Adblock Plus now sells ads
theverge.com
theverge.com
Extensions: Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa... Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin... Opera: https://addons.opera.com/en/extensions/details/ublock/ Microsoft Edge: https://github.com/nikrolls/uBlock-Edge#microsoft-edge
...not that Edge isn't hilariously un-fun to use, even with an adblocker...
This all adBlock making money by blocking ads and then showing their own ads is becoming ridiculous and unethical.
So what does Adblock stand for now ?
That qualifies as Open Source under any reasonable definition of the word [1]. So being Open Source is no argument for or against either Adblock Plus or ublock origin, because both are.
Then you have a gazillion of "Open source licenses", that can be less "free" to more "free", like BSD, GNU, MIT, Apache, the free source license, ...
Same thing it did years ago when it decided that an Adblocker should default to allowing "Show Ads" for any advertiser which paid them a blood ransom: PROFIT
I think they've mentioned that a site owner signs up on AdBlock Plus marketplace to sell ad space on their _own_ site.
It will be just another ad marketplace with one exception: AdBlock will make sure that these ads are shown to people who uses the extension. They also promise to allow only "acceptable ads" on the marketplace.
Do you think there is some ultimate arbiter of what is and isn't "ethical"?
The same way a person who downloads an antivirus expects it to block viruses.
Performing the exact opposite of the stated and expected purpose of the application, for money, is a violation of trust. There is an implied belief that a product should do what it claims (and its name clearly states a purpose -- ad BLOCK), and the plain English reading of the title makes that pretty clear.
Imagine a virus scanner that only blocked those viruses that didn't pay up.
Surf the web without annoying ads!
Can block tracking, malware domains, banners, pop-ups and video ads - even on Facebook and YouTube
Unobtrusive ads aren't being blocked in order to support websites (configurable)
It's free! (GPLv3)- Users want ads to just go away, period, the end.
- The devs want ads to be nice. So they swat down the nasty ones and permit the nice ones.
Ransomware was probably the wrong way to do that, but I can see why it was superficially appealing. "We check your ads for niceness, and then permit them. We won't give our effort away for free", being the idea behind it.
The utter shit people run on major sites these days is so patently offensive ("Single Mom's Weight Loss Trick!", "Get Government Money Tomorrow!") that I keep a blocker on for my own sanity. I'm consistently appalled at the extremely low quality advertising that supposedly reputable properties put on their sites.
Give me good ads, please. Don't give me garbage.
I see few to none on Firefox, but even with a firewall hosts blocklist, Chrome/Android shows the bottom-feeder stuff on, again, supposedly reputable publishers' sites: TIME, CNN, Salon, Vox, and more. And the only impression it gives me is that thes companies have to be absolutely desperate to let that crap darken their pages.
You're right, it's absolutely insulting. To both the reader and the sites running the spots.
If advertisers take a sudden "nice" approach, I'll keep blocking ads for another decade or so and see if the trend lasts. That's all I feel I owe them at this point.
They're experimenting with a new and better way to power the exact feature I installed the software for.
No trust is being violated here.
Replacing Ads with other ads is worse because you're not only depriving a content creator of revenue but then profiting off of their work. You could argue that it amounts to theft.
Is using fast-forward on your DVR unethical?
Is skimming past the ads in a newspaper or magazine unethical?
Is it ethical to let your eyes glide past the ads shown in a browser?
Is it ethical to read books from a free library rather than buying the right to read a copy from a store?
TV is paid on viewership numbers. Newspapers are paid on circulation. Gliding past ads on a site is factored into the CPM values. Books in a library are paid for and covered by the first-sale doctrine.
You don't think people who change channels to avoid ads/who use DVRs is factored into the price per viewer for TV ads?
Your individual impact might be harder to track than with ad-blockers, but on the aggregate you are driving down the price per viewer by switching on channels during ads, using DVR, etc.
(Imagine a world where 100% of people used a DVR and skipped ads. Obviously the price of TV ads would plummet. By using a DVR you are contributing to making our world, that world).
So if I had the free time, I would consider attending in order to ask pointed questions and warn other people away.
I think we're at a very Napster moment for content websites.
Additionally you can use things like Patreon or Google Contributor.
It is everyone's duty to burn all books, because a non-trivial and unpredictable portion of books contain hostile, abusive, invasive, and/or subversive content.
This is made apparent by:
>loss of data, loss of time, loss of money and loss of privacy.
Not really. There are certainly plenty of books which will lose you money and time.
More importantly, if the sole concern is "hostile payloads" then the acceptable ads program should be exactly what you support. I'm fine with ads on sites like Facebook where I know it's not going to take over my computer or launch a massive popup, and I support ABP in pushing more publishers towards acceptable ads.
