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Comment by sparkzilla | Hacker News Reader

I'm fairly sure that if publishers removed popups (ads and subscription forms), ads that move the text while you're reading it, and autoplay video or audio ads, then most people would be happy. As it stands, readers are bombarded with ads that ruin the actual reading experience.

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No, that wouldn't be enough. The real problem is profiling. It's spooky and most tech-savvy people dissent it. And they (aka we) are the ones that influence the general public as to adopting ad blocking technologies.

It's one thing having Google serving me personalized ads which I know come from my search history, and a whole other having the same thing happening from various ad-serving companies with which I have no affiliation at all. Where the hell do they get my profile from? And who regulates that market?

Most tech-savvy users aren't the problem, ad-blockers aren't popular because some people don't want to be tracked, they are popular because most people don't like being annoyed and spammed with obnoxiously loud advertisements.

I beg to differ. Ad blocking has been around for almost a decade, AdBlock Plus was first published in 2006. But if you take a look at historical usage [1] of ad blocking technologies you’ll see that it started spiking after 2012, right when profiling was widely adopted by the digital advertising marked due to the usage of programmatic advertising. Also it’s tech related sites that are taking the biggest toll [2] (although that could also be attributed to adoption of video ads). I also don’t think it’s irrelevant that ad blocking usage in European countries is twice that in US [2]. Generally speaking I think Europeans are more concerned for their privacy.

Just to be clear, I won’t argue that ads are annoying and that makes a lot of users willing to use something to block them. I just have the impression that it was after the adoption of profiling technologies that ad blocking usage boomed.

[1] http://www.mondaynote.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/347_adb...

[2] http://digiday.com/publishers/global-rise-ad-blocking-4-char...

Exactly with almost no impact, only in the past 1-2 years did it became a major issue as more and more people were installing them and now with Apple and the likes actively promoting them it became a common knowledge.

As for the European part, as a European I would not agree to that statement at all most people here do not show any more insight into technical privacy than who I know in the US.

VPN is also quite common here in Europe and not for any privacy concern but because regional blocking of content is a plague here. And it's not only to access US content Europe is a nightmare when it comes to distribution rights for IP since even tho we have a unified market every country still has it's own distributors.

So if a Belgian user wants to access French content they more often than not have to use a VPN to get a French IP because otherwise no streaming for them, same goes for an Austrian or a Swiss user who wants to consume German content. And that's before going into the insanity of regional content for the likes of Netflix.

You also forget that Europe has adopted Chrome much faster than in the US because from 2010 to 2014 they had to have the browser choice menu for all versions of windows which were shipped in the EU upon installation (You can also see a short spike in IE users once that directive expired in dec 2014, presumably just to get Chrome/FF again ;)) which meant that they had the ability to install free adblockers (adblock for IE costs money, and is a shite reverse proxy).

They get that information from tracking you across the wide internet (because you see the banners which also track you) and they sell targeted advertisement to specific audiences using real time bidding systems where you can bid for advertisement space for a specific audience ('interested in cars', 'interested in electronics', 'probably male', 'age 30 to 40') etc. That profile data is gathered/derived from your browsing behavior.

I don't see it as a big issue when an ad follows me around the net. Yesterday I searched for a musical instrument on Ebay; now ads for the instrument display on Facebook. They may, in some way, invade my privacy, but they don't invade my reading experience.

Add in "ads using any kind of animation", "ads that slow site loading in any way", and "ads that use up limited mobile bandwidth" and you'd get closer. When reading text, any kind of animation in view proves quite distracting, which likewise "ruins the actual reading experience". And ad scripts and ad servers use up bandwidth and slow down page loads.

Disabling Javascript and making flash click-to-play take care of most (all?) of these. Though the latter has become more difficult to do (in Chrome) on either a whitelist or blacklist basis since Chrome recently made the controls to quickly change a sites content policy more buried.

@Sparkzilla, I agree. I don't know which I find the most annoying. The videos that play themselves or the pop-ups which when trying to close takes you to a whole new site. Damn it! I just want to read the news.

> most people would be happy

Except those on slow or limited data connections that suffer because of image ads, and everyone who opposes tracking ads on principle.

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