Killing the messenger: ad-blockers | Hacker News Reader

Killing the messenger: ad-blockers

espresso.economist.com

65 pointsfridek105 comments

Well, yeah, ad-blockers are among the best antivirus-software, speed up page-load times, reduce data usage, improve privacy and require roundabout 0 effort on the user's part. And except for ignorance of their existence or extreme benevolence, there's not a whole lot of reasons for users to not install ad-blockers.

That the ad-industry has been flourishing for so long is actually more surprising to me...

Under your scheme web sites can themselves still have slow load times, high data usage, malicious payloads, and privacy implications such as profiling you based on your browser fingerprint - but you can actually get all of the benefits you mention (and more) by redirecting http traffic to 127.0.0.1 instead.

The only thing you lose is content, but the same thing is true for web sites that disappear because they have no business model other than making content and displaying it along-side clearly marked advertising - it's not like you or anyone else wants to pay for content.

Well, there is a middle ground - you can enjoy the slow page-loads, bad privacy, and all the other effects of visiting web sites, while also cutting out genuine content, through a second business model: make web sites replace their genuine content with indistinguishable shilling, and suddenly you have the best of both worlds: no clearly-marked advertising; slow page times; and no content!

That's an interesting middle ground.

Edit: got a downvote. In what way does 127.0.0.1 not strictly dominate a web site shilling with no genuine content? It is better in every conceivable way. It's also the future that you asked for, suggesting that web sites come up with a viable business model without any advertising. Or do you just want them to disappear?

please don't post like this

In case it wasn't clear, the fact that ad networks are separate is a historical relic. Technically, there is next to no impediment to the servers that serve content serving advertising content at the same time.

So Sylos's point "ad-blockers are among the best antivirus-software, speed up page-load times, reduce data usage, improve privacy and require roundabout 0 effort on the user's part. And except for ignorance of their existence or extreme benevolence, there's not a whole lot of reasons for users to not install ad-blockers" actually is only a historical fluke, present in the short term only.

Web sites themselves are technically able to do all of the things that Sylos mentions, without involving any off-server advertising. But web sites today have advertising that is clearly displayed.

By aggressively blocking them, while saying that web sites' broken business model isn't the users' fault, you are encouraging two things:

1) Encouraging the ecosystem to make web sites serve advertising utilizing their own stack

2) Encouraging web sites to collect deep analytics from their visitors and share them directly. This is much worse than colecting advertising view information.

3) Paid shilling. This exists today and is called "native advertising."

It is often indistinguishable from genuine content. As in, I don't know if I am consuming genuine content, or fake content. But the latter answers people's misguided calls for web sites to come up with an alternative model.

It is very simple: today, web sites that are in the business of creating content and monetizing it using advertising networks are NOT in the business of personally collecting and selling deep analytics on their customers. They are also NOT in the business of creating shill content.

This can change in the future. I wouldn't like it to.

You dig your hole deeper with every reply. Your fearmongering won't work here. Yes, they track and sell our data. Yes, many of them are ripoffs and "shill" sites. Your stating they aren't doesn't change facts at all

"It is very simple: today, web sites that are in the business of creating content and monetizing it using advertising networks are NOT in the business of personally collecting and selling deep analytics on their customers. They are also NOT in the business of creating shill content." - wrong. They get their money from the adv networks who do EXACTLY THAT, which in turn pays the site owner. They are quite literally doing exactly what you claim they don't.

Here is the core of the argument. You aren't listening to the public. You know, the people you want to visit your site. You don't create content for the joy. You do it for the MONEY. Therefore it would behoove you to listen to your customers, ie US, and give us an experience we will want to pay for. Disregarding us will cause us to disregard YOU. We lose nothing. You lose potential customers. Quit trying to bail out a sinking ship with a bucket, and build a raft that could one day become its own, better ship.

I have no idea why you think I work in the ad or newspaper industry. (To be clear: I don't and never have.)

