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Techdirt Is Now Without Any Google Ads or Tracking Code
- e40 5y agoBut, ironically, the safari content blocker won’t show the page for me. On mobile.
- Brajeshwar 5y agoIt is on a perpetual loop for me on Desktop Safari. I have NextDNS and AdGuard turned on.
- wayneftw 5y agotl;dr This link should work for you: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210726/09441047251/techdirt-is-now-entirely-without-any-google https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210726/09441047251/techd... Same here, with Adguard. The problem is with the title part of the url, since the title contains the word "ads". I did an experiment: If you remove the words after "-google" in the url, it still works. You could probably remove the entire title of the url and it will still work by article id... So here's a link that will work with Adguard enabled: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210726/09441047251/techdirt-is-now-entirely-without-any-google https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210726/09441047251/techd...
- Semaphor 5y agoThat sounds like a terrible ad blocker? Why would it trigger from a word in the URL? And doesn’t it even show a "show me the site anyway" page?
- proactivesvcs 5y agoWow, I'm running a huge set of Privoxy rules I've worked on for the better part of two decades which tends to err on the side of blocking, and yet it doesn't get tripped by this positioning of "ads", because it's in such an innocuous position.
- Tagbert 5y agoWhich content blocker are you using? That url loads just fine for my on iPad and iPhone safari.
- mtnGoat 5y agoTry Microsoft ads, they aren’t backstopped by Google in any way. Regardless of ownership, you’ll run into same problems almost everywhere if you publish articles critical of your advertisers. That’s nothing to do with Google and just the market working as intended/expected.
- proactivesvcs 5y agoMicrosoft ads are still run by an abusive brand which is even hostile to the privacy of their paying customers.
- mtnGoat 5y agoi dont disagree, but this article was complaining that every ad network is backed by google. that is false. the correct complaint, IMHO, is that the ad networks themselves, regardless of who powers it... are shady. singling out google is not entirely fair.
- dljsjr 5y agoWhat's the use case for using both Plausible and Matomo at the same time? Just pseudo-"A/B" testing for which one is a better fit or are there major feature differences where using both is needed? Or just for kicks?
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- karaterobot 5y agoRecently there have been a few companies formally distancing themselves from Google, and doing so with a press release. Is there a reason why this is happening now? To my knowledge, Google's basic nature has been known for quite a while, and people who care have lined up on different sides depending on their ideologies and self-interests. What has changed in the last 6 months that makes so many companies change their opinions about working with them? Is it just that public opinion has crossed some tipping point where it makes sense to gamble on a temporary revenue hit in order to be on the "right side"? That seems unlikely, just because I don't know a lot of people who weren't skeptical of Google a year ago who are now. Is it related to FLoC? That seems like a wonky issue that's under most people's radar. Is it the EU antitrust hearings? Also seems unlikely. Honest question: why now?
- readflaggedcomm 5y agoGoogle's pushing advertising clients away. Techdirt started this path by at least August when they reported on Google flagging their pages (third link in this story), and it took time for them to shop competitors who are really resellers. I would have guessed it would be most of their readers blocking easy-to-block ads, and the low payout, but it seems capricious policy enforcement is happening across Google and Youtube especially.
- OrvalWintermute 5y agoI'd dare say that the growth of DuckDuckGo, Apple, and a number of different VPN services are proving that consumers are highly interested in privacy and don't want to be tracked everywhere. This is also reenergizing the subscription vs ad revenue debate, particularly for big companies that have a vested interest, or, 30%, for pushing subscriptions.
- hinkley 5y agoThere are several group dynamics I see in this. The one I think they want you to focus on is that typically nobody defects until someone high profile does. Then the floodgates open and everyone defects. Somebody has to go first, and sometimes several somebodies if the tribe is big enough. More cynical dynamic is virtue signaling, which can pretend to be the former.
