Ad Blocking Irony
subtraction.com
subtraction.com
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The only solution I could come up with for Android/iOS was to run a remote digital ocean firewall to block all ads at the network level, and connect to it with a VPN. Everything else I've tried or implemented on the devices themselves ate up too much resouces or had to be dangerously elevated in privilege (NDK) just to stop the damn ads. A bonus of this method is you can also experiment with filtering known Android bugs before they reach your device if for whatever reason you can't update your system.img
Then scrubbed traffic is passed to Snort (or use Suricata), with a ruleset to look for attack signatures. You can update rulesets from mailing lists https://lists.emergingthreats.net/mailman/listinfo/emerging-... and make your own by following whoever on Twitter is involved in Android/iOS security like @pof (Pau Oliva). There are specific mobile "emerging threat" rulesets too https://lists.emergingthreats.net/pipermail/emerging-sigs/20...
Now you can install Ublock Origin on your phone browser and most of the work it has to do is already done saving memory and bandwidth. Here you can experiment with custom rulesets for how pages get displayed, whitelist certain objects you may wish to look at and not blindly block. To further go down the rabbit hole you can build your own mobile version of FF on your VM, ripping out all these harmful things: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/Home/chromium-se...
You can also set up a script on the VM to update Android on AWS. If say there's a new web views critical bug, and a patch is released your VM script (Ansible/Chef) can start an AWS instance, get the latest patch(s) and completely build a new system.img automatically. This can all be done with a custom app you write with the backend hosted on your VM, or with Termux or KBOX, and automate/abstract away all the ssh key logins and tasks with a script. Open your app see all available new Android patches, then click "Build" to automate your new system.img with your own signatures.
Of course you don't have to use any of these tools, you could learn about their innards then roll your own software. If you are a javascript developer have the pf firewall dump it into your custom interpreter on the VM, that can look for unusual behaviour and just pass scrubbed js to your browser on the phone.
Mobile ads are the worst. They hijack the whole screen, float around make it impossible to view content, are a pain to dismiss, and they hijack scrolling.
They are also highly likely to be a carrier for malware. Good riddance to such rubbish
Why was iOS's inclusion of ad blocking capabilities the turning point in what seemed to be an already-unstoppable movement towards a return to sanity for the web?
Why is everyone so scared of ad shops/website owners having to change their business models? I don't understand the hype.
Because iOS was the last major platform on which true adblocking was (AFAIK) completely impossible until this week.
Desktop browsers have had adblocking for ages, and even non-rooted Android devices can block ads in webpages (root is required only to block ads in native apps).
There were many 3rd party browsers on the App Store with ad blocking support since iOS 4 or earlier.
They're terrified, they write a bunch of articles, and it spreads around a little. I'd be really interested to see some data over the next few weeks, so we can determine whether their fears were justified.
Never mind that as the western world has been in a slump for nearly a decade, companies has started to reevaluate their spending. And in the process has come to question the impact web ads have.
For the record as a guy who uses ad blockers religiously and has also worked in the web ad industry, I think it's completely overblown and not much will change.
FTFY
It's a giant secular shift in the industry and we'll all be affected by it. Business models that looked sound a year ago look shaky now; some investment hypotheses will be thoroughly invalidated and others will be proving out.
If you're on the bottom looking up, or the outside looking in; it's going to be awesome. We have the possibility of overturning orthodoxies, the freedom to try new things; etc.
But it's not going to be easy. Display ads have actually been pretty crucial to the ecosystem of capitalism so far. They are the primary means by which potential customers are informed of the existence and desirability of products and services.
One solution is to push people from web sites to native apps that serve the same content but with ads.
The other player in this game are technologists making ad-blockers. Up to this point, these technologists have been only moderately successful in permeating the market.
Ads are so terrible, and ad blockers so effective, that it's a risk for media companies to even talk about ads and ad blockers. It's bad PR for media companies, and an argument against ad-blockers is more likely to simply make more unaware people aware of ad-blockers than it is to persuade ad-blocker users to stop blocking ads. Ad blockers are a problem for media companies, but not a big enough problem to warrant taking the risk of talking about ads.