But what about data or privacy?
>I'm fine with ads on sites like Facebook where I know it's not going to take over my computer or launch a massive popup
The concern there would be privacy/tracking via advertisements. I readily admit that is a silly argument if one is already using Facebook. I do not have a Facebook account. I do not know when, if ever, Facebook will extend their advertisements to be used on partnered sites instead of internal-only. I can block them in advance even if I may never see them at all.
If it means we go back to the days where people spent their own money to create pages because they were passionate about a subject, I'm fine with that. I miss that era. It sure beats advertisers thinking they are entitled to know where you go when you browse around the web.
The difference is that you're not having someone sweep the grocery store and remove all free sample ladies before you enter it. Ignoring a free sample lady is akin to ignoring an ad on page.
The primary difference though is that the lady doesn't take a photograph of you, follow you around the store noting everything you stop to look out or put in your cart, and then follow you out to the parking lot and go to the next store with you.
I'm not saying that what content owners or advertisers do is right or ethical, just that at it's core blocking the ads is unethical as well.
What gives Ad Block Plus the right or qualification to determine that my ad is a "bad" ad?
Why should ABP have the ability to suppress editorial or advertising content on my website, replace it with it's own advertising content and not share revenue with me?
Ad blocking itself may be considered a ethical issue as well, but it's a different ethical issue. With blocking, the decision is ultimately made by the end user. With ad injection, ABP is making itself a third party stakeholder.
I'm a happy Adblock Plus user and I like this move.
Advertising, in general, does not bother me. I occasionally even find it valuable. Ads on sites like Google and Facebook are perfectly fine by me—I just don't want big, animated ads or (more frequently) broken ones which prevent me from reading content. In fact, I already go out of my way to disable ABP on sites where the ads are acceptable.
Contrary to what people on HN believe, advertising is not inherently evil. Most people are perfectly fine with ads so long as they're not invasive.
Honest question - don't the sidebar ads (on the right) on Facebook look ugly and intrusive to you (more so since they also change often)?
Apart from Facebook tracking, I block ads on Facebook because of these too.
Not at all. I honestly don't even understand how you could think they are.
They're literally just a (static) image and a few lines of text.
Heck, I often even find Facebook ads to be inherently valuable. Most of them are for services I use and like.
I would guess most people have this idea (in most cases illusion) that advertisers are not able to manipulate them. I do not have that illusion, and I do not like people that are manipulating me for their own benefit. I do not know if they are evil, but I think it is fair for me to try to avoid those kind of people.
I certainly don't pretend that advertising has no impact on me.
I also don't think I'm a mindless drone who does whatever advertisers say.
Advertising is not zero sum. It can be effective and good for the consumer. For example, I have Charles Schwab account because I once saw it in a magazine ad, did some research, and have been a happy customer ever since. Both Schwab and I won, even though they "manipulated" me into learning about their excellent offering.
> I do not have that illusion, and I do not like people that are manipulating me for their own benefit.
You should probably never leave your house then, because almost every person in the world is trying to (subtly) manipulate you. Manipulation isn't evil.
However, a lot of adverts are subterfuge these days and I did fall for one (to shame it, it was TrackR Bravo, which works nothing like its advertised, to make matters worse it was part of a present), so one does need to be careful.
This is a fine stance to have, but I don't see how it relates to the context of ad-blockers. It's a simple enough just to not visit websites that display advertisements. Why would you need an adblocker for that?
Because there are websites with content other than advertisements I am interested in.
Now, I think Facebook, Google, other advertisers and content providers using these ad networks have made the (moral) rules of the game quite clear. They try to extract as much net value from every transaction with me as is even remotely legally and technically possible. And they make massive investments on the technology that is trying to maximize this value extraction. Why should I feel bad playing by the same rules they have created?
(Note that in practice I am not as ideological as my arguments here are. I have e.g. chosen to disable the adblocker for some websites instead of paying for subscription to support them somehow. Reason for this is the fact that it is much easier to turn off the adblocker than hassle with payments.)
Most people on HN make their living off advertising I would wager!
For example, some sites won't let you in until you unblock ads. With an extension you can use the in-browser UI to whitelist that site, with a HOSTS file you'd have to figure out exactly which domains got blocked, then update the HOSTS file, and finally restart the browser & flush the DNS Cache Resolver for it to take effect.
Again, it works, it is just a bad user experience.
I think I'll be the judge of that, given that I'm the "user" in this "experience" ;) It works just fine for me.
