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Comment by thirdsun | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. I think Wired, as well as other publishers, are missing the point here. I don't have any issue with ads in general - but if we're talking about ads that Wired has no control over and just fetches from a network, it's a whole different story. The same applies to ads that significantly increase page load times, bandwidth usage (I'm forced to use a metered LTE connection) or privacy concerns.

Simple static ads would render most of these concerns unnecessary, but I doubt there's any incentive to go back to that kind of "outdated" advertising.

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Simple static ads that are not huge, distracting or obnoxious, that are delivered free of any script or similar code, and all hosted by the first party. Those are the ads I would probably find acceptable.

They should be able to still do this too; presumably they still have an ad department for the dead tree version of things. That means they have the people in place to sell ads and integrate them into their content. Of course, magazine ads don't really fit your "not huge, distracting or obnoxious" requirement but their ad people can evolve too. There's probably even a business in this for websites/companies that don't have dedicated ad departments.

But most people who block ads just don't want to see ads. Your technical concerns are in the minority.

I think they just don't want to see ads as intrusive as the ones found these days. Neither do I. While my main concerns are performance, bandwidth, security and privacy, I don't think that simple static image ads would have led to the widespread adoption of ad blockers we're currently seeing.

In my opinion it's due to the fact that ads became very intrusive lately - video, audio, flash, popups, fullscreen overlays, endless scripts, you name it.

Absolutely. The number of people who would still resort to blocking ads if they were non-targeted, static, tastefully done yet clearly recognizable as advertisements, served locally, non-tracking, and non-obtrusive would probably have been negligible. But now there is an entire economy that depends on advertisements that track you and know you and need to be served via third party brokers, because if they didn't they wouldn't sell.

I don't know the solution to fix this mess, but I will gladly help pop the current bubble so something more useful can replace it.

If you put a static ad image hosted on your own server on the page, something like http://wired.com/img/jhfkfhfuhi34cn2.jpg, ad blocker will not be able to distinguish it from other images and won't block it.

There is also common banner dimensions that get blocked, but it is easy to defeat by adding a pixel somewhere that fits into site design.

Problem with this approach is that you can't just slap some random ad network script there and be done with it, no targeted ads, tracking etc - basically everything people don't like and a reason to use ad blockers.

It's amazing why they don't just do this. Part of the reason why is that ad blocking is so easy, so most people will just do it... especially if it has the added benefit of removing the 5 second delay on YouTube videos due to ads.

But I don't care enough to wipe out static in page ads, especially since those don't have the added cost of tracking me anymore than visiting the site does. In short, I still wouldn't like those adds, but I would like them a lot more than the ads I currently block.

I think adblockers block content which usually is offsite, so it's not a matter of "technical concern".

EDIT: rephrase

I don't even require that they be static - I find ads relevant to the content I'm looking at useful sometimes, and particularly for searches I may end up going with something advertised in the results (generally on DuckDuckGo, occasionally on Google and Google Shopping).

What I object to is the cesspool of unidentifiable tracking and god-knows-what-else crud.

> slow ads

heck i block ads as a side effect of blocking things like Google analytics.

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