Forbes Site, After Begging You Turn Off Adblocker, Serves Up Malware 'Ads'
techdirt.com
techdirt.com
1. Click Forbes link 2. Get blank page where ad should be and "Continue to site" link 3. Click continue 4. Get request to turn off ad blocker 5. Laugh that I can't remember that Forbes blocks ad blockers 6. Google the headline 7. Read the story someplace else
Hope that helps.
a[href*="forbes.com"] {
color: red;
}
If you don't just want red links you can also combine it with pseudo elements, e.x.
a[href*="forbes.com"]:after {
content: "[warning: forbes]"; /* or an emoji or something */
}
Stylebot lets me just write css, or can grab an element off the page and they give you a GUI to edit the most common style properties. The ability to just write CSS as simple as .stupid-ad { display: none; } is what I was after.
To anyone who wishes to do this, you can add more sites by listing them, comma-separated, except for the last entry, like so:
a[href^="siteone.com"]::after, a[href^="sitetwo.com"]::after, a[href^="sitethree.com"]::after { content: "[generic warning because multiple sites]" }
Host file.
forbes.com 127.0.0.1
At home I have a giant list of sites I've blocked for this.
#Requests I turn off uBlock. Doing them the courtesy of not giving them any traffic instead.
WestCoastJustin shared a great one-liner [2] for checking the list to make sure there were no nefarious entries; here it is without the unnecessary cat command:
grep -v '#' steves_hosts | awk '{print $1}'| sort | uniq -c
All it is doing is slowing their death. News which doesn't get consumed will die out.
I'm of the opinion that ad-based business models on the internet will not work much longer. I'm of the opinion that only three business models will survive the next decade:
1) Collecting and selling user data in bulk (Massive sites that have access to said data)
2) Paywalls (Most sites)
3) Donations (minority, tight knit communities)
Will the web be worse off for it? Potentially. But I see ads as extremely harmful to people and not something to be tolerated regardless of the reason. From the subtle control over peoples' psyche, serving malware, or even being straight up scams... I don't see advertisements as moral and think the world would be better off without them.
add this line to your host file:
0.0.0.0 taboola.com
https://gist.github.com/bcruddy/4a994621c7ba050b19ddc956769e...
1. Install https://github.com/reek/anti-adblock-killer
2. Laugh maniacally.
Sorry, but it's _my_ computer. I control it. Publishers don't get to decide what it does or does not do. I do.
BUT the publisher intercepted you and said "you cannot continue with adblock turned on". Why do you think you have the right to see that content without seeing the ads when the publisher explicitly said you can't do that?
When he wastes your bandwidth with ads, he is the devil, but when you waste his bandwidth, it's perfectly OK?
Technical ability has nothing to do with it. You have the technical ability to stab someone with a knife. You have the technical ability to download a book, copy it and then distribute it. Is that OK too?
Just because you CAN do something does not mean you SHOULD do it.
> you cannot continue with adblock turned on
They don't say that. They tell their users "to continue, please whitelist our site or turn off your adblocker", which is a whole lot more irresponsible and something I am totally not okay with.
People might actually believe the message, they ought to turn off their adblocker and view the site!
I help many non-technical people clean their laptops (yes it takes a lot of time, but I'm a nice guy and it can be done during beers). I install them an adblocker. If the only reason was "because the Internet just looks nicer without ads", I probably wouldn't. But especially for not-very-technical people, an adblocker is usually a better (and way less resource-intensive) security defence than an actual virus scanner.
What if sites like Forbes manage to successfully guilt these people into disabling their adblockers? Forbes will get a few dollars yay and my friends may lose a few hundred because they got ransomware not-yay.
I wish they just told people to go away.
Yes. He can try to stop me, just as I try to stop him. This is the game. It's an antagonistic relationship. There's nothing inherently "wrong" about either side - it just is how it is.
> You are not entitled to see the content.
If their server gives me HTML containing the content, it's up to _my_ computer what to render, therefore I am entitled to see or not see whatever is in that response.
I am very entitled to use of my own computer. They do not get to decide what happens once their content is on my end. If I were sending malicious code to their server in order to remove the adds or similar, you'd have an argument but since it's happening entirely on my computer, you don't. The entitlement to how my computer renders it rests entirely on me.
This is not a game. You just like to freeload and when somebody calls your bull, you throw a tantrum.
Blocking ads will only make things worse, btw. You just don't see it coming, yet. Just wait for the telcos.
You think your privacy is violated now? LOL.
Oh and btw, if you missed it, Verizon bought AOL. Have a nice evening.
This is the same as music/movie piracy. Basically you're doing it because you dont have the legal/physical repercussions of taking other things in life.
