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Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics

• Yuioup 5y ago
  It would be 100% if I could do it on mobile.
  • zorked 5y ago
    Use Firefox mobile then.
    • ohazi 5y ago
      Seriously, this. There may be an argument that Chrome is marginally faster than Firefox on desktop, and while this may also technically be true on mobile, it's completely dwarfed by the fact that Chrome is being asked render 5x as much crap (with animations and sound and video and nagbars and ...) compared to Firefox mobile with uBlock Origin. You will literally regain hours of battery life. Those Joules belong to you -- don't just shrug and hand them to Google.
      • jobigoud 5y ago
        > Those Joules belong to you My Joules, my rules.
  • robin_reala 5y ago
    You can: use Firefox Mobile and turn on Enhanced Tracking Protection.
    • kubav 5y ago
      You can install ublock on mobile firefox too.
      • robin_reala 5y ago
        On Android, yes. On iOS you can’t, but at least you’ve still got ETP and Firefox Focus’s ad blocking.
        • faeyanpiraat 5y ago
          You can use adblockers on ios aswell, I use adguard. It works for youtube ads which is nice.
      • azalemeth 5y ago
        I wish you could install umatrix, and it had a decent mobile UI. Umatrix has just transformed the way I browse the web and if anything it has educated me at the same time. I like seeing that this random site has about 2^5 different domain names contacted, ranging from ad-junk to CDNs. It tells me quite a lot about its developer. Sites with one hostname, minimally awful JS and few-to-none XHR requests get a thumbs up. On the other hand, it probably means that I am a "false negative" in TFA's report. I'd love to know the correlation between the server logs and what Plausible shows for a connection. I'd also like to know how they infer OS -- e.g. for privacy reasons, my reported user agent is not accurate...
        • jobigoud 5y ago
          > I like seeing that this random site has about 2^5 different domain names contacted You can see that in uBlock Origin already. The summary info has the number of domains connected and if you click on "more" you have the details, just like on desktop. You can also block JavaScript altogether for a particular site.
  • CyanBird 5y ago
    You can install noscript in Firefox mobile without problems, that's what I did
  • aomobile 5y ago
    Just use the private/anonymous browsing feature - problem solved
  • dave_sullivan 5y ago
    For Android, I'm using fennec with ublock origin and it's great. Also YouTube Vanced is very useful. And Infinity for a tolerable reddit experience on mobile.
  • RedShift1 5y ago
    I use Blokada and it works well.
  • BiteCode_dev 5y ago
    ublock origin is available on firefox mobile is you use android.
  • buro9 5y ago
    Android offers Private DNS, just point that at nextdns.io and block things even within apps that aren't browsers. The biggest benefit is definitely the sheer speed at which news websites load on my phone now, even when I'm on a crap connection. Another benefit: This isn't a VPN, so you can still use a VPN whilst using Private DNS. Edit: Also... lol, I can't access TFA as plausible.io is also blocked on my network and phone. I'm going to assume that the article is actually an analytics competitor whose pitch is "GA is blocked, use us instead!". Edit 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=plausible.io https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=plausible.io Yes, assumption was correct. Edit 3: NextDNS stats from my home network: 11.45% of DNS requests blocked, but from my phone 23.7% of DNS requests blocked. You need this more on your mobile than in a web browser!
    • gpas 5y ago
      Thanks for sharing nextdns. I just registered and I'm very impressed.
    • dalu 5y ago
      Nextdns is giving me an ID. Why would I want to be tracked by unique ID? That's even worse than GA
      • buro9 5y ago
        You don't have to do that... NextDNS ultimately uses Cloudflare DNS under the hood, so just point yourself at 1.1.1.1 and you're done but it will block nothing. If you want a DNS server to block things, know that the definition of what to block is subjective and some people may disagree with what you want to block. For that reason you get an account, which allows you to have a configure, and that needs to be resolve to you... so at some level an identifier of the configuration is needed. This is the id.
  • lambdaba 5y ago
    On Android I use personaldnsfilter (https://f-droid.org/en/packages/dnsfilter.android/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/dnsfilter.android/), which creates a local VPN, there are also actual VPN apps that allow blocking ad hosts, and you can also use AdGuard DNS directly.
    • azalemeth 5y ago
      Out of curiosity, what does this bring you over hosts file blocking, and how much does it affect battery life? I use dead-simple modifications to /etc/hosts and it seems to be remarkably good. Do you MITM yourself for further adblocking, or just use it for the modified DNS?
      • lambdaba 5y ago
        My phone is not rooted, and I just switched to nextdns.io on suggestion of another commenter here. I can't say about the phone battery, but I don't think it makes a big difference.
  • 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
    https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid/ Also on F-Droid: https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:IceCat/icecat-help-help https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:IceCat/icecat-help-help https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.stoutner.privacybrowser.standard/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.stoutner.privacybrowser....
  • kklisura 5y ago
    Use Brave.
    • underscore_ku 5y ago
      so brave!
  • azinman2 5y ago
    iOS has content blocking extensions.
  • isoprophlex 5y ago
    NextDNS does comprehensive blackholing of tracking and ads, very limited battery impact. Works on ios and android. I think their free tier is very generous at 300k lookups/month; otherwise it's something cheap like 2€/month if you want unlimited lookups (i use this to block tracking on all my devices + home network)
    • aembleton 5y ago
      > very limited battery impact. Why would it use any extra battery? The phone has to make DNS lookups whether its with the one from nextDns or from the DHCP server.
      • isoprophlex 5y ago
        I've had bad experiences, battery-wise, using on-device adblocking solutions (that inspect DOM). An alternative i tried was tunneling to my raspberry pi that ran pihole (dns blocker), and bouncing all my traffic off the home connection, but that was also battery intensive. You're right, this dns solution is very unobtrusive when it comes to energy use.
    • ddaalluu1 5y ago
      Are you working for them? When I want to "try for free" I'm assigned a unique ID which is then used in all DNS resolution requests. How is that even remotely tracking-safe?
      • isoprophlex 5y ago
        No, not working for them. The unique id is to retain settings across different devices. Of course you have to trust them not to sell you out.
  • leokennis 5y ago
    If on iPhone, install NextDNS and enable a blocklist which blocks GA, flip the switch, now NextDNS handles your DNS and will answer requests to GA with a "sorry cannot find this".
  • kunagi7 5y ago
    Use Bromite, Vivaldi or Brave on Android. They have built-in ad tracker protection. The first two even support custom filtering lists. On iOS the options are a bit worse but Brave has some kind of adblocking that works. Safari also supports blocking lists via AdGuard but it's more limited.
    • marak830 5y ago
      Or just use Firefox. Android of course, your screwed on Apple.
