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Comment by nhebb | Hacker News Reader

The only reason ad blockers work is because they serve external resources. When media sites really wise up, they will figure out a way to serve ads from their own domains. Building a system for ad bidding, rotation, tracking, advertiser monitoring, and external auditing is too big of a task for many sites, so I think there's a startup opportunity to develop and sell a platform that can easily be installed on a server.

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They already have... My employer are running multiple native advertising techs to alleviate the problem of ad blocking. We are also running anti-ad-blocker techs to measure and take action on users with active ad-blocking technologies.

Personally, I'm thoroughly against this arms race where both we and our users are loosing. But the financial side of our company sees it a different way.

You're talking about 3rd-party tech? Could you name one (or some?). Given that Linux is big server-side the tech would have to fit into that stack so I'd like to see how that's done for curiosity sake.

I think having it native is actually better because then companies will see the impact on their bandwidth and compute resources so that'll force ad-tech to be less bloaty. In theory.

Ad's are blocked at such sites by URL path (for images) or by DOM path, or by regex. It is even easier and predates adblock, see Greasemonkey plugin.

You're thinking of domain based adblockers. There's also DOM modifying adblockers and javascript manipulating adblockers.

Why would spam detections techniques that we use for email not work for content?

Can you give me extra details on this topic. I mean some extra information and resources.

There is not much to say. Back in the "old days", you had article with text and images (related to the article, e.g. images/1.jpg, images/2.jpg) and somewhere in the middle of article was banners/123.jpg, but it could easily be images/3.jpg. This was mostly good because both parties (content provider and content consumer) both pay the same price for the bandwidth. This keep ads on the sane levels because too much add would be costly for provider so they keep them moderate.

Then something changed and ads was outsourced to third parties, so instead of images/3.jpg you would have link to external domain, e.g. http://ads.com/3.jpg. Because this way content provider no longer pay for ad bandwidth (it is hosted on other server) they could literally add infinite amount of ads. 8MB jpeg? no problem 3MB javascript? no problem, 4MB animated gif? no problem. This will chew through your data plan very fast so users started blocking ads, the simplest way is block content delivery networks of all ad companies.

Next logical step (for displaying ads) is to move them back to the original domain of content provider. Then you cannot tell which of then images/1.jpg, images/2.jpg or images/3.jpg is ad, unless some human will mark it. This is difficult, prone to errors and abuse and would make ad blockers gigantic.

Bandwidth is not the only reason to block ads. Removing distractions is more important for me.

It's possible (or should be possible, it was/is in the browser iCab) to block images depending on their size (and ads often are of the same size, e.g. banner ads). Sure, the browser has to start loading them, but after reading an image's metadata it can stop. And if the img tag contains the image's dimensions, even that can be skipped.

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