What media companies don’t want you to know about ad blockers
cjr.org
cjr.org
And maybe I should clarify, how does self-hosted ads solve the problem?
- It's hard to block ads on the same domain as the main content.
- Just loading an image with an ad is not as much of an performance hit as javascript loaded tracking ads and thus should not annoy users as much.
- More secure, because you can not hack one single ad service and distribute mallware to thousands of sites. Besides, the solution is less complex, and complexity always leads to bad security.
There is no reason a neutral 3rd party can not review logs, software, or other data to ensure in house ad metrics are accurate.
(I work on the ad systems team of an affiliate marketing company, where essentially all advertisement contracts are done on a PPA basis, rather than PPC)
* Either a /static/ image or colored text
* Normalized (re-packed, stripped of all other data, etc)
* Vetted by a human somewhere to not be 'misleading in appearance' (not checking facts, but making sure that it doesn't look like a download button or anything else not obviously an ad)
* Based on the content of the context and nothing else (you can bake them statically based on the story and/or comments thread on the page)
I don't think shifting responsibility to publishers is the answer. A half-serious idea would be to have a neutral regulatory body issue "licenses to advertise" but how long until corporate interests took that over?
I read it as a measure of their financial desperation. They're eating their seed corn (their reputation is their most valuable asset in that without that, what else do they have?), and, well, what other choice do they have? HN has been talking about the other choices for years, but every time I see someone try one, they sink.
At the end, I know they need to get money but ads don't serve any purpose. I mean I never buy product from ad, I have only things that suite what I have search 10 minute ago. Why putting ads for that? I already know the product and this will never push me to buy something.
Really, they're mostly spinning a web of lies that keeps them employed. You won't find employment doing this for a living if you don't pretend like most of what you do really impacts everyone.
I'm one of those people who will actively abandon products that market too heavily or with material that manipulates its consumers. I switched away from Dove soaps/shampoos back when they started their viral "Campaign for Real Beauty" shenanigans. Pretending you care about your customers' self-image problems... to market soap... turned me off.
It's the difference between Coke & Budweiser, and Squarespace & Geico ads.
That is kind of the point. Online ads should go back being exactly like print ads are. Sold individually, static, untargeted and un-trackable. Not because the ad-networks, advertisers or site owners think its best, but because its the only type of ad that the viewers will accept eventually.
Problems with self hosting:
- It's super duper hard to change the status quo. For them, the current solution 'works fine', once they fight the supposed evil that ad blockers are. Trust me, I fight for this sort of stuff and they just don't understand things the way we do.
- You can't do as much or sell ads for as much. You can charge more if you know more data about your visitors and can sell the ads to clients under the impression that it'll reach the exact demographic they're looking for.
- For some companies, it's already too much of a chore to have an in-house dev team to manage the content website. Have to have _people_ manage all these self hosted ads is not appealing to these companies. Very similar to AWS vs self-hosting
- An image is less interactive, so you can't sell it for as much. Those big fancy ads that are interactive are sold more many many more times the price as just a single jpg more.
- If you're 'lucky' to work in a media org big enough to have a sales team, even they don't sell out every single ad placement all the time - there's a big tailed on these states they still want to monetise and ad networks helps them do that.
That aside, things are changing. Everything on our site happens over HTTPS, which is a plus. We do win 'arguments' to move things in-house and not served from an ads network, where appropriate. We have an in-house 'studio team' who creates custom campaigns and creatives for clients, and they're almost entirely self hosted.
If part of your pitch is that you avoid adblockers, then once you get big enough you'll constantly be fighting an uphill battle.
Obviously in execution it would be different, but I hope you get the idea.
Edit: I think self-served ad platforms are one way forward, but it depends on what problem you're trying to solve.
I'd just like to add that almost all the problems with malicious ads are caused by ad networks that are used as "backfills" for when the in-house ads aren't booked. Backfilled ads are not inspected and can contain everything, but they are also needed because otherwise you'll have unsold inventory.
When we don't have a big sponsor for a section of our site, or haven't had enough direct sales for certain placements, it goes out to the ad exchange to action the spot off. That's where the problem is. That's somewhere we could start enforcing certain quality.
