 7y ago
No one (or a much lesser percentage) would use an ad-blocker if ads were just ads, without all the tracking, privacy and malware concerns. Go back to contextual static-image ads, folks.
mwsfc 7y ago
Please correct me if I am wrong here regarding Ghostery functionality: In current Firefox & Vivaldi versions it behaves as you would expect....blocks ads according to your settings for every tab load. But in chrome, the default behavior (assume chrome induced) appears to be to auto disable the plugin until you manually re-enable the plugin then reload the tab....repeat process for every new tab load. Do I have a Chrome setting misconfigured or is this another example of Google's "what's best for you is what we say it is" attitude?
- throwaway9878 7y ago
  https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
  - mwsfc 7y ago
    Thanks! Had not seen this. Will look into.
  - jiveturkey 7y ago
    how's that related to parent's question? I can't find a correlation. are you suggesting he not use chrome? that's isn't much of an answer. parent: I've not seen this problem. I only use chrome on mac. maybe on windows/linux it's doing something differently. as each new tab is a new process, it smells like a goofball file system permissions issue to me. does it still happen if you create a new profile? it works as you'd expect both with google sync on, off, paused, and never-been-setup for me. hard to imagine that this isn't some bug of installation for you. there's no way this would be tolerable behavior and if it were because of chrome per se, there'd be lots of uproar so you'd find your answer right away.
    - mwsfc 7y ago
      Yes, agree, expect would have seen more of an uproar if this was wide spread. Was trying to stay out the troubleshooting rabbit hole, thus posting the Q here in case other have observed the same. Still, with the other browsers proclaiming more privacy features and google somewhat begrudgingly trying to slow that conversation its hard to know what to expect in chrome without going deep into their roadmap.
jslabovitz 7y ago
From the article: > The very beginning of ad blocking is the 90s, just when the ads appeared. In 1993, GNN, the very first web advertising service, was launched. Then in 1994, the first-ever banner was sold. In the blink of an eye, the online ad industry was worth billions of dollars. Double Click emerged, Yahoo started to sell ads. And that's when the very first ad blocker was created. GNN (Global Network Navigator) was not an advertising service. It was the first commercial online magazine. O’Reilly & Associates, the publisher of GNN, wanted to see if a website like GNN could be supported through commercial sponsorship. GNN’s ads were informational — much more like whitepapers than a display ads. (Wired’s HotWired site, which launched at almost exactly the same time as GNN in the fall of 1993, invented the banner ad, which of course is what most adblocking tech has targeted. Cookies for tracking didn’t come along until later.) Source: I worked on GNN as technical director, and in fact my first job there, in the summer of 1993 about a month before we launched, was to assemble the first ‘ad’ — a set of articles about intellectual property law, sponsored by the now-defunct Bay area law firm Heller Ehrman.
- blakesterz 7y ago
  I don't know if you spotted it, but they added your comment to the footnotes at the bottom of the page now.
- lmm 7y ago
  > GNN (Global Network Navigator) was not an advertising service. It was the first commercial online magazine. Isn't that the same thing? With a couple of exceptions, magazines are advertising services first and foremost, in as much as the overwhelming majority of their revenue comes from ads.
  - jslabovitz 7y ago
    I don’t want to argue about magazines (or newspapers) in general, since it seems you have quite a cynical view there. I’d advise that you research common standards of journalism, including the concept of the editorial/advertising wall. But I’ll tell you that the the existence of GNN itself, in 1993, was certainly not for the purpose of serving ads. Heck, as I explained, online advertising didn’t even exist at that time (besides a few misguided attempts on Usenet), so there was only conjecture that it might work at all, and lots of room to experiment. Also, there was really no other economic revenue model accessible to us, other than sponsored content, as there were no online payment systems on the WWW of that era. Heck, there weren’t really any active websites at all — almost all sites (including GNN) were what we’d today call static sites. (As I mentioned, cookies came later, so there was also zero targeting of ads besides basic demographics of Internet users at the time.)
paulie_a 7y ago
Basically ad blocking makes the internet useful again. I am no longer bombarded with popups or distractions. Therefore I won. Tracking is pathetically useless on the internet. It's easy to screw with the metrics and your "profile" but even without doing so tracking is simply snake oil
izzydata 7y ago
If I can't block the ads on a page I'm simply not going to visit it ever again. I've never seen a website that was actually necessary for me to visit that had ads or couldn't be blocked.
- marssaxman 7y ago
  I feel the same. There is nothing on the web I need to read so badly that I am willing to put up with advertising to get it; I can just go waste my time somewhere else.
aSplash0fDerp 7y ago
Is part of a digital detox turning off java by default and enjoying the Text Web in its full glory? What do you estimate the cost is annually for all of the wasted bandwith (especially mobile data) on predatory marketing?
throwaway55554 7y ago
Websites started off with a glass storefront and an open door. You kinda had to poke your head in the door to look around to see if you wanted to go in. Then the glass storefront had some sales prices shown. Then slowly you could no longer even see the glass storefront for all the ads. Then the spinning sign men showed up to annoy. Now, there's a bouncer with a clipboard blocking you from getting in. It's mostly just not worth the effort any more unless you have an ad blocker in some form.
- Agenttin 7y ago
  This is a really good metaphor.
bubblethink 7y ago
So a survey article about adblocking without mentioning the main ad blocker in the world (and their competitor), ublock origin. Well played! As for the history lesson, the main meta lesson is that adblockers need to be completely detached from any monetory incentives. No company, however noble, should be trusted at all. Only open source + community ad blockers have survived and flourished. Time and again, people have tried to make a quick buck by becoming the middlemen in the adblocking industry by promoting their flavour of ads, whitelisting ads, or just hijacking ads.
- ameshkov 7y ago
  Sorry for that, we don't mind mentioning anyone, it's just there was no historical event that we could tie to uBO. I'll ask the author to add a footnote about uBO and others we missed to mention, we love them all. upd: done
  - samatman 7y ago
    I haven't read the article, and I'm not what you'd call well-versed in the history of ad blocking. But even I know that uBlock was bought out and introduced 'acceptable ads', and that uBlock Origin became the community fork which maintains the spirit of the original uBlock. That deserves more than a footnote, imho.
    - ameshkov 7y ago
      Acceptable ads deserves being there, you are right. This was the first attempt at finding a compromise with advertisers, hated by a huge part of users and advertisers at the same time. But it was launched by Adblock Plus in 2011, long before uBlock was developed.
    - ripdog 7y ago
      Acceptable ads was introduced by adblock plus, and it remains their primary revenue source. uBlock is the original version of uBlock origin. Both were started by gorhill4 (sp?). Gorhill got sick of the constant support burden of people coming into his repo and reporting unblocked ads, which he then had to redirect to the filter list repos. He handed the entire project off to some teenager with little programming experience. Said teenager did little but make a new website and request donations, core work basically halted. Afterwards, gorhill got sick of seeing his old project be abandoned and get a bad reputation, and forked it as uBlock origin. Thus, uBlock origin is not a community fork.
jiveturkey 7y ago