With ad blocking you go right to the original source, ask them for a copy of the content, they give it to you, then choose how you're going to render it. They gave you the content. They never made me accept a license agreement on it. I can choose to render it however I damn well please because that's up to my computer. Does IE produce an immoral rendering of the page because it doesn't support a CSS feature they use? What if I load the page in Lynx and don't see ads, is that immoral?
Might depend on your country (or state). But it doesn't really seem like a legally enforceable condition to me. Not to mention all the practical snags of such a demand.
For instance, these ads are generated real-time and are targeted towards the user. Would yielding to that be part of the same demand? If you block or shield against targeting, or even in a private tab, or clearing cookies on exit. You could make the same argument that, this too deprives publishers (part) of their income because tracking is less effective.
What if the ads contain tooling for realtime monitoring how long you are "active" on the page, which parts your mouse hovers on, etc? Are we morally obliged that we run that code and (truthfully) submit that data as well? (Rhetorical question obviously)
Morality is tied to intention. If you can only access something with a screen reader and can't see ads, that's fine. If you're intentionally removing ads while full well knowing what they are for, that's immoral.
Then again morality is subjective to the individual so perhaps this is better described as basic ethics.
All that being said, I'm not sure how me seeing the ads helps them as I never click on them anyways, but I chalk that up to their business issue. I do not necessarily believe that just because they don't provide their content in a form/implicit contract that I wish to participate in, that I am still entitled to consume that content. A prime example for myself is EA Games. I disagree with a lot of their publishing practices and business decisions, but that doesn't mean I play all their games as pirated versions anyways, I simply abstain. Consuming the content by skirting this implied contract only results in this arms race you see in games, online content, and just about any other form of media. It's a competition between users wanting money-free content and publishers wanting to control exactly how their media is distributed and paid for. I don't think either side in this fight is right, but by participating on one side it eggs the other side on.
Wait, I don't get this "business issue". If you really never click the ads, you're ultimately not making anyone any money either. In fact, if you think ad-blocking is bad, merely never clicking on them is even more toxic to that industry. And I don't mean bandwidth. Because now it's the businesses paying to uselessly show you ads who are paying for your free content.
How is that better? You're still consuming your content for free (which is a terrible thing :P), except you're now also voluntarily punishing yourself with advertisements you don't care about that do nobody any favours. Of course you're free to believe that makes up for it, or something (not judging, they used to base entire religions around the concept).
I find it a bit hard to reconcile chalking up never-clicking-ads as their business issue, and simply not downloading and displaying the ads at all (thus also never clicking them) as a user problem.
To be fair, the current anti-anti-adblockers like anti-adblock killer could defeat such a measure as is. Short of rendering their page to an image with ads builtin, there's not much you can do if someone's willing to replace JS.
What do you have against a good old fashioned cat and mouse game?
As it is right now, we are disincentivizing people from participating in a system that actually has a chance of surviving. Without compensation in some form, higher-tier journalism can't survive, and I for one don't think a world where all news comes from amateur bloggers is a better one.
The only way the model is going to change is if everyone adopts ad blockers and anti-anti solutions. And that's not going to happen. So I've got to deal with what we realistically have until someone comes up with this mythical better model and makes it work.
I can't change the model, but I can change what my computer does about it.
They could forbid JavaScript, require simple URLs, and flow their content around well-defined and crafted ad locations. Their site would load quickly, the ads would still attend to the image they intend to project to the reader. Metrics on such ads wouldn't require third party JavaScript to monitor.
None of their readers would be subject to malware. Reader and provider would not be an antagonistic relationship.
They could do all of these things. They seem to have chosen another path, and made the choice for their readers--those they've kept--at the same time.
In short, for most people, a paywall is a much stronger negative than ads, so it's not an obvious why somebody who wants to use ads should just use a paywall.
That said, there are good, defensible reasons to run an ad blocker. Namely, that it's a security risk not to. That's not a moral argument though, and my only issue is with people that think they are justified to consume the content no matter the desires of the producer, that once it's published it's fair game. I have no problem with people that run an ad blocker but acknowledge that it does cause some harm. I count myself in that group.
Oh, I missed the bit where these people were hacking or forging credentials to get the content.
> that once it's published it's fair game.
Of course it is. Once you give me a newspaper I can cut out the articles I want - format shifting if you will. I simply can't duplicate them.
HTML is intended to be interpreted and rendered to the client's specifications. Don't expect this to change, it was designed this way for a reason. If that's not what you want, distribute PNGs.
That's okay, I seem to have missed that part where it's shown how that relates to my statement in any way.
> Of course it is. Once you give me a newspaper I can cut out the articles I want - format shifting if you will. I simply can't duplicate them.
That's after you've already gotten the material. You are addressing the method in which you consume, I am talking about your right (if not legally, morally) to consume. If you walk up to me and ask for my newspaper without offering compensation, and I say "sure, but you have to first look at this pamphlet I'll hand you with it", then I think in this example it is clear that throwing the pamphlet away prior to reading the paper is morally wrong.