But anyway I look forward to reading your research here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11916756 - I'd just like you to collect some facts and conduct some interviews, it shouldn't take you more than half a week tops, and I'm sure you're more than happy to do it for free. I encourage you to also throw up a paypal link in case someone feels like paying (I mean, I personally won't, but still). I realize I might be proposing a bit of a broken business model for you, but I'd still like you to do it.

Please just take a few days and do this work - I'd like to read the results! Thanks.

What about all the content available right now for free, without ads? Will it magically disappear just because some ad-supported businesses (that provide content as a side-effect) are unable to find another way of sustaining themselves?

Your argument is based on the premise that intrusive ads and contentcalypse are the only alternatives. This is simply false.

>What about all the content available right now for free, without ads?

Sure. We're on one of these pages right now. It has a full-time paid moderator (dang), pays for its own servers, and has no content monetization of any kind.

It is subsidized by a startup incubator, not the readers. This isn't an objection on my part. But I literally can't tell if the conversation is being influenced, and neither can you. It's simply indistinguishable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494500

It could be great, it could be draconian, you never know. When I read about Wall Street in the Wall Street Journal, I'd prefer not to have to make the same guesses. I prefer to see advertising in the Wall Street Journal, with an editorial iron curtain between the advertising and content divisions, and advertising very clearly labelled. The Wall Street Journal without any clearly-labelled advertising would be a scary thing.

This ship has sailed. The WSJ has already run adverts as editorial ( http://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/oct/12/wall-street-jou... ). Moreover, it's a Murdoch paper and therefore reflects the prejudices of its owner.

The idea that the old printed press is some sort of politically and financially neutral arbiter of facts is convenient but has never been entirely true.

The same has also happened to the Telegraph in the UK: https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/peter-oborne/why-i-...

I got a lot of downvotes, but here is why your first link, the Guardian, works:

http://imgur.com/1ze5jZM

(I'm drawing attention to the editorially independent advertisement.) The cut-off portion reads:

>In what appears to have been a damage limitation exercise following the Guardian's inquiries, Langhoff resigned on Tuesday, citing only the complaints of unethical interference in editorial coverage.

It's literally an exact demonstration of the separation effect that I'm talking about. The Guardian is your trusted source, because it gets to display well-marked, editorially independent advertisement, instead of writing it into stories. This might be eroding - your link is from 2011 after all - but the fastest way to erode it completely is to remove advertising revenue and make newspapers more beholden to native advertising or shallow advertising-like content.

Why do you insist that the only alternative is for newspapers to be: "more beholden to native advertising or shallow advertising-like content"?

There are other ways of generating revenue while still producing high-quality content. And it's not like the whole world is going to turn adblockers on overnight, the trend is visible but it's slow, newspapers and other related businesses have plenty of time to think this through and implement other ways of getting money. Also, the trend may well die out if there is a significant change in how intrusive ads are in general.

Another thing is that, in capitalism, this kind of thing is supposed to happen all the time, isn't it? Isn't it just that "the newspaper market is ready for disruption"? Is publishing industry that dependent on this single stream of revenue? It's like Saudi Arabia and the oil, then.

I can't help but think that publishers are lamenting because "free lunch is over". There was no Internet and everything was fine. Then the WWW (and AdWords) came and suddenly it was easier than ever to show your ads to thousands and later up to millions of users. Someone discovered that such advertising actually "works" (for some definition of "works"...), people started taking it seriously and publishers naturally expanded their businesses to the Internet. Their contribution to the Internet is mainly ads and DRM. Anyway, it worked for a long time and now it may be slowly dying out, some publishers may go bankrupt, but many will find ways to replace ads revenue on the Internet with something else.

Basically, what's the big deal? What am I missing here?

That's a weird way to twist GP's post.

It's not GP's "scheme", it's an observable fact - ad blockers are among the most effective anti-malware and computer optimizing solutions out there. More and more it seems to be something as obvious as having a firewall on your machine.