> 2015 — Content blocking comes to Safari and iOS typo. He means "Safari on iOS". Safari on desktop had normal extension-based ad blocking since day 1. Then the content blocking API came to iOS then later the same API in macOS. > • No debugging tools perhaps in 2015 -- I wouldn't know -- but today it's certainly debuggable with the help of a macOS host. Much like remote gdb. > The maximum number of rules limitation is a huge problem, not a problem at all. rules limitation is per filter but each adblocker can install multiple filters. I suppose the rules limitation is for latency reasons, in case of a poorly designed blocker. > It was disproportionately hard to maintain a completely different filter list for Safari alone. Completely false. filters are regex's. It's trivial to use the same source list with whatever filter technology. I guess because this article is content marketing, and not academic research, these errors (and omissions) are ok. But I do wish, that given the title, the author had bothered to mention that Bing inserts ads that are not blockable via simple URL filters. adblock+ currently doesn't handle them and I believe they are not handle-able at all via the Safari content filter API. By extension => ad blockers are doomed. So yeah, he's not going to say that because he's selling an ad blocker ...
- ameshkov 7y ago
  1. The only debugging tool we have is the browser console, and the only thing printed there is the blocked URL, you cannot even find out what rule did that. 2. The maximum number of rules IS a problem and it is there only because the current implementation consumes to much memory and slow to compile a content blocker. WebKit devs may allow us to pull request an alternative implementation (there’s an ongoing discussion on bwo), and if there are no performance issues, the limit will be increased. 3. Regarding maintaining a filter list, traditional blockers do not use regexes unless it is really really necessary. What’s written in this post is by people who maintain filter lists for over 10 years.
- webmobdev 7y ago
  This is from an ad-blocking community and shows that Apple is NOT serious about supporting ad-blocking and is in fact even sabotaging it on Safari: > uBlock Origin was ported for Safari in 2016, and was updated regulary (mostly changes from the main project) until 2018 when development completley stopped. Since then Apple has begun phasing out Safari extensions as extensions, and has instead been implenting a new extensions framework which is extremley limited in adblocking functions, only allowing "content blockers", which are just links bundled as an app which Safari enforces. From Safari 12 / macOS Mojave, old legacy Safari extensions were still allowed, but came with warnings saying that they will slow down your browsing (they infact won't, or at least not noticably). ... Though it is still curently possible to install uBlock Origin by downloading the extension from Github (edit: must follow these instructions, it will not be starting from Safari 13 / macOS Catalina, when the legacy entension API will be fully deprecated. Source: https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/158 https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/158
m3047 7y ago
"It means that an ad blocker of the future will have to monitor traffic of the entire network." (towards the end) This is already a concern in the DNS world, with Response Policy Zones (RPZ) on one hand for DNS-based control (https://dnsrpz.info/ https://dnsrpz.info/) and DNS Over HTTP(S) (a.k.a. DoH) on the other.
monksy 7y ago
I remember using Naviscope and sometimes dealing with DNS blocks with the hosts file. Those were the days. (I had a very rudimentary ad blocker via my web browser back in the days [404Browser])
superkuh 7y ago
I don't block ads but I do block all javascript by default. They are essentially synonymous now.
SignalsFromBob 7y ago
I feel that we've done ourselves a disservice by referring to them as ad blockers rather than content blockers or, better yet, virus blockers. With malicious ads being the primary vector for compromising a person's computer, calling these tools virus blockers would not only be more accurate, but it would make it harder for sites to counter their use from a public relations point of view. Could you imagine visiting a web site only to have it tell you to disable your virus blocker to view the web page? Yet, web sites make the same requests of your "ad blocker" even though the end result is the same. They want you to disable your security protections and risk infection to view a web page.[1] Sadly, I believe we've already lost this battle and are worse off for it. 1. https://www.networkworld.com/article/3021113/forbes-malware-ad-blocker-advertisements.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/3021113/forbes-malware-...
- heretoo 7y ago
  > "risk infection" this is how I feel about all advertisements
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    And rightfully so, because their whole point is to compromise your mental faculties. They're a memetic hazard.
- matheusmoreira 7y ago
  Ads in general should be considered malware. They have adware and spyware components and both types of software used to be detected and removed by anti-malware software. Apparently a few lines in the terms of service nobody reads is all it takes to legitimize this abusive software. Because users have "agreed" to be subjected to malware, their use of content blockers somehow becomes immoral.
- seppin 7y ago
  Or just a way of maintaining the integrity of your own internet experience.
- robertlagrant 7y ago
jakub_g 7y ago
I feel like the article is missing an important milestone about release of Brave browser for Android circa 2017/2018 (it's only briefly mentioned at the end). It changed the landscape on Android in my opinion: it was the first browser that was as good as Chrome (fast, same look & feel -- being a fork of Chromium -- plus regularly updated and having strong, credible technical team behind it) but also having ad blocking built-in and other additional privacy measures. Soon Opera added ad blocking as well, and other browsers (except Chrome) followed.
- SirLotsaLocks 7y ago
  Samsungs browser also has adblock
- Scottn1 7y ago
  You have your timeline backwards. Opera was the first browser to implement a built-in native adblocker in 2016. Here is the blog announcement: https://blogs.opera.com/desktop/2016/03/opera-built-ad-blocking-now-beta/ https://blogs.opera.com/desktop/2016/03/opera-built-ad-block... Opera was and actually continues to be a pioneering browser with many "firsts" over the years. I was an avid user of it for a decade but I am saddened that it has become surrounded in controversy with a shady Chinese owner and predatory loans and stopped using it two years ago. https://www.engadget.com/2020/01/19/opera-accused-of-predatory-loan-apps/ https://www.engadget.com/2020/01/19/opera-accused-of-predato...
  - jakub_g 7y ago
    Good catch! Here's a better link specifically talking about mobile: https://blogs.opera.com/news/2016/06/ad-blocker-android-ios-windows-phone-download-free/ https://blogs.opera.com/news/2016/06/ad-blocker-android-ios-...
mrlala 7y ago
Who is honestly clicking on all these ads that makes advertising worthwhile? I am honestly baffled sometimes how this all works... In my 30+ years of internet usage in one form or another I have rarely, rarely, rarely ever clicked on a freakin ad. Yes, I've generally had them blocked for the most part. But when they aren't blocked, I see what the content is and why would I even want to click on one! Color me confused who is keeping the web running by clicking on ads.
- scarejunba 7y ago
  Lots of people. I'm responsible for a few hundred dollars of consumption from my Instagram ads for festival gear. We send each other concert ads over Insta far too often for it not to be effective. Either way, though, neither of our experiences tell the whole story. The truth is in the metrics and I used to be in the ad tech industry. The metrics are solid. Especially on the guys who own the platform: Google w/ search and Facebook which just attracts users like nothing else on its properties.
- tayo42 7y ago
  Part of me thinks theres an internet ad bubble. I think its really hard to know how much value an ad provides, so it gets handwaved as being critical to success and worth tons of money. A lot of big internet companies rely on ads or provide services to companies that provide ads or make it easier to use ads.
  - tyfon 7y ago
    I work in the financial industry and even if the CAC is really high (100s of dollars) it still pales in comparison to the income we get on average from the new customers. I don't work in marketing but even if I personally hate ads, they unfortunately work really well especially in combination with facebook/googles profile on everyone and the fact that they seem to learn who clicks a certain ad after a few days and only display it to that group.