Where I think most people differ on this subject is how accurate that analogy is for consuming internet content. If you believe the implication is clear that in visiting a site and retrieving their content that they would like to grant permission to view it based on the either an implicit transaction or an explicit statement (such as here), then you probably fall on one side of this issue. If you believe that no such implicit understanding exists, or where made explicit it's invalid for some reason, you probably fall on the other side of this issue.
For me, the arguments that fall along the lines of "once it's been sent I can do what I want" don't sit well because they feel anti-social in nature. We don't act that way with the people around us, why should be expect it to be entirely different just because we can't see their face? Unaccountability for poor behavior is a downside of anonymity, and something to to by mitigated, not accepted.
> HTML is intended to be interpreted and rendered to the client's specifications. Don't expect this to change, it was designed this way for a reason. If that's not what you want, distribute PNGs.
I don't think this really applies to my position in any way or the argument as I see it in any way.
For me, guilt trips are anti-social in nature. And from a business perspective, they're a losing proposition, because over time people just stop feeling guilty.
It's fine if you have your morals, but your morals are not my morals. And it's a more effective argument to talk about yourself anyway: "I view ads because I believe it's a fair exchange for the publisher's content."
So, while I'm kind of a hypocrite for saying you shouldn't guilt trip people, what I really mean is that I've found it's better to talk about my own morals than to tell people that I think they should have them.
I tried very hard specifically to not do this. The only case where I put a specific label on someone else's behavior was in an example in which one party is not acting in good faith. Specifically, much of the comment was about the dichotomy of views, and whether you think that example even applies to the situation we are discussing. To be clear, I don't think someone who uses an ad-blocker is immoral unless they themselves believe what they are doing is wrong, because I don't believe it's possible to be be accidentally immoral (and if you believe what you are doing is fully justifiable, it's moral, regardless of whether it's seen as social acceptable or not).
> It's fine if you have your morals, but your morals are not my morals. And it's a more effective argument to talk about yourself anyway: "I view ads because I believe it's a fair exchange for the publisher's content."
That is exactly what I did. The portion of the comment where I actually examine a stance is prefixed with "For me", and is about my relation to that specific viewpoint, which itself isn't meant to be inclusive of the entire other side of the argument.
I suspect you formed an initial impression of what I was trying to convey, and that colored your interpretation of my words. I urge you to go back and read my comment again, but keep in mind that my goal was firstly to provide what I thought was an accurate, non-accusatory assessment of the sides of the argument, and present them in a way where rational people could see the merits of each (and I may have fully failed in this), and then provide my own personal reasoning why one interpretation does not work for me. I guess that's why I was honestly confused when you started talking about a guilt trip, because that wasn't my intention at all (so I may have failed horribly in that respect).
> If you walk up to me and ask for my newspaper without offering compensation, and I say "sure, but you have to first look at this pamphlet I'll hand you with it", then I think in this example it is clear that throwing the pamphlet away prior to reading the paper is morally wrong.
"You shouldn't accept my gift without reciprocating."
> For me, the arguments that fall along the lines of "once it's been sent I can do what I want" don't sit well because they feel anti-social in nature.
"Your arguments are uncivil, you should make different arguments."
I get your point about "For me".
> We don't act that way with the people around us, why should be expect it to be entirely different just because we can't see their face?
"You should not treat your property like it's yours alone."
> Unaccountability for poor behavior is a downside of anonymity, and something to to by mitigated, not accepted.
"Your behavior is bad, you shouldn't behave like that."
I hope this helps, and I understand that I may have misread you, it's just my reaction / perspective.
That example was set up specifically to not be a gifting. If someone sets terms before giving you something it's not a gift, it's clearly transactional. In my mind, the newspaper is being given by someone at a stand, it's being "sold", but not for money.
It was set up this way specifically to show one particular way of thinking about it, not to imply that is the only way it can be seen, which is what I was getting at when I said "Where I think most people differ on this subject is how accurate that analogy is for consuming internet content." Some people believe it's a clear transaction, others seem (I assume, not being of this group) to believe it's not.
> "Your arguments are uncivil, you should make different arguments."
I can see why you think that, and it's due to a poor word choice on my part. What I was thinking when I wrote "anti-social" is "anti-societal". That is, anti-social but not in the colloquial sense. Specifically, since I think the exchange is transactional, ignoring my own part of the transaction on purpose is selfish in the singular, and society breaking when accepted by the masses. Almost nobody does this (that's sociopathy), but I think people have convinced themselves that it doesn't apply in this case (i.e. it's not a transaction, which is the root of my cognitive dissonance assertion in my original comment). This is nothing special, people behave in anti-social (anti-societal) ways all the time (lane hopping on the freeway, cutting in line, etc). It happens when we convince ourselves that the negative consequences, or the chance of them occurring, are small, but our need is great. The individual effects of this as small, but in aggregate it would be unsustainable.