(No! Don't install a firewall! The poor script kiddies have to make money somehow!)

> The only thing you lose is content, but the same thing is true for web sites that disappear because they have no business model other than making content and displaying it along-side clearly marked advertising - it's not like you or anyone else wants to pay for content.

I say, good riddance. The only thing you lose is shitty content. If someone has something valuable to say, people will pay, or that someone will be willing to pay themselves to keep it up (as it is with most really valuable content on-line). If the only way to support your "content" is to shove toxic waste in the faces of your visitors, then frankly, you have no business hosting that content in the first place.

Now, for your middle ground - I guess that if we get there, we'll see a rise of anonymization proxies, Tor 2.0 or something like that. RE native advertising, in your example you're literally defending evil behaviour by saying those people could be even more evil. Like a robber that attacks me regularly and says, "as long as you have cash on you, I'll keep coming for that; if you move your money to your debit card, I'm afraid I'll have to beat you up for your PIN code". Am I supposed to be thankful to the robber that they don't beat me up and settle just for taking my cash?

Fuck it, I say jail the robber, and burn down the advertising industry.

> If someone has something valuable to say, people will pay

God, I hope you're right.

There's actually an adblocker which effectively does this:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-ethical-ad-blo...

"This extension provides a 100% guaranteed ethical ad blocking experience. The conundrum at hand: users don't want to see ads, but content providers can't give away content for free. The solution is simple: if a website has ads, the user simply should not be able to see it. This way, the user doesn't experience ads, but they also don't leech free content."

TeMPOraL in your sibling comment says "I say, good riddance". That poster should run this adblocker.

I'm close to that with uMatrix and myself being too lazy to set up rules for the ad-laden sites to even render properly. My Internet browsing experience is definitely much better without visiting those sites though :P.

Wow. The mental gymnastics here are astounding. Every time the ad blocker argument comes up, in pop you affiliate defenders, crying "If you block our ads, we will all disappear!". No, buddy- crummy sites that make bad decisions with regards to advertising and/or content (or lack thereof), would disappear, as very much needs to happen. People don't just not want to pay for content, we are just tired of we, ourselves, being the commodity with which it's paid for. Charge a subscription, start a patreon or what have you. If your business (make no mistake, if you make money off your website, that's very much what it is), survives or thrives, kudos. If not, it wasn't feasible and you need to rework your business plan or start a new one altogether. Ads are the laziest, most anti-consumer way you can possibly make money. Many of us have been around since the internet began, and we remember the years of wonderful, continuing content that existed before advertising (and even after the pop ups and banners, it was a long while before the site operators made any real money), and will continue to do so after ads as we know them have shifted yet again.

I'm not going to pay you anything, but would you mind expanding on your comment by interviewing some reporters, editors, ad executives, and reading trade journals from the advertising and media industries? Would you also prepare some charts showing revenue, the number of editorially independent news sources, and the monetary effects of paywalls and related content, and how it's changed over the past few years?

I know I'm asking you to do all this for free, but if you want you can put a line at the end of your post "-------Sponsor message follows-------" and regardless of what goes below it (which you don't have to look at) you'll get $1000. You'll stay editorially independent and can write whatever you want, just make sure it is honest, thorough, and well-researched.

On second thought let's nix that $1000 - could you just do it for free, maybe throw up a PayPal link and see if someone wants to send you money.

I'd like you to do this research, I'd be interested in reading it. I think about 2 days is enough for you to write this article, you shouldn't have to talk to more than about a dozen people and read maybe 2-3 trade journals, which you could find in any large library.

I look forward to reading your comments. (Forget I mentioned anything about the ad payment, that's now off the table - that was some stupid mental gymnastics on my part, my apologies.)

so why aren't they built in to all browsers by now? many have pop up blockers and that was for the same reason, the ruin of the browsing experience

More and more publishing websites now block you when you run an ad blocker :/

Ad blockers have to become smarter first. For example, by making the displayed DOM different from the DOM seen by the browser (and JS).