  - Nextgrid 7y ago
    I wouldn't say that ads are completely ineffective (there's a significant chunk of the population that doesn't resent ads like we do, and will actually click on them even if they're aware that they're ads), but I agree that there's definitely a bubble going on. I've seen many non-tech people search for a certain brand or product, and despite it being the first non-sponsored search result, they will instead click on the sponsored result/ad ad the top even though it's the same product. The above causes the metrics and conversion rate to look great, so the waste of oxygen that is the marketing department can justify their salary and budget, the ad providers and all the ecosystem around it also gets paid, but at the end of the day that ad wasn't actually providing any value because the user already had the brand in mind and only clicked the ad by mistake.
mariushn 7y ago
I guess we all know Chrome on Android doesn't support extensions in order to prevent ad blockers. If there wouldn't be Firefox, Chrome on desktop would have surely limited ad blockers as well.
wespiser_2018 7y ago
There is a great paper on the arms race between Ads and Ad Blockers out of a group in Princeton. They propose a perceptual ad-blocking scheme where ads are always rendered in a DOM, but elements only displayed to the if they are not "ad like". This is makes it much easier to evade ad-block detectors, since your browser appears as if it does not have an ad-blocker! https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/ad-blocking-framework-techniques.pdf https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/ad-blocki...
- ameshkov 7y ago
  There is another interesting paper on a similar topic that proves that this approach is vulnerable to different adversarial attacks, for instance, you can make it block legitimate content, or you can conceal ads by adding an overlay invisible to a human eye. https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.03194 https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.03194
- asdff 7y ago
  The alternative to the arms race is to stop having browser extensions. In a browser like chrome made by an advertising company with 80% of the browser market last I checked, the results could be devastating for the vast majority of internet users. We nerds will always be fine. Mobile will of course fare far worse unless you root your device, for ios and android. Can't wait for the inevitable day where the unskippable 10 min youtube ad pauses if I look away from the screen...
Blackthorn 7y ago
I posted this deep in a thread but feel like it should be a higher level comment so here we go. Websites can be so ridiculously short sighted and just want to squeeze out every penny they can not thinking of the users they end up losing in the process. And they do lose users And fast. Personal experience time! I ran a pretty popular wiki for Dungeons and Dragons homebrew on what used to be called Wikia. At some point they decided they available needed to have some terrible new skin that was stuffed with ads and unbelievable ugly. We pushed back but they were adamant about forcing it, so I took all the content and all the users and self hosted it for almost a decade afterward. The Wikia site was completely dead. Sucks for them but their choice. I paid $10/mo or $20/mo for the site depending on the year, and never ran ads. At one point I got an offer from a company in the same hobbyist space to buy it from me. At that point I was extremely sick of being my own sysadmin and worrying about security vulns so I accepted it. Now some time later they're trying to pull the "stuff it full of ads in the worst places!" routine. Users are getting pissed and starting to ask me about taking all the content...and users...and going off to a server adminned by me again. If I do this, it will be completely devastating for the site and tank their traffic. Do they care or realize? Guess we'll see. All of this could be avoided if they just made the ads less shitty. Not showing up in the middle of navigation bars. Not being bigger than the surrounding content, so it completely stretches it and ruin's the site layout. Not having a completely clashing background color to the site. All extremely simple stuff.
- birdyrooster 7y ago
  This reminds me of A/B testing that likely was the method Google unwittingly used to obfuscate sponsored results in Search. The A/B test KPI they were measuring clearly was creating more click through to sponsored properties and it eroded trust and utility in exchange. I am sure they increased their short term Ad Words profits.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    I keep saying: A/B testing is how Satan influences this world. They make it all too easy to turn your product development into optimizing bad metrics, and they give ammunition for justifying self-destructive decisions (it must be good, the data says so).
kristianc 7y ago
> Now it’s surprising to see a lot of comments like: "Why do you need an ad blocker? Just use the hosts files". I often wonder if people realize that they’re being that person.
ck2 7y ago
When adsense first came out it was text only and ads were actually fascinating and interesting to read. They were regulated and meaningful. Then images and javascript were eventually allowed and it was all downhill from there. Now it's a race to the bottom of how many hundreds of external objects and tracking that can be added to a page as well as malware since so many badly behaving ads slip right through any attempt at automated bans.
droithomme 7y ago
I don't turn off my virus blocker for anyone. No way no how no sir. Sites that refuse to show content without opening up for viruses are intrinsically suspicious, no matter how fancy their brand name.
8bitsrule 7y ago
Here's another history (the dates in the OP are fuzzy). https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2019/12/20/monetizing-the-banner-ad-crisis https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2019/12/20/monetizing-the-ba...
ddevault 7y ago
1. Click 2. Open network panel 3. Google Analytics 4. Close tabs It's disgusting how so many so-called privacy advocates can't even get this right even when talking about privacy.
kurehajime 7y ago
Ad blockers were born earlier than the Internet and personal computers. --- A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages Alan C. Kay Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 1972 https://www.mprove.de/visionreality/media/kay72.html https://www.mprove.de/visionreality/media/kay72.html >A combination of this "carry anywhere" device and a global information utility such as the ARPA network or two-way cable TV, will bring the libraries and schools (not to mention stores and billboards) or the world to the home. One can imagine one of the first programs an owner will write is a filter to eliminate advertising!
einpoklum 7y ago
Commercial companies being able to force themselves onto our consciousness is unacceptable. Personally, seeing ads in public spaces feels just like in totalitarian countries you would see large portraits of the supreme leader or government propaganda. Somehow this is legitimized because they're private corporations. Not in my book. More power to ad blocker authors, and a particular shoutout to: * Raymond Hill of uBlock Origin fame: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/ https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/ * The EFF, for blocking trackers and other 3rd party nasties with Privacy Badger: https://www.eff.org/privacybadger https://www.eff.org/privacybadger
einpoklum 7y ago
I wonder if the legal action against AdBlock Plus / Palant made a dent in the download or use of ad blockers in general. The article doesn't provide any evidence of this. Also - don't get your apps on Google or Apple's app stores! Use APKMirror, APK pure, etc. Some of these even have app-store-like apps to use instead of Google's, that don't need a Google account. Also, there's at least one app "store" app specializing in FOSS purely: https://f-droid.org/en/ https://f-droid.org/en/
Causality1 7y ago
I personally think we're nearing the end of a golden age where sites can support themselves through advertisements that 90 percent of users see while we, the nerds, are able to easily block almost all the ads. The more widespread blockers become, the more incentive there is to create unblockable ads, e.g., YouTube inserting a video ad directly into the video stream so that even if you had some kind of content-aware AI blocker running you still wouldn't be able to continue your video until the ad is over and the unedited stream resumes.