But this is all couched in why I can't subscribe to that view, not why I think someone else should be ashamed, or feel guilty. If you don't think it's transactional, there's nothing to feel guilty about, as you aren't doing anything wrong in your own eyes. I happen to think people of that view are wrong, but I don't think they have anything to be ashamed of.
> "You should not treat your property like it's yours alone."
That's the point in question. If you believe the relationship is transactional, it's not fully your property until you've fulfilled your side of the bargain. I've been trying to show both sides of the argument, but you seem stuck on ignoring mine; It's not about controlling your property, it's about whether the transaction that makes it your property has even been fulfilled. If there were money involved (I sell you a paper for $1, but hand it to you before collecting the dollar. You walk away without paying), I doubt there would even be anything to discuss. The question is whether, and how, it's different if I expect something besides money from you. This is ambiguous in most cases, but when a site has a banner that explicitly outlines their views on ad-blockers, it's much less so.
> "Your behavior is bad, you shouldn't behave like that."
Should be viewed in light of my "anti-societal" meaning above. In my examples I use a person-to-person situation because I think people are much less likely to think certain behavior is acceptable then. If it's not acceptable then, why is it acceptable when you are anonymous, or the other side is not a person? That is, anonymity does seem to encourage some bad behavior because of lack of accountability, so is some of what we're seeing he attributable to that, or is it entirely separate?
> I hope this helps, and I understand that I may have misread you, it's just my reaction / perspective.
It does, and I hope what I was trying to express, is a bit more clear. That is, explicitly, "there is a disconnect between the sides of the argument, this is what I think it is, and here's my reason for choosing my side in light of that information".
The first is the implicit or explicit contract to view ads in exchange for getting to view content. Entering into a contract in bad faith or breaching a contract is both a legal and moral issue. When the terms of a contract are repulsive to me, I have no moral problem breaking them or lying about my intentions. I would let you pay me any amount of money to eat shit without proof and not follow through. You could always try and sue if that ended up being a problem. Generally though I won't enter into such contracts if there's a viable alternative.
The second thing is ownership of the property that's used to view the content. The argument here is that since it's my computer, I can control what my computer displays to me. I know that you have the copyright on the content and the ads, but copyright doesn't stop me from doing what I want with my own private copy so long as I don't distribute it.
So in the end, if you distribute content to me without verifying that I've viewed the ads first, you're putting yourself at risk for breach of contract on my part, and since I find ads repulsive it's a really high risk because it's my computer and I'm going to program it the way I want.
I'll readily agree that the content/ads thing is a problem, and that people deserve to make money for making things. But any fix to this problem is going to be systemic, not based on convincing people to play by the rules when they can easily get away with breaking them.
I believe it is a moral issue, but depending on whether it's a legal contract, or observed legally, I'm not sure it's a legal issue (not sure as in don't know the specifics of contract law and what is considered a contract).
> When the terms of a contract are repulsive to me, I have no moral problem breaking them or lying about my intentions.
I have no problem breaking a contract where it's been misrepresented to me. But when the terms are up-front and clear, but I don't believe they are fair, I don't believe I have a right to enter into that contract with the intention of breaking it. What's worse, trying to get someone to sign a contract with (up-front but) unfair terms, or lying about your intention to fulfill your side? Does it matter which is worse, if they are both bad?
> The second thing is ownership of the property that's used to view the content. The argument here is that since it's my computer, I can control what my computer displays to me. I know that you have the copyright on the content and the ads, but copyright doesn't stop me from doing what I want with my own private copy so long as I don't distribute it.
I'm not trying to make a case about having to display content, I'm trying to make a case about obligation to display content when you want to display other content. The medium is irrelevant. I would make the same case with paper. Having an assistant cut out the ads from a magazine (or removing and reprinting without them) before presenting it to you is equivalent in my eyes, and the same problem. The magazine is clearly offered with the advertisements as part of the package, to offset what would be the true consumer cost. That you are capable of having someone take scissors to it is not the issue; whether that breaks an implicit or explicit agreement based on the purchase of the magazine would be (and in this specific case the magazine would have a foreword saying it should not be altered from the form it was presented in, as that was part of the purchase price).
> So in the end, if you distribute content to me without verifying that I've viewed the ads first, you're putting yourself at risk for breach of contract on my part, and since I find ads repulsive it's a really high risk because it's my computer and I'm going to program it the way I want.
Every contract entered requiring something from both parties puts at least one party at risk the other will breach, and sometimes both are at risk. The other party putting themself at risk is not a justification for breaching the contract in itself, otherwise libraries would have a very hard time functioning.