      • teekert 5y ago
        AdGuard (local app) works in Safari. I don't like safari, but the AdGuard blocking does not work in FireFox! I use DDG browser mostly and it works well. I do see the occasional ad. The whole browser situation in iOS is really user unfriendly.
      • kunagi7 5y ago
        Firefox is another nice alternative if you have a good Android phone I guess. Sadly, I have a quite old Android device (but its battery life it's still good) where Chromium-based browsers are already quite slow and Firefox feels even slower and drains the battery faster (the old Fennec was worse than the new one, it hanged for 30 seconds).
  • throwawayswede 5y ago
    Get yourself a PiHole&PiVPN or NextDNS and never look at ads on any of your devices again
    • vmoore 5y ago
      Oh yeah because sending all your DNS requests to a US company that's probably under duress by the NSA to hand over logs sounds like a great idea!
      • throwawayswede 5y ago
        Newsflash: most of your data is reaching a US based company anyway
  • toastal 5y ago
    AdAway (root) from F-Droid helps me out
• fergie 5y ago
  Well done lads!
• aomobile 5y ago
  I surf in private mode. A super simple solution for all your tracking protection needs people. It boggles my mind how this comes up again and again yet we have private browsing since when? The 90s? Don’t be lazy - that’s the real reason, isn’t it? Having to login again..
  • isoprophlex 5y ago
    Yes, because of course private mode protects you from fingerprinting tech and other tracking infrastructure /sarcasm
  • llarsson 5y ago
    No, we really did not have private browsing since the nineties. It's a new thing, for sure. What we had in the nineties was that we could configure our browsers to ask for every single cookie that a site wanted to place on our computers. That got old really fast when internet advertising became a thing, and tracking cookies were all over the place.
    • capableweb 5y ago
      > No, we really did not have private browsing since the nineties. It's a new thing, for sure. Indeed! Seems the first browser to implement some sort of incognito/private/separated profile (specifically to hide your tracks, not general like Firefox Profiles) was Safari around the release of Mac OS X Tiger (April 29, 2005).
  • piaste 5y ago
    You do know that fingerprinting is a thing, right? Private browsing is designed to keep your local device clean of your tracks, not the wider web. At all. Telling Facebook "hello, I am visiting baddragon.com from Mozilla Firefox 63.1 on Obscure Linux in Podunk, Saskatchewan, population 32" is barely an improvement over telling them "hello I am John Q. Smith and I am visiting baddragon.com". And of course, private browsing is generally per-instance. Log in to your Google account in a private tab? All your other "private tabs" are also logged in to Google until you close the private browser.
• turbinerneiter 5y ago
  There is a German movie about the system that is used to gather TV ratings. It's a special box that some users get which reports what they are watching. Small sample size goes into a big statistic (not sure how accurate the portrayal of the system in the movie is). These boxes are given to the people who pay the German public TV fee, which excludes i.e. students (they don't have to pay) and some other groups. This group of critical people figured that out and started to hack into these machines to fake ratings. They faked the ratings away from stupid trash TV towards some higher quality stuff, documentaries, culture, ... Obviously in the movie then the country saw a renaissance, everyone got smarter, yadda yadda, you get it. I feel like this is similar. All tech savvy people block ads and analytics and at least the known tricks they use against us. So the internet only tracks the defenseless people and is then built to serve them (and or exploit them). Maybe we should engage in large scale AdWords fraud. Send come fake traffic away from Facebook and over to Wikipedia.
  • erdii 5y ago
    You mean something like AdNauseam? https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/ Edit: it's an adblocker that is supposed to click on EVERY ad that it blocks.
    • divbzero 5y ago
      What GP describes would be stronger than AdNauseum. Instead of sending clicks indiscriminately for every ad, you would send clicks for high quality content.
      • scrollaway 5y ago
        That'd just end up costing the high quality content providers money. Ads wouldn't just get cheaper for them. On the contrary, clicking only on trash, and having the high quality content have a much higher signal-to-noise ratio would have the desired effect. Maybe.
        • turbinerneiter 5y ago
• ponytech 5y ago
  This article clearly suggests that you should use their own solution, Plausible Analytics. They are also JavaScript based, so how long before ad-blockers start blocking them too? Isn't it time to come back to server side analytics?
  • timdaub 5y ago
    They are blocked a whole lot too, see my comment in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28365505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28365505
    • ponytech 5y ago
      I don't get your comment, sorry. By server side analytics I meant using a tool like AWStas or Webalizer which parse web server logs to tell you how much visitors you had on your site. I can't see how it can be blocked.
      • jobigoud 5y ago
        They meant that "Plausible Analytics" are blocked a whole lot too.
        • timdaub 5y ago
          exactly (can't edit original post anymore, sorry)
          • ponytech 5y ago
            You were answering the first question not the second, totally make sense now. Sorry for my misunderstanding.
  • ushakov 5y ago
    you can serve the script from your own server (what they call proxy) and it shouldn’t be noticed by adblockers
• happybuy 5y ago
  As a developer of an ad blocker[1] our stats would seem to back up what Plausible has found: - Despite having equivalent desktop (macOS) and mobile (iOS) apps, most of our users (> 75%) use the app primarily on desktop - Most users say the key reason for use is for privacy protection; even with Safari providing some inbuilt privacy tracking protection - Our app is focused on providing a simple 'set and forget' ad blocking approach; so you would think the key audience would be less tech savvy users. However a large proportion of users are tech-inclined and knowledgeable users. - A lot of tech heavy websites are some of the worst offenders in terms of tracker usage and advertising. For example, The Verge can load 3.5x faster simply by using an ad blocker that blocks the on-page trackers and ads[2] [1] https://www.magiclasso.co/ https://www.magiclasso.co/ [2] https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/difference-adblocking/ https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/difference-adblocking/
  • telesilla 5y ago
    Can you make this for Android?
    • happybuy 5y ago
      Google has no incentive to support effective ad blocking on platforms they control (Android and Chrome). This has made us reluctant to develop for or invest time on these platforms – the platform owner would be working against what we would be trying to achieve.
      • Dah00n 5y ago
        What? Apple is even worse. There was a big cry when Google wanted to nuter adblockers API but Apple have done exactly the same thing. You fell into a pr stunt. Apple doesn't care for privacy. Just look at how they scan you pictures..
        • nacs 5y ago
          Apple literally built an API for ad-blocking. How is that worse?