Ad exchanges and real-time bidding (RTB) are only causing a problem for people working in the media space because on the one hand if you don't have them you lose money, but on the other hand it's like gambling in regards to the quality of ads that will be served.
If I was buying a box of cereal, "we couldn't source enough reputable corn, so we topped it with melamine" would be the death of that cereal, for me.
(And yes, this is buyers at the cereal company instead of ad sellers, but it's the same: the hypothetical cereal company was not able to "sell" enough of its money to corn suppliers.)
Of course the goal is to operate at 100% efficiency, but in reality that's not going to happen all the time. Backfill channels like this are a way to make at least a little bit of money when sales a slow for a bit for whatever reason.
In terms of the problems the online media industry faces with advertising, the efficiency of in-house sales teams is not a huge priority atm.
[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
There are only so many ways to obfuscate your DOM without screwing up the page layout and making your UI people angry. The battle against add blockers cannot be won.
I strongly believe that the ad industry will die, at least in the sense of what it is at the moment. Fighting ad blockers is its death rattle. That doesn't stop the technology being interesting though. Quite the opposite in fact, as a developer I find it fascinating.
Well, I'm sure that it would not be impossible:
- ads are the changing part of a webpage, so they can be identified
- ads could be collaboratively removed, by allowing the user to select the ad, then send its fingerprint to a central entity, so that others can benefit
- AI techniques could be used to identify and remove ads.
Because the content of the site is narrow (photo tours of office design projects) it ends up attracting a certain group of people who are interested in office design and office furniture (self-targeting if you will).
Any moderately popular news site will have filter authors going out of their way to block their ads in the filters regardless of URL domain.
I feel like there's this myth that adblock is just trying to block "bad" ads, but the evidence shows most blockers really try very hard to block all ads. Trying to stay one step ahead of that is a losing proposition for media companies.
[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock#installation
[2] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium...
That being given, the only alternative for NYT and friends is for subscription which they don't have the taste for, since it gives them the true value of their journalism.
The difference in this true value, and older ad-based value: their take from the revenue-sharing agreement with malware-creators. We just got better with dealing with malware, and their malware based revenue took a hit.
This is a trick question: they are. It's called native advertising.
Ad blockers block the scummy ads. It's still possible to make a living by serving ads, but it implies that one can't be lazy in his monetization strategy.
There are some ads that there only for brand building. Not sure if we want to see them. Let's count them out because they are not for things we want to buy right now ("buy" a product could be "vote" for a candidate, etc.)
We're left with ads for items we didn't know and we discover we want to buy. Or for items we know and the ad remembers we want to buy them. We follow the link and buy them. The problem is: how many things of that kind are we buying every day right now? One, maybe not even one. So this leaves us with a handful or ads to be served to us per week or per month, with the assumption of an omniscient ad server that knows what we will buy. We're still not there. Luckily, I'd say.
Then there is the malware thing: they don't care to send us ads we want to consume, they just send as many ads as they can to maximize the infection rate.
The point is that serving up sidebar/header/pop-up ads is no longer effective because these forms of advertising are intrusive and subject to blocking.
What seems to be effective is the "sponsored content" or "native advertising" model whereby ads are served in a form that mimics desirable content. The crucial point here is that the advertisement is useful and relevant to the consumer, and so is not interpreted as an interruption or distraction. Moreover, these ads don't tend to carry malware because they're media produced by the media company in question, often hosted on the same domain.
This is a model that presently works. My point is that ad-blockers block obsolete ads, whose monetization is increasingly malware-driven, precisely because the content is no longer relevant to consumers.
But because everyone feels entitled they have a unique story to tell and want to start up their own media property, we have ad networks they can use to make money to try and fund it.
Write once; serve many times.
I just want print ads online. I want them to be simple, static, non-trackable and non-targeted ads that clearly stand out from the rest of the content. Targeted ads should be limited to showing boat ads on a boat site, or golf gear ads on a golf magazine site.
Sites with a broader audience must simply accept that just like in print they are forced to show broad brand building ads.
True, but in a very different way. Native ads don't serve malware and assault your senses.