This would break e.g. mouseover events. Ultimately the only foolproof way is obscuring the ads but leaving the space they take up on the screen blank.

A "stealth mode" button on my adblocker that did this that's automatically already enabled for websites that are regularly blocking it would be very useful.

> This would break e.g. mouseover events.

Not if these are generated only from the DOM seen by the browser.

What actually useful sites block ad-blocker users?

(I'm not counting Forbes' blog posts as useful.)

Because the first browser to introduce ad block would get banned by major publishers and people would stop using it. This would have to be a simultaneous deployment by all major browser vendors. The best they can do on their own is things like Reader Mode in Firefox - obviously there to cut down on the amount of shit on-line, but not strong enough to make the "important people" angry.

Also keep in mind that the Internet That Matters now is the commercial, ad-backed one. Even standardization bodies have serious conflicts of interest now, and the changes are about enabling businesses to make money, not about making the Internet a better / more useful thing for humanity in general.

> would get banned

Reason #57 betraying the user agent in the referrer is a terrible idea.

Opera has built-in adblocker (with filters).

Opera has a market share of <2%.

Depends on the market. 7% in Poland (and that's not their top market).

Still quite a lot considering the "Opera" doesn't exist anymore (since 2012?) and what is now Opera is actually a branded Chromium with some extra features.

Brave Browser has all that build in, and Firefox is heading there with tracking ads now automatically blocked in private browsing windows, but those browsers have the user's back - I imagine Chrome has Google's back and Google is about advertising.

Brave is promising a way for users to microtip sites they visit automatically, to make up for the lost ad revenue, so that will be an interesting experiment.

Browsers need this stuff built in pronto, because non-tech people have no chance of knowing the 4 or so plugins you currently need to install to browse safely.

Opera and K-Meleon also have it built in. Like you said, browsers not in advertiser's pockets.

They are of course. Which is why Opera's built-in ad blocker display's Google's ads by default. So the advertisers that pay browser vendors actually benefit.

They are.

Disguised as "reader mode".

Microsoft tried to enable "do not track" by default and the whole advertising industry went nuts. That's why everyone is afraid now. Apple started to move slowly on it by enabling ad blockers on IOS to even exist. Google have too much skin in the game, but they are not afraid of hurting their competition, they implemented flash and video ad blocker in recent chrome (and chromium, where they also rein) everywhere but not on youtube! (the blocker is not as obvious as to trigger when url != youtube, but they crafted the rules that it just so fit youtube one.

anyway, everyone is moving slowly, because microsoft was clever and fast to make a calculated mistake that show what will happen to anyone that tries.

"Microsoft tried to enable "do not track" by default and the whole advertising industry went nuts."

Did they? I thought the advertising industry didn't care about this feature or it's default setting at all, since they just ignore it anyway.

It was privacy-conscious people who didn't like the activated-by-default setting. Because in the rare case some service actually did respect that feature, they most likely would choose to ignore it for all IE users, because in most cases it wasn't the users active choice.

yeah. pretty much every ad nerwork blatantly ignores it nowadays. They rushed to disable it when microsoft pulled that.

enable it and visit amazon. See if their network will or will not show you tons of ads of what you just saw there.

Because the advertising industry pays browser makers:

http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/041315/how-mo...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-22/google-pai...

Well, I doubt it'll ever be all browsers because the biggest browser in the world is owned by an advertising company.

Greetings from Poland :)

Even while inconvenient for me, I've switched on my android from chrome (which I also use on desktopt) to firefox because of one reason: you can install plugins (read ublock, adblock etc) on firefox for android. Since that day, mobile browsing is a BLISS !!!

You can see here (and elsewhere) why: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/01/business/cost-...