All that changed when Apple decided to include ad blocking in IOS9. Now ad-blocking will permeate a very large portion of the market, and since Apple is a trendsetter in the mobile market, it's likely that other mobile manufacturers will follow suit. Obviously Google is not going to support ad-blocking in Android, but they'll have a hard time preventing Samsung/Motorola/etc. from shipping with their own ad-blocking software.
Now it's worth the risk for media companies to talk about ads and ad blockers, because if they don't, their entire business model is going to die anyway. So they're trying to persuade consumers that ads are actually in their best interest so that there will be consumer pressure on Android phone manufacturers to allow ads.
I don't think it will work. Consumer pressure only happens when consumers feel pain, and there's no ad-supported media so great that losing it is more painful than ads. The only people who are actually feeling pain from this are people whose businesses are ad-supported, and frankly, I'm quite happy about that: people who tie their business to an immoral, unethical business model should be punished. It's rare that the bad guys actually get what's coming to them.
Anyone who is worried that this is going to hurt technologists: it's only going to hurt the ones who deserve it. I've been programming professionally for 10 years and I've never worked for a company whose business model involved advertising because it disgusts me. This doesn't affect me at all. If you decided to hitch your wagon to the advertising horse, that's your fault; you did a bad thing and I don't feel sorry for you.
I personally don't like commercial television (I hate interruptions in the middle of a show), or pop-ups that get in the way of me reading a page, or pages that are so plastered with ads that it's hard to find the content.
But when I search on Google for a particular kind of product, and it shows me ads for a new instance of that product (that doesn't yet have the organic PageRank), I'm happy to click on the ad to find out about it.
"A bit of advertising" that's well enough targeted and tastefully presented is absolutely a good thing. Every show in a TV series or movie is an advertisement for the next show or installment. Every book is an advertisement for its sequel. Every blog post is an advertisement for the next blog post. Every blog post, Facebook comment, video, or friend telling you about a product is an advertisement for that product. Many of those aren't paid advertisements, but many secretly are.
Saying that "advertising" is blanket wrong is the same as saying "learning about new things is wrong." Because how could you find out about something new if it weren't advertised somehow? What exactly are you protesting?
And for the record, I would pay for a search engine without ads (probably DuckDuckGo).
However, if the recommendation is not truly heartfelt or organic, if the purveyor of the recommendation is a specialist not in the domain of the product but in the domain of making recommendations, it's an "advertisement" and not just a casual recommendation.
And I would prefer a life of haphazard discovery and missing out on a few good products, than a life of having to battle salesmen trying to butt into every aspect of my experience.
Saying that "advertising" is blanket wrong is saying that becoming an expert on selling things regardless of what the things actually are is wrong. It may be a bit of an old-fashioned idea in our age of professional specialization and whatnot, but I stand by it.
If you want to include those things in your definition of advertising, fine, but let's be clear here: that's not what most people here are talking about. Ad-blockers don't block those things.
That's certainly not the definition of "advertisement" I use, either. I have no problem with individuals asking me to check out their thing. It's entirely a different thing for someone to tie this request in with a piece of content in a way that isn't easily separable, using psychologically studied manipulation techniques to invade the very chemistry of my brain, and decrease the quality of my overall experience while doing so, invading my space with their noise and light, telling me my girlfriend isn't hot enough, my clothes aren't nice enough, my penis isn't large enough, I don't make enough money. Fuck those people. There's no way that this is subtle enough that I'm going to be okay with it.
You're saying that you define "advertisements" as the things you don't like.
Google ads sometimes miss the mark, but often are for exactly what I'm searching for. Why would I condemn them along with penis enlargement ads?