[1] http://imgur.com/9HXNIcD [2] https://gist.github.com/anonymous/ce893a061d5dbd611f064e9554...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12007472
Clicking on an article in timesofindia takes you to this:
hindustantimes.com www.hindustantimes.com script block
indiatimes.com timesofindia.indiatimes.com script block
lets you get past the blocker.
See "Canard PC" who successfully funded an ads-free web version of its paper magazine (the kickstarter is even finishing today):
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/canardpc/canard-pc-onli...
You should not install an ad-blocker if you really want a flash/java blocker. You'll still be vulnerable.
(Yes, there have been vulnerabilities in JS et al too, but blocking JS is a very different proposition.)
Yes it's a bit tedious to enable domains when something breaks, but I'm actually fine with that. Would of course not recommend this to just anyone.
I don't think this is the case. Either way you might get one crash per millions of loaded ads. Making this argument just silly.
Not sure if you write software or not but crashes are more or less expected, just keep them below X% and it's "ok".
The obvious example would be sites with mediocre mobile pages fighting to serve ads. It's pretty standard to hit broken redirects, script issues, and all sorts of other crash-like behaviors visiting those.
Now, comparing it to free-riding a subway/bus service on the other hand...
Every time i bring it up i get downvoted, but why is blocking ads but still consuming the content okay? I'm genuinely curious.
To me it really feels like stealing. Like sneaking into a movie theater/concert/amusement park without paying, or like you said free-riding a subway/bus.
And when looked at through that lens, many of the excuses people make seem comical. (Ads make pages slow, they are ugly to look at, I don't agree with the business model). To me those excuses sound like saying "I don't think the movie is worth it, so i'm just not going to pay" while walking into the theater, or walking into a concert without paying because "waiting in line to get a ticket takes too long, so i just won't".
I'm hoping to have an actual conversation here and figure out why I feel so differently about this than many of the people on here do. What am I missing?
Why is it that you morally think it's okay to just consume content others have created without paying?
Unlike a subway ride, it's impossible to tell whether a website has ads or not before you visit it. So I can't know whether I've violated the morals you're talking about until I already have done it.
I think publishers are welcome to create adblock-blockers, and I don't have any interest in working around them. I suspect it's not a feasible business model, but that's their problem, not mine.
And i'm fine with that as well. If you want to block ads that's cool with me, but don't expect to get the content as well.
1. Pay $1 a month to view my content without ads
2. View ads
And you block ads without paying, i'm going to block you. You seem very pragmatic about what is best for you and your PC, well this is me being pragmatic about it as well.
If you block ads, and don't pay a subscription, you give me no value. It only costs me money to serve you content. So you aren't getting served content if you are going to be blocking ads.
It's not "discrimination" any more than a movie theater only letting people that pay in is.
If you implement it on your backend, without me needing to run your adblocker blocking js code, which I will block. I'm okay with that if you implementation is based on your servers, you just can't decide what software I will or will not run on my machine. So even you implement some form of Digital Restriction Management one would still find a way to circumvent it (against the law in many places), actually one should do it as a form of civil disobedience. People should control their own technology, not the other way around.
Oh my god it's not even close I can't believe you said this.
I used to watch satellite TV when I was a kid. Most channels I watched were privately owned and purely financed with their (extremely long) ad breaks. Is it my moral obligation to sit through every single ad break?
My answer is no, that's ridiculous. If a company decides to offer content for free, it is not my obligation to make sure their business model stays lucrative. It shouldn't be anyone's obligation to consume every last bit of content someone offers only because it's given away for free.
The publishers are not offering content subject to a fee (which I am not paying). They are offering content for free, and also offering ads for free.
Accepting one of their free offers, and rejecting another of their free offers is not the same thing as "just consume ... without paying"
Some news sites do offer their content subject to a fee, and if they were interesting enough then I would pay that fee. But, because none of those sites (that I have encountered) are worth it, in comparision with the freely-served pages of the net, I choose not to pay those sites, and forego their content.
But if they are not explicitly charging a fee, then we fall back to the default custom and practice, which is that they offer content for free, and ads for free, and I have the right to accept as many, or few, of those offers as I like.