• themacguffinman 5y ago
  Worth noting that if you're already willing to setup a first-party proxy like Plausible does in this comparison, you can do the same thing with Google Analytics using either the NYPL project [1] or send whatever you want to the Google Measurement Protocol API [2]. You can usually send whatever you want through a first-party proxy in basically any competent analytics product. Analytics is not ads. I find it this comparison a little misleading because Plausible admits that their own script/endpoint are blocked by adblockers, just to a lesser extent than Google Analytics [3]. [1] https://github.com/NYPL/google-analytics-proxy https://github.com/NYPL/google-analytics-proxy [2] https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1 https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection... [3] https://plausible.io/docs/proxy/introduction https://plausible.io/docs/proxy/introduction
• FriedrichN 5y ago
  Seeing as Plausible is still a script, how much of the remaining percentage of Firefox/Linux users are blocking scripts entirely? My default uMatrix settings block everything but first party CSS and images.
  • lopis 5y ago
    Considering that most of the web is unusable for most people without javascript, I'm pretty sure no-script people are a very very small portion of the internet.
    • FriedrichN 5y ago
      A lot works quite okay, reader view also works great a lot of the time. And if necessary I'll allow first party scripts and most tracking scripts are third-party.
• GekkePrutser 5y ago
  This is good to hear. I didn't think the percentages would be that high. "Data driven design" is kinda overrated anyway. It's better to actually listen to your users. Stats don't show what people think, and they're often tweaked to show what people want to see.
  • TeMPOraL 5y ago
    Collecting telemetry is essentially doing an impromptu social science study, and it suffers from the same problems - collecting good data and making correct inferences is a difficult task, and it requires specialized skills. Social scientists are trained to do this, and yet they still fail more often than not[0]. A random business trying to run product development off automated metrics? They don't stand a chance. This is not to say the data is useless - it's just worth remembering that, unless you have strong statistical background, you're probably reading your data wrong, so your metrics should be treated as weak evidence at best. -- [0] - It's not snark, it's a corollary of the replication crisis. This is a hard job.
  • WJW 5y ago
    "Listening to your users" is just a more manual form of data gathering though. Also, it's not like "hearing what you want to hear" has been invented by statisticians, that is super easy to do when talking to users as well. Some of the problems in talking to users: - people will often tell you what they think you want to hear rather than what they really think. (Very few users would ever tell an interviewing dev that they think the product is unsalvageable, the dev team wasted several months and that the user would never ever use it) - Users often don't know what they want because they don't understand the full range of possibilities. Sometimes they dream of tech that would violate several laws of physics, at other times they fail to realize that for-loops exist and just ask for a faster way to manually click a button a thousand times. - Fads affect users just as much as anyone else. If there has been a surge of news articles about how Google is doing fancy AI stuff, you can bet the bakery on the corner of the street will mention machine learning when asked what they want to improve their business.
    • JohnFen 5y ago
• _arvin 5y ago
  Can confirm, part of the 58% who block all the ads. Using a raspberry pi as a pi-hole, works great. Getting 100% blockage [0] on this adblock test [1]. [0] https://i.imgur.com/7hdaHmh.png https://i.imgur.com/7hdaHmh.png [1] https://d3ward.github.io/toolz/adblock.html https://d3ward.github.io/toolz/adblock.html Haven't seen an ad in months. (kidding)
  • herbst 5y ago
    Same here. I don't even open the browser when my phone is not connected to my safe heaven WiFi.
    • arepublicadoceu 5y ago
      Just wireguard to your “safe haven” and you can open your browser anywhere. Or, if you’re lazy like me, just use NextDNS when you’re outside. There’s even an option to only activate NextDNS when not connected to the Wi-Fi of your choice.
      • herbst 5y ago
        To be honest. I enjoy being semi offline when not home. But yeah, would be easy to VPN home.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• throwawayswede 5y ago
  The fact that it's so low (yes imo 58 is pretty low) speaks volumes to the attitudes of the "tech-savvy crowd" towards tracking and data mining.
  • scrollaway 5y ago
    Including Reddit's audience as "tech savvy" is an outright lie. Reddit is one of the most popular websites in the world. (And even if it weren't, it doesn't take much browsing to see how non-tech-savvy its audience is. It's basically Facebook at this point.)
    • throwawayswede 5y ago
      While I agree with you, unfortunatley that is still technically considered the tech-savvy crowd, amongst others at least.
      • scrollaway 5y ago
        The audience isn't even sort of comparable to Hacker News though, so putting both in the same headline is weird. There was some correlation long ago, now not so much. The Firefox numbers above are a much better tell of what a "largely tech savvy crowd" looks like. 88%.
        • markosaric 5y ago
          Depends really on the subreddit in question. The traffic to the blog post that was analyzed came from /r/linux which should be more tech savvy than the average web user and also more tech savvy than the average Reddit user (i would put /r/linux audience close to the Hacker News audience)
• Tenoke 5y ago
  I assumed it was more since posts I've had on the front page have more like 70-80% of traffic missing in GA. It could be because I only enable it when DoNotTrack is off though which I don't believe is the default.
• YKreator 5y ago
  One solution is to use its own Google Tag Manager server. In this case, the events are sent to the server container via a custom URL and the data is then transmitted to Google analytics.
• superasn 5y ago
  That's why I prefer goaccess(1) over any other tool that uses client side Javascript. It's basically a real time website log analyser which gives you enough information to know whats happening on your website but doesn't require any pesky Javascript etc to do it. Also since it is works by analysing your log files it can never be blocked. (1) https://rt.goaccess.io/?20210826211303 https://rt.goaccess.io/?20210826211303
  • scrollaway 5y ago
    By nature it won't filter out bots, however. One of my clients' website traffic is composed of over 75% bot traffic. Server-side logs are unusable for anything other than site performance.
    • dschooh 5y ago
      > By nature it won't filter out bots, however. I have two questions about this: - Since you know they are bots, why couldn't you filter them? - On the other hand, couldn't there be bots that run JavaScript which would be tracked client-side?
      • scrollaway 5y ago
        > Since you know they are bots, why couldn't you filter them? A decent amount can be filtered by UA. This is inconvenient because UA is a very large piece to log and index on, so you need to do UA processing to do anything useful with it and … well by that point it just becomes a chore and I suspect there's good logging services that do this better than you'd spend your time doing yourself. > On the other hand, couldn't there be bots that run JavaScript which would be tracked client-side? They exist but they're more rare by nature, because running JS at bot scale is expensive.
        • dschooh 5y ago
          > well by that point it just becomes a chore and I suspect there's good logging services that do this better than you'd spend your time doing yourself. Which is why the OP suggested using tools like goaccess.
• jokoon 5y ago
  Are there relevant studies on the effectiveness of advertising? I remember spotting such study. I still wonder if advertising is always worth spending on, beacuse google and facebook make a big amount of money with it, but I'm still skeptical when I see the actual amount of people "engaging" in ads, when you see how much it actually costs.