186 points by GraemeL 7y ago

I miss the days when barely anybody blocked ads. Those of us who did didn't have to worry with defeating anti ad block systems.

gjsman-1000 7y ago
uBlock Origin is shockingly competent at defeating those "please turn off your adblocker" warnings.
- sp332 7y ago
  Is this with default settings, or did you add another filter list for those?
- Karunamon 7y ago
  On most sites, at least. There are a few out there that go well out of their way to be annoying. Facebook likes to construct their ad text out of multiple randomly-named divs. TVTropes uses randomized IDs on their ad popover.
  - boring_twenties 7y ago
    They seem to do this for more than just straight ads. I use uBlock Origin to filter out the "Stories" div. It comes back every week or two.
- bilegeek 7y ago
  And if uBO doesn't cut the mustard, you can set up Nano Defender to work in tandem detecting this stuff, though it is a manual setup. Though I personally can't tell how effective it is, since I also run Bypass-Paywalls and uMatrix, so I don't know how much credit to give to those extensions.
- asdff 7y ago
  Sometimes it breaks a site and needs fine tuning of the settings, but its easy enough, and I've never found an ad or paywall or cookie popup or anything that I couldn't zap away.
kemotep 7y ago
Before I used an ad blocker I encountered a lot of malvertisting[0]. Now that I use an ad blocker and set it them up for friends and family random virus attacks, bluescreens, and other types of issues are a thing of the past. I understand not all advertising agencies are responsible for this behavior but when these types of attacks can occur on mainstream websites such as Forbes[1], I frankly cannot trust any ad network to not infect my computer. [0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising [1]:https://www.engadget.com/2016/01/08/you-say-advertising-i-say-block-that-malware/ https://www.engadget.com/2016/01/08/you-say-advertising-i-sa...
- asdff 7y ago
  I'd take the little minigame ads that gave you a virus over the blatant propaganda that appears today, to be honest.
joe_the_user 7y ago
The only blocking I do is turning off video autoplay in firefox (that sites like Tumbler somehow get around). Yet the Washington Post blocks me as using an ad-blocker, possibly because I'm using Linux, possibly because of no autoplay. But altogether, it seems like anit-adblock efforts are going to start having more and more collateral damage.