Again, this line of reasoning only even makes sense if you believe there is a contract. If you do, then you either accept it or you don't, and you either fulfill your side or you don't. I know what I believe are the right choices of those available (where "right" means society perpetuating, not society breaking, when extended to all people).
I don't think you can argue the terms of ads on the web are upfront and clear. It takes serious reading to learn about all the different methods they use to track you now. They often give people malware. Is that part of this inherent "contract"?
> I'm not trying to make a case about having to display content, I'm trying to make a case about obligation to display content when you want to display other content. The medium is irrelevant. I would make the same case with paper. Having an assistant cut out the ads from a magazine (or removing and reprinting without them) before presenting it to you is equivalent in my eyes, and the same problem.
So you're saying that even though I paid for the magazine, I own the magazine and can do what I want with it, I don't have a right to use the paper it's made of as I please? Sorry, but that's utterly ridiculous. And I think most people would find it so too.
It'd be different if I borrowed the magazine, but since I own it I'd say it's fully within my right to cut out ads, chop it in half, fold it into planes, use it as toilet paper, what have you. That's my right as an owner of the magazine.
When the site has a banner that says they want their ads displayed, then that's clear. I've made it obvious that I think it can be ambiguous otherwise, but it is not in that case.
> So you're saying that even though I paid for the magazine, I own the magazine and can do what I want with it, I don't have a right to use the paper it's made of as I please?
No, that's not what I said. Very specifically, we are talking about whether you own the magazine yet when you haven't fulfilled the transaction that would give you ownership, and if that is actually a transaction. I've written extensively in this thread about exactly this. Either you didn't bother to read the back-and-forth rwjwjuwjudf and I were having, or ignored my point.
> It'd be different if I borrowed the magazine, but since I own it I'd say it's fully within my right to cut out ads, chop it in half, fold it into planes, use it as toilet paper, what have you. That's my right as an owner of the magazine.
Sure, if you own it. Very simple, if a magazine that costs $9.99 starts selling for $1.99 but has some conditions (you need to view all the ads at least once), do you fully own it before you've fulfilled that condition?
Specifically, what you identify as different in the following scenarios will probably illuminate the actual difference in your point of view to mine:
- You pay full price for a magazine without ads, which is $9.99.
- You pay a subsidized price for a magazine with ads, which is $1.99.
- You pay nothing (fully subsidized) for a magazine with ads, and an explicit signed written contract that you will not alter the ads.
- You pay nothing (fully subsidized) for a magazine with ads, and there is a notice that this price is only for people that agree to no alter the ads.
- You pay nothing (fully subsidized) for a magazine with ads, and there is no notice about ads whatsoever.
In which cases would you feel fine altering (of having someone alter for you) the ads?
Well if you say it like that, it almost sounds harmless! But that's not what they're doing.
What they are doing, is encouraging/begging people to disable their adblocker--which functions as a security (and privacy) feature of the browser--instead of telling people to go away if they want to keep it on.
Of course there's no way to nicely word an honest message that communicates "adblockers are not welcome". Especially not for a site that depends on advertising revenue, it would never get past the marketing/editors. That's a big part of the problem; the majority of advertising depends on skirting the line between honesty and dishonesty, and this attitude tends to seep into the businesses that are so dependent on advertising.
This becomes an even bigger trap if their content-quality is on the low end to begin with. I'm not familiar enough with Forbes to say that is the case for them (IIRC it's not that bad, is it?), but consider all those really shitty clickbait sites with listicles and blogspam. That's what those advertising dollars buy us. Who is more likely to stop producing content if advertising revenue drops? High-volume low-effort clickbait writers, or the "quality content" writers that actually care about the topic they write about?
2) The site tells you, "hey, we see that you run adblock. If you want to consume our content you have to disable that. If you don't want to disable your adblock, bye."
3)You still go ahead to consume the content.
In what universe this is OK?
They didn't give it to you. They put a wall and said "You cannot pass this wall with adblock turned on". You decided to circumvent it. Because...?
Their "wall" as you describe it is actually just client-side code which runs on _my_ computer, not theirs, so I get to decide how it executes. It would be completely different if the "wall" was on the server side of course (for example, a paywall).
If it's on my computer, it's under my control. Just because it came from their server does not mean it has any rights on my computer at all. They're not entitled to my computer.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
That means posting civilly and substantively or not at all.
There are a few blog posts around the net where some users have tried similar and found that W3 schools was also serving up content from another place that had not been blocked.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...
Is there a list of sites with ad blocker detectors? We could easily move such sites to the bottom of search results.
