Welcome to the Block Party: The internet after ad blocking

About a year or so ago, my dad called me out of the blue and told me that my mom was crying because "internet ads were following her and making her anxious".

Earlier that day, she came from a doctor and ended up searching for a medical condition on a famous search website. After that, she started seeing ads for various bullshit remedies all across the internet. Almost every website she visited, showed her same types of ads. Even when she wanted to forget and take her mind of it, she couldn't because these ads were constantly reminding her of it.

She got so disgusted that she quit using the web for the rest of the day and cried.

I guided them on how to install ad blocking addons and how to change default search engines (she now uses Startpage) But we couldn't easily block it on iPad so the solution was to switch the search engine and clear cookies.

All these companies that make money off tracking people and are selling search results really need to rethink their business models.

PS: She also wrote an email to Tim Cook complaining about this and got a reply from someone that they will "look into it". I'm glad Apple will now a provide solution to block these kinds of things on an iPad.

I don't want ad companies tracking me.

Ad companies have roundly demonstrated that I can no longer trust them to show me ads without tracking.

Sorry, but I'm not switching off that blocker. Maybe if the history of the internet had taken a different course. But now it's too late -- the well's been poisoned, and advertisers and publishers have only themselves to blame. Pointing the finger at the users doesn't do anything to repair this lost trust.

    Ad-blocking, insofar as it contributes to the decimation of
    advertising revenues, will hasten this exodus to the
    platforms. And there is no way to block the ads shown to you
    by Facebook or Google or Twitter in their own apps,
    especially not on mobile.

Aside: There absolutely are ways to block ads within apps. There are already Android apps that accomplish this to various extents, and I'm sure they'll only get more sophisticated to match any migration of users to mobile.

Damn, that article took a strange leap with discussing what better ads would be. Somehow it entirely skipped the possibility that more ads might resemble the ads of the most successful advertisers of the web (like google, facebook, twitter) and instead leaped on a dystopian slope where all ads are served by the content platforms of those companies.

Saying that twitter, google or facebook ads cannot be blocked is just bogus. People use them on normal web browsers that quite easily could block them. The reason they're not blocked is that it's not worth the hassle, because the ads are clean, small and polite. You know, better ads.

Such better ads are not patented, and switching to pleasant text ads like the industry leaders leaders did would make ad blockers a marginal phenomenon.

I was always a defender of a site's right to use advertising in lieu of any better way to pay for its content. As someone who'd had stabs in the past at making content sites with useful content, I understood that it was a case of etiquette. If you want to read my content, do me the courtesy of allowing an unobtrusive text ad to exist off to the side. On that basis, I never blocked ads. Sometimes the ads were even interesting.

I use an ad blocker now. Too many abuses of my willingness to let the publishers show me ads and I eventually just got sick of it. Where the line was crossed for me included:

- Videos (or audio) autoplaying over the top of my own music; especially when they're in some other tab, halfway down the page, forcing me to go hunting to figure out where the sound was coming from

- Links commandeered by popup launchers; especially when they cancel the original click, or load my link in a new tab and override the current tab with the ad popup, which often resulted in me accidentally leaving the ad tab open while I closed the tab I actually wanted.

- Hover ads that activate because I was careless enough to not pay precise attention to the location of my mouse pointer

- Page content scroll positions jerking up and down as ads appear or disappear (usually just the former)

- Overlay ads appearing on top of content I'm trying to read, and in particular those which make the close button either hard to see, unresponsive when clicked, or which respond as though I've clicked the ad itself

- Content that just won't display because it's blocked by ad resources that have stalled while loading

And so forth. I'll stand up for publisher's rights, but only to a point. Eventually the noise and bad behaviour just becomes too much.

I love the mantra of "the web is supported by advertising" that every one of these sorts of articles at least quotes. It's not. Shitty business models are supported by advertising. There are plenty of us who provide non-advertising driven services that are profitable and can afford transit costs.

As for blocking, the technology allows it so I will use it. If it doesn't allow it, I have no ethical qualms about breaking it until it does. If I'm paying for the portal device be it tablet, desktop, smartphone, TV, I will be in control of it. If it's subsidy-driven, their funeral.