  • bertil 5y ago
    Yes, pretty much every company first data person runs Cost-per-action (CPA) analysis to estimate how many sales can be attributable to ads vs. other ways of raising your brand. It’s an imperfect science (just use the word “attribution” to trigger shivers in any data person) but it’s very clear that targeted platforms offer dramatically cheaper leads for almost every product. That’s why the hostility to ads feels misplaced: it works, it helps company to whom you want to give money to find you and people like you. It’s just that condescension from _some_ people in Ad platform and a press that insistently favours the worst people mean that people like me who argued for more user-friendly interfaces (ban certain content, prevent repeated ads) were routinely overruled.
    • WJW 5y ago
      > it helps company to whom you want to give money to find you You mean, the companies who want me to give them money. I'm sure there are a few companies out there whose product I actually want and don't mind paying for, but their number is absolutely dwarfed by the number of companies that seek to induce FOMO/status anxiety/etc in order to get me to buy things I don't need and would not want if not for advertising.
      • throwaway2048 5y ago
        every advertising platform wants to pretend they are delivering useful products that people would otherwise be unaware of, but almost exclusively deliver what you have identified.
      • foerbert 5y ago
        Yup. I find it amazing the quoted myth lives on. It doesn't even make sense. How many problems do most people have that can be solved with an existing product they are unaware of? The numbers can't be very high. How do you explain well-known brands advertising the same product for decades on end? Surely Coke and Pepsi aren't suddenly enlightening many people to the existence of their drinks. How about ads that get shown to the known-same individual time and time again after mere minutes? (See Hulu, at least back in the day, not sure what it's like now.) The whole line about ads being mere consumer education is ridiculous and doesn't even stand up to a cursory thought.
• cm2187 5y ago
  ...but the same people stuff their own products with ads and analytics.
• throwaway4good 5y ago
  "All in all, the difference in stats would mostly come from people blocking the Google Analytics script. Google Analytics is listed on many blocklists while the Plausible proxy runs as a first-party connection and is not." So what exactly does Plausible do to avoid being blocked in the same manner? What prevents GA from doing the same?
  • Sebb767 5y ago
    > So what exactly does Plausible do to avoid being blocked in the same manner? It seems they serve plausible from the same server as the origin website (first party), probably under an unique name, which means you need to block the script manually on every domain instead of simply blacklisting `plausible.io` (for example). > What prevents GA from doing the same? That's a good question. Probably ease-of-use (no need to explain how to host it, easier updates) and the lack of need to do so. YouTube, for example, could also make it _far_ harder to block ads by simply sending a single video stream, but they don't for some reason.
    • maple3142 5y ago
      IIRC, It is possible to serve Google Analytics script on your server if you really insisted in doing it: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/save-your-analytics-from-content-blockers-7ee08c6ec7ee/ https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/save-your-analytics-from-c...
• timdaub 5y ago
  Nice that Marko did a follow up by writing this blog post. A few months ago (in May), I also asked myself the question of "How plausible are our web analytics?", and I was able to see the same phenomenon [1]. Many people in my audience block client-side web trackers. One option would now be to host a plausible proxy on-premise. But I didn't have time to try that out yet. PS: We're paying plausible customers and our stats are publicly accessible [2]. -1: https://rugpullindex.com/blog#HowPlausibleareOurWebsiteAnalytics https://rugpullindex.com/blog#HowPlausibleareOurWebsiteAnaly... -2: https://plausible.io/rugpullindex.com https://plausible.io/rugpullindex.com
• thinkingemote 5y ago
  One of the reasons for mobile apps is that adblocking is disabled. Explains why Reddit promotes it so much. Similarly, wrapping websites like Discord or Slack in Electron also gives the website owners full telemetry and tracking that they can't get in a tech savvy browser. Would an always on VPN, a remote pihole be the only way for privacy?
  • timdaub 5y ago
    Honestly, if they'd abuse their power given through electron - surely, we the users would start boycotting one way or another. Ultimately, this purpusefully regressing UX for revenue - nobody likes it except the finance department.
  • poisonborz 5y ago
    A DNS with adblock blacklist is a simpler solution. Also, it's the only way for system-wide adblock for rootless Android.
  • TeMPOraL 5y ago
    Not sure if VPN would help you much against telemetry in a mobile app. A native foothold in your phone's system gives them access to much better data than they could infer on the server side. E.g. if I wanted to know where you're hailing from, I'd browbeat you into granting me Location access privileges. If that's too difficult, I'd get you to grant me Files/Photos privileges (this one won't raise too many alarm bells with apps like Discord or Reddit), and then try to read EXIF geotags off your recent photos.
    • qualudeheart 5y ago
      Wouldn’t it be possible to fingerprint users just based on the images they have installed?
  • eitland 5y ago
    It doesn't need to be an actual VPN to somewhere else. Lockdown for iOS can be run without using the VPN server.
  • 5y ago
• Procedural 5y ago
  I don't.
• megamix 5y ago
  Might as well stop the whole damn thing :). For the better internet health
• gigatexal 5y ago
  only 58% of us? I thought that number would be much closer to 99%
• 8fingerlouie 5y ago
  I used to have Google Analytics blocked on my home networks (through Pihole/Adguard Home) with the exception of one network which my wife uses. She works with SoMe so not having access kinda interferes with her job. I've since moved to NextDNS.io to have network agnostic ad/malware filtering. Still keep a "special" configuration for my wife :)
  • jerrre 5y ago
    what is SoMe?
    • 8fingerlouie 5y ago
      Social Media manager. I was as confused when i first saw job postings for "SoMe experience", and figured it was a MeToo thing :)
    • klausjensen 5y ago
      Social Media
• stanislavb 5y ago
  Only 58% :)?
• octref 5y ago
  Does anyone have recommendation for static site hosting with simple server-side analytics? The only thing I can find is Netlify Analytics, but $9/mo is too much for hosting a few pages of OSS project documentations. If there's no complex interactivity achieveable only through JS, I prefer to ship sites with plain HTML/CSS, so I don't really like to use any client-side analytics. And yes – I can live without all the fancy features to track and profile my visitors. I don't want to host by myself either, since I enjoy using a simple git push to deploy my site.
  • maattdd 5y ago
    I use AWS Cloudfront on top of my static blog to get basic analytics (and some edge caching). It is almost free.
  • shantnutiwari 5y ago
    Netlify analytics is very inaccurate to begin with-- it was showing me I was getting 20,000 visits a month on a 5 year old blog I never updated! Moving to a normal analytics, the number is closer to a dozen, maybe a few hundred. I suspect Netlify doesnt remove bot traffic
  • busterarm 5y ago
    https://plausible.io/blog/google-analytics-alternatives https://plausible.io/blog/google-analytics-alternatives
  • the_duke 5y ago
    If you are willing to go a bit more hands on: * Use a CDN which provides access logs (AWS Cloudfront, logs are stored in S3, Azure supports this too i think) * Feed those logs into a self-hosted analytics solution, like goatcounter [1] [1] https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter
  • sofixa 5y ago
    CloudFlare Pages does this.