Whatever -site:forbes.com
1. Open Forbes link in a new tab 2. Get redirected to completely blank page with only /welcome/ in the URL path 3. Temporarily enabling JavaScript for its domain and reloading won't help, since it lost the original URL and I don't remember where I got the link, so I don't even try 4. Give up and close the tab
For most sites where JavaScript is required, temporarily enabling (uBlock origin advanced mode) and reloading is enough. Forbes is the only one I recall which completely loses the URL in the redirect.
I use w3m
Of course it is not like I remember what it was, but I don't have to bother with Forbes anymore.
I get the anti-ad blocker complaints - there are a lot of sites that depend entirely upon advertising revenue for their continued existence. And this isn't just crappy blogmills - even a company like the New York Times doesn't make enough money from subscriptions alone to continue operating without advertising of some sort.
Maybe there's a different model out there but as far as I'm aware no-one has found it yet, and in the mean time I'm quite prepared to tolerate advertising on web sites in return for the content I get. I'll even tolerate a pre-roll ad or a full-screen takeover before I get to a page every now and then - but there's a line. The mild end of it (for me) is ads clearly intended to make you click by accident, and the severe end of it is malware like this. And in my experience it's on the rise.
By all means implore your users to turn off their ad blockers. But clean house first and make sure you know what you're serving. The real problem is that it's borderline impossible for anyone to do so, given how many reseller networks exist out there these days. I often see people say that sites should arrange and sell their own advertising - but the reality is there's no money in it. Selling yourself out to the Google ad behemoth is often the only way out.
Sure they have. Sites just need to host the ads natively instead of outsourcing that responsibility. But they don't want to do that, because they don't want to take on that responsibility.
Two questions: how much time do you spend selling/negotiating with advertisers? And you say you could earn more from a network: have you researched at all exactly how much more?
Naively, it seems that maybe advertisers would pay you more because 100% of the visitors to your site are relevant to their products (but admittedly I'm out of my realm of expertise).
It is difficult to say how much time I spend on that side of things since it has been built up over time and have pretty high advertiser loyalty - total guess, but maybe 5-20% depending on the time of year. Most of my time is spent acquiring, editing, and categorizing content as well as adding new features to the site.
I haven't really done much research into the various networks, but I do get sales pitches from time to time. My first question is always wondering which advertisers using the network are relevant to my readers (almost always the answer is none). Plus at this point I have a direct relationship with marketing departments, so there isn't really a need for a middleman.
Edit: for people here interested in tech offices, here's the best link: http://officesnapshots.com/offices/?fwp_industry=technology
It's such an obvious model that it's amazing the ad industry hasn't understood how well it works. Instead they persist in using crappy non-functional trackers and ad blocker blockers and all kinds of other bullshit techniques - because apparently they'd rather game readers than provide something good and useful.
Postscript: a minor bug. I'm using OS X Chrome, and the ad bar keeps twitching when I reach the end and try to scroll down further.
Is that scroll bug on all pages with the ad sidebar? Do you run any script blockers?
There is also http://officesnapshots.com/search/
The fact that a website is about interior design is already enough information for advertisers to show you relevant ads.
I think all this tracking is pointless. They still show me ads about fridges weeks after I've bought one.
They weren't ads for Amazon products I looked at last week, or ads for jobs. Good job, it's a really well done site.
But it looks like all bets are off when things go to the web, and even the most high-brow magazines take their web properties and make it look like the web equivalent to something next to the chewing gum at the grocery checkout stand.
You make money by putting me at risk? We share that money (and more) if you actually harm me.
From a security standpoint this is horrifying because it means that attempts to sandbox ad javascript away from site javascript in the browser will become impossible, since the sandbox will tell the browser what to block.
Turns out that eliminating ads in the client upon payment is actually quite difficult to do with good hygeine; ad networks are very sensitive to "fraud." Now that we have a good solution, we're pretty excited about it.
Maybe that's too close to the "public radio" model, and would never work at scale, but I'd pay for it.
Subscriptions, however, are consumer-empowering. And everyone gets how they work. (Netflix, Prime, etc.)
You could try Google Contributor. It shows you pictures of cats instead of ads, and let's you give a couple pennies to the website. It's not 100% but it's something different.
"We need you!" or "We're better now!" is a hard sell after all of that brutal, personal experience.
*By "you," I mean the content publisher.
It will be come a You problem when these sites cease to exist because they have no money. No, we're not anywhere near that stage yet, but that doesn't mean we can't talk about it.
> It will be come a You problem when these sites cease to exist because they have no money.
Nah. Like I said, whatever value they provide is not greater than the cost of the malware they distribute. Them going out of business would be a net-good for the world.
That feels like a blanket statement. When we're talking about the free press going under because they aren't able to afford to keep running, that sounds a lot more like an Us problem than a You or Me problem. Yes, I realise that sounds hyperbolic, but...