This is why I encourage all the people I know, who aren't great with computers, to use adblockers:

http://i.imgur.com/dzwaKhI.png

Saw that ad for what is borderline malware on a fresh install of windows 10 while trying out Microsoft Edge to see what it's worth as a browser. It's a google ad (you can always spot them through the X button), on a popular website.

As long as google doesn't do any real policing on what is permissible in their adnetworks, it will always be a user's right to protect himself. Television and newspapers have higher standards for ads, at least in my country.

This was also a reminder that Edge will not be a real browser until Microsoft adds the possibility of using an adblocker. No extensions, no deal.

The author gets one thing massively wrong. So do the reddit commentors they quote.

The quote:

"Ad blockers could end up saving the ad industry from its worst excesses. If blocking becomes widespread, the ad industry will be pushed to produce ads that are simpler, less invasive and far more transparent about the way they’re handling our data"

Oh? And how are you so sure they won't go the other direction? Because that's where I'd place my money in a heart beat.

Adblockers rely on blocking requests to known ad networks and affiliates. If the ads are instead served up locally, from the site the person is visiting itself, it can't block the ads. Ad blockers are 100% ineffective in those instances. A company like google or any other major ad network just needs to create some sort of back-end, plugin or server side program that serves up ads from the domain you're visiting. The ad blocker wouldn't know if it's a picture of a cat or an ad for Netflix since it's all coming from randomsite.com

Several smaller companies have already started doing this and it could very well signal the end of ad blockers if it becomes widespread and adopted by the big players (specifically adsense).

The one thing I don't see is ad companies becoming more transparent & open. That's silly to even think about since it's less profitable alternative. The companies that don't do this will cannibalize the ones that do since they'll be shooting themselves in the foot. No, I see ad companies becoming more clever.

As far as content creators go, I don't even know how this is a debate. Just how entitled are people nowadays? Is this why they call millennials the entitled generation? If someone creates content, and wants people to see an ad for Pepsi before you can consume that content, that is the creators prerogative, not yours. End of story. There's no further argument here. I don't know why people think everything should be free. Nothing is free, everything is subsidized by something.

My personal reason for using an ad blocker is the infrastructure.

There is nothing wrong with ads. But there is something deeply wrong with ad networks and automated ad placement.

Giving up a square of your website to some company to place whatever the hell they deem relevant is the reason I dislike web ads. I go to a website to read their content, not what Doubleclick thinks I should see based on my creepy user profile.

So if content creators curate and produce ads in partnership with advertisers (whose products they must actually, you know, like enough to want to promote to their readers) then maybe people will find ads less offensive. Instead of seeing ads for malware, or a private medical condition, or the towels they were just browsing on Amazon in a separate tab.

Great content creators don't use an algorithm and analytics-generated user profiles to determine what content to serve individual users, they just publish what they think their readers will like. Why not do the same for ads?

As a possibility, a model whereby advertisers pay both content providers and readers for viewing ads.

I can imagine a system where before viewing expensive content (your next ultradeep NYT analysis I really want to read) I'm given a choice to view an ad (video, audio or picture) on one of the topics I'm interested in and be paid say $0.001. There are ad processors, let's say 2 or 3 major ones A, B and C, with whom I have an account. NYT hires one or two of them to give readers reasonable choices of what kind of ads to view and pay both ways. I'm registered with A and C with interests in cars, musical instruments and hiking equipment (in fact they may be priced differently), NYT supports A and B, which is fine, I'll be paid by A this time. I may of course change my preferences over time.

This will make ads even more expensive for the advertisers, but will at the same time improve relevance. In fact advertisers may compete for keywords/interests just like they do with Google Ads.

> In other words, even the most important and widely respected newspaper in the world is nowhere close to being healthily monetized, especially not by the small number of people who pay for it.

It's not true that people won't pay for "content". People subscribe to Netflix, and still go to the theaters in droves (despite "piracy"). People buy games. And it's not even true that there's a problem with written content: people still buy books.

People won't pay for news, which isn't the same thing as "content" in general.

The reason people won't pay for news is because news have no inherent value.

Reading the news is a way of passing time; it's more like glazing at trees and leaves in the wind (but much less enjoyable).