And ad blockers absolutely block those things -- Google ads in particular. I just saw, in another thread, how one ad blocker would pull out an ad embedded in the page that was tasteful and relevant, just based on its css class. And the ad block developer was proud of doing this, to the point of mocking the web site creator in the same thread.
My point is that advertising is a spectrum, and you can't just "block all ads" without throwing out the good as well. And a related point is that some advertising is good.
What I was responding to was the allegation that all advertising is bad. And until you're willing to pay for the content you create, that advertising is necessary to pay for it.
I pay for Netflix and Amazon Prime to avoid commercials.
No, I'm saying that talking about the definition of "advertisements" as if you're too dense to understand what people mean when they say "advertisements" in this context is a distraction.
I'm not arguing for any definition of "advertisement". I don't believe words have inherent meanings. I believe that people should try to understand what people are saying instead of being pedantic.
> Google ads sometimes miss the mark, but often are for exactly what I'm searching for. Why would I condemn them along with penis enlargement ads?
Because they're a failure of Google to provide a good service. If they're exactly what you're searching for, they should be the top search result. And if I come to Google's page looking for good search results, I definitely don't want to see an ad where I would expect to see the top search result.
> My point is that advertising is a spectrum, and you can't just "block all ads" without throwing out the good as well. And a related point is that some advertising is good.
I disagree. There is no situation where I want to be manipulated into buying a service or product I didn't specifically come to a page for. There are no good ads.
> What I was responding to was the allegation that all advertising is bad. And until you're willing to pay for the content you create, that advertising is necessary to pay for it.
All advertising is bad. I'm willing to pay for the content I consume (and I do in many cases where it's possible to do so).
Counterexamples:
* Paid placement on Google Search pages for exactly the thing you're searching for.
* Affiliate link ads for products on pages that review the product.
* Paid reviews of games, or products on Amazon: Many reviews posted on Amazon, and some professional YouTube reviewers, are paid reviews. If I'm in the review section of a web site, I am there to see a review. If I'm searching for a game review on YouTube, I want to see a review. I expect to be told that they got a product for free to do the review, but it's also the primary content. But it's also a paid ad.
Advertising is not just psychological manipulation to prefer Pepsi to Coke. It's also communication of the existence of a product to a potential audience that wants that product.
>There are no good ads.
You're using that term again, and I don't think you know what it means.
If you use the term to mean "ads are anything that I don't want," then the statement is tautological.
If you use the term to mean "ads are anything that is paid content," then that would exclude anything that is relevant but that had been paid to be included on that page. I've seen that happen many times -- that some new product is bootstrapped into organic search results via paid advertising.
What is your definition, if not the above?
And how do you expect a new product to be promoted if not through advertising? You don't just grow organic search results by magic, and waiting for word of mouth to be enough to promote a product is a pretty sure way to kill a company. Even advertising by getting a product placement on blogs tends to be practically worthless in terms of conversion numbers. Are you just saying "no new products are necessary, I'm fine with what I have"?
That's a perfect example of confirmation bias. You're ignoring all the times that fails to justify the times it succeeds. This doesn't change the fact that the heuristic is broken: I don't want the content that the creators paid to be the top result, I want the top result to be what I searched for. If those happen to be the same, that doesn't justify the crappy heuristic. And if the ad produces better results than Google, that's a major fail on Google's part: it still doesn't prove that "whoever paid for the space and vaguely resembles what I want" is the heuristic I want used to produce the top of my Google search results.
> Affiliate link ads for products on pages that review the product.
There are so many things wrong with this. This sort of advertising manipulates reviews and makes them untrustworthy, and it means that only products which can pay for affiliate links get reviewed.
> Paid reviews of games, or products on Amazon: Many reviews posted on Amazon, and some professional YouTube reviewers, are paid reviews. If I'm in the review section of a web site, I am there to see a review. If I'm searching for a game review on YouTube, I want to see a review. I expect to be told that they got a product for free to do the review, but it's also the primary content. But it's also a paid ad.
Paid bias is exactly not what I want when I am looking for a review.