The mobile ad scene is ridiculous. I'm about to switch from Chrome to Firefox just because of that stupid "ad network" that has some scripts which "escape their iframe" and keep redirecting half of the sites I view to what is presumably a malware download service.

I'm also considering doing the same. Every single time I open a webpage on my phone it takes forever to load (even on a fast and reliable wi-fi) and I often cannot read anything until I have closed the cookie consent panel, the "install our app" modal, the full page autoplaying video ad, and the "subscribe to our newsletter" pop-up. It's like yelling insults to someone else while in an elevator.

Also, I travel somewhat, and I have 400 MB roaming included per month. No way would I risk having some animated ad using this all up.

A good choice, it has become more stable over the last few months. A while ago i had so many crashes it was unusable.

I get less crashes now and the speed up from running uBlock Origin on my old S3 is very noticeable.

I recommend 1) Self-Destructing Cookies and 2) HTTPS Everywhere on Firefox mobile too.

> But the survey also found that very few people pay anything for online news—just 9% of people in English-speaking countries

That's WAY higher than I expected

9% of 500M would be 45.000.000 paying customers... I think that might be wrong...

It should instead be read as 1 in 10 readers is willing to pay for free content.

Agreed. I would think a 9% conversion rate would make any business man salivate. There's your whales, start targeting them.

To me, ad blockers are a sign the web is working.

Ethics comes up a bit when it comes to ad blockers. Sites make money from ads. Dont' they have a right to?.. I think if we're going to think about it in that sort of way, we need to sort out rights. The web means that servers can serve whatever they want. They have a "right" to send you pictures of clowns when you request their page, even if that page was a news site yesterday. They can also send you ads. The client has the "right" to do whatever they want with that page. They can use whichever browser they want. Display the content however they want using whatever software they want. They can read the code, execute the JS, selectively display the content....

That's the deal. Servers can send what they want. Clients can do whatever they want with whatever servers send them. Users are exercising their rights with adblockers.

On the more practical side, it's interesting how the economics of this has evolved. In the beginning, online ads were pretty useless and worthless. The economic model around online ads collapsed with the 99 crash.

Then Google (or really omniture) figured out how online ads could work. They cleverly used it to serve ads with a tiny, unobtrusive footprint and still make way more money than the dancing monkey ads from the 90s. We've been in rapid growth mode since, and the value of advertising stock is now through the roof.

Now that online ads are valuable again, the incentives to go overboard are overwhelming. Even Google who made small and unobtrusive ads a core idea have crossed some big lines. They look at valuable search queries like "best divorce lawyer in Toronto" where every click is worth $50, all the clicks going to those worthless (free) organic results and aggressively trying to increase the share of clicks going to ads.

Now, even if you search for a divorce lawyer by name, you will first scroll throught a page and a half (on mobile) of his competitors ads. This is unequivocally "obtrusive" in the sense that it puts less relevant content in more prominence than the relevant stuff.

This time it's being driven by ads being valuable rather than worthless.

Back to the rights thing... Ad blockers and the active right of users to reject certain content is a balancing force here. When a respectable news site, forces you through an ad before they load a page, autoplay a video and then pop up (or under) an affiliate link to aliexpress and dating for gold digger pages...

Is there any way sites could force you to view their adverts? Short of forcing you to use some kind of custom browser, I can't think of anything. I guess you could say something like "enter the code shown somewhere in the middle of this video advert to read this content" or something? Even then you'd probably get browser extensions to scan the video and read the code.

I am amazed the numbers are that low actually. Most sites become unusable without an adblocker as many mobile browsers simply crash when trying to load that many content.

Also, the amount of data used by ads is overwhelming, and (at least in my country) mobile data limits are still from 1999. Since setting up a squid proxy with adblocker for my mobile devices, my mobile data usage dropped significantly, allowing me to switch to a cheaper data plan.