What bothers me the most about all these fertile sources for spam and ads to thrive (junk snail mail, telephone marketers, email spam, internet ads) is not just the malicious intent of most of it, but also the inefficiency of it all. A majority of Internet traffic is bots[1] costing electricity and time sorting through spam. Most of my snail mail by weight and size is trash every single day, waisting effort of an already underfunded and non-profitable USPS. Internet ads clutter up web interfaces and take up cycles in our browsers wasting time and making the delivery of information much less efficient. I feel as though in time, with all the physical and digital public services we have, 60% of infrastructure resources will go toward wasteful and nefarious services, 30% will go toward blocking and mitigating said services, and the remaining 10% will be human activity wondering why everything is so damn slow and expensive.

[1]http://theweek.com/articles/454320/62-percent-all-web-traffi...

Maybe the ad-heavy Internet was just a phase. Business models come and go. Craigslist killed newspaper classifieds as a business. Ad blockers may kill web ads as a business.

Would've been nice if the article had pointed out that ad-networks have become a popular way to distribute trojans and malware using Flash exploits (though I'm sure when Flash is gone, ppl will keep finding other browser exploits ad's can exploit).

Another possibility is that people will learn to care about what they read, and learn that it costs something. We don't have to tip, either.

Also, I'm sorry, but I'm never going to login to Facebook to read the Economist, and I stopped using Twitter's mobile app when they introduced sponsored content.

Content providers (from ad networks to movie studios) need to realise that you can only go so far. Ads have become more than ads. They track you wherever you go, not just online but offline too and people are starting to realise how intrusive this is. Most people are reasonable. A lot of articles have been publish about how terrible ads are but if you show them in a tasteful and a non-intrusive way (meaning that they don't track the user), they can be very successful.

Podcasts have been getting more and more popular everyday and I listen to a lot of them. I almost never skip any podcast ads even though I've heard most of them before because they feel more authentic (mostly because it's read by someone whose opinion I trust) and they're not intrusive at all. It seems like a good trade of to listen to them while getting great entertaining/informative content for free and I might get a good deal on something I might be interested in (since they mostly offer promo codes). If I'm listening to a podcast on technology, I get to hear Hover's ad spot, for example. That's interesting to me because as someone who's interested in listening to a podcast about technology, it's possible that I already manage a couple of domains and I might not be happy with my registrar (then again, who is). They're generically targeted ads. While on the websites, cookies follow me wherever I go, sometimes even when I delete them and my information is sold by companies I trust as a user because they're greedy and some other party want my information just so they can put ads in front of my face. When I try to block these, I'm called unethical because I'm taking food off the table of the writers.

There's a middle way here but I don't think ad networks ever going to realise this the same way movie studios haven't realised you can't solve piracy problem by adding more and more DRM. Don't be intrusive. Don't fuck up the UX. Don't bother me. I don't mind removing my ad blocker and see ads if that means I'll support the websites I visit. But ad networks are greedy and I fear this is only going to make them become more intrusive because of how easy (and now probably widely reached) ad blockers are going to become. And even if they do realise their mistake and make ads less intrusive both for privacy and UX reasons, no one will be there to realise that because everybody will be using ad blockers.

The advertising market have been inflating for ten years now. Ten years ago one user would earn you an average of one usd per month, while you only get around 1 cent per user now. The same goes for advertisers, if your ad gets shown for ten thousand people, you can expect one lead. While ten years ago that would have been a hundred leads.

Given the date and the description of blocking ad banners specifically, my guess is that they were talking about an ad-blocking proxy like Internet Junkbuster.

These proxies weren't as easy to install as browser extensions, but they did a good job of blocking ads, and I remember similar conversations about The Future of Ad Blocking at the time.

There are so many premises wrong here - it hurts:

1. The majority of people in fact doesn't care about being tracked - "hackers" (and also myself) do care though - but that's a minority.

2. Most people like good advertisement.

3. It's wrong to just naturally assume that ads have to be annoying. A discreet, not-moving, not-animated ad is not bothering anybody.

4. Just as most people aren't willing to pay for content they aren't willing to pay for the maintenance of ad blockers - which is why the devs of those ABs will (and as a matter of fact) already offer whitelisting for money. [http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/02/over-300-businesses-...]

5. More and more web-sites will simply deny access to their content if ad blocking is detected.

6. The HN people's perspective on ads is in each and every way not that of the majority of people potentially clicking ads. We are not the driving force.