- proactivesvcs 5y agoTwo steps in the right direction, but this one page still sends requests to soundcloud.com, rawgit.com, cloudflare.com, googleapis.com, amazonaws.com, fontawesome.com, sndcdn.com, stackcommerce.com, stackassets.com, stacksocial.com, and gravatar.com. Their "self-hosted" Plausible content is pulled from tics.techdirect.com, which resolves to 46.101.161.209 and shares a reverse DNS with custom.plausible.io. Can't tell who runs the web server on the other end of this, so it may well be self-hosted. The site also dropped a first-party one-year cookie, and let a third party drop a week-long cookie. My browser is set to send Do Not Track requests, so my explicit wishes are still being flagrantly ignored. There is still a lot of third-party tracking going on here, as well as execution of remote code under the control of third parties. It's remains a privacy and security clusterfuck but it's better than it was.
- shakna 5y ago> ... rawgit.com ... Wait, they're still serving things via rawgit? They started shutting down in 2018! That service has been deprecated for three years. That sounds like an attack that is just waiting to happen. > GitHub repositories that served content through RawGit within the last month will continue to be served until at least October of 2019. URLs for other repositories are no longer being served. > If you're currently using RawGit, please stop using it as soon as you can.
- proactivesvcs 5y agoFire and forget mentality. Wasn't long ago that some advert video hosting site's domain was taken into new ownership to host porn. It must take a lot of effort to integrate all this third-party garbage into a site. If only a site's security was given a similar effort.
- MattGaiser 5y agoI can easily see that after 2 years there is nobody left who remembers what APIs are in the code.
- quadrifoliate 5y agoI am not surprised at all. Technical debt, periodic refactors or security analyses are very low on the list of things that get rewarded, and shiny new projects are high. That's until a security incident takes place, then people are reprimanded and things will be okay for a month or two. Until that's fixed, things like this will keep being commonplace.
- OrvalWintermute 5y agoThe message is that Techdirt is without Google Ads, Tracking Code or analytics. This may be a set in the right direction but..... The same page on which they posted this is running CSS from fonts.googleapis.com, as well as embedded frames from soundcloud.com & w.soundcloud.com which I also believe is google owned. So, count me a little skeptical
- seph-reed 5y agoIs SoundCloud owned by google? I looked it up, but it didn't seem to be. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=google+owns+soundcloud&t=brave&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=google+owns+soundcloud&t=brave&ia=...
- jjulius 5y agoIt's not, but the implication is that they're touting their effort to be "much more protective of the privacy of Techdirt's readers" as they begin self-hosting their tracking tools, while reader data is still being sent to SoundCloud, a private third-party with a heavily-vested interest in user tracking.
- OrvalWintermute 5y agoThanks for the correction, apparently I was mistaken.
- megablast 5y agoYou haven’t actually said what you were mistaken about.
- OrvalWintermute 5y ago> mbedded frames from soundcloud.com & w.soundcloud.com which I also believe is google owned. This is erroneous, as soundcloud is not google owned.
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- rraval 5y agoI evaluated both Plausible and Matamo as privacy preserving analytics options for my blog, and ended up rolling my own solution for cost reasons. Cloudflare workers and Pulumi make this pretty trivial to self host. Here's the Show HN that never picked up steam: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27175347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27175347
- shp0ngle 5y agoThe lesson is that it’s incredibly torturous and hard to not actually serve Google Ads or Google Analytics, and that’s sad.
- dheera 5y agoMaybe like letsencrypt we need letsanalyze that lets you easily self-host your analysis and generates pretty Material Design reports with nice fonts and touch friendly graphs.
- teddyh 5y agoLike Matomo? https://matomo.org/ https://matomo.org/
- Animats 5y agoIt's also a business opportunity. Sign up a few major brands that market to everybody, such as Ford and Pepsi. You tend to not see those on Google. Offer 4-second GIFs. Get acquired by IAC.
- judge2020 5y ago1. disable your ad and tracking blocker 2. Go to Ford.com and build a Mach-E configuration 3. wait a few days 4. load some Google Ads Ford is definitely an advertisers on Google Ads. I get them every time I go back to check out the Mach-E or other upcoming EVs from them.
- ericholscher 5y agoWe were discussing with them adding https://www.ethicalads.io/ https://www.ethicalads.io/ which is our new non-tracking ad network. Sadly we're still only focused on developers, and Techdirt's content is very wide ranging, so we were only able to propose running ads on a subset of their content currently. We'd love to be able to support them when we are able to expand our audience to a larger tech-focused site in the future.