> Advertising is not just psychological manipulation to prefer Pepsi to Coke. It's also communication of the existence of a product to a potential audience that wants that product.
What you're not understanding here is that ads don't add to my knowledge. Just because I don't see ads for 10 products doesn't mean I'm not going to find 10 products I like. It just means I'm going to find different products. And since I'll be finding products using my own toolset rather than whatever crap advertisers smear in my face, I'll get better results. Ads don't make it easier to find products, they add noise to the signal and make it harder to find products.
In short: there's no shortage of information. Ads are just crappy information.
>> There are no good ads.
> You're using that term again, and I don't think you know what it means.
You're being intentionally dense. I'm talking about "stuff that ad blockers can block". If you want to hand-wave and argue about the definition of words as if they have an inherent meaning and as if you aren't intelligent enough to get what I'm saying from context, you're going to be talking to yourself; I'm not going to have a pedantic argument.
> And how do you expect a new product to be promoted if not through advertising? You don't just grow organic search results by magic, and waiting for word of mouth to be enough to promote a product is a pretty sure way to kill a company. Even advertising by getting a product placement on blogs tends to be practically worthless in terms of conversion numbers. Are you just saying "no new products are necessary, I'm fine with what I have"?
This is true now, but it wouldn't be true if we could get rid of advertisers completely and only have word of mouth and organic search results. The reason these very good tools don't work is because advertisers have broken them.
OF COURSE I want new products. But I want ones that become popular because they're good, not because someone paid to shove them in my face when I was looking for something else. Not only do ads not provide that, they make it harder for me to find the good stuff because they clutter up the information stream with crap.
You want new products, and you want organic search results, but you don't want ads to promote a product.
You just want heuristics that can determine what's a good product (or other search result) and show it to you even when no one has ever seen or evaluated the product before. (If everyone blocked all ads and all spam, how would you bootstrap a new product? Spamming bloggers?)
That's called a nondeterministic algorithm. An algorithm that magically "does the right thing."
>This is true now, but it wouldn't be true if we could get rid of advertisers completely and only have word of mouth and organic search results.
Because no one will ever be able to exploit those magical heuristics you're positing above.
Waiting for word of mouth to promote a product is equally magical thinking, unless you have unlimited money to burn. If someone has put up the investment to create a new product, they don't have time to wait for potentially years for the product to end up popular. You need to fail or succeed quickly.
Just developing a product sometimes needs enough eyes to get the feedback you need to improve your product to be useful, to tune the product to be what people need.
You want the awesome new products, but only after other people have vetted them for you. Other people who have looked at and evaluated product they've found through ads. Which you don't want to look at. Read about Kant's Categorical Imperative to understand my opinion of that behavior.
At best, a even a "tasteful" ad requires you to
0. Interrupt whatever you were doing.
1. Parse text or recognize the basic features of an image.
2. Run whatever heuristics you use to decide if the parsed data is an ad.
3. Try to skip past the ad, either temporally or spatially.
4. *Continue* to monitor the ad until you recognize that it no longer
impedes the thing you interrupted in #0.
> every
If your definition of "advert" is so broad it includes everything, it's not a particularly useful definition. Ad blockers (and this discussion in general) are talking about ads that are not the content the user requested; otherwise ad blockers would ban the entire page.
[1] http://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt-...
No, it doesn't.
A good Google ad will be about the exact thing you're searching for. And yet ad blockers will aggressively attempt to block every such ad.
>Ad blockers (and this discussion in general) are talking about ads that are not the content the user requested; otherwise ad blockers would ban the entire page.
They block Google ads, and so are blocking content that can be useful to the user.
The first result has high PageRank. If no one has heard of a new product, how can it get high PageRank without some kind of promotion?
Who cares? I don't want sites that "bootstrap popularity", I want sites with quality content.
To quote XKCD[1]: "I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at." If you're more worried about getting your content onto the front page of Google than about having content that's good enough to end up on the front page of Google, you're never going to produce anything I care about.