mrspeaker 7y ago

Great article! It's funny to finally see ad blockers go "mainstream". My dystopian-future fear is that that Web Assembly will be the end of ad blocking (and the end of a web of connected web sites). Big sites will eventually convert to essentially "a web browser inside a web browser" so they have total control over the content and how it's displayed. Then ad blocking (and other customization) will be limited to "the analog hole" - trying to image detect or OCR things. I hope I'm wrong, but I've also been asked countless times over the years to "stop people copy/pasting our text" and "stop people seeing our code" and "stop people downloading our images"... the browser-in-a-browser feels inevitable!

BiteCode_dev 7y ago
Yes, but doing so, they will lose the ability to be indexed, searched, archived and linked to. Like during the flash era. Which in turn will start a new trend of website that are "open". It's a cycle.
- karatestomp 7y ago
  Plenty of sites already give Google something different from what they show everyone else, right?
  - Karunamon 7y ago
    I thought that was an offense that would get one either severely de-ranked or delisted from search outright?
    - karatestomp 7y ago
      What do paywalled sites do, then? They don't seem to have a problem ranking just fine.
      - Karunamon 7y ago
        They show the abstract or the same bit of the headline and maybe a paragraph you see when hitting the page. Googlebot doesn't get the full text.

notRobot 7y ago

No one (or a much lesser percentage) would use an ad-blocker if ads were just ads, without all the tracking, privacy and malware concerns. Go back to contextual static-image ads, folks.

mwsfc 7y ago

Please correct me if I am wrong here regarding Ghostery functionality: In current Firefox & Vivaldi versions it behaves as you would expect....blocks ads according to your settings for every tab load. But in chrome, the default behavior (assume chrome induced) appears to be to auto disable the plugin until you manually re-enable the plugin then reload the tab....repeat process for every new tab load. Do I have a Chrome setting misconfigured or is this another example of Google's "what's best for you is what we say it is" attitude?

throwaway9878 7y ago
https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
- mwsfc 7y ago
  Thanks! Had not seen this. Will look into.
- jiveturkey 7y ago
  how's that related to parent's question? I can't find a correlation. are you suggesting he not use chrome? that's isn't much of an answer. parent: I've not seen this problem. I only use chrome on mac. maybe on windows/linux it's doing something differently. as each new tab is a new process, it smells like a goofball file system permissions issue to me. does it still happen if you create a new profile? it works as you'd expect both with google sync on, off, paused, and never-been-setup for me. hard to imagine that this isn't some bug of installation for you. there's no way this would be tolerable behavior and if it were because of chrome per se, there'd be lots of uproar so you'd find your answer right away.
  - mwsfc 7y ago
    Yes, agree, expect would have seen more of an uproar if this was wide spread. Was trying to stay out the troubleshooting rabbit hole, thus posting the Q here in case other have observed the same. Still, with the other browsers proclaiming more privacy features and google somewhat begrudgingly trying to slow that conversation its hard to know what to expect in chrome without going deep into their roadmap.

jslabovitz 7y ago

From the article: > The very beginning of ad blocking is the 90s, just when the ads appeared. In 1993, GNN, the very first web advertising service, was launched. Then in 1994, the first-ever banner was sold. In the blink of an eye, the online ad industry was worth billions of dollars. Double Click emerged, Yahoo started to sell ads. And that's when the very first ad blocker was created. GNN (Global Network Navigator) was not an advertising service. It was the first commercial online magazine. O’Reilly & Associates, the publisher of GNN, wanted to see if a website like GNN could be supported through commercial sponsorship. GNN’s ads were informational — much more like whitepapers than a display ads. (Wired’s HotWired site, which launched at almost exactly the same time as GNN in the fall of 1993, invented the banner ad, which of course is what most adblocking tech has targeted. Cookies for tracking didn’t come along until later.) Source: I worked on GNN as technical director, and in fact my first job there, in the summer of 1993 about a month before we launched, was to assemble the first ‘ad’ — a set of articles about intellectual property law, sponsored by the now-defunct Bay area law firm Heller Ehrman.

blakesterz 7y ago
I don't know if you spotted it, but they added your comment to the footnotes at the bottom of the page now.
lmm 7y ago
> GNN (Global Network Navigator) was not an advertising service. It was the first commercial online magazine. Isn't that the same thing? With a couple of exceptions, magazines are advertising services first and foremost, in as much as the overwhelming majority of their revenue comes from ads.
- jslabovitz 7y ago
  I don’t want to argue about magazines (or newspapers) in general, since it seems you have quite a cynical view there. I’d advise that you research common standards of journalism, including the concept of the editorial/advertising wall. But I’ll tell you that the the existence of GNN itself, in 1993, was certainly not for the purpose of serving ads. Heck, as I explained, online advertising didn’t even exist at that time (besides a few misguided attempts on Usenet), so there was only conjecture that it might work at all, and lots of room to experiment. Also, there was really no other economic revenue model accessible to us, other than sponsored content, as there were no online payment systems on the WWW of that era. Heck, there weren’t really any active websites at all — almost all sites (including GNN) were what we’d today call static sites. (As I mentioned, cookies came later, so there was also zero targeting of ads besides basic demographics of Internet users at the time.)