1: https://safari-extensions.apple.com/details/?id=com.giorgioc...
tl;dr Gorhill started uBlock, got fed up & gave it to chrisaljoudi, later did a reversal, forked the project and continued with maintaining that fork, only now his version is called uBlock Origin.
However, it's not that "the original author wasn't able to get it back". He is too proud of himself to admit the big mistake it was to give up the project to a random greedy teenager (who after the drama offered to give it back), so he decided to stay with the Origin name.
The result of this is that said teenager still makes a profit off the brand name (see ublock.org). People see that page and happily give him money thinking that they are helping the world.
By the way, it's also worth noting that the greedy teenager inflated his Github commits with minor changes and by hijacking the authorship of some commits, so that people would think that he did more than he actually have done (he can't really do much), and donate more to him. Eventually he just stopped making commits at all (https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/graphs/contributors), since people will still donate just for thinking that his domain is legit.
The moral of the story is that uBlock Origin is a good extension, but its developer, despite being talented, can't be trusted to be here tomorrow. He can just have a tantrum and delete the entire project or give it up to some other random teenager again.
Even using a name like "uBlock Next Generation", which is less ambiguous than "uBlock Origin" and suggests "this is the new project", would still cause confusion. People unfamiliar with the project history would just call it "uBlock", leading to the same donation problems.
"Tantrum" exists only in your head. Be judgmental as much as you wish, bottom line is that you know nothing of me or my private life.
No, uBlock Origin was the original. The fork was confusingly also called uBlock. Origin==original.
See https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/commit/06334a190ea9589e983... (or Wikipedia)
> https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/commit/06334a190ea9589e983
That's even what they show in the chrome/firefox store images, it doesn't make much sense to me that it adds several seconds to Firefox startup time
Am I missing something ?
Be skeptical of claims which come with no technical details whatsoever to help you reproduce it?
That is the purpose of the built-in logger[1]. By default uBO is not setup to block other extensions' network requests, or those made by the browser itself, one has to configure it explicitly for this to happen[2].
1. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/The-logger
2. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Behind-the-scene-netw...
Well, not all my addons - turns out though my Scriptish has been installed since Firefox 3 (now at 45), it wouldn't reinstall after removal for compatibility problems. Not sure why that wasn't automatically detected, and that may have been the performance issue
It loads quite fast on Firefox, see https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Launch-and-filter-lis... -- see "Setup time" graph, typically less than half a second on Firefox.
It's like using two antiviruses to be more safe. I believe ublock already takes care of trackers by default, and if not, just add the tracking list.
We started blocking ads because they had become 1. obnoxious, interfering with the fruition of the actual content; 2. dangerous, being a vector for malware and disrespecting our privacy; and 3. costly, for those with a slow or metered connection.
Most people accept ads, if they are acceptable.
They are the first company to actually push through with a plan to restore this market to sanity, so it's only natural they would take a small profit from it. Other well-known technology companies grab well into the two digit percent off other people's earnings.
I started blocking ads because they dramatically slowed down my browsing experience. But I keep blocking ads because, fundamentally, I believe that advertisements are neurotoxins, and nobody has the right to poison me.
The old Sean Tejaratchi quote - popularized by Banksy - applies here, I think - http://www.readingfrenzy.com/ledger/2012/03/taking_the_piss
And you have no right to the content you're viewing but blocking ads on. If you really consider ads 'poison' surely boycotting sites that use ads is the solution or offering an alternative solution this is actually viable.
I agree. But that's no excuse for someone getting on their high horse but not offering an alternative and still accessing the content.
Edit: I guess the truth hurts. Thanks for the downvotes. Whatever, I stand by my observation as a foreigner having watched TV in many other countries and I can tell you from first hand experience that U.S. TV is the worst offender by a HUGE margin.
Also, the shows themselves are generally quite good, it's just the networks that suck. When many Americans think of TV they're thinking of HBO and Netflix and friends, so advertising isn't such a big deal.
My main point is that with "regular" TV, if you removed all of the flashback reminders and commercials, you've basically got a 15 minute TV show stretched over the period of an hour with as much drama as can be thrown in so as to keep you sitting there in front of as many commercials as they can squeeze in during that time. It's a disgraceful waste of your time as a viewer.
These tend to be, in a 30 minute slot:
<2 minute highlight reel>
<2 minutes of original footage>
<1 minute of "coming up next">
<5 minutes of ads>
<1 minute of "previously on...">
<3 minutes of original footage>
<1 minute of "coming up next">
<5 minutes of ads>
<1 minute of "previously on...">
<3 minutes of original footage>
<1 minute of "next time on...">
<5 minutes of ads>
Which gives 8 minutes of original footage stretched over 30 minutes, with 15 minutes of ads and 7 minutes of rehashing.