Keep pushing. I've said this many times before, there will inevitably be some casualties in the war on intrusive ads but these might be necessary to convince advertisers to come back to us with a fair deal. Don't accept guilt-tripping, don't be pressured into allowing unlimited surveillance by private entities, traditional circulation based advertising which isn't a bare in terms of bandwidth or surveillance can and will work when users demand it.

But it is good for actual companies/people who pay for ads, right? I mean, in the first place I wouldn't want to pay for showing my ad to someone who is not genuinely interested, thus is not a potential client. And it is in my interest that such people use ad-blockers.

Everyone is a potential client for Coca-Cola or other generic brands. And (the theory is that) even if you hate the ad, it will make you more likely to buy their brand vs competition.

Advertisers interest is rather diverse. While I see the brand value coca cola might aim at, I can also understand that advertising to the wrong user at the wrong time can hurt your wallet or your brand.

An example would be check24. It's just a random German comparison webservice. However, as they produce unbelievable disturbing video ads I can't block, I passionately hate them.

I'm wondering if they are as bad as their TV ads...

If I come across an particularly annoying ad I will try my best to remember that brand and buy the competitor out of spite (if there is no cheap generic store brand available anyway). Surely I am not the only one that does this.

I do that too. That's why I e.g. never used Groupon - they've pissed me off with annoying ads, and that was even before they became controversial.

> If I come across an particularly annoying ad I will try my best to remember that brand

This is enough for them in the long run.

Yes, came here to say the same thing. The (unconscious) brand recognition usually outlasts the (conscious) aversion against it.

That said, I'm still not buying anything Sony -- almost fifteen years after their rootkit scandal.

I'd say there are exceptions, like Nestlé still having a bad name from the scandal that started the boycott in 1977 [1]. I don't think they are overly suffering from that, but it's still common for people to refuse buying anything from Nestlé.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestl%C3%A9_boycott

Edit: I found this part even a bit amusing: "As of 2013, the Nestlé boycott is coordinated by the International Nestlé Boycott Committee"

You underestimate my spite and vindictiveness.

I disagree. In my case my bias towards products I have bought before (and that were good) is much stronger than brand name recognition. Therefore if I didn't already buy products from their brand anyway then I probably won't in future either.

But maybe we are talking about different areas of daily life or I am grossly underestimating the power of ads on me. So feel free to present examples or evidence to the contrary.

Edit: There is also of course the large fraction of ads that simply cannot influence me in any way, because I simply don't buy products from those categories (lotteries, terrible AAA games, etc.).

> And (the theory is that) even if you hate the ad

I must be the exception then, because seeing these ads makes me actively avoid these brands in the future simply out of spite.

You are making the incorrect assumption that people who have ad blockers would be unaffected if they saw the ad instead.

The truth is that advertising works on almost everybody.

Please back up your claim. I ad block ads like on the street and on the radio by deliberately looking away or turning off the sound. The only effect those that do seem to slip through have on me is that I get annoyed, despise the ad, and the product.

I always thought I'm (and most people) are unaffected. I had eye-opening experience recently. I was going back home after work and went to buy sth to eat in small shop. I bouth spaghetti and vegetables and the shop clerk asked me "what's with everybody buying it recently?". I had no idea, then I went out and noticed the billboard near the shop changed to some readymade spaghetti sauce that day.

You're right, they work on me by convincing me never to buy products from that company.

Yeah, it's the people selling ad space that lose revenue, not the people buying it to show their ads. The system seems a bit self-destructive at the moment. Ad-space buyers keep making more obnoxious ads, raising click rates at the expense of the people trying to use the site. The users get fed up and install ad blockers, which harms the sites but not the ad networks. The sites themselves are squeezed in the middle, without much leverage to stop either obnoxious ads or people from blocking them.

It seems that a simple solution would be to cut out the ad networks. If the New York Times or The Economist just serve the ads themselves, rather than using a third party network wouldn't the ad blockers be unable to distinguish them from other content?