paulie_a 7y ago

Basically ad blocking makes the internet useful again. I am no longer bombarded with popups or distractions. Therefore I won. Tracking is pathetically useless on the internet. It's easy to screw with the metrics and your "profile" but even without doing so tracking is simply snake oil

izzydata 7y ago

If I can't block the ads on a page I'm simply not going to visit it ever again. I've never seen a website that was actually necessary for me to visit that had ads or couldn't be blocked.

marssaxman 7y ago
I feel the same. There is nothing on the web I need to read so badly that I am willing to put up with advertising to get it; I can just go waste my time somewhere else.

aSplash0fDerp 7y ago

Is part of a digital detox turning off java by default and enjoying the Text Web in its full glory? What do you estimate the cost is annually for all of the wasted bandwith (especially mobile data) on predatory marketing?

throwaway55554 7y ago

Websites started off with a glass storefront and an open door. You kinda had to poke your head in the door to look around to see if you wanted to go in. Then the glass storefront had some sales prices shown. Then slowly you could no longer even see the glass storefront for all the ads. Then the spinning sign men showed up to annoy. Now, there's a bouncer with a clipboard blocking you from getting in. It's mostly just not worth the effort any more unless you have an ad blocker in some form.

Agenttin 7y ago
This is a really good metaphor.

bubblethink 7y ago

So a survey article about adblocking without mentioning the main ad blocker in the world (and their competitor), ublock origin. Well played! As for the history lesson, the main meta lesson is that adblockers need to be completely detached from any monetory incentives. No company, however noble, should be trusted at all. Only open source + community ad blockers have survived and flourished. Time and again, people have tried to make a quick buck by becoming the middlemen in the adblocking industry by promoting their flavour of ads, whitelisting ads, or just hijacking ads.

ameshkov 7y ago
Sorry for that, we don't mind mentioning anyone, it's just there was no historical event that we could tie to uBO. I'll ask the author to add a footnote about uBO and others we missed to mention, we love them all. upd: done
- samatman 7y ago
  I haven't read the article, and I'm not what you'd call well-versed in the history of ad blocking. But even I know that uBlock was bought out and introduced 'acceptable ads', and that uBlock Origin became the community fork which maintains the spirit of the original uBlock. That deserves more than a footnote, imho.
  - ameshkov 7y ago
    Acceptable ads deserves being there, you are right. This was the first attempt at finding a compromise with advertisers, hated by a huge part of users and advertisers at the same time. But it was launched by Adblock Plus in 2011, long before uBlock was developed.
  - ripdog 7y ago
    Acceptable ads was introduced by adblock plus, and it remains their primary revenue source. uBlock is the original version of uBlock origin. Both were started by gorhill4 (sp?). Gorhill got sick of the constant support burden of people coming into his repo and reporting unblocked ads, which he then had to redirect to the filter list repos. He handed the entire project off to some teenager with little programming experience. Said teenager did little but make a new website and request donations, core work basically halted. Afterwards, gorhill got sick of seeing his old project be abandoned and get a bad reputation, and forked it as uBlock origin. Thus, uBlock origin is not a community fork.

jiveturkey 7y ago

> 2015 — Content blocking comes to Safari and iOS typo. He means "Safari on iOS". Safari on desktop had normal extension-based ad blocking since day 1. Then the content blocking API came to iOS then later the same API in macOS. > • No debugging tools perhaps in 2015 -- I wouldn't know -- but today it's certainly debuggable with the help of a macOS host. Much like remote gdb. > The maximum number of rules limitation is a huge problem, not a problem at all. rules limitation is per filter but each adblocker can install multiple filters. I suppose the rules limitation is for latency reasons, in case of a poorly designed blocker. > It was disproportionately hard to maintain a completely different filter list for Safari alone. Completely false. filters are regex's. It's trivial to use the same source list with whatever filter technology. I guess because this article is content marketing, and not academic research, these errors (and omissions) are ok. But I do wish, that given the title, the author had bothered to mention that Bing inserts ads that are not blockable via simple URL filters. adblock+ currently doesn't handle them and I believe they are not handle-able at all via the Safari content filter API. By extension => ad blockers are doomed. So yeah, he's not going to say that because he's selling an ad blocker ...

ameshkov 7y ago
1. The only debugging tool we have is the browser console, and the only thing printed there is the blocked URL, you cannot even find out what rule did that. 2. The maximum number of rules IS a problem and it is there only because the current implementation consumes to much memory and slow to compile a content blocker. WebKit devs may allow us to pull request an alternative implementation (there’s an ongoing discussion on bwo), and if there are no performance issues, the limit will be increased. 3. Regarding maintaining a filter list, traditional blockers do not use regexes unless it is really really necessary. What’s written in this post is by people who maintain filter lists for over 10 years.
webmobdev 7y ago
This is from an ad-blocking community and shows that Apple is NOT serious about supporting ad-blocking and is in fact even sabotaging it on Safari: > uBlock Origin was ported for Safari in 2016, and was updated regulary (mostly changes from the main project) until 2018 when development completley stopped. Since then Apple has begun phasing out Safari extensions as extensions, and has instead been implenting a new extensions framework which is extremley limited in adblocking functions, only allowing "content blockers", which are just links bundled as an app which Safari enforces. From Safari 12 / macOS Mojave, old legacy Safari extensions were still allowed, but came with warnings saying that they will slow down your browsing (they infact won't, or at least not noticably). ... Though it is still curently possible to install uBlock Origin by downloading the extension from Github (edit: must follow these instructions, it will not be starting from Safari 13 / macOS Catalina, when the legacy entension API will be fully deprecated. Source: https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/158 https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/158

m3047 7y ago

"It means that an ad blocker of the future will have to monitor traffic of the entire network." (towards the end) This is already a concern in the DNS world, with Response Policy Zones (RPZ) on one hand for DNS-based control (https://dnsrpz.info/ https://dnsrpz.info/) and DNS Over HTTP(S) (a.k.a. DoH) on the other.

monksy 7y ago

I remember using Naviscope and sometimes dealing with DNS blocks with the hosts file. Those were the days. (I had a very rudimentary ad blocker via my web browser back in the days [404Browser])

superkuh 7y ago

I don't block ads but I do block all javascript by default. They are essentially synonymous now.