If your news source is willing to take money from folks attacking your machine, what does that say about their trustworthiness? Sure, go on about the wall between church and state, or that it is the ad network and not blog, but there is a reason some of the larger corporations occasionally go on media buying sprees. I'm not sure that it is strictly impossible to be financially dependent on others and maintain a completely independent voice, but I can't think of an example.
It is a suboptimal situation. I get that publishers are ending up with horrible tradeoffs. At the same time, if faced with a close friend who has ebola, I'm going to be incredibly sympathetic while also keeping quarantine.
I also heard another complaint about my approach, which was that if I avoid sites like Forbes, why do I still need an ad blocker? And of course, the answer is that I rarely bump in to things or stumble, but still like guardrails on steps.
At this point I'm willing to take the risk of there being less content on the web.
[0]: I generally suggest nearlyfreespeech.net
Answer is probably that you don't - these companies will probably fail and other companies that can get away with cheap hosting and staffing will hack together comparable things using amateurish content.
I'm fine with it. I just want them to die already so that alternatives will spring up more readily.
They simply do not take malware seriously. They continually let it exist on their ad network. As a publisher that uses Adsense I find this extremely frustrating. As example: I've spent quite a bit of time attempting to block ads that lead to the "ask.com toolbar." These are always deceptive. They confuse my visitors and then I hear about it.
Additionally ads where the only text is "Download Now" or "Read Your Private Messages" are clearly deceptive. And yet they're allowed.
There are so many easy ways Google could improve the situation. And yet, they don't. This is a serious problem, and it is only going to get worse until Google responds appropriately.
Most sites that serve ads can't sell all their inventory directly, so they fill their remaining impressions with ad networks, who sell bulk inventory space. Those ad networks have the same economic limitations from selling all their inventory, so they need to sell _their_ remaining impressions to another network. And so on down the line.
All it takes is for one ad network to get a little loose with their serving policy for a malware provider to make an in. And I can't think of a way for an upstream ad network (or even DoubleClick) to ban malware, without tracking down that errant provider. You can't blacklist a domain, because usually the ad network hosts the ad itself. And like it or not, ads have to run Javascript or Flash.
It's a crappy situation to be in, but it's not any one actor's fault (except for the malware advertiser), and the fix isn't easy or else someone would have thought of it.
They certainly don't need to run whatever arbitrary scripts the advertiser wants. The advertising network can provide whatever functionality the advertiser needs, there's no reason to leave this obvious hole open. The idea that I can pay someone some cash to put whatever arbitrary JS I want directly into Forbes's website is utterly ludicrous.
Ads with JS, require going through automated testing (certain things like new Function, and eval are not allowed, along with `window[`, as well as creating a script tag, XHR, and some other bits... No remote content loading, beyond images, period... all content for an ad must be in a self-contained file, and can only exit via a window.goto that the ad-network injects for the purpose... A whitelisted subset of DOM interaction is all that is allowed, and the total payload of an advert must be under ???kb, something reasonable.
Flash ads requiring a source inspection...
All ads served from the network directly, not loading js/html/css or anything outside their network...
It's easy enough to do this, and pass the cost of inspecting JS and Flash ads onto the customers... they can decide if they really need it. It becomes part of the cost of doing business... Banning interstitial ads, and those that take up more than half the screen.
http://www.engadget.com/2016/01/08/you-say-advertising-i-say...
http://www.extremetech.com/internet/220696-forbes-forces-rea...
http://www.networkworld.com/article/3021113/security/forbes-...
Publishers should look to Stack Overflow and be inspired to run ads of high quality and relevance[0].
Throw out the ad networks, tracking, and reject rich media ads. Instead focus on high value ads that align well with your readership and manually verify the quality of these ads. If publishers do this I am willing to turn of my ad blocker.
0: https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2016/02/why-stack-overflow-do...
I get tired of installing ad blockers on every machine/device in the house, and on some machines use multiple different browsers -- I'm suffering from blocker installation fatigue.
If you run dnsmasq, you can block [1] a lot of ads for your entire house at once through DNS.
1: https://www.debian-administration.org/article/535/Blocking_a...
Look into setting up a Squid node for your home network and run adblock in the ACL rules.
It's also worth noting that uBlock Origin has a separate redirection framework which includes certain anti-anti-adblock capabilities. uBlock Origin also recently introduced an overlay buster[1] which can work as a generic filter to block the kinds of overlays that the anti-adblockers show.
[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/commit/ff8f0eb7a9c39e8941f...
http://www.ghettoforensics.com/2016/03/of-malware-and-adware...
TL;DR
Article says "Well, how about they start treating their ad inventory with at least a percentage of the care with which they treat their content?"
The researcher who discovered the issue says "Forbes almost immediately reached out and we started a dialog. We shared logs, events, and descriptions of the ad."
In contrast, when the researcher reached out the correct the Engadget article that started this and quoted him, he got no response.
