8 ms·

The only downside is that product managers who rely on third-party analytics to decide what platforms are relevant will never see Firefox+uBlock users as releva

The only downside is that product managers who rely on third-party analytics to decide what platforms are relevant will never see Firefox+uBlock users as relevant. I've had to argue this at multiple companies; fortunately at some places multiple developers used uBlock so it wasn't as hard as making the case alone.

godelski 6y ago
> fortunately at some places multiple developers used uBlock so it wasn't as hard as making the case alone. Is adblocking not common? Every tech literate person I know uses an ad blocker. I'd say about 30-40% of millennials I know use them, most using ADB or uBlock Origin. Every time I see someone using a browser with ads I forget what a nightmare the internet is.
- cpeterso 6y ago
  These sites claim the percentage of US web users using an ad blocker was 25% in 2016 and 27% in 2017: https://www.businessinsider.com/30-of-all-internet-users-will-ad-block-by-2018-2017-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/30-of-all-internet-users-wil... https://www.statista.com/topics/3201/ad-blocking/ https://www.statista.com/topics/3201/ad-blocking/
- kroltan 6y ago
  Not everywhere, I'd say it's common within specific crowds. At my company people are either don't know about them, or actually fundamentally disagree with their purpose. (No, it's not an AdTech company, before anyone asks)
  - godelski 6y ago
    But is it a software company? I can understand the disagreement, but with the state of things it is just atrocious. I'd be fine if things weren't so invasive and were clearly ads. Pop ups, pop unders, dark patterns to cause clicks, flashy images on text pages, malware injection, 10x page load times, etc are all reasons why I personally can't stand it. It just feels like they are trying to trick me into seeing their product instead of trying to generate real interest. Until then, I personally can't support it. I don't think most people minds ads, such as on TV, but everyone hates the ad that is 10x the volume of the show and that's how the internet feels to me currently.
    - kelnos 6y ago
      > I don't think most people minds ads Is that true? I despise ads and the entire advertising industry. I would wear special glasses that would block billboards from my vision if they existed. I pay extra for the ad-free version of Hulu. When I'm at someone's house and they have cable and the TV is on, I find ad breaks incredibly jarring. Am I just an extreme outlier? It would make me sad for humanity if that was the case. Not minding blatant emotional manipulation in your face all day seems... not great.
      - UI_at_80x24 6y ago
        >Am I just an extreme outlier? No. You are not alone. MOST people don't realize that there is an alternative.
      - ACow_Adonis 6y ago
        I think it's more that they've been conditioned to accept ads. if you spend a significant time travelling through rather diverse countries, one of the first thing that hits you is different laws and norms around what can be advertised and where. moving through dictatorships and seeing elections is eye opening in its "weirdness". as a non American, visiting America and seeing laws, flags, billboards and medicine advertising is weird. anyway, my point is, if you haven't been brought up with it, you see it for what it is, and normal becomes what you experience every day. one you spend a few years ad free, it's incredibly hard to go back, it's really jarring, and you see advertising the same way you see plastered images of the dictator in absolutely random locations when you visit other countries (and there's a good reason for that, because they're fundamentally the same thing).
      - godelski 6y ago
        To be clear, it is about the type and frequency of ads. I don't live in a place with a bunch of billboards, but whenever I drive through the Bay or LA it is jarring. Same when I watch YouTube on my phone. So it a big part is how they are used and implemented. For example, I don't mind the ads when listening to podcasts (I couldn't care less that rocket mortgage wants to tell me about themselves) or DDG's sponsored links. These do not feel invasive and since I am using a free service I can accept the payment of my time/(half-assed)attention as a means of funding the service. It is this type of advertisement that I do not think the general populous minds (as a form of payment). But I am not comfortable with ads outside this scope (tracking, individualized, etc). And I do like to pay for services to bypass ads even though I use ad blockers that mitigate them anyways.
- zamadatix 6y ago
  Only 30% of FF users have any add-ons at all. Only about 1/3 of those have adblock plus or unlock origin.
  - llarsson 6y ago
    Alternatively, only 1/3 of Firefox users that also do not disable telemetry have any add-ons at all. More than a handful choose that browser for privacy, including keeping stuff private from Mozilla.
    - newen 6y ago
      Yeah, first thing I do when I install Firefox is disable telemetry and install uBlock.
      - rightbyte 6y ago
        Is it opt out or do you choose in the installer? I forgot.
        newen 6y ago
        You have install, then go to the privacy settings and opt out.
    - zamadatix 6y ago