EDIT: The question "How exactly do you bootstrap popularity?" is the most repugnant, repulsive thing on this thread. I can at least empathize with people who are trying to create content and now have to find a different way to fund it. But you're literally just trying to achieve popularity without doing anything that deserves to be popular. It's people like you that I'm trying to avoid when I use an ad blocker. Your goals are diametrically opposed to mine. I don't want anything to do with whatever crap you want to shove in my face. I want the internet to be a place for people to share art and information that helps push humanity forward, and you want to add noise to the signal. Your small-minded profiteering is literally holding humanity back, and I can't wait for you to go out of business.
Let's say you're a plumber in a city. You have a family at home you need to support. You'd like to rank top ten for "plumber in cityx" but you're competing with hundreds of alternatives, including directories and so on.
How do you demonstrate your ability for a decent chance at ranking well? Door knock to get early customers and then rely on word of mouth or reviews? That's advertising with a shotgun approach and could intrude on people when they're at home with their family. Letter box drop? Advertising.
AdWords and decent contextual advertising not an unreasonable option at getting in front of people already interested in your service.
The person wants to bypass actual quality and compete by advertising instead of on merits. They're changing the rules in a bad way, and I don't much care about their intent: they're screwing up the internet and it's repugnant even if they don't intend it to be.
> Let's say you're a plumber in a city. You have a family at home you need to support. You'd like to rank top ten for "plumber in cityx" but you're competing with hundreds of alternatives, including directories and so on.
So either you're not a good enough plumber to be working on your own, or you've worked with an experienced plumber and have built up your reputation that way.
You're talking about this in the context where people need to manipulate their rankings to compete, but the only reason they need to manipulate their rankings is because their competition is manipulating their rankings. I'm saying I would rather remove manipulation from the system and let people compete on their actual merits. Ads are the problem, not the solution.
The person was me, and you're completely mistaken about what I said, much less the intent. "Actual quality" is not an objective metric, and many ads are promoting new products that are high quality.
>So either you're not a good enough plumber to be working on your own, or you've worked with an experienced plumber and have built up your reputation that way.
I call BS. You've obviously no real experience promoting a product or service from scratch.
You could have 30 years of experience as a plumber and go out on your own as an independent contractor and you'd be starting from ZERO. Not from experience. You can't just take your former employer's customers; that's unethical and typically against your employment contract. So you have to find new customers under a new brand.
And it's arguably worse for promoting other products or services today. I had 20 years of experience when I struck out and started my own company again; that experience opened doors when I made personal connections to work with people, but it meant crap for my indie game release. Most popular games would fail without being propped up by advertising (and some would be less valuable to their players if they weren't as popular -- I'm thinking of games where you play against others, and so the more people who play, the more valuable the game is to everyone. Standard network effect).
>You're talking about this in the context where people need to manipulate their rankings to compete
Ranking in Google isn't magic. It's an algorithm based (in large part) on popularity. You're basically saying no new business or product ever has the right to exist, because anything that isn't popular now has no right to become popular.
How exactly do you expect something to become popular quickly enough for a company not to go out of business without getting the product in front of enough consumers?
Often Google's model of SEO with the importance placed on backlinks and unique content does little but serve the plumber who does less actual plumbing and more trading links or writing keyphrase-laden blogs or whatever else.
There are two sides to this coin. You could argue that they have a hard time gaining traction because they aren't advertising. But I'm arguing that they are having a hard time gaining traction because other people are advertising.
> Often Google's model of SEO with the importance placed on backlinks and unique content does little but serve the plumber who does less actual plumbing and more trading links or writing keyphrase-laden blogs or whatever else.
Often your model of advertising does little but serve the plumber who does less actual plumbing and more buying ads.
Just because Google also fails doesn't mean that ads are a successful way to find information. Ads and Google's search can both be bad heuristics.
And many aren't. The question is: what heuristic better matches the average person's definition of "actual quality".
