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Comment by legohead | Hacker News Reader

I worked for a company that got most of its revenue from online ads. When I started, adblockers were 20%. When it got up to 35% the boss decided to take action.

We hired a third party anti-adblocker, and it worked great. It went back and forth with the adblockers as they updated to block our anti-blocking.

Most adblock extensions use some standard rules-lists, similar to email spam lists like Spamhaus. I guess we pissed someone off enough and they introduced a rule to block all AJAX requests on our site. This pretty much ruined our site, so we finally relented and removed the anti-adblocking altogether.

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When 99.99% of ads on 99.99% of sites are horrible monstrosities of Javascript and browser tracking and fingerprinting scripts, they will all be blocked and stay blocked.

I'll look at an ad in exchange for viewing your website. I will not let you digitally rape me in exchange for viewing your website.

Exactly. When and if the ad industry learns to regulate itself I will stop blocking ads.

Until then, they've screwed themselves over.

Have you tried leaner, less obtrusive, ads? Something like straight simple text?

We started off nice: "Hey, you are disabling ads, please turn them on" etc. Then we offered an ad-free subscription (almost worthless). And I think we played with another idea or two, before finally going through with the blocking adblockers.

I think you missed the point of the question - people install adblockers typically because they find the ads are intrusive (full-screen graphic overlays, etc), or their machine gets infected with ad network-delivered malware.

If you presented ads that were respectful to the visitor (i.e. weren't offensive) I expect the blocker escalation war would cease.

How would your users know you had "respectful" ads?

For example, when they visit, there are no interstitial pages, boxes covering the page when a user mouses out of the viewport, autoplaying audio/video, or any of that other obscene nonsense.

paulddraper is pointing out that if the user has an adblocker, they will never notice whether your ads are intrusive or not.

There is no chance to recover a user after they install an adblocker.

Unless you stop using ad networks and just inline unobtrusive text ads?

This is a trap. If you make your ads content-like, and integrate them into your content, then people will say your site is deceptive, hiding ads in content so people read them like factual articles.

You don't need to make them content-like. Have ad sections that are just text. I can't recall the name of the site but that one Mac-related site that does text ads seems to be doing pretty well at it. Please if someone does know the site I mean let me know it's on the tip of my tongue!

The inventor of markdown. Fireball something. But it's really an exception.

Daring Fireball, that's the one! Of course it's an exception - no other bugger tries, opting to instead chuck adsense all over the place.

John uses Deck[0] for Daring Fireball

0: http://decknetwork.net/

Didn't realise there were also adverts on the site. I was more talking about the feed sponsorship

http://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/

Deck is the only decent ad network I'm aware of, so I keep them unblocked. The fact that you haven't noticed he has ads on the site speaks enough.

I'm not a mac user so I only ever visit the site when I double check he's still doing the sponsored feed thing before using the site as an example of non-ad income.

Unfortunately however I didn't notice it as uBlock Origin had blocked it.

I find his podcast relaxing (well, most of the time) to listen to even though I'm not a Mac user either. I think he mentioned Deck a couple of times, so I turned uBlock off to see, and hey, they really are reasonable and tasteful, so I left it open for them. They're not getting almost anything from me since I very rarely visit sites in their network, but I leave them on on principle. I don't mind ads, I mind being digitally and visually raped.

After they install an ad-blocker anywhere. The site in question could always been been nice and unobtrusive with their ads. It makes no difference for most users.

I haven't once seen an attempt by any site to show me a "this is what our ads would look like - we're clean, honest!" element when they detect I'm blocking.

My adblock policy (the same one I use on all friend & family systems) is extremely strict. I'm not going to whitelist your site, or any site for that matter, just to see if your ads are "safe". Your options are to show me they are DESPITE my blocking for a chance at an unblock, or prevent me from viewing your site altogether.

You're acting like the typical use for adblockers is targetted -- it's not. People browse the web with always-on adblock. Your site is likely not the one that tipped them over the edge, either.

> people install adblockers typically because they find the ads are intrusive (full-screen graphic overlays, etc), or their machine gets infected with ad network-delivered malware. If you presented ads that were respectful to the visitor (i.e. weren't offensive) I expect the blocker escalation war would cease.

This is absolutely incorrect. Users may install them because they find some amount of ads to be abusive, but damn near nobody (relative to all ad blocker usage) starts out on a white list basis, and the idea that they're diligent about unblocking sites that have "good" ads that get past their blocker is just absurd.

Can you mod my Playstation? I need to play, um, archived games. Yeah that's it. Archived games.

While this cliche is indeed very true, the ability to play games from a hard-drive in the PS2 was amazing. No ferreting about for disks, much faster load times etc. I didn't pirate a single one, and loved HDLoader.

Unfortunately I agree with you. I try to do that, but too many sites are abusive. If a site said "hey, we see you block ads, please unblock, we only use small text ads", I'd unblock right away. Most of the time though, after I unblock a site, I immediately have to re-block it.

Personally I find that "begging" annoying for sites that I almost never use, like Pastebin. I consider it for sites I use more often, but I agree with you that most of the time I end up turning it on again, ads just lag the site and are obtrusive.

Nail on the head there. I installed an ad blocker to stop video adverts on YouTube. Everything else is collateral damage.

FWIW YouTube now offers an ad free service for a monthly fee, bundled with Play Music. $10/mo in the US.

I'll be first in line when it gets here (seriously)

> United Kingdom Not yet available here

Annoyingly, it worked for a bit when it was first released (as I was subscribed to GPlay Music at the time).

Was nice, and I actually started watching videos on my phone / chromecast more. Ads being back is annoying.

So are you suggesting that the sites that are collateral damage pay for my youtube red service?

Because that seems reasonable.

I don't understand the connection.

I'm OK with being shown a moderate amount of ads, if they're relevant and not obnoxious. I realize the site needs ads to bring in revenue and that they don't always publish out of altruism. But over the last 5 years .. whew! I've started reconsidering following any links: "Do I really want to take the risk?"

Another issue is that many 3rd party ad networks have performance issues. Nothing like waiting for the ad network to catch up so you can view the site.

Slightly off-topic, but I have to ask: have you tried (or considered) hosting your own ads?

It's really easy to get caught by basic lists. After use garbish/deceptive class names / ID's of DOM or file names, you get more popular and cat and mouse games start with block list maintainers.

Did your revenue go back up to what it used to be?

Just wondering how fast would the ad-blockers respond to you changes?

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