      Actually this debate came up so often they added a special telemetry coverage extension that ignored telemetry disabled status (to great uproar) on 1% of users and reported back the number of people with telemetry disabled. As expected "more than a handful" actually turned out to be "a vocal handful" out of the 200,000,000 MAU pool. Also those that disable telemetry after starting Firefox still sent telemetry. Mozilla only promises to delete it after 30 days not that they don't generate a number that says what % new installs in the last month disabled telemetry (though they don't publicly report this to my knowledge). So that leaves those with whitelist only firewalling or similar measures that I (hope?) we can all agree isn't going to swing these numbers at any interesting digit position.
- kelnos 6y ago
  Anecdotal, but I've pushed close friends who are reasonably technical to install an ad blocker. Without my urging, they wouldn't have had one at all. When I come across someone who doesn't adblock, it surprises me, but it really shouldn't, as it seems most people don't have an ad blocker.
  - fauigerzigerk 6y ago
    I still don't use an ad blocker. I know all the arguments for ad blocking and I agree with many of them. I know what difference it makes in terms of performance and annoyance. But I just can't bring myself to indiscriminately block all ads, knowing how important they are as a funding source for the websites I use. There's only one thing that destroys privacy even more thoroughly than ad targeting: payment.
    - rattray 6y ago
      Out of curiosity, do you mind sharing what sorts of websites you use that you feel this loyalty towards? News, community, educational, etc? Is it a small group of sites, or a wide variety?
      - kbenson 6y ago
        Not GP, but I don't block youtube and I block most other stuff (because uBlock Origin blocks be default). Google is probably the most likely to track more info about me, but it's also obvious that the ads played factor into the money the content creators get, and I felt bad after a while of blocking their revenue stream. It's also got me really close to paying for YouTube red, which is the other option,and o e I wouldn't consider without the annoyance of ads.
      - fauigerzigerk 6y ago
        It's a wide variety of sites. Local news, tech news, science mags, other special interest sites, porn, discussion forums, Q&A sites, some social media. It's impossible to list them all. Essentially, it's the great variety of what's available on the open Web that I don't want to lose. I don't want everything to become one big app store with all its suffocating narrow-mindedness and oppressive control freakery.
- DominikD 6y ago
  I'm tech savvy (software developer for 15+ years) but I used to be a web journalist in my early days and I can appreciate the need of ads. So I wouldn't block ads until a year age or so. But I'm still very conscious of pages I visit, whether I want to give them eyeballs or not (POS at NYT are in the "not") and I exempt many pages from ad blocking.
zamadatix 6y ago
Percentage wise adblock users or Firefox users total to about 10% of users so it really depends on the target user demographic to say whether or not you need to specially account that those users aren't being reflected. Coding tools probably. Game for a social website probably not. Also depends on the financial model, if it's primarily ad based then the group of users you don't have good ad data for isn't something you should care about either.
- AlchemistCamp 6y ago
  I've run both Google Analytics and my own back-end analytics on the same site and found GA missing over 1/3 of my total non-bot traffic. Most of that traffic was Firefox.
  - zamadatix 6y ago
    Would be curious which site that was and if it falls into the target demographic stuff mentioned. Also to note the above % for FF share isn't just from 3rd party analytics anyways, places like Wikimedia report similar numbers. Different services different amounts but again, target demographic usually and not by much unless it's extremely tech niche or something.
    - AlchemistCamp 6y ago
      The demographic is about 1/5 US, with sizable traffic from India, Brazil, Germany, Nigeria and Australia. It's mostly 18-45 and mostly male.
- Angeo34 6y ago
  While that number may be true you have to keep in mind that more than 50% of global FF users are based in DACH and by extension the rest of German speaking Europe (i.e. Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Switzerland).
  - zamadatix 6y ago
    Ignoring that the DACH region only has ~100 million people and that if every last man woman and child were monthly FF users it still wouldn't be half of 210 million users... according to Mozilla's own stats at https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity regional MAU is: 10M Brazil 13M China 12M France 20M Germany 12M India 9M Indonesia 6M Italy 7M Poland 7M Russia 30M United States It's honestly a bit frustrating how even on HN everyone thinks they know who around the world uses something more than the actual public data on it. On one hand you have people insisting the data is missing huge swaths of people and on the other you have people insisting a region has over half the users when that would be less than half the users according to the very data the other person is trying to say is missing lots of people!
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
viraptor 6y ago
That should be easy to prove with user agents from the web logs - show the analytics vs access log percentage difference.