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The equilibrium will be Ad Blockers that white list benevolent and discreet ads - advertisement as an income source will become less attractive but it won't go away.

Also Ad Blocking depends on detectable code or ad servers. If the ad dissemination technology shifts accordingly then Ad Blockers simply won't be able to detect ads any longer.

It's possible that some advertising will merge in with regular content and become covertly invasive over the long term. Publishers become credibility farms, where credibility is built using real articles and sold via "propaganda" pieces. One possible example is the Wired tennis physics link posted recently [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10210808

For all the people cheering on ad blockers: do you not realize that the _only_ result of wide-spread ad blocking is to drive smaller ad networks out of business and make Google into a monopoly?

This is not a win for privacy or security on the Internet. Google is an order of magnitude worse offender compared to the small-time ad networks.

And no, you cannot ad block Google. Good luck trying to block google.com cookies and access to *.google.com.

Are there any studies that show whether cross-site user tracking actually increases ad click-through rates? An advertiser can already intuit a lot about a reader from the current web site or search terms without tracking their activity on other sites. The most relevant ads I've seen were from Feedly and Twitter, who have their own profiles based on RSS feeds or Twitter accounts I follow.

I'm mainly talking about news outlets, and mainly the premiers like NYT and major regionals.

Those outlets claim, probably rightly so, that they can't survive on subscriptions alone, they need ads. But on the web, what that means is "we can't survive unless we degrade your web experience and violate your privacy by selling you to ad networks."

We're all focused on the ad side, and "how can we make money selling exactly what we've always sold without ads."

Maybe selling news is not a viable business on the web. Ad blockers are not just evidence that we don't like ads as they are now, but also evidence that "we don't want to pay for what you're selling us. What you're selling us isn't worth it."

Maybe a premier outlet like the NYT should be more than a news outlet. Maybe also an education outlet. NYT especially (and other premiers) already have people who do excellent research, writing, presentation, web development and data analysis. They have all the tools for education, they just aren't deploying them that way.

In classrooms, teachers sometimes try to incorporate current events into lessons. Turn that on its head.

But don't fall into the trap of replicating "the classroom," or courses, online. This would need some pretty serious innovation.

Would I subscribe to something like that? Hell yeah. I'd even accept ads, but not active privacy gouging ads, just static text and images served from the first party domain. Don't do something new, only to fuck it up with old.

Premier news outlets could be so much more that just another trap for ad viewing. They have really smart people, trapped in their employers' outdated business models.

Anecdotal evidence: I was shocked how quickly web degenerates when you disable adblocking.

Start with a reputable major news site, click on one business clickbait article -> a bit sleazy but still somewhat readable site opens -> click on different clickbait article -> sleazier site opens with a lousy article -> click again on ad -> full blown video popup ad extravaganza for rather unsavory business opportunities.

I shudder to think what would have happened if I had chosen to read about medicine or sex.

So in some ways online advertising has the same problem that fashion industry does. The immediate suppliers might be decent but a few steps down you get into OSHA nightmares exported overseas.

The problem is that incentives encourage this sleaziness no matter what high moral standards A,G,F,M, et al profess publicly.

Is there a way that I, as a consumer, could sell ads to ad networks that would be "viewed" (i.e. consume resources) by content outlets? Maybe they could be so resource intensive that admins would feel compelled to review logs, and the log content would somehow have enough information that an admin would buy a shoe.

Maybe http headers sent to content outlets could have ads.

Maybe something magic and really creative, I don't know.

You could even customize part of the message. One part from the advertiser, and one part from me, "Please do me a solid and stop blocking my ads to you. I need the ad revenue to help pay for my broadband fees."

Why don't more publishers try to detect the ad blockers with stuff like this? https://github.com/sitexw/FuckAdBlock

And then they could throw up a page that says "Sorry, AdBlock must be disabled to view this content"

> And there is no way to block the ads shown to you by Facebook or Google or Twitter in their own apps, especially not on mobile.

This is not entirely true. AdBlock Plus for Android works at the system level.

Have we hit peak ads? [1]

[1]: http://peakads.org/images/Peak_Ads.pdf

I don't run ad blocker since 2009. I just got that good at ignoring ads. F12 + delete offending element works wonders for the most annoying stuff. And there are always hosts files.