Let's look at this as if you were approaching this as a fresh, new problem: you're trying to design a heuristic that finds products that most closely match what people want. You'd have to be an idiot to think that "products that paid me to rank them higher" is a good heuristic. Even very naive heuristics would be better.
Paid advertising serves advertisers and people creating crappy products who can artificially inflate their image. It doesn't serve consumers or people creating quality products.
> Ranking in Google isn't magic. It's an algorithm based (in large part) on popularity. You're basically saying no new business or product ever has the right to exist, because anything that isn't popular now has no right to become popular.
No, I'm saying that advertising breaks popularity as a good metric. If it weren't for ads, organic popularity would be a good metric of quality. But advertising allows people to manipulate popularity in their favor without actually providing quality.
> How exactly do you expect something to become popular quickly enough for a company not to go out of business without getting the product in front of enough consumers?
I don't. I think that creating something good takes time. Why do you think people are entitled to a get-rich-quick scheme?
Or maybe which ones got online back when SEO was trivial. (I once ranked #2 in my country for "make money" with a 5-minute site almost completely devoid of useful info.) Or when keyphrase domains dominated.
For many industries, AdWords is just another layer in the arms race completely detached from the actual product/service.
Do you honestly think ads are a decent reflection of which plumbers are actually best? Or just which ones spend more time on advertising than under a sink?
At least when I search, Google is trying to provide me quality search results. I'm not arguing it's perfect: it's obviously not. But ads aren't even trying to serve my interests, they're trying to serve the interests of advertisers.
For example it was the case for a very long time that if you searched for 'firefox' on Google the ad at the top of the results would take you to a site offering downloads of firefox that came bundled with malware[1].
So it's quite possible for Google ads to claim to be "the exact thing you're searching for", but to actually be tricking you. Thus the user needs to think carefully before clicking any Google ad. This is true of search results too of course, but it's vastly harder to game the search results to get your malware into the top spot for a term like firefox, compared to just buying up the adwords inventory, so the chance of getting scammed is much lower.
Google ads are not just text ads of course. Their display ads include many of those big fake download buttons that you find on any software download site. Yet another minefield for users that makes a simple task into a battle of wits and requires constant vigilance. The biggest illustration I had of that was using a fresh Windows VM last year to download some Windows software, and falling for one of those fake download button adsense ads. The reason being that I normally use an ad blocker and I wasn't mentally prepared for the challenge of finding the download link on the page that wasn't a landmine.
Given that Google were happy to serve up ads for malware for years, despite being told about it frequently, I have absolutely no sympathy for them, and I would recommend that everybody I know uses an ad blocker to block ads on Google search results pages.
[1] http://i.imgur.com/Ote9c2k.png an example from the start of the year, taken when I wrote this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8879229
The last time I was on holiday in the US it seemed like the TV shows were just interludes between adverts for expensive brands of anti-depressants and weird painkillers (which turn out to be Paracetamol but for $10 per pack instead of E1).
By the end of the first month, I didn't miss TV.
Moving to the US was such a shock, I can't believe people here just put up with this shit, it is impossible to focus on what you're watching when it's interrupted literally every 5 minutes.
But the tech community lost their collective shit and threw around loaded terms like "extortion", "mafia" and "protection scheme" (I'm not exaggerating, search for those terms on this domain), which made any nuance impossible.
Almost anyone who produces content and puts it on the internet makes money from ads. It's not just limited to "big media companies".
People can't seem to accept the fact that ad blockers are hurting the entire internet, not just "big media". All that free content you consume every day? Yeah, it's subsidized by ads.
Yes, but small content producers don't control the public discourse on this. You're attacking something that has nothing to do with what I said.
But if you want to bring it up: I don't care. Small content producers who rely on advertising for revenue are just as bad as large content producers who rely on advertising for revenue. Just because you're a small business doesn't give you an excuse to rely on a bad business model.