There's a bit of mental gymnastics there, but I get what you are saying. I still don't agree, but I get it.
I just feel that if you asked, 99% of content creators would not see it like that, in the same way a store isn't "offering you a product, and the chance to pay for it".
<insert obligatory quote which allegedly originated with Upton Sinclair> Of course they don't see it like that. Would you happen to have a less biased source? Say, just about anyone whose salary does not rely ads?
A free human being should have the right to choose the information that goes into their mind, without that right, how can we make free decisions? If it's an all or nothing deal, then your information is clearly lacking intrinsic value, I can find that elsewhere.
>Why is it that you morally think it's okay to just consume content others have created without paying?
If I write a poem, make 7 billion copies, and mail it to everyone in the world, I'd be silly to think those 7 billion people are morally wrong for not paying me.
Monetary payments are based on the assumptions of scarcity and contractual agreements between two parties. Neither of these two things exist for public facing websites.
The playground rules were simple: you prop a server that responds to HTTP requests, and in response you send an HTTP response that generally contains content. That's it, those are the rules. If someone wants to make money from this system, that's on them, not me. If they can't make money, well what did you expect from a playground where everything is freely given? Creating straw man "rules" around payment and moral obligations is futile. If the responder has issue with what I do with their response, perhaps sending content using HTTP is not the proper medium for what they want to accomplish.
In summary, just because you want to march in and monetize shit does not mean that any of the rest of us have any legal or moral obligation whatsoever to play along.
For me, blocking ads is a form of civil disobedience: I disagree with the predatory tactics of the ad industry, so I feel morally obligated not to support them. Arguing your case like it is just "consumers vs poor publishers" is ignoring the negative effects that a third party has on both the publishers and the consumers, and dismissing those arguments as "comical" might be part of the reason why it's so alien to you. It's the same as the case against music piracy: those arguments are also framed as "consumers vs poor artists" while completely ignoring the effects of the copyright-holding businesses.
Also, I don't think many people will tell you that they have a legal right to do so. The legal argument boils down to "there's no law against it", which is a different assertion than "there's an explicit law supporting me". Most people will instead tell you that they have a moral right to protect their computer or their life from the shady practices of advertisers.
For a more extreme viewpoint (but still one I can get behind), I'll gladly refer you to http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2015/07/advertisers-should-...
I don't generally mute the tv during ads, but i will fast forward sometimes if i'm watching a recording. And while I don't think anyone should feel obligated to view ads, blocking them deprives the content creators of income, which means a bigger push for other forms of income which I feel are pretty much universally worse (paywalled content, native advertising, in-form advertising which is non-targeted and quickly out of date, etc...).
It's a bit of a fine line i guess. Blocking them outright is too far, but scrolling past them without looking is more than fine.
It's kind of weird, and i'll be the first to admit that it might be hypocritical to say that, but it's what i feel.
But as for a "solution" (but obviously not a perfect one), I've found Google Contributor to be a fantastic service. It's a system that basically lets you "bid" for advertising space the same way the ads do, and if you "win" the bid, you don't see an ad and a portion of your monthly fee goes to the site owner.
So long as I have control of my internet connection, and am responsible for paying for the bandwidth that it downloads, I have the right to block malicious or simply unwanted domains and ips. No, I do not consent to download your 8MB uncompressed ad images, or your 35 MB auto-playing videos, terrible website.
And if ads were purely static images, served from the same source as the article, you would have a valid point. But as it is, not blocking ads leaks possibly identifying information (e.g. [1]) to untrusted (by me) third parties.
The alternative is to turn off the adblocker and leave your computer vulnerable to malware. It's an "either me or them" scenario, except it's caused by the irresponsibility of the other side. Why take the risk for someone else's profit? There's nothing positive to gain from this and you can also add performance issues and actual problems with finding information or navigating the website.
>many of the excuses people make seem comical.
>Ads make pages slow
I suppose it was a while since you had the pleasure to browse a modern website on an older device.
>they are ugly to look at
Why is this not a valid point in your opinion? I find it that ugly, cringeworthy ads make it harder to focus on the actual content of the website, especially if these are animated.