  • marvinblum 5y ago
• zoobab 5y ago
  Get me some lawyer and enforce Schrems2 against Google Analytics.
• hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
  Why so little? Honestly, I believe the percentage is much higher, we just deliberately unblock certain sites for market research and so on. Most of the web is completely unusable w/o adblockers.
  • martinpw 5y ago
    Maybe browsing from work? Some companies have policies against installing third party browser extensions.
    • jopsen 5y ago
      Or using default browser on your phone.
• dgudkov 5y ago
  It amazes me that over the last 10-20 years an astonishing amount of money and intellectual capital have been invested in adtech and crypto but nothing in micropayments. Ads are evil, but it will remain a moot point until we have working micropayments. We have (and will have) ads with all their downsides exactly because we don't have micropayments, because ads basically work as a substitute to micropayments.
  • dijit 5y ago
    I'd be interested in working on stuff like this; I used to work in a PCI-DSS Tier 1 company storing cardholder data on-premises so if someone wants to work on this and would like my help with this please reach out; my contact information is in my bio.
  • qualudeheart 5y ago
    I’m still surprised more apps don’t have inbuilt marketplaces and then take a cut of payments. Reddit could do this. Users sell to each other through an Etsy like interface. Reddit takes 5% of each transaction. This solves Reddits existing inability to monetize through ads as successfully as their major competitors.
    • sodality2 5y ago
      What would be sold on a Reddit market?
      • travoc 5y ago
        Moderator privileges and astroturfing opportunities.
      • whimsicalism 5y ago
        Like craigslist 2.0? They could capitalize on the fact that there are existing sub-communities around various niches.
        • deleted 5y ago
• bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  hmm, so this means it's about time for the newest how to hire guideline being - come to our site, if you block Google Analytics that means that you can go to the potential interview pool.
• eterevsky 5y ago
  This is a bit concerning. I would like to block ad, but would prefer to keep analytics enabled, since it helps improve the products that I'm using. I'm using Brave and I don't see any obvious way to set it up like that.
• tomaszs 5y ago
  I have been using professionally Google Analytics for over ten years. When I set up Summon The JSON store on Shopify I made decision to not use it. It does not give any value. And moreover it takes a lot of time to study. At the end rather on quality and sales you focus on visits, and a lot of other non important metrics.
• morpheos137 5y ago
  99% of users ignore online adds. Most advertising is a con, on the ad buyer.
  • libertine 5y ago
    You're saying that while commenting on a HN post from a company that sells analytics solutions, with a piece of content showing that Google Analytics it's getting blocked a lot by a specific type of a audience. Like... hey guys, you know, if you want to sell to these folks maybe you should consider an alternative to GA, right? Why didn't you ignore this? This is fine for you, yet an AD that's it's clearly identified as being an AD, with, literally, a defined area - it's not.
  • fortran77 5y ago
    HN users think they're too smart to be susceptible to ads, but I'm skeptical! I think ads work. I block ads not because I'm anti-ad, but because 1) it's nearly impossible to browse the web at all without an ad blocker and 2) Malware has been delivered via ad networks, sometimes on otherwise reliable websites that were duped into running the ad. I'd have no problem with ads if they appeared as ads used to appear in a newspaper - static content between articles that doesn't distract or interfere with my reading experience.
• jeroenhd 5y ago
  I expected these numbers to be higher. However, an even more interesting metric is the 88% block in Firefox. Firefox may not have a great market share, but based on these numbers it's market share may very well be eight times higher than your analytics report. This can change the argument of "it's only 3% of our users so we don't need to test on FF" to "it's a quarter of our user base, we should at least test it", depending on your target audience. I've seen tons of people claim general Firefox usage is negligible based on public data from websites such as statcounter, but these metrics prove that those statistics are unreliable and should not be used. The best you can do is use server side UA inspection, though you can't really distinguish bots from real users that way.
  • DocTomoe 5y ago
    I feel this heavily depends on your goal. IMHO, this points at Firefox being used mostly by ad-averse, tech-savvy users, while the less-adverse, less-savvy users prefer Safari and/or Chrome. If your objective is to maximize ad revenue, the most obvious approach would now be to ignore Firefox completely and focus on non-FF browsers. Of course, following web standards would be the Golden Way, and more selfless actors follow that rule, but that song has been sung ever since the old Netscape/MSIE wars.
    • bluGill 5y ago
      > If your objective is to maximize ad revenue, the most obvious approach would now be to ignore Firefox completely and focus on non-FF browsers. No, your best approach is to test firefox carefully to ensure it is broken. That way you encourage people to use something more friendly to you. I hope I didn't give anyone ideas.
      • dannyw 5y ago
        Dont give Google Maps and YouTube ideas. Wait...
        • tempestn 5y ago
• daitangio 5y ago
  PiHole is my preferred solution. I have come with some insights here: https://gioorgi.com/2020/pihole-lockdown/ https://gioorgi.com/2020/pihole-lockdown/ Give it a try! https://pi-hole.net/ https://pi-hole.net/
  • tsjq 5y ago
    is there a way to run this pi-hole on cloud so, multiple users can use it , and also while using mobile data ? also, for those who do not want to spend on / does knot know to fiddle with RPi.
    • Havoc 5y ago
      This should only be done in combination with a VPN. Open DNS points are not generally recommended Check out nextdns instead. It can likely do what you had in mind
      • tsjq 5y ago
        thanks. I will check this out. is AdGuard also a similar approach ? https://adguard.com/en/welcome.html https://adguard.com/en/welcome.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdGuard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdGuard
        • Havoc 5y ago
          I know adguard has a pihole like thing called adguard home. Don't know anything about it beyond that.
• gruturo 5y ago
  The remaining 42% of users work in adtech and need to monitor their own product, are stuck on some platform where an adblocker is not possible, or are they just masochistic ?
  • saagarjha 5y ago
    A lot of people in adtech block ads.
  • tsjq 5y ago
    forgot the ignorant or not-tech-savvy ?
  • yoz-y 5y ago
    Or they put their money where their mouth is and stop going to websites that are ad ridden to the point of unusability.
• jonplackett 5y ago
  I think it's more like 75% for HN alone. I built a game - termsandconditions.game that got to #1 on HN a few months back and for a while I couldn't understand why I had such high CDN use and 4X less registered hits. This is why!
• scotty79 5y ago
  How do you deal with "please disable adblocker" messages? I found them way more annoying than the ads themselves.
