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Comment by kardos | Hacker News Reader

Blocking all adverts is short sighted. It works at present because the ads are delivered in a pretty obvious manner and it's easy enough to drop the scripts/elements. Blocking everything will become a much harder game once the content producers figure out how to bake ads directly into the content. How are you going to distinguish between an image that's part of the article and an advertising image when they are both served from the content producer's host?

Installing an adblocker is a reaction to an overwhelming onslaught of ads. The solution is some sort of compromise between "full on malvertising shitshow" and "eliminate all ad-funded business models".

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EasyList[1] already contains various per-site adblocking based on CSS selectors, with several packages for different languages and site type. I think the community is big enough and motivated enough to manually lists any ads on most websites.

Also first-party advertising is complicated because it prevents the advertising company from publishing the ads it wants, since the ad would be delivered by the site itself. While this is the business model of Google and Facebook, most sites don't have the analytics power to publish the most relevant ads to their users.

[1] https://easylist.adblockplus.org/en/

Re easylist, that is what I meant by 'pretty obvious'.

Re first party advertising, the scorched earth blocking approach is going to push the advertising industry to take over first party advertising. Your site runs httpd and advertd, where advertd receives ads from the industry to inject into the pages, and returns tracking data to the industry. If this doesn't exist yet, it's definitely under construction.

> How are you going to distinguish between an image that's part of the article and an advertising image when they are both served from the content producer's host?

That would at least stop 3rd-party ad tracking, and would make ad malware less likely

I doubt that. What I think we'll see is that the content producers will inline the ad-industry adverts & tracking code and send the tracking data back to them. Which amounts to routing the advertising machinery through the content producer's network rather than directly to the client. I don't see where the vetting process will be vastly improved or how it would lead to fewer trackers.

You can't get a tracking code that tracks users across all the sites they visit unless the user gets their tracking from a single site.

The best thing the tracking industry _could_ have done is not pair it with stuff you don't want to view like adverts. If tracking was done via jquery hosted on a CDN, it's quite feasible we wouldn't even know it was happening.

> If tracking was done via jquery hosted on a CDN, it's quite feasible we wouldn't even know it was happening.

That almost certainly is being done, and we probably know about it.

Surely google track their cdns?

If they do, they aren't using tracking cookies. I can't guarantee they aren't doing any sneaky browser fingerprinting (like panopticlick.eff.org) to track me, though.

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