godelski 6y ago

> fortunately at some places multiple developers used uBlock so it wasn't as hard as making the case alone. Is adblocking not common? Every tech literate person I know uses an ad blocker. I'd say about 30-40% of millennials I know use them, most using ADB or uBlock Origin. Every time I see someone using a browser with ads I forget what a nightmare the internet is.

cpeterso 6y ago
These sites claim the percentage of US web users using an ad blocker was 25% in 2016 and 27% in 2017: https://www.businessinsider.com/30-of-all-internet-users-will-ad-block-by-2018-2017-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/30-of-all-internet-users-wil... https://www.statista.com/topics/3201/ad-blocking/ https://www.statista.com/topics/3201/ad-blocking/
kroltan 6y ago
Not everywhere, I'd say it's common within specific crowds. At my company people are either don't know about them, or actually fundamentally disagree with their purpose. (No, it's not an AdTech company, before anyone asks)
- godelski 6y ago
  But is it a software company? I can understand the disagreement, but with the state of things it is just atrocious. I'd be fine if things weren't so invasive and were clearly ads. Pop ups, pop unders, dark patterns to cause clicks, flashy images on text pages, malware injection, 10x page load times, etc are all reasons why I personally can't stand it. It just feels like they are trying to trick me into seeing their product instead of trying to generate real interest. Until then, I personally can't support it. I don't think most people minds ads, such as on TV, but everyone hates the ad that is 10x the volume of the show and that's how the internet feels to me currently.
  - kelnos 6y ago
    > I don't think most people minds ads Is that true? I despise ads and the entire advertising industry. I would wear special glasses that would block billboards from my vision if they existed. I pay extra for the ad-free version of Hulu. When I'm at someone's house and they have cable and the TV is on, I find ad breaks incredibly jarring. Am I just an extreme outlier? It would make me sad for humanity if that was the case. Not minding blatant emotional manipulation in your face all day seems... not great.
    - UI_at_80x24 6y ago
      >Am I just an extreme outlier? No. You are not alone. MOST people don't realize that there is an alternative.
    - ACow_Adonis 6y ago
      I think it's more that they've been conditioned to accept ads. if you spend a significant time travelling through rather diverse countries, one of the first thing that hits you is different laws and norms around what can be advertised and where. moving through dictatorships and seeing elections is eye opening in its "weirdness". as a non American, visiting America and seeing laws, flags, billboards and medicine advertising is weird. anyway, my point is, if you haven't been brought up with it, you see it for what it is, and normal becomes what you experience every day. one you spend a few years ad free, it's incredibly hard to go back, it's really jarring, and you see advertising the same way you see plastered images of the dictator in absolutely random locations when you visit other countries (and there's a good reason for that, because they're fundamentally the same thing).
    - godelski 6y ago
      To be clear, it is about the type and frequency of ads. I don't live in a place with a bunch of billboards, but whenever I drive through the Bay or LA it is jarring. Same when I watch YouTube on my phone. So it a big part is how they are used and implemented. For example, I don't mind the ads when listening to podcasts (I couldn't care less that rocket mortgage wants to tell me about themselves) or DDG's sponsored links. These do not feel invasive and since I am using a free service I can accept the payment of my time/(half-assed)attention as a means of funding the service. It is this type of advertisement that I do not think the general populous minds (as a form of payment). But I am not comfortable with ads outside this scope (tracking, individualized, etc). And I do like to pay for services to bypass ads even though I use ad blockers that mitigate them anyways.
zamadatix 6y ago
Only 30% of FF users have any add-ons at all. Only about 1/3 of those have adblock plus or unlock origin.
- llarsson 6y ago
  Alternatively, only 1/3 of Firefox users that also do not disable telemetry have any add-ons at all. More than a handful choose that browser for privacy, including keeping stuff private from Mozilla.
  - newen 6y ago
    Yeah, first thing I do when I install Firefox is disable telemetry and install uBlock.
    - rightbyte 6y ago
      Is it opt out or do you choose in the installer? I forgot.
      - newen 6y ago
        You have install, then go to the privacy settings and opt out.
  - zamadatix 6y ago
    Actually this debate came up so often they added a special telemetry coverage extension that ignored telemetry disabled status (to great uproar) on 1% of users and reported back the number of people with telemetry disabled. As expected "more than a handful" actually turned out to be "a vocal handful" out of the 200,000,000 MAU pool. Also those that disable telemetry after starting Firefox still sent telemetry. Mozilla only promises to delete it after 30 days not that they don't generate a number that says what % new installs in the last month disabled telemetry (though they don't publicly report this to my knowledge). So that leaves those with whitelist only firewalling or similar measures that I (hope?) we can all agree isn't going to swing these numbers at any interesting digit position.
kelnos 6y ago
Anecdotal, but I've pushed close friends who are reasonably technical to install an ad blocker. Without my urging, they wouldn't have had one at all. When I come across someone who doesn't adblock, it surprises me, but it really shouldn't, as it seems most people don't have an ad blocker.
- fauigerzigerk 6y ago
  I still don't use an ad blocker. I know all the arguments for ad blocking and I agree with many of them. I know what difference it makes in terms of performance and annoyance. But I just can't bring myself to indiscriminately block all ads, knowing how important they are as a funding source for the websites I use. There's only one thing that destroys privacy even more thoroughly than ad targeting: payment.
  - rattray 6y ago
    Out of curiosity, do you mind sharing what sorts of websites you use that you feel this loyalty towards? News, community, educational, etc? Is it a small group of sites, or a wide variety?
    - kbenson 6y ago
      Not GP, but I don't block youtube and I block most other stuff (because uBlock Origin blocks be default). Google is probably the most likely to track more info about me, but it's also obvious that the ads played factor into the money the content creators get, and I felt bad after a while of blocking their revenue stream. It's also got me really close to paying for YouTube red, which is the other option,and o e I wouldn't consider without the annoyance of ads.
    - fauigerzigerk 6y ago
      It's a wide variety of sites. Local news, tech news, science mags, other special interest sites, porn, discussion forums, Q&A sites, some social media. It's impossible to list them all. Essentially, it's the great variety of what's available on the open Web that I don't want to lose. I don't want everything to become one big app store with all its suffocating narrow-mindedness and oppressive control freakery.
DominikD 6y ago
I'm tech savvy (software developer for 15+ years) but I used to be a web journalist in my early days and I can appreciate the need of ads. So I wouldn't block ads until a year age or so. But I'm still very conscious of pages I visit, whether I want to give them eyeballs or not (POS at NYT are in the "not") and I exempt many pages from ad blocking.

