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Comment by nimbix | Hacker News Reader

Self hosted ads would change nothing when it comes to blocking. Some ad servers allow you to proxy all the requests through your subdomain, but ads still get blocked. CSS selector based blocking is widespread and adding another `.sidebar > .ad` rule to adblock is no big deal.

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There's no reason why the ads and the CSS for them can't be served by a small proxy application that runs on the server(s) of the site, and works by changing the name of any selector to a random string on every page load. Potentially it could also generate random DOM nodes in the HTML so xpath based blocking wouldn't work either.

I suppose you could have a stateful adblocker that looks for the element changing between page loads, and ignores the randomly generated elements that aren't visible to the user. Of course it would only work the second time you load the page. The adblocker could load a second copy of the page in the background, and then update the DOM of the first page after it determines which elements were regenerated.

That'd be an interesting approach. I like the idea of diff'ing a page to detect sneaky ad injection.

An interesting idea, but it would be difficult at best to prevent false positives on sites with dynamic elements.

Those random DOM nodes will probably be easy to recognize because they can't affect how the final page looks. If all else fails there is still the option of rendering the page, using image-based add detection, and killing/hiding the associated DOM nodes.

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.

The battle against ad 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.

I can see it getting as bad as to demand that much of the content itself be an image, with ads stitched in server-side before serving the whole thing up.

Server Side Ad Insertion platforms, like Brightcove Once[1] are exactly this - dynamically inserting ads into the single video stream for VOD content. It makes it really easy to implement a video player with ads, as well as having the handy side effect of being difficult to block the ads.

[1] https://www.brightcove.com/en/once

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