This format, although now popular in other countries, is a "modern-classic" of US television.
You'd better get on the horn to Discovery, I think you've got a gold mine on your hands there ;)
> a "modern-classic" of US television
If by "modern-classic" you mean "beyond irritating" :P
Plus: You nailed that edit real, kudos - though, you missed the 1 minute "> Previously on...whatever show it is" at the beginning. 8 minutes of content on a channel you pay for, plus 15 minutes of advertising... so you're basically paying more for the ads than you are for the content... there's something really really wrong with this from a moral perspective.
If you pay for a channel, you should be paying for the content on that channel, not paying to be advertised to with some content as a by-product just to get money from both ends of the donkey.
Either of which is beyond annoying.
Once in a while, I'll seek out a few Listicles with ad blocking off to see just what the state of the art of agressively deceptive advertisements is.
While the UK isn't exactly a model citizen in this respect, at least on the BBC which everyone (arguably) pays a TV license for, there is content wall to wall... because you pay for that. On channels you don't pay for, there is advertising, and I think this is totally fair. But why should people pay to (mostly) be advertised to and not to be delivered the content that they're paying for?
Obligatory Mitchell and Webb Gift Shop Sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MFtl2XXnUc
The best content on the internet is ad-free.
This is one of the most data-driven industries on the planet and there are petabytes of data generated every day showing how well it works.
But there are a lot of very talented and creative people, a ton of research, and a whole industry, really, fighting hard against people's conscious or unconscious attempts to ignore ads, and they can be very effective, even if you don't consciously realize it.
There's a lot of research showing that advertisement is effective. The point of advertisement isn't always to directly make you rush out and buy a particular product right away. So just because you don't do that doesn't mean the ad wasn't effective.
Many times the point of the ad is to make you have a positive association with a brand, or to make you remember (even merely subconsciously) the brand so that you recognize it among a lot of other brands you see in a store -- and thus be more likely to buy a product of that brand rather than that of a brand you've never seen an ad for before.
With some fixed not too screamy image smartly positionned, I'd never block ads.
I don't get the logic behind these ads. They really think that shouting red stuff at my face will make me spend time and money ? If someone is looking for something he'll react to subtler cues. If the ad is really relevant (not just word match) to the content, it's even better. But that's a rare oddity.
Actually, yes, they do. And it scares me that they may be right. Ads are toxic. Why don't we ban them? I've yet to hear a sensible argument to keep ads.
I think this is mostly a fallacy. I know of many developers, bloggers, musicians, film makers, etc who put their content out into the public domain because that's what they want to do. There are "monetizing" opportunities above and beyond advertising that seem to work well, but the lowest common denominator, and by inference, the lowest form of media, are generally ad-driven.
People argue with "yeah, but what about game of thrones and silicon valley". I reply with "yeah, but what about keeping up with the kardashians, jersey shore and the latest CSI franchise".
The gold / dross ration is 1 / 99. We can easily lose most of the ad driven content in the world without losing entertaining content.
I may be a statistical aberration though. I'm obviously not the "target audience".
But these are subscription-driven? The Americans would be a better example. I get shows like that on iTunes, because if a show is good enough to watch, it's too good to watch with commercial breaks.
(Nor should it, in my opinion.)
Anyway, I can't give you a sensible argument to keep "brand" ads which strike me as ridiculous also. But if I'm an inventor and I invent a great new X, how the hell am I supposed to tell the world about it without advertising it in some form or another? "Hey, I have a machine that can make your life easier. But I can't tell you what it is or how to buy it, because ads are illegal. This makes sense."
Because there's no way to do so that doesn't run into serious issues with Freedom of Speech, in both letter and spirit.
Who decides what's speech and what's an ad?
Much like SPAM, they wouldn't pay for it if it didn't work.
Unfortunately.
I fall in this weird spot with ads. I don't like them, they slow down the experience, they can have PORN on them (this happened to my brother the other day), they have little oversight and track you. Many things I do not approve of.
What I DO approve of is paying content creators. And unless you are paying to remove ads through google or something else then you aren't paying the content creators and this is how we get paywalls. Which I personally don't like and even worse, plagiarized articles from pay-walled articles so that we can see them on sites where we can just block ads.
I'm not saying I think ad blockers are bad. I just think we shouldn't feel that we have a right to content without ads if they are done properly. I.E. Not tracking, no malware in ads, etc. etc. If we get ads that server all 3 parties (consumer, ad companies, and content creators) so that consumers don't have to pay then I think we should be ready to get back on board.
if they allow the public to view their content, they cannot dictate how the content is viewed. There's ways to block people from viewing content if ads are blocked - but a lot of sites don't do that, because they deem the traffic more important.