SignalsFromBob 7y ago

I feel that we've done ourselves a disservice by referring to them as ad blockers rather than content blockers or, better yet, virus blockers. With malicious ads being the primary vector for compromising a person's computer, calling these tools virus blockers would not only be more accurate, but it would make it harder for sites to counter their use from a public relations point of view. Could you imagine visiting a web site only to have it tell you to disable your virus blocker to view the web page? Yet, web sites make the same requests of your "ad blocker" even though the end result is the same. They want you to disable your security protections and risk infection to view a web page.[1] Sadly, I believe we've already lost this battle and are worse off for it. 1. https://www.networkworld.com/article/3021113/forbes-malware-ad-blocker-advertisements.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/3021113/forbes-malware-...

heretoo 7y ago
> "risk infection" this is how I feel about all advertisements
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  And rightfully so, because their whole point is to compromise your mental faculties. They're a memetic hazard.
matheusmoreira 7y ago
Ads in general should be considered malware. They have adware and spyware components and both types of software used to be detected and removed by anti-malware software. Apparently a few lines in the terms of service nobody reads is all it takes to legitimize this abusive software. Because users have "agreed" to be subjected to malware, their use of content blockers somehow becomes immoral.
seppin 7y ago
Or just a way of maintaining the integrity of your own internet experience.
robertlagrant 7y ago

jakub_g 7y ago

I feel like the article is missing an important milestone about release of Brave browser for Android circa 2017/2018 (it's only briefly mentioned at the end). It changed the landscape on Android in my opinion: it was the first browser that was as good as Chrome (fast, same look & feel -- being a fork of Chromium -- plus regularly updated and having strong, credible technical team behind it) but also having ad blocking built-in and other additional privacy measures. Soon Opera added ad blocking as well, and other browsers (except Chrome) followed.

SirLotsaLocks 7y ago
Samsungs browser also has adblock
Scottn1 7y ago
You have your timeline backwards. Opera was the first browser to implement a built-in native adblocker in 2016. Here is the blog announcement: https://blogs.opera.com/desktop/2016/03/opera-built-ad-blocking-now-beta/ https://blogs.opera.com/desktop/2016/03/opera-built-ad-block... Opera was and actually continues to be a pioneering browser with many "firsts" over the years. I was an avid user of it for a decade but I am saddened that it has become surrounded in controversy with a shady Chinese owner and predatory loans and stopped using it two years ago. https://www.engadget.com/2020/01/19/opera-accused-of-predatory-loan-apps/ https://www.engadget.com/2020/01/19/opera-accused-of-predato...
- jakub_g 7y ago
  Good catch! Here's a better link specifically talking about mobile: https://blogs.opera.com/news/2016/06/ad-blocker-android-ios-windows-phone-download-free/ https://blogs.opera.com/news/2016/06/ad-blocker-android-ios-...

mrlala 7y ago

Who is honestly clicking on all these ads that makes advertising worthwhile? I am honestly baffled sometimes how this all works... In my 30+ years of internet usage in one form or another I have rarely, rarely, rarely ever clicked on a freakin ad. Yes, I've generally had them blocked for the most part. But when they aren't blocked, I see what the content is and why would I even want to click on one! Color me confused who is keeping the web running by clicking on ads.

scarejunba 7y ago
Lots of people. I'm responsible for a few hundred dollars of consumption from my Instagram ads for festival gear. We send each other concert ads over Insta far too often for it not to be effective. Either way, though, neither of our experiences tell the whole story. The truth is in the metrics and I used to be in the ad tech industry. The metrics are solid. Especially on the guys who own the platform: Google w/ search and Facebook which just attracts users like nothing else on its properties.
tayo42 7y ago
Part of me thinks theres an internet ad bubble. I think its really hard to know how much value an ad provides, so it gets handwaved as being critical to success and worth tons of money. A lot of big internet companies rely on ads or provide services to companies that provide ads or make it easier to use ads.
- tyfon 7y ago
  I work in the financial industry and even if the CAC is really high (100s of dollars) it still pales in comparison to the income we get on average from the new customers. I don't work in marketing but even if I personally hate ads, they unfortunately work really well especially in combination with facebook/googles profile on everyone and the fact that they seem to learn who clicks a certain ad after a few days and only display it to that group.
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  I wouldn't say that ads are completely ineffective (there's a significant chunk of the population that doesn't resent ads like we do, and will actually click on them even if they're aware that they're ads), but I agree that there's definitely a bubble going on. I've seen many non-tech people search for a certain brand or product, and despite it being the first non-sponsored search result, they will instead click on the sponsored result/ad ad the top even though it's the same product. The above causes the metrics and conversion rate to look great, so the waste of oxygen that is the marketing department can justify their salary and budget, the ad providers and all the ecosystem around it also gets paid, but at the end of the day that ad wasn't actually providing any value because the user already had the brand in mind and only clicked the ad by mistake.

mariushn 7y ago

I guess we all know Chrome on Android doesn't support extensions in order to prevent ad blockers. If there wouldn't be Firefox, Chrome on desktop would have surely limited ad blockers as well.