zamadatix 6y ago

Percentage wise adblock users or Firefox users total to about 10% of users so it really depends on the target user demographic to say whether or not you need to specially account that those users aren't being reflected. Coding tools probably. Game for a social website probably not. Also depends on the financial model, if it's primarily ad based then the group of users you don't have good ad data for isn't something you should care about either.

AlchemistCamp 6y ago
I've run both Google Analytics and my own back-end analytics on the same site and found GA missing over 1/3 of my total non-bot traffic. Most of that traffic was Firefox.
- zamadatix 6y ago
  Would be curious which site that was and if it falls into the target demographic stuff mentioned. Also to note the above % for FF share isn't just from 3rd party analytics anyways, places like Wikimedia report similar numbers. Different services different amounts but again, target demographic usually and not by much unless it's extremely tech niche or something.
  - AlchemistCamp 6y ago
    The demographic is about 1/5 US, with sizable traffic from India, Brazil, Germany, Nigeria and Australia. It's mostly 18-45 and mostly male.
Angeo34 6y ago
While that number may be true you have to keep in mind that more than 50% of global FF users are based in DACH and by extension the rest of German speaking Europe (i.e. Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Switzerland).
- zamadatix 6y ago
  Ignoring that the DACH region only has ~100 million people and that if every last man woman and child were monthly FF users it still wouldn't be half of 210 million users... according to Mozilla's own stats at https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity regional MAU is: 10M Brazil 13M China 12M France 20M Germany 12M India 9M Indonesia 6M Italy 7M Poland 7M Russia 30M United States It's honestly a bit frustrating how even on HN everyone thinks they know who around the world uses something more than the actual public data on it. On one hand you have people insisting the data is missing huge swaths of people and on the other you have people insisting a region has over half the users when that would be less than half the users according to the very data the other person is trying to say is missing lots of people!

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

viraptor 6y ago

That should be easy to prove with user agents from the web logs - show the analytics vs access log percentage difference.