You could not be more wrong. I am having a hard time imagining any art installation, public park, etc., that does not have rules about how you use and consume it. Offering something to the public does not mean the method of consumption is suddenly a free-for-all.
This is a ridiculous assumption that gets played out here a lot. There is an agreed-upon trade taking place - you get to consume content, they get to advertise to you. If you don't like the terms, you should avoid engaging in the transaction.
I do believe that tracking your activity borders on an illegal invasion of privacy, and so I support blocking trackers. If trackers come disguised as ads, they should be blocked. That said, trackers are most often invisible, and a person is unable to make a decision about the agreement at hand. There, the transaction is unfair. Ads however, are immediately clear, and make the value proposition very easy to understand.
Take movies, for example. You used to buy a ticket, and watch a movie. Then theaters started running commercials (not previews) before a film. I stopped going to theaters that run commercials. I understand that previews are also commercials, but I've made an informed decision about which types of transactions I'm willing to engage in with theaters.
The same should go for websites. I'm very happy to be passively advertised to in exchange for content. (Same happens on TV while watching football on the weekends - I've accepted the transaction.) Ads that auto-play videos with audio turned on? Absolutely not. And so sites that do that have become sites I don't visit.
So, I am all for sites refusing to provide content without a value exchange. I remain against illicit collection of private information without consent.
Edit: the down-votes are silly. Try engaging in conversation instead.
You could also choose to "block" those ads by coming to movies late. That's what I do.. how is that different from blocking ads on the web? The theater is giving me advertisements + content, and I have the ability to ignore / block whatever I want by leaving / entering the theater. Until theaters stop allowing me into movies late and force my eyes open Lasik-style so that I _have_ to watch ads, I'm going to keep engaging in this perfectly ethical behavior.
You could also resize your browser to block ads in a side column, but it's not the same thing.
also, i think the person you replied to was speaking more in terms of technical capability rather than some notion of quid pro quo.
Interestingly, their content is still viewable (though in raw form) when viewing the page source, at least for now, and there are extensions allowing you to view it anyway.
The content-blocking / anti-content-blocking arms race has begun.
I complied, just to find myself overwhelmed by some of the most obnoxious, heavy, and dangerous ads around.
The solution? STOP VISITING FORBES. It's that simple.
It also shows that you can't trust the publishers themselves to rate their own ads, and that's why an initiative like ABP's one is a good thing.
that was my solution. i've never found an article on forbes that was really critical to my life that i couldn't live without. generally its some clickbaity headline that i'm only very mildly interested in knowing what they have to say, and i'm happy to find some other source of basically the same information if i actually care. the only thing that forbes offers over their competition is that they wind up at the top of google results because all that ad revenue must get poured into hiring SEO optimization experts...
Here's what I did: when Forbes asked me to disable my ad-blocker, I politely ignored the request. When it demanded that I disable my ad-blocker, and actively prevented me from viewing the articles, I simply went elsewhere. Problem solved: they made it too difficult to see their site while blocking ads, so I stopped going to their site.
Every site which really believes that ad-blocking is "theft" should do the same. But as long as they happily allow me to see the site while blocking ads, I have no problem doing so. I'm merely politely declining to view the ads, just as I politely decline the extra warranty when buying stuff, or I might not bother showing up early enough to see the ads in a theater before a movie, or I don't bother looking at billboards on the highway, or I muted the TV and/or went to the bathroom during commercial breaks back in the days when I watched TV.
If you really want people to look at your ads, you need to enforce that, instead of just whining about it. But if you enforce it, you might drive some people away, but there's nothing you can do about that. You can't have it both ways.
If suddenly a big social movement arose that condemned tipping, the landscape would shift, restaurants would stop accepting tips and start paying their staff more, and life would go on. It doesn't happen only because people are happy with the status quo.
That's not the case with advertising. There is no social expectation that you must watch ads. Quite the opposite, in fact: virtually everyone avoids ads when they can do so, with some interesting exceptions like movie trailers.
If you set up a business whose viability depends on your customers doing something they don't want to do, with no social convention to back you up, then you're going to have a bad time. And that's your fault, not your customers'.
Now I don't know where you live, but. I was speaking from the US perspective.
And if you don't tip then employees at that establishment may not meet federal minimum wage. While businesses are supposed to make up the difference, in practice they don't. So there is considerable social pressure to tip because of this situation, and because many of us have worked in the restaurant business and appreciate how hard it is or know someone who has struggled there.