> People can't seem to accept the fact that ad blockers are hurting the entire internet, not just "big media". All that free content you consume every day? Yeah, it's subsidized by ads.
Which content is that? Do you mean all that crap I have to sift through to get to stuff I care about? Or do you mean the stuff I care about that I would rather pay for than have to click around an ad?
Ad blockers are not hurting the internet, ads are hurting the internet.
The internet wouldn't exist without ads, kiddo. At the very least, it wouldn't be recognizable. It wouldn't be something that is ubiquitous to our daily lives.
The Internet I remember 15 years ago before there was a myriad of clickbait reposting sites was chugging along just fine.
anything really small that happens in SF gets blow out of proportion here and in the circles we belong.
and since IOS is a driving revenue source for start ups aiming for fame in SF in the hopes to get funding/exit, then anything apple do will drive people crazy here.
it's mostly irrelevant anywhere else, we just happen to drive the ephemeral tech press
Meanwhile, Apple was trying to sell hardware, and Flash makes hardware suck. It runs hot, it sucks up battery, and consumers blame the hardware, not Flash.
Who says, “Flash has terrible battery life?” Nobody. They say, “My iPhone barely lasts an afternoon before I need to charge it again.” Flash freeloads on the hardware, because nobody blames it for their bad mobile experience. In hindsight, it’s obvious why Apple refused to support Flash: It degrades the iPhone experience.
So Apple “blocked” Flash, and iPhone grew anyways, and it was Flash that got killed by iPhone, not iPhone killed by Flash.
Now Apple is making it easy to kill ads. And it’s for the same reason: iPhone owners would rather read certain web sites on their desktop browsers, because the experience of reading on the iPhone is terrible, thanks to ads. They suck up battery and hog the limited viewport.
If this had happened five years ago, people would laugh and say Apple was shooting itself in the foot, and that web sites would simply block Apple users that use ad blockers. But having seen what happened to Flash, they realize that there’s a reasonable chance that Apple users blocking ads will take ads to the same place Flash went: The trash can.
The web sites that figure out a different business model will beat those that block iOS user who block ads. The newspapers that play along with iAds will beat those who try to serve ads through HTML. And that means the industry could be about to receive a major disruption, one that didn’t happen on the desktop.
Just as Flash wasn’t killed by Flash blocking on the desktop, but by Apple refusing to support it on iOS.
This a short-term reset though that the industry would do well to capitalize on and change some of the thinking that got us into this mess now.
But on the other hand, there are non-intrusive ads that are text or simple image based ones. Those ads get hit in the cross-fire of ad-blocking.
Most of the sites that are producing content charge nothing from the user except for in the form of advertising. That's not a big ask most of the time.
It's like Google providing this amazing service, of cataloging and indexing THE ENTIRE INTERNET and providing relevant and fast search results to everyone, and all they ask is that users are displayed simple text ads. It's not a big ask for the service they provide.
I realize you can whitelist sites with ad-block. BUT, if you are going to a webpage to read and ingest content, I would argue that morally the transaction is to disable ad-block to view the content.
1) Several of them that I have tested break basic functionality - videos not playing etc.
2) Adblock Plus, the leader in this space, decided to get greedy and not launch a blocker, but rather an entire browser, which I suspect most people will not embrace. I certainly won't, but I'd love ABP on my iOS Safari.
3) Peace, the most popular of the ad blockers, was removed after the author had an attack of conscience [1].
4) The ABP folks have decided to offer to pay those rolling out iOS adblockers for using their "acceptable ads" list. Sort of like a reverse adsense - basically extortion revenue sharing [2] .
[1] http://www.wired.com/2015/09/popular-ad-blocker-pulled-ios-a...
[2] http://bgr.com/2015/09/17/ios-9-ad-blocking-scandal-adblock-...
Paste a link to an article, get a minimal version to read.
Source code: https://github.com/mpgarate/justread/ Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8319903
I use it for sites with so tiny fonts, it's impossible to read without zooming the page.