- shortformblog 5y agoPlease let me know when you expand in that way as well. I would love to look into it.
- ericholscher 5y agoTotally! We're still working on firming up our existing niche, but looking to expand. You can subscribe to our newsletter to keep in the loop (~2x posts a month, sub in the site footer) and see our journey, but I'll also add you to a Trello card for folks to reach out to!
- shortformblog 5y agoKeep me posted. Would love to see a revival of The Deck.
- ericholscher 5y agoThat's definitely the vision, we just need to get the word out.We're not the best marketers, but learning slowly as we go.
- judge2020 5y agoI've had a good experience with https://www.carbonads.net/ https://www.carbonads.net/ which seem to be the same thing - ads based purely off on the content of the website.
- Waterluvian 5y agoFascinating. The URL was fully content blocked by default on my iPhone’s adblocker.
- drcongo 5y agoIronically, the entire Techdirt site is blocked for me by one of my content blockers. I don't actually know what Techdirt is or whether it's worth unblocking.
- ipaddr 5y agoWhat dns block are you using?
- Tagbert 5y agoTechdirt is a tech news site with articles that are longer than soundbites. They cover a range of tech topics with a focus less on Company X just released this great product Y. I’d look into who sets the rules on your content blocker. I can’t think of any reason why Techdirt might be blocked beyond the common tracking that we are discussing here and which they are trying to get rid of.
- ryantgtg 5y agoTechdirt is great. I think the overall perspective is “tech and the law.” I’ve learned a lot from that site.
- drcongo 5y agoThanks (to you and others). A post elsewhere in the comments pointed out that removing `ads` from the url works - which is the same for me. For the record, I'm using AdGuard in Safari, with DNS from AdGuard Home on a Raspberry Pi with upstream DNS set to NextDNS. I'm very happy with this setup, can't remember the last time an ad or tracker slipped through.
- ocdtrekkie 5y agoMike Masnick/Techdirt's political lobbying arm, Copia Institute, still proudly promotes their sponsorship from Google on their front page: https://copia.is/ https://copia.is/
- icebraining 5y agoYes, so what?
- beebeepka 5y agoNoScript is reporting the following: 1. techdirt.com 2. cloudflare.com 3. fontawesome.com 4. s3.amazonaws.com 5. soundcloud.com Now, I don't know what kind of scripts are being loaded from these sources but things are looking refreshingly spartan, considering techdirt is an online publication For comparison, arstechnica usually has like 18 sources, 10 of which are trackers
- asdff 5y agoTech sites have been in a bad state for over a decade at least, after the arms race that occurred that 'freshened up' these websites from what they were around 2005 or so. Thankfully they still have RSS feeds or I can use services to scrape an RSS feed from them.
- beebeepka 5y agoThe best part is when they even tell you what is going to be served even if you do pay for premium. No ads but most tracking remains. It's mostly about image
- doodpants 5y agoIf the site has no tracking, how come it shows a GDPR-compliant cookie warning?
- danudey 5y agoThe site has no Google Analytics or Google Ads. They didn't say no tracking, and they didn't say no cookies.
- doodpants 5y agoAh, I didn't realize that the modifier "Google" also applied to the phrase "tracking code" in the post title. Also, my understanding is that the GDPR notification is only required for tracking cookies, not all cookies.
- WalterBright 5y agoAds should be relevant to the site, not the user. For example, I buy hot rod magazines to get the advertisements selling hot rod parts in those magazines. I don't buy them to read toothpaste ads. I even pay money to get those ads. But if I was visiting a site about dental hygiene, I'd be interest in the toothpaste ads. I've tried to configure context-sensitive ads from Amazon on my web site to be books on programming. But Amazon would insist on showing: 1. batman movie ads 2. the same ad for a C++ course over and over and over and over So I wound up removing those from the site. Instead, I created a list of good programming books myself, and would randomly cycle through that list to show an ad. It would be so much better if I could enable: "Only show books from this category." as my aim is to only show advertisements that would be of interest to the people reading the site. Google has context sensitive ads, and one would think this would work. But it doesn't. For example, I have a page on the American Revolution. Google's context sensitive ads are usually for travel agencies, presumably based on the place names on the page. Actually relevant ads would be for history books. I tried meta keywords, etc., nothing worked. I gave up. Google's context algorithms are worthless and the site owner should be able to provide guidance.