  • cyberpsybin 5y ago
    There are anti anti-adblockers built into uBlock. If that does not work, just ditch the site.
  • cookie_monsta 5y ago
    Strange, but I haven't seen one lately that actually blocks you. Clicking outside of the modal tends to make them disappear. Could be that I am visiting less annoying websites these days though...
  • nullc 5y ago
    The blockers also block most of those. When that fails I find the back button works pretty well. If it's a popup for something I don't have a choice about using (e.g. a government site), right clicking the offending element choosing inspect and then deleting it out of the dom usually solves the problem.
  • jobigoud 5y ago
    Any website with a fully blocking message I disable JavaScript entirely in uBO. If the site is still unusable after that I just close the tab.
  • MiddleEndian 5y ago
    uBlock Origin eye dropper, select that element, and add it to my blocklist.
• cyberpsybin 5y ago
  Only 58%?!
• sharmin123 5y ago
  5 Things To Check Before Taking Divorce Decision Or Separate: https://www.hackerslist.co/5-things-to-check-before-taking-divorce-decision-or-separate/ https://www.hackerslist.co/5-things-to-check-before-taking-d...
• BatteryMountain 5y ago
  Pihole (2M domains) + Firefox strict mode + uBlock Origin is what I do. Any other tips? Used to have privacy badger too but it breaks too many sites for me.
  • 3r8Oltr0ziouVDM 5y ago
    Disable JavaScript by default (try uBlock's advanced mode).
    • BatteryMountain 5y ago
      If I do this, the internet basically becomes useless for me to be honest. Many useful sites breaks for me (shopping, banking etc)
• tr33house 5y ago
  So proud of the plausible guys for getting to the top of HN. I remember reading about them in 2019 on indie hackers! All the best
• fswwi 5y ago
  Only 58%? I expected 95% at least.
• drpancake 5y ago
  This is pretty much in line with what I observed a few days ago when my post[1] reached the top of the front page here. Google Analytics reports 10k uniques vs. 35k in Netlify's server-side analytics. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28288760 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28288760
• platz 5y ago
  Adblocking an immoral tragedy of the commons type move. Psychologically, It's not unlike NIMBYism or residents of a gated community that figured out how to avoid paying their taxes.
  • batch12 5y ago
    These poor, poor ad companies are being taken advantage of by me. I have no shame. I even immorally block ads on thousands of endpoints used by other people! Quite the tragedy!
  • devilduck 5y ago
    This is a hilarious take, thanks for the laugh!
  • raxxorrax 5y ago
    You mean because the free internet is infrastructure belonging to all and ads are its maintenance? I fundamentally disagree with this parable. I don't think common practices in advertising are a necessity, especially when it comes to analytics.
  • JohnFen 5y ago
    > Adblocking an immoral tragedy of the commons type move. Adblocking is a reasonable defense against the constant and expanding abuse (of both people and the commons) that the ad industry brought on us. For the record, I don't engage in ad blocking as such. I block scripts, which has the side effect of blocking much of the more abusive ads. However, reasonable ads aren't blocked at all -- it's just that there aren't many reasonable ads on the internet.
  • dang 5y ago
    We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28365335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28365335.
• jillesvangurp 5y ago
  That's why apps are so popular with ad driven properties. No cookie banners, hardly any limitations. And you get to keep users nicely inside the walled garden. Anyway, I indeed use Firefox with ublock origin, multi account containers, etc. I also use Firefox on Android. A lot of stuff people assume they need apps for works just fine in that.
  • 63 5y ago
    Same here. I particularly enjoy the mobile YouTube and Twitch experiences much better than their respective apps (mostly because of ad blocking).
  • driverdan 5y ago
    This is why it's important to block ads and trackers at a lower level, such as using a hosts blocklist.
  • account42 5y ago
    > No cookie banners You still need informed consent in the EU, GDPR is not specific to websites.
• Dah00n 5y ago
  And 90+ % of those likely have plausible.io on their block list too. At least it is on all tracking/analytics blocklists I use.
• wooptoo 5y ago
  * at the DNS level.
• WhyNotHugo 5y ago
  This is exactly why metrics like "only 10% of our users use Firefox" are complete rubbish. Only 10% of the users that don't block GA. That's pretty in line with "X% of users that participated in our poll say they don't min participating in polls".
• that_guy_iain 5y ago
  The thing is, they also block plausible. It's the ad blockers that block.
• nikkinana 5y ago
  Me too! You all suck, don't deserve tracking revenue.
• masswerk 5y ago
  For the tech-savvy audiences and blog writers: Google provides a dedicated opt-out plugin [0] for various browsers. (So it's not just browsers interfering, ad-blockers and disabled JS.) [0] https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout
• randomperson_24 5y ago
  This is highly inaccurate. The author is using Plausible via a proxy but Google Analytics directly (a very biased way to do things). Secondly, PiHole, uBlock origin and most other adblockers also block Plausible analytics (there are discussions on their own Github Issues regarding it). If you are proxying Plausible to get accurate readings, same should be done with GA.
  • robin_reala 5y ago
    I don’t read this as Plausible vs GA but server-side anything (including a GA proxy) vs client-side GA. in that case, it doesn’t seem like these figures should be wildly wrong.
    • cwizou 5y ago
      They definitely did, this is not a GA vs server side comparison. From the source : > I compared stats between Plausible Analytics and Google Analytics.
• enigma-reload3d 5y ago
  I expect HN to be close to 90%
• masto 5y ago
  The title seems to have been truncated. Presumably it meant to end with “, according to a Google Analytics competitor”
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• nullc 5y ago
  Can some HN users that don't block ads across the board in their browser explain how you can stand using the Internet at all?
• jccalhoun 5y ago
  I am amazed at how non-techy people use the internet. I teach college and I will sometimes have students go to some web site. I am amazed at how few use adblocking and just accept all the ads and popups and overlays and crap. Even more than that, I will see them using something like google docs and google will put an overlay for some new feature and they don't click the X to close it. They just type away with that overlay in the corner. That drives me crazy. I don't know how they do it.
  • Tarsul 5y ago
    there are too many popups, especially now with how many cookie pop-ups work. So the easiest way is try to ignore it if possible. Ok, yeah, the best way would be to block it completely but as this shows again: humans are lazy creatures. Every click is a click too much.
  • rapnie 5y ago
    Yes, and it goes further than that: "Should I add an ad-blocker to your browser for an ad-free internet experience.. it'll only take 2 sec." and they respond: "Nah, not needed". And also "You are using the worst browser available to you (Samsung), shall I install Firefox?" and then "Nah, don't care".