And content sites / articles that take forever to load on my slow bandwidth.
It even helps for sites that start playing videos automatically - wasting my precious bandwidth.
> Khoi Vinh is a graphic designer, blogger, and former Design Director for The New York Times, where he worked from January 2006 until July 2010.
https://github.com/simonlindholm/toggle-gifs
Sadly since then many sites etc has moved to gifv, basically a webm with a different name.
Recently, I had a website pop up a fullscreen "Rotate your device" banner. There are no words to express the anger and hatred that consumed me in an instant.
Personally, I remember running proxmitron to block ads and tracking junk, and adding functionality to websites back in the day.
Nothing has really changed in the last 15 years.
1) Content costs money to produce. No way around that. Only option is pay directly or indirectly (via ads). What we need is better facilitators of both.
2) Ads are not going anywhere. The industry is not "in trouble" or imploding. There are dozens of ways around adblock and much of adtech is actually run behind the scenes server-to-server. It's not impossible to bring it 100% server-side and serve the final page as a mix of content + ads. This is effectively what happens with native apps already and there's an increasing amount of sponsored content. Content consumption is way up with billions of ad clicks, video plays and articles read everyday. The ad industry is stronger than ever.
3) Blame for the current situation is shared by all. Publishers should have better standards. Ad networks should use better formats and engineering. Advertisers should buy better stuff and know where/what is actually running. Just follow the money - buyers > networks > pubs with about a dozen layers in the middle, everyone trying to make the people who pay them happy. Users are not in this chain unfortunately.
4) Payments are not a magical solution. Most people do not want to pay, even if you might and the web is too granular for site-specific subscriptions which requires a scalable 3rd party. This is VERY hard to do considering the mechanics of the internet but there are things in the works like Google's Contributor program. Sadly results have NOT been great because any amount of money adds friction and most editorial/news content does not provide replay value like a music track would, but there is promise with network scale, bundling and the option to choose the level of ads/payment involved as your browse.
5) Browsing via ads is far more anonymous than payments, which involve credit cards which means name, address, birthdays, purchase history, credit history, etc. Contrary to lot of FUD, ad networks usually rely on 3rd party companies for data and they mostly focus on wide demographics and interests. If you're worried about privacy, then look at Google and Facebook who are both the de facto leaders in adtech primarily because of all the data users willing give them. Those are the companies that know who you really are on every device.
6) Finally I just want to say that the industry is not stupid or clueless, it's just massive (150B+) with lots of politics and back-room deals. Any industry this size usually takes years or decades to adapt and there's still a lot to figure out so change will be slow but ultimately the old guard will be retired and better stuff will come along. It's accelerating now so that's a good sign. I know everyone thinks they can do better with some brilliant idea and flip things around instantly but it's just not that simple. Please remember there are plenty of smart, talented, hard-working people (just like you!) that are working on this. I promise we will figure it out.
It feels like this was down-voted by those who disagree with the content. Such a sad state for hacker news.
uBlock is such a sweet sweet slap in the face of such advertisers. I'd love to see small text ads that are relevant to my search or content. Giant banner with flash and won't disappear? Forget about it.
There's a lot of complexity to this industry and it certainly isn't anywhere close to dying.
Thanks,
I have no idea what this "non stop barrage of ads in the App Store" is you referred to.
"help, doctor, it hurts when I do this"
What would you think about Chrome providing a filter-capability to enable blocking all ads except for Google's assets?
For eg, how many of you use an app to browse hn? Even though the website is so lean and fast, it is horrible to use on an ipad.
Other browsers like Firefox and Chrome completely fail at reflowing HN.
They're working on improving it but it's an ongoing process.
I generally prefer the reading experience on my iPad because of this, actually. The only reason I go back to the normal site on my mac is if I want to comment, or if I want to make use of the 'new comments since last visit' feature (via a chrome plugin).
If the hn.premii.com developer is reading this: any chance you could add a visual indicator for new comments? would make my experience perfect.