There is no such social obligation or shared experience when it comes to web content authoring and site maintenance.
Everyone I know who makes web content is doing it for free or even paying for hosting because they are pursuing it as a hobby. They all make money in other industries. Or they do web development in a traditional business for internal consumption and are on salary.
So blocking ads is natural to us all. We can't imagine the motivations of people making web content, freely viewable, with the expectation that they will be paid by ad revenue at some later time.
I don't know who these people are, but if they banded together and maybe formed a union or released a documentary, they could get the rest of us to start a conversation to move the status quo.
In the meantime I'll continue posting to sites like this for free without expectation of compensation for my time, and donating money to the running of sites I value if that option is made available to me.
In any case, if I turn on uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger, I still end up with 15 things blocked: https://cl.ly/0l2r0d440G05
Some are recognizable - Facebook integration, for example. But I noticed that your domain is actually in the yellow for uBlock Origin! https://cl.ly/3v0f0h2K0a39
Looks like the naming convention of your ads is enough to throw up a red (yellow) flag: https://cl.ly/3N1x050G0Z0V
No idea what my domain being in the yellow means. Can you elaborate?
That's awesome. I like the fact that you are able to make this feasible and that you advertise based on your content and not your user. Kudos.
It's still not a perfect solution. I give up a lot privacy that way, and in order to use Contributor, I have to give up some of the other uBlock features that I really like (in particular, element-based blocking).
I will note, though, that I don't feel in the slightest bad viewing Facebook or Twitter with ads blocked. Facebook and Twitter survive by network effects; I couldn't reasonably opt out of using their services even if I want to. Since I'm forced to use their services, then, I think it's reasonable that I do so on my own terms.
I would apply this model to, if I pay for TV don't give me ads too. Either raise your costs, provide me with a higher cost version of TV as an alternative or don't run ads. I look at the Tivo as one of the first Ad Block devices out there and there was a REASON it was created, you've already got me paying for this service why are you taking someone else' money too?
I don't even have a Twitter account, and never did. I don't give two shits what some celebrity has to say in some 160-character burst of text.
I do have a Facebook account, mainly to keep someone else from making one in my name, and also because it's used as an authentication mechanism for some services (like Tinder), but I don't actually spend any time there at all. Why would I? I don't care about seeing family photos for distant relatives or people I knew in high school, and I sure as hell don't want to read a bunch of wacko political BS, which is what most people seem to use the site for. If I want to keep up with friends or family, I use my telephone, email, or I visit them personally.
And that's annoying in more ways than one, being reminded so blatantly that you are being tracked well enough to identify individually
To me, ads are unacceptable. They steal your attention and polute your mind with subtle signaling and behavioural patterns. I applaud iniciatives like São Paolo's outdoors ad ban [1], and wish it were implemented in many more cities.
Another commenter below mentioned Google Contributor [0] which seems like an interesting take on a cross-site subscription.
I'm a huge fan of The Atlantic's work. I don't remember reading a single article of theirs that I wasn't blown away by the quality and interest of. But I hesitate to subscribe because there's such a glut of free content out there, growing larger every day as the barriers to creating that content lower, and I'm not sure how many hours I could devote to reading The Atlantic's articles, compared to all the rest of the free content consumption I do.
A lot of people perform a similar economic calculation and decide it's just not worth it for them to subscribe, so all that's left for them is the ethical question -- whether to effectively donate on the honor system (or at least not use ad-blockers, if they're aware of them and know how to use them), and it's pretty obvious that any ethical qualms some people may have about consuming free content don't amount to much income for the content producers or content distributors.
1. Subscribing to every content producer directly will be extremely expensive for people. Advertising, on the other hand, spreads the costs across a large population with some amount of invisibility on who, in the end, pays for what. Only some kind of aggregation like on cable TV or others (Netflix, Hulu, etc.) have some potential to survive and pay content producers somewhat well. I'd be interested in any large scale aggregations that come at a not-too-high price yet provides an ad free and flexible experience (time shifting, place shifting, cross platform, cross device).
2. In your case, even if you were to subscribe to The Guardian, I seriously doubt if it would stop tracking you. Web sites that provide content always have analytics for their own site, but they're also interested in learning a lot more about the visitor so that they can get more data points on what their focus should be in order to maximize their impact and money making potential (not necessarily in this order). I'm guessing a lot of sites that offer subscriptions continue to track their users even without showing ads. The only difference then with a paid subscription is that they have a real name (likely), a real address (likely, depending on the payment method), and an email address attached to the subscriber that they can connect to the user's behavior. It actually seems worse, that you would pay to subscribe and yet still have to use a tracker block (like Privacy Badger) or ad blocker (like uBlock Origin).