Funny, too, because I don't even use Ad-block.
--
I wish Forbes just was honest and went full paywall. I wish everyone did this.
Why not just make the ad inline into the content of the page. It would speed up the site as you would not have to make all the extra connections to these ad networks via thirdparty javascript.
It seems to me, that someone who got an $xxx ransomware, or paid the nerd herd to remove malware from their computers could be the base of a class action lawsuit... That's what it will take to get this crap to change is to actually hold one of these larger media sites responsible.
One argument is that Forbes has a duty of care and the ability to prevent serving damaging malware to its compliant invitees (visitors). They're in breach of that duty, so maybe damages for negligence?
Not click on them, just see them. Even though I never click on any ads, they still consider it valuable to subliminally influence me into wanting stuff I don't want.
To me, this is even shittier than forcing me to click on an ad before giving me the content. But to also serve me malware... is beyond shitty, it's dangerous.
Content is cheap these days. There's too much of it out there, high quality and free. In fact, I wouldn't mind if there were less content produced on the Internet.
I know that the content that is really valuable will still stay and all the bullshit that needs ads to stay afloat will disappear.
Forbes with malware? No, thanks.
For me the rule of thumb is this - if you need me to turn off my ad blocker, then I don't need your content.
Ghostery disabled, it initially reported that about 60 trackers loaded in the page which then quickly turned to 97 to then reach more than 110 trackers.
I highly recommend installing Ghostery.
https://twitter.com/teapot/status/707016161234276352 https://twitter.com/teapot/status/707016382286680066
I am aware of Ghostery's business model and I am not against businesses selling metrics and/or ads in general. I think there should be consequences for companies that do not have the best interests for the users.
Consider clickbait.
Consider listicles, blogspam, the "you'll never guess X these celebrities Y", reposts of photos of cool-seeming-yet-utterly-impractical things to do with food/furniture/clothing/lifestyle/health/etc. At some point you probably helped clean out a friends' Windows laptop, tried to Google whether some process or application is useful or safe to remove--yeah those sites. I can't list all the types and categories, there's hundreds.
The only reason trash like this even exists, the only way this unfathomable high-volume fire-hose of vapidity is made possible, is because of these advertising networks.
This is what the vast majority of all those advertising dollars buys us.
Who is more likely to stop producing content if advertising revenue disappears? The high-volume low-effort clickbait-linkspam writers, or the "quality content" writers that actually care about the things they write about?
I'm convinced that if the online advertising industry were to collapse some day (I can hope, but I doubt it'll happen), it will be a net-positive for ALL the content online. Not just because an Internet without advertisement is just so much nicer, but also because the clickbait writers will be the first to stop producing "content", because unlike the quality writers that care, there will be exactly zero reason for them to continue producing informational landfill.
https://www.ghostery.com/ - I recommend it
At the very least, the people who are anti ad blockers will hopefully shut the fuck up now because they're wrong and it's not a matter of opinion.
Malware ads are being displayed because they are winning the auctions. That's because - on a CPM basis - malware authors are probably the ones who will always be able to pay the most. A successfully infected machine is worth a good chunk of change.
Ad networks are uniquely suited to malware delivery. Have an exploit which only works for OS X users? Don't bid on the windows users.
C: Excuse me? Are you the produce manager?
M: Yes, that's me.
C: Oh, good. Yesterday, I bought a banana here.
When I got it home, I discovered there was a bomb in it.
M: I'm only the produce manager. I don't deal with bombs.
C: But the bomb was *in* the banana.
M: How was it?
C: How was what?
M: The banana. Not bruised or overripe or anything?
C: No, the banana was fine. It was a perfectly normal banana.
...with a bomb in it.
M: Ah, good. Another satisfied customer.
C: I am *not* satisfied! I could have been killed!
M: Were you?
C: Obviously not!
M: So what's the problem?
C: There was a bomb in my banana!
M: Well, we just sell the bananas as we get them, from the banana-modifying company.
C: Why can't you just get your bananas direct from the plantation?
Why can't I get an unaltered, unmodified banana--without any bombs in it?
M: Excuse me, sir or madam, but this is a *business*.
How do you expect us to pay our employees with a store full of unmodified bananas?
C: [facepalm]First thing I'm doing when I get over there is install the most restrictive ad blocker I can find.
Browser extension that gets all the articles, post-processes to strip the ads and serves the content when user asks for the same article url. I'd pay $9.99 for it. If the publishers won't get on board a unified subscription service, let's just go around them.
It's not my extension, and I don't know the nitty gritty details of how it works, but I do know it stops that horrible Forbes splash screen from popping up.
[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/israblock/kekndmao...
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/israblock/?sr...
The ad networks that are most profitable are going to have some terrible deal flow that includes malware and viruses.