wespiser_2018 7y ago

There is a great paper on the arms race between Ads and Ad Blockers out of a group in Princeton. They propose a perceptual ad-blocking scheme where ads are always rendered in a DOM, but elements only displayed to the if they are not "ad like". This is makes it much easier to evade ad-block detectors, since your browser appears as if it does not have an ad-blocker! https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/ad-blocking-framework-techniques.pdf https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/ad-blocki...

ameshkov 7y ago
There is another interesting paper on a similar topic that proves that this approach is vulnerable to different adversarial attacks, for instance, you can make it block legitimate content, or you can conceal ads by adding an overlay invisible to a human eye. https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.03194 https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.03194
asdff 7y ago
The alternative to the arms race is to stop having browser extensions. In a browser like chrome made by an advertising company with 80% of the browser market last I checked, the results could be devastating for the vast majority of internet users. We nerds will always be fine. Mobile will of course fare far worse unless you root your device, for ios and android. Can't wait for the inevitable day where the unskippable 10 min youtube ad pauses if I look away from the screen...

Blackthorn 7y ago

I posted this deep in a thread but feel like it should be a higher level comment so here we go. Websites can be so ridiculously short sighted and just want to squeeze out every penny they can not thinking of the users they end up losing in the process. And they do lose users And fast. Personal experience time! I ran a pretty popular wiki for Dungeons and Dragons homebrew on what used to be called Wikia. At some point they decided they available needed to have some terrible new skin that was stuffed with ads and unbelievable ugly. We pushed back but they were adamant about forcing it, so I took all the content and all the users and self hosted it for almost a decade afterward. The Wikia site was completely dead. Sucks for them but their choice. I paid $10/mo or $20/mo for the site depending on the year, and never ran ads. At one point I got an offer from a company in the same hobbyist space to buy it from me. At that point I was extremely sick of being my own sysadmin and worrying about security vulns so I accepted it. Now some time later they're trying to pull the "stuff it full of ads in the worst places!" routine. Users are getting pissed and starting to ask me about taking all the content...and users...and going off to a server adminned by me again. If I do this, it will be completely devastating for the site and tank their traffic. Do they care or realize? Guess we'll see. All of this could be avoided if they just made the ads less shitty. Not showing up in the middle of navigation bars. Not being bigger than the surrounding content, so it completely stretches it and ruin's the site layout. Not having a completely clashing background color to the site. All extremely simple stuff.

birdyrooster 7y ago
This reminds me of A/B testing that likely was the method Google unwittingly used to obfuscate sponsored results in Search. The A/B test KPI they were measuring clearly was creating more click through to sponsored properties and it eroded trust and utility in exchange. I am sure they increased their short term Ad Words profits.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  I keep saying: A/B testing is how Satan influences this world. They make it all too easy to turn your product development into optimizing bad metrics, and they give ammunition for justifying self-destructive decisions (it must be good, the data says so).

kristianc 7y ago

> Now it’s surprising to see a lot of comments like: "Why do you need an ad blocker? Just use the hosts files". I often wonder if people realize that they’re being that person.

ck2 7y ago

When adsense first came out it was text only and ads were actually fascinating and interesting to read. They were regulated and meaningful. Then images and javascript were eventually allowed and it was all downhill from there. Now it's a race to the bottom of how many hundreds of external objects and tracking that can be added to a page as well as malware since so many badly behaving ads slip right through any attempt at automated bans.

droithomme 7y ago

I don't turn off my virus blocker for anyone. No way no how no sir. Sites that refuse to show content without opening up for viruses are intrinsically suspicious, no matter how fancy their brand name.

8bitsrule 7y ago

Here's another history (the dates in the OP are fuzzy). https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2019/12/20/monetizing-the-banner-ad-crisis https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2019/12/20/monetizing-the-ba...

ddevault 7y ago

1. Click 2. Open network panel 3. Google Analytics 4. Close tabs It's disgusting how so many so-called privacy advocates can't even get this right even when talking about privacy.

kurehajime 7y ago

Ad blockers were born earlier than the Internet and personal computers. --- A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages Alan C. Kay Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 1972 https://www.mprove.de/visionreality/media/kay72.html https://www.mprove.de/visionreality/media/kay72.html >A combination of this "carry anywhere" device and a global information utility such as the ARPA network or two-way cable TV, will bring the libraries and schools (not to mention stores and billboards) or the world to the home. One can imagine one of the first programs an owner will write is a filter to eliminate advertising!

einpoklum 7y ago

Commercial companies being able to force themselves onto our consciousness is unacceptable. Personally, seeing ads in public spaces feels just like in totalitarian countries you would see large portraits of the supreme leader or government propaganda. Somehow this is legitimized because they're private corporations. Not in my book. More power to ad blocker authors, and a particular shoutout to: * Raymond Hill of uBlock Origin fame: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/ https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/ * The EFF, for blocking trackers and other 3rd party nasties with Privacy Badger: https://www.eff.org/privacybadger https://www.eff.org/privacybadger

einpoklum 7y ago

I wonder if the legal action against AdBlock Plus / Palant made a dent in the download or use of ad blockers in general. The article doesn't provide any evidence of this. Also - don't get your apps on Google or Apple's app stores! Use APKMirror, APK pure, etc. Some of these even have app-store-like apps to use instead of Google's, that don't need a Google account. Also, there's at least one app "store" app specializing in FOSS purely: https://f-droid.org/en/ https://f-droid.org/en/

Causality1 7y ago

I personally think we're nearing the end of a golden age where sites can support themselves through advertisements that 90 percent of users see while we, the nerds, are able to easily block almost all the ads. The more widespread blockers become, the more incentive there is to create unblockable ads, e.g., YouTube inserting a video ad directly into the video stream so that even if you had some kind of content-aware AI blocker running you still wouldn't be able to continue your video until the ad is over and the unedited stream resumes.