    • mardifoufs 5y ago
      The Samsung browser isn't actually that bad at all. Has some neat features that can't be found in Firefox or even Chrome, like the enhanced video playback tools. Plus it supports adblocking plug ins (though only FF has the much better ublock origin). Keep in mind that tons of website just outright won't work with Firefox mobile too, and it has a very annoying bug that has been known for years where all your tabs will very oftem reload whenever you switch to another app and come back. And that's regardless of how much free ram you have. Samsung browser just... Works.
      • Tom4hawk 5y ago
        > Keep in mind that tons of website just outright won't work with Firefox mobile I know this anecdotal but I'm using FF on Android (Lineage OS without google apps/micro g etc. - only F-Droid) and the only site that causes issues is google.com. For some <sarcasm>unknown</sarcasm> reason it servers images in much lower quality. Of course it's not a technical limitation. If you change your UA to chrome everything goes back to normal. That was the biggest reason I moved to DDG. > it has a very annoying bug that has been known for years where all your tabs will very often reload whenever you switch to another app and come back I definitely don't have this issue. I have over a thousand tabs opened, it definitely doesn't reload all of them while I'm switching between apps.
• cesarb 5y ago
  > Plausible proxy runs as a first-party connection and is only blocked by those visitors who block JavaScript entirely. Which means it still underestimates; those who selectively disable Javascript, through things like uBlock Origin's advanced mode or uMatrix, will not be counted. So the real percentage is probably higher than that 58%, and we don't know how much higher.
• marcinzm 5y ago
  >I looked at analytics of a site that had a post trending on Hacker News and Reddit with more than a thousand upvotes and more than a thousand comments. Reddit is a very diverse site and not a tech savvy site overall. This just means the subset of users who liked this, likely very technical link, blocked GA. To use that to claim 58% of all reddit users block GA is very disingenuous imho.
  • asddubs 5y ago
    doesn't ublock black GA by default? That might help explain it
• underlines 5y ago
  Every reputable Digital Marketing Agency now switches to Google Tag Manager Server Side (first party) tracking. Only disabling Javascript would circumvent this.
• xnx 5y ago
  Google even has official add-ons (for multiple browsers nonetheless) to opt out of Google Analytics: https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout
• t0bia_s 5y ago
  PC: SimpleWall, uBlock, Decentraleyes, Privacy Badger Android: AdAway, uBlock, Decentraleyes, Privacy Badger Home network: Pi-hole I never asked for ads and telemetry, so there is no other option for me.
• GuB-42 5y ago
  That's something I often think about. Are blockers used for fingerprinting? Especially by the likes of Google who controls both the ads/analytics platform and the website (aka first party). There is a specific demographic who use blockers, generally of the tech-savvy kind. It should even be possible to detect the blocker being used and some of its settings. It would be ironic to detect that a user is blocking almost everything and show them ads for privacy-oriented products and services.
• thrower123 5y ago
  How is the percentage that low? Maybe iPhone Safari is to blame? It's not quite as bad as things were ten, fifteen years ago, where not using an ad blocker was just begging to get your machine pwned, but it's still bad.
• rubyist5eva 5y ago
  Shocking it's not higher.
• lobocinza 5y ago
  So Linux user base is kind of almost 5% instead of <1%?
• uthapaa 5y ago
  Why people block google analytics let the owner of the website track you.. it will help them to earn because they open a website to serve you not to untrack you...
• dalu 5y ago
  I run c64g.com Back in the day I could choose ad formats and place them to be non-invasive. Since a while ago Adsense only has the responsive ad format. It stretches across the full width and is extremely high. I tried what they suggested to limit the size but it isn't working. The site looks nice without ads. And I personally hate so see it so full of ads. But server needs to be paid and I'd like to also earn something for my time and knowledge spent on developing the site and maintaining. There's a lot of work to be done there. I'd like the audience to be able to write their own reviews, upload images, maybe even offer a way to play those games in the browser. The site used to be #1 in search results, but since Google prefers wikis it's not anymore. I've also decided to not track my visitors via any trackers, so no piwik, no GA. Only server logs. There's also legacy.c64g.com which despite not being listed anywhere anymore performs better than the main site in ad revenue. It has static banner ads that are not invasive. I had a free forums service many years ago. German audience. Barely made server costs. I wanted of course to earn something for my time maintaining it so I put those annoying layer ads there. It was a downward spiral. The layer ads initially brought additional revenue, really nice revenue but people started protesting and after a while leaving and using adblockers, who could blame them. It was so full of ads it was unusable. I wrote an adblocker-blocker, which displayed a black screen if adblock was detected. That lead to people leaving even more. Eventually so many people left that removing the annoying ads resulted in not being able to pay the server rent and it had to close down. Ads are a necessity for some sites (subscription based model won't work) Google is actively destroying the sites that choose to put those ads on them by removing choice of ad formats. Recently I moved away from chrome on the phone for my daily browsing because Firefox allows me to install an adblocker add addon and chrome doesn't. Even worse are those cookie nag screens. Every top result on Google search has an annoying one. I blame the, sorry but it's true, idiots of the EU parliament who make half assed laws without taking care of the consequences. Remeber Shareware of the 90s? It's worse than that now. I wish there were cookie screen blockers. Lately I started to just navigate back when I visit a site with a modal cookie dialog that wants you to accept all by default. In most cases I don't bother to click anything anymore, if I visit your site and can't read the info I came for to read I will leave. Too bad there isn't a metric to count that. GA is some of the worst spyware and since the US government has access to it whenever it desires it's also used to track individuals. It's one part of the huge spy apparatus the US shadow government built.
• mgh2 5y ago
  Why is this even at the front page of HN? I give them credit for the brilliant marketing. This is an ad disguised as an article targeting the "tech savvy" by bundling HN and Reddit (a truth + a lie makes the statement more true), a common clickbait tactic > This makes sense especially considering how difficult it is to install an adblocker on Chrome, the most popular browser on mobile devices. Nope, it is really easy: is just an extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/adblock-%E2%80%94-best-ad-blocker/gighmmpiobklfepjocnamgkkbiglidom https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/adblock-%E2%80%94-... It makes me think Reddit users are inflating/manipulating this article w/ votes and comments Correction: "difficult to install adblocker on mobile devices"
  • ehsankia 5y ago
    The headline is the perfect anti-Google HN-clickbait, and it is quite misleading. These people just run any ad-blocker, they mostly all block Google Analytics as a side-effect. The majority of those 58% probably don't care about GA specifically.
    • Breza 5y ago
      To be honest, I've used Brave for a long time and I didn't realize it blocked GA.