Sure they lose targeting, but physical media has existed for years based on ad revenue from companies that paid them directly for advertising. Even the tiniest local and university newspapers have gotten by with free distribution and paid ads for as long as I can remember.

Just open any Polish major website without adblock to understand why. +10 trackers, +20 ads per page, +6 social buttons per post.

I agree, Polish websites are so cluttered with advertisments, some of them being pop-ups hiding the whole main page of initial load. Completly unusable without ad-blocker. BTW. The best ad-blocker I found so far is just uninstalling Flash plugin from your browser. HTML 5 is not so popular yet, so that helps a lot.

In Chrome you can make it so that Flash is not loaded by default, but you can right-click on the unloaded Flash applet and make it load and run. I think it's somewhere in the settings.

On Firefox, Flashblock does the same IIRC.

You can disable it(flash, java). When you are interested you activate it, just for one time.

That is what I do.

Just as a random data point, I haven't had Flash for some years now and I think I haven't been missing anything. YouTube and other major video sites serve HTML5 video just fine.

Firefox's flash version is no longer up to date and vSphere needs a newer one so I didn't even bother with it. I'm using chromium exclusively as a fallback for vSphere.

It's everywhere (Poles are just smart).

THere is much more time & bandwidth on major content sites spend purely for ads than on content

On slate: 60% ads

on business insider: 75%

on BBC: 65%

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/01/business/cost-...

On mobile, i simply use firefox. It's the only browser on android which easily allows me to install adblock (ublock origin exactly). highly recommended.

On mobile I installed AdAway.

Regional newspaper sites are the worst. Every time I go there I feel dirty.

It's a dead end. People in Poland won't really pay subscription fees, so the only way to monetize is through ads. Ads don't pay that much though, so they are packed in amounts that are beyond annoying for users. So they block.

On the other hand, most people gather their daily news digest from one of the top news outlets, which in turn serve heaviest ads. So the most valuable customer is the average Joe who doesn't know ads can be blocked and doesn't really care.

> So the most valuable customer is the average Joe who doesn't know ads can be blocked and doesn't really care.

Which outlines a great mission for us - to reach every average Joe and Jane and educate them that yes, ads can be blocked, and yes, their computer will be running much better and faster when they do it.

> People in Poland won't really pay subscription fees, so the only way to monetize is through ads.

I thought that too, but I watch some starcraft matches on twitch, and many Polish-language casters have lots of subsriptions and some donations.

This industry is ripe for disruption by micro-payment system. I want to be able to surf, and make a small payment on every website I visit ($0.001). If system detects I actually used something (copy&paste, longer visit, scroll down, print bookmark), payment should be increased significantly.

But it has to preserve privacy, be scam proof...

That will simply move the incentives towards publishers spreading their content over as many pages as possible to get more micropayments from you.

That is one of the problems which needs to be solved. Scammers are everywhere where money are.

You mean like they already do?

Like those 'slideshow' style articles that load a new set of ads with every 'slide'?

Yes, Blendle is a step in the right direction. It includes the ability to demand a refund if you feel you've been baited. It also charges per article, not per page view -- although the prices are higher than what you quoted.

Ideally the payment system would be in the browser. You deposit some amount the a payment provider, and newspapers sends a 402 Payment Required http code to the browser, when you land on an article.

We at Scriber have created a micropayment platform for publishers: https://www.scriber.io/

You can test the user experience of it by browsing our demo publication: http://www.getexplorerr.com/

We've put a lot of effort into making the UX as seamless as possible, trying to mirror the in-app purchase experience of native apps. We're also signed up for Stripe's Apple Pay on the web which should make the process even smoother.

I have been seeing more and more discussion of fundamental issues occurring in the online advertising industry which are acknowledged to cause backlash which harms the bottom line (ad-blockers, decreased viewership, etc).