A company called Blendle has started working on micro-payments on a per article basis across several sites, but I personally don't find it friction-less to use and see that the price per article is actually high (so I end up ignoring the email notifications with headlines).
I think we're sorely lacking in visionary utopianism and balls.
Paying per site will ensure I hear fewer points of view on the news and other topics since it doesn't scale well currently.
What about all the small websites, from creative to forums, that aren't big enough to graduate from ads but can pay their own rent with them?
Seems like a net loss for humanity to lose them from the internet while keeping only the large businesses online.
If I couldn't pay the bills for one of my services, I would rather introduce a paid tier, or at least a paid ad-free version. Or I would ask for donations whenever the money runs out, like Wikipedia does.
A paid tier is a surprisingly narrow business model. People aren't willing to pay for much, and not every website has such an explicit product. A lot of that is just conditioning, as people aren't used to having to pay for anything since ads. And most people see ads as zero-cost. The second you start charging a dollar, now you're the guy charging the dollar that nobody else is.
How many forums do you pay for?
And donations are almost always a joke. Else you wouldn't have to beg in a way that puts most ads to shame: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/spa/quq37nq1583x0lf/nv9ad0..., and that's for a website that brings value to just about everyone that touches the internet.
For example, everyone would buy food even if it wasn't advertised, so the food industry as a whole might well be losing money on ads. (If you're feeling nitpicky, substitute "cheap food industry" for "food industry".) It's a kind of prisoner's dilemma situation where each firm keeps spending money on ads to avoid losing market share to competitors, but all firms together would be happier with a blanket ban on advertising. I suspect that many online ads are also fighting for a share of a fixed-size market, and would benefit from a ban as well.
Ad blocking is a gradual way to institute such a ban without requiring everyone's consent. It's probably already making many companies richer without them realizing it, by suppressing the ads of their competitors. In fact, these are the companies you want to get richer, because their products are spreading by word of mouth instead of ads.
I'd wager the net effect would be to entrench big brands.
Are you? Previously no one knew about the startup. Now one in three people in the targeted segment see it.
Good thing for uBlock Origin because otherwise they should be indicted to anti-competitive behavior.
No, I don't like ads and I run uBlock Origin. I don't work for an advertising company and couldn't care less about ads.
But what Adblock Plus is doing here is illegal.
However here it seems to come with additional behavioral standards to the public.
As for being illegal? No idea, but Google are doing something similar - reducing the rank of sites that don't use Google as their source of advertising. More or less ;-)
Google frame it the same way as Adblock Plus - only sites with intrusive adverts are going to be punished, while those with Google adverts are wholesome and pure. But it is a very similar technique to AP. It's not quite the same, as the adverts are not blocked "merely" the whole site is downgraded in Google's search. Ouch.
Then there's Brendan Eich's Brave browser that follows exactly the same model as Adblock Plus. Remove sites' adverts and show Brave's in their place! It seems cheeky to me, but not sure what law it breaks. Is there are "don't be a jerk" law in the US? Maybe there should be :-)
What law are they violating?
I'm a software lawyer.
As far as I know, nothing they are doing rises to violation of any law or regulation with regard to this particular move.
Is it unethical? Maybe. That doesn't mean it is illegal. It is certainly not coercive - you can freely install or uninstall adblock, and you are free to advertise or not advertise with them. They do not have a monopoly, natural or otherwise, and their product is wholly voluntary. If Microsoft were installing ABP as a matter of course in IE and they prevented you from uninstalling it - then there is an argument that this would be anti-competitive.
An independent third party distributing totally voluntary, uninstallable software? Unlikely.
For adblock, there is "adblock" and "adblock plus"
For uBlock, there is "uBlock" and "uBlock Origin"
Are there similarities between both those cases?
So to recap, uBlock is a stagnant branch of the project that has not been updated in some time and has seemingly been abandoned by the maintainer to instead work on a paid adblocker for iOS. uBlock Origin is actively being developed, and helmed by the original author. Use uBlock Origin. In a perfect world you wouldn't need to, but, it is what it is.
I can't understand why they couldn't transfer the name and put it all under uBlock again, that'd make it a whole lot easier.
They do? still doesn't seem like that, e.g. https://www.ublock.org all links go to ublock, except for one link on the AMO site
'''which will allow blogs and other website operators to pick out so-called “acceptable” ads and place them on their pages. If a visitor using Adblock Plus comes to the page, they’ll be shown those “acceptable ads,” instead of whatever ads the site would normally run.'''