>I don't agree with the business model
And I have the very rare occasion to effectively demonstrate my disagreement in a way that affects the company, unlike TV or printed press where I can do nothing about the ads served.
What I don't see there is an explanation of why "I don't like the ads/privacy risks/other and therefore will not use this site" is not an option under consideration?
As an ad block user I can't answer the question myself, but it's still a valid question.
I don't think this is the correct word (and it definitely enforces publishers negative preconceived notions), but they can't be relying on an untrusted party (browsers) to enforce their business model.
As you put it, the nature of the internet is that user agents are able to render it however they wish.
"No one who refuses to contribute to the creation of high quality journalism has the right to consume it.”
I'll pay or not. But I won't have to fight an arm race anymore.
Or maybe the guy is lying : he wants a very particular kind of "contribution" to his journalism. Maybe a contribution in terms of tracking, personal information, etc...
I already shell out over $50 a month for various subscriptions. For my less common websites, I'd rather "pay" by viewing ads. (And I refuse to just steal the content. If the ads are too much, then don't use the site. IMO you don't get to choose if you pay for something based on how much you like it...)
And the people on HN and reddit that announce to the world that ads shouldn't exist and anything that uses ads is a terrible thing seem crazy to me.
I'm a happy ad viewer. It keeps the content free and the creators paid. If you asked people whether they want to pay for something or view ads, the answer will be ads in the vast majority of cases.
And dispite all the talk of malware in ads, I've never seen it. I'm sure it exists, but until I begin to see it in my own experience or hear from friends and family about it, I'm going to keep enjoying ads as a monetization method.
Genuinely asking: how do you keep track of this? Do you add bad sites to some domain blacklist? How do you protect yourself from e.g. ads that auto-play audio, or take over control of the website for a period of time, or redirect to the app store on mobile?
If it ever gets to the point that I can't remember which sites I don't want to visit i'll probably add some kind of blocklist, but that hasn't been a problem yet.
The only site I can think of off the top of my head that I don't visit any more is the verge. It's just too much, and the experience isn't worth the content (and for them it's not so much the ads, but just that the site is so heavy and slow. The ads did contribute to my decision though, they are full-page and expand down and everything terrible about ads). There are more, but I honestly can't think of them right now...
But if I did get an audio ad, or a redirect ad, and they were consistent enough that it became a problem, i'd stop using that site.
I mean, on a scale of bad things, having an audio ad play once isn't really all that high up the ladder. Yeah, it's not ideal, and it shouldn't happen, and if it happens a few times i'm going to stop going there, but it's a sound on a website. Removing an entire chunk of income from a news website because I'm afraid of hearing an audio ad (something most trustworthy sites also don't want in their ads) seems over the top.
Here's the thing about malware: you don't necessary "see" it.
Ad serving has problems, but you can't invalidate the claims that media companies need to make revenue by saying you want to minimize risks.
But no one seems to talk about the middleground - ad serving done responsibly. I'm fine with ads, as they're performant and don't abuse my computer.
The metaphor isn't to driving a car, it's traveling from A to B. Which means that it's the false dichotomy that self-driving cars and mass transit are trying to break.
People get this odd vehement behavior when told that companies that depend on ads won't like it if you block their ads. The grown up thing to do would be to stop using these companies if you dislike their stance against your ad blocker. Instead there is this childish whining, as though people are entitled to free news without ads.
There is probably no internet-connected workstation today that is safe from malware, so one needs every bit of protection they can get.
Not running an ad-blocker or even better something like the Firefox protection tracker is foolish.
Ad-blocking is a security layer; browser configuration is terribly difficult to do correctly.
I actually agree with that. Firewalls are often incredibly complex codebases and usually written in C (with a rationale of the need for performance). Exposing such a thing to arbitrary internet traffic virtually guarantees exposing a vulnerability.
Just don't open network ports except for services that you want to expose to the network. If you really need to expose an insecure service to a limited set of machines, use a VPN.
There isn't a list of sites serving ads that carry malware so we have to block everybody, sorry for them all. If there were a blacklist of notorious malware carriers, much like the one for spammers, we could use it to mount a blockade. Maybe it's really the right thing to do. I'm afraid it will include most of the news sites.