The fact that these patterns are being spoken about to such a large audience - I have no link to the advertising industry and have seen loud messages from large publications outlining some issues:

- Relevance: showing an ad of something you just searched on eBay on your news site was novel at first but over time people have learned to tune out because seeing your search for soccer ball while reading about terrorism just taught people to blank out the irrelevant ads.

- Performance: tracking scripts, social sharing, multimedia ads. Refer to the series of VPAID Google+ posts outlining the detrimental effects of a single ad loaded into the user's view.

Companies targeting contextualisation and performance, and accepting that users are no longer willing to accept the poor quality of current popular methods may be in the minority at the moment but the niche will most likely expand. They will be economically rewarded for investing their time into newer, more effective methods, and current popular methods will slowly be overtaken by those methods that obtain a better ROI.

A good question is how long will the industry ignore the rising walls of ad-blocking? Walls seem a lot hard to take down than build in these types of situations. It would be wrong to expect people to turn off their ad-blockers because the industry pinky-swears not to overstep the boundaries again.

> They will be economically rewarded for investing their time into newer, more effective methods

The risk is, they won't. The overwhelming majority of awful, amoral advertisers may be closing the window of opportunity for the rare-as-unicorns respectful ones, because adblocking software doesn't distinguish.

> adblocking software doesn't distinguish

I think the "walls" of ad-blocking will be dismantled slowly and those who can prove their respectfulness will be whitelisted through the blockade.

Ad blocking will be a standard feature in every major browser within 5 years, and we will laugh at these days they way we did with pop-ups.

Brave browser paving the path of the future.

In Chrome, which run by Google, who make most of their money from ads?

I can see Firefox doing it as standard.

I think Apple are happy just allowing the ad-blocker extensions (and they got some publicity when they did that).

For some months I try to not use ad blockers on one laptop (Dell XPS13 2016) after years of ad blocker usage.

1. I still hate how sometimes ads pop up where I click, often above videos. Might be intentional or might be download times of the ads (or might intentionally use the slower download of ads by placing them there).

2. While traveling with a limited mobile data plan, data was sucked up by video ads, reloading ads, ... the largest strain on my data plan was ads.

3. Many ads get larger and have sounds, which is painfully annoying.

4. Not yet been infected by an ad, but the anxiety is there.

5. Not scientific, but my feeling is power is significantly drained faster (checking some days with ad blocker on)

Every time I set up on a new box I try browsing without an ad blocker. I lasted 23 hours last time.

Is the title trying to say that ads are somehow messengers..?

Probably trying to aim for a "shooting the messenger" pun, as in: Adblockers are killing content, not the shitty ad networks responsible for their rise.

... or the people using it. The message would be "your ads are bad", the ad blocking stats are the messenger and the shooting consists of media trying to tackle adblockers instead of bad ads.

I'm guessing they mean the sites.

People blocking ads are just the same as people skipping through ads on a vhs recording of TV, or going to the toilet/making a drink when the ads are on. Nobody likes ads.

I'll just keep reading public service news sites.

The online presence of commercial news feels mostly stressful, incendiary, and yucky to me. That publishers don't understand or ignore the way their advertisements ruin the user experience and sell out our news reading habits is just another reason to consider commercial news as basically hostile.

More and more of the large German news pages are adding auto-playing videos to their websites and you find them even on their mobile websites. Think about that for a second... auto playing videos on mobile websites in a country with very expensive mobile contracts... Who thought that this might be a good idea?

It's not the easiest to setup, but the best way to block ads is with a block list in your hosts file. Even works across browsers.

I think even browsers such as Firefox should begin to offer an easily accessible adblock button. But instead of being enabled by default, it should be off by default for all websites. If the users are annoyed with a site's ads, then they can click to block them, and the preference is saved permanently until the user unblocks that site again. I believe this is exactly what Opera does now.

Third-party tracking protection should be enabled by default.

This sounds like an excellent idea, except switch it on by default. You're describing ublock origin.

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