  • Jorengarenar 5y ago
    It says it's difficult to install on mobile
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • mgh2 5y ago
      My bad, but the original premise still stands
      • mdoms 5y ago
• ScottWRobinson 5y ago
  Really curious how this compares to Cloudflare's analytics. I run a site for developers with decent traffic, and according to Cloudflare only about 25% of our readers block Google Analytics. I had always thought it would be a higher percentage, so this seems to make sense. It's also odd that the clicks from Google Search Console line up very closely with what we see from Google Analytics. I had always thought this data would be more accurate since Google SERPs uses (used to use?) forwarding URLs to track this stuff.
• cbsmith 5y ago
  In other news, water is wet. ;-)
• skizm 5y ago
  Aside: I thought I heard a while back that Chrome and Safari were changing their browser extension APIs such that it would make it difficult to truly block ads / 3rd party scripts / blacklist domains. Did this ever come to fruition? Was it overblown? Never heard where that went.
• qwerty456127 5y ago
  I'm surprised the number is so low. I would expect it to be way higher for this specific group.
• travisgriggs 5y ago
  And… 100% of Google Analytics authors are tech savvy. This is called irony.
• CalChris 5y ago
  Ok, so I sheepishly admit that didn't know how to block analytics. Now I do. https://www.privacyaffairs.com/block-google-analytics/ https://www.privacyaffairs.com/block-google-analytics/
  • wintermutestwin 5y ago
    That link is a joke: The highest ranked solution is installing a google extension.
• BlackLotus89 5y ago
  > Plausible proxy runs as a first-party connection and is only blocked by those visitors who block JavaScript entirely. It is not blocked by any browser or adblocker Would be interested to also include that into the statistics. How many nerds block javascript? I wouldn't be counted by the plausible proxy since I disable javascript per default via ublock and if I allow javascript I still filter it using uMatrix.
• mastazi 5y ago
  I'm curious as to why Reddit users were considered a tech-savvy audience. While there are some tech-centered subreddits, many others are not.
  • markosaric 5y ago
    the subreddit that drove the traffic to the post that was analyzed was /r/linux which should be more technical than the average subreddit out there
    • mastazi 5y ago
      Thank you, I missed that part.
• NoGravitas 5y ago
  Now I need to teach my adblocker to block Plausible, even when hosted first-party.
• napoleond 5y ago
  I think this is why most sites—especially those targeting technical audiences—should rely on server-side analytics instead. Add some middleware to your web framework of choice which logs request data and parse that, or use something like https://www.tabbydata.com https://www.tabbydata.com (disclaimer: I built that) to pipe it into a data warehouse. Voila! No JS tracking, retain useful metrics.
  • prepend 5y ago
    I’ve used server log analysis, awstats, for maybe 20-25 years. It’s really interesting the difference between awstats and Google analytics (or Adobe analytics, etc). The reason I keep using Google stats on my backend is convenience and “Google magic” for tracking session length, bounce, behavior, etc etc. I can get most of that out of awstats, but that requires more work.
• mrfusion 5y ago
  Can I block this on safari on the iPhone.
• ovebepari 5y ago
  I don't. I like personised ads. I don't want bra ada at 3 am whish I won't buy.
• ghostpepper 5y ago
  The entire methodology of this 'study' is comparing analytics from Google to analytics from Plausible? Who is Plausible, you might ask? Just take a look at which blog is hosting this very study. This is a clever ad for a google analytics competitor.
• SeanFerree 5y ago
  Great article! I have always wondered about this
• bawolff 5y ago
  Its not that i care about google analytics per se, its that i really want to kill more aggressive ads, and the easiest option is an extension that does both. I certainly dont really like GA, but i wouldn't take specific action to block it. Definitely not taking specific action to unblock.
• newbamboo 5y ago
  And we know it doesn’t make a difference.
• micromacrofoot 5y ago
  I'm surprised it's not higher to be honest
• tiku 5y ago
  I wonder why Google did not yet make a tool to integrate your server logs into analytics. That way you can really measure everything.
• OliverJones 5y ago
  Pi-Hole on my domestic private network.
• yoble 5y ago
  Their open analytics page shows the live HN traffic to their website, driven by this article - quite a peak from regular: https://plausible.io/plausible.io https://plausible.io/plausible.io
• splch 5y ago
  as i browse from duckduckgo browser
• WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
  Of course they do. Every invasive thing I'm made aware of, will be blocked. My home network runs Pi-Hole, and every browser has uBlock Origin. The Internet has been a bearable place. And then I happened to show my 2 year old a cartoon from Youtube on a non-adblocked device. My. Freaking. God. It's full of ads. The cartoon is 10 minutes. Every minute, an 15-second, at the very least, ad rolls in. Like fucking gnats by the river in the summer: you get one, two, and then you are swarmed in them. There weren't the yellow markers anywhere on the progress slider, too. Not all of those ads were good for kids, too. One was, I kid you not, an ad for Jira. An ad for the fucking Jira, in the middle of a cartoon. Won't anybody think of the children!? My daughter was very much not impressed. So was I. I promptly got uBlock Origin running, and youtube-dl'd the whole channel those cartoons were in, for good measure.
• NewEntryHN 5y ago
  How do I block Plausible?
  • mrlatinos 5y ago
    Pihole
• mrlatinos 5y ago
  plausible.io is also blocked
• asiachick 5y ago
  Me, I don't block Google Analytics intentionally, I run Ublock Origin to get rid of ads in general and it happens to block Google Analytics.
• pachico 5y ago
  That remaining 42% surprises me even more...
• fartcannon 5y ago
  Healthy people don't eat junk food.
• bob229 5y ago
  Only idiots use google services
• blacklight 5y ago
  > Plausible proxy runs as a first-party connection and is only blocked by those visitors who block JavaScript entirely. Then sorry, as a NoScript user I probably manage to escape both GA and your experiments :)
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
  Original title (matched that of the blog post) "58% of Hacker News, Reddit and tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics"
• GoblinSlayer 5y ago
  >Plausible proxy runs as a first-party connection and is only blocked by those visitors who block JavaScript entirely. That's me.
• tsavo 5y ago
  Blog post for a competing platform criticizing the effectiveness of the market leader in the space. It's a widely known trend that more tech-savvy consumer audiences tend to employ more tracking countermeasures. The sales message in the post claims GA is cookie-based, which isn't entirely true. Cookies are one complementary component of tracking within the Google stack, but not the only one. Depending on your account type, GA deployment, and reporting method, you can achieve reporting results that are not solely cookie-based. The over-simplification is for sales purposes.
• ninjarunner 5y ago
  Google Analytics is only the tip of the iceberg; moves to pixels, premium analytics, saas tools reporting, partners, to CDPs and on and on. Found easy tool to show extent takes only few minutes to set up: https://truetraffic.io/ https://truetraffic.io/
• vishigondi 5y ago
  This is incorrect. Google Analytics uses a first party cookie. Only the ability to create paid media audiences using GA is blocked by non chrome browsers and ad block extensions.