- renewiltord 5y agoThe problem is that most people spend most of their time on "Which Harry Potter character am I" and stuff like that and they're already Harry-Potter-saturated at that time. Contextual ads have their place, certainly, but chasing ROI ultimately does lead you to target segments based on other things. For instance, if you were browsing high-end networking hardware and you decided to go browse chicken recipes, it's still better to show you network device ads simply because even if you have a 1/1000th chance of converting on them, you'll be worth more than buying chicken.
- WalterBright 5y agoNote that I'm willing to pay to browse relevant ads, as are a large number of people who buy specialty magazines. But there's no advertisement broker that provides such a service to web sites. They all follow the google/amazon model of serving irrelevant and annoying batman and travel agency ads, which motivate people to install ad blockers. Note that (before the intertoobs) there were other products where people were willing to buy ads to browse: 1. the yellow pages 2. newspaper classified ads 3. JC Whitney catalogs 4. Hemmings Motor News 5. all the computer/electronics/hobby magazines Another method is exemplified by the "Detroit Muscle" car show. It is ostensibly about how to soup up your car. But it's actually an ad platform, as they use various tools and supplies to do the work, and show how to use them. That's what pays for the show and it's why I watch the show. I like ones about how to bend metal and here's the tool that does it. There are shows on how to weld and here's the welder for the job.
- marcodiego 5y agoMy uBlock Origin blocks 3 requests, AdBlockPlus blocks 5 and Privacy badger blocks another 3. en.wikipedia.org and news.ycombinator.com have 0 on all three filters.
- Derbasti 5y agoAnd yet it still asks for a boatload of cookies. If it really were "clean", it wouldn't need the cookie banner (see Github, for example).
- n3k5 5y agoIs anyone here familiar with Matomo? I noticed the linked page attempts to run it before seeing it mentioned, because Ghostery blocked it. It's a “Free software alternative to Google Analytics” “which can easily be configured to respect your visitors' privacy”[0] (emphasis mine). But can it be configured in a way so you can claim “without any tracking code”? I wonder whether the claim in the headline was supposed to be merely “no third-party tracking”. [Edited to add:] Waiiit a moment, is the intended meaning simply “no Google tracking code”? (I don't think the article addresses this anywhere; hope I didn't just miss something.) Or maybe I'm supposed to know that “no tracking” is jargon for something like ”attempts to not store PII” in this industry? I doubt that it can be configured such that, for example, unique visitors are statistically estimated instead of counting unique IDs from tracking cookies — but I'm too lazy to research that in detail, so it would be interesting to hear from someone who knows more. [0] https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo
- judge2020 5y agoWell, the only thing you can do is attempt not to store PII and only pull very limited information from the browser, ideally just the utm tags, referrer, and maybe some available api feature flags (eg. say you want to roll out webauthn and want to figure out how many of your users' browsers have that capability). Unless you trust that the site has `access_logs off`, tracking can just be done by analyzing those access logs even for users with noscript.
- dmix 5y agoFWIW Plausible is built with Elixir and Matomo is a self-hosted PHP/MySQL app.
- kumarvvr 5y agoGoogle Ads is so deep into tracking that it defeats its own purpose. I search for Product A on Google or Amazon and am immediately inundated with ads for the same product on every page I go that has Google ads What is worse is that the ads continue even after I purchase the product / service. So I get ads for a mobile phone I searched for and bought in Amazon (and all its accessories) for months after I have already purchased it. My mind automatically ignores every ad.
- Abishek_Muthian 5y agoCan someone tell me why Techdirt is not featured often in the Google front page results when compared to other media? Is it because they originally had summary to 3rd party content and so Google ranked them low for not having original content? But now they seem to have only original content.