If I want something, I decide I want it. I research it, and I make my choices based on multiple sources. Dancing clowns and phony sales do nothing but waste my time and annoy me.
Having said that, we need some way forward, even if it's nothing but a small step. I propose that all advertisers voluntarily place ads (and paid product endorsements) inside and <advert></advert> tag, preferably with an alt attribute. My browser could show me the ad or the text. It's up to me. Ad Blockers would no longer be a thing. Who would need them? And if advertisers really wanted me to see the full-bandwidth version of whatever schlock they're peddling, over time they'd develop a reputation for delivering funny/interesting/engaging ads. Then I might let some through. Hell, I might start following them on Twitter.
But don't hijack my browser, track me against my will, and force me to look at things I don't want to simply to find out what kind of car accident happened outside last night. Content producers and consumers should not be in an adversarial relationship. Yet this is what they've created.
If you don't want tracking, don't visit the website. Ads don't force you look at things. You're looking at it.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/adblock-plus-is-launching-an-ad-...
"Advertisers will not be able to target ads via the Acceptable Ads Platform using the granular behavioral data many have become accustomed too, however, to preserve user privacy and security.
Rather, they’ll have a limited set of information with which to target their ads, including the domain on which an ad would appear; the device, browser and operating system on which it’s being loaded; and the geographical location it’s being loaded from."
OK, so the "limited" set of information is already 5 pieces of information, and without specifics about the geographical location I am going to assume it can vary on any scale determined and changed by ABP at their discretion. In combination this is very likely to be a UUID for a vast majority of people (sorry, I don't have a reference, but that is what I have read somewhere). More pertinently, I have a vague feeling that this combination is enough for retargeting (people in adtech, please give us your input).
Folks are mentioning uBlock Origin. But there is tremendous pressure from online publishers, who I expect are soon going to turn this into a game of Whack-a-Blocker.
Ehh...it'll probably be the useragent string and the result of geocoding the client IP address. This is fairly narrow (especially for obscure and/or out-of-date browsers), but I think calling it "unique" might be a stretch. I guess it would be highly dependent on the population of your city or town and on the popularity of the site itself. I might be one of just a handful of people who reads HN while laying in my bed at night on an iPhone 6S, but I'd expect quite a few people in a major metro area are hitting big media sites from Chrome on Windows.
EDIT: trivial wording tweak
- what language do they speak
- what regional market do they shop in
- what is the compatibility of their client browser to render your ad
For now, I am going to assume that WSJ is correct and either got this information from someone other than ABP, or they know more than what has already been announced.
Ignoring massive news sites who are probably not that concerned about the devaluation of their content, ABP is really pushing this solution as a boon for small blogs and medium sized publishers [1]:
"Looking ahead, the chief improvements the AAP will offer are its feedback mechanism, the way that mechanism will turn real-time bidding (RTB) on its head and how the AAP will be an especial boon to small blogs and medium-sized publishers."
Let us just consider the relationship between ad profitability and how much data is indispensable: is the issue actually poorly solved BECAUSE people have been taking tracking for granted (including the readers)? What about using all the content on the website for better ads? Sure, it would be REALLY lucrative if you, the site publisher, could also show an ad for a product I just browsed on Amazon.com, but it is also super creepy and at some point devalues your site in my eyes.
I really wish we could hear from someone who has built an ad network which helps small publishers.
[1] https://adblockplus.org/blog/new-acceptable-ads-platform-lau...
Wedging yourself in the middle is an awesome business plan.
[1]: OK, maybe in the extremely broad, indirect sense that reCaptcha helps Google solve image classification problems, which make Google products like Maps/Books/Images better, which increases traffic, which increases ad revenue
Google is involved in making it harder to scrape the web for the average person. They are involved in most web standards. If you go in to most robots.txt files, they have root forbidden for user-agent: *. But you can be sure that Google is whitelisted.
Google has a vested interest in making it harder for the average person to scrap the web. This is because they position themselves as a repository of information. This is a clear case of wedging yourself in the middle.
1. Tell users you're doing something for them.
2. Get lots of users.
3. Change product to screw them.
4. Profit!
This happens too often.
In an effort to keep my Chromium/FF instances 'clean' I just use https-everywhere and uMatrix (since it came out - my trust in noscript and abp was waning a long way back). It's nice to block the vast majority of low-hanging trackers. I'm hoping that having FB, GA and myriad other tracking scripts auto-disabled circumvents some of their even smarter tracking methods (IP, cookie) but I'm always open to modify the setup, just not at the expense of my limited computing resources.
Using 10 privacy extensions is a non-starter, for instance. Not to mention how little I trust most of the ad blocking efforts out there.
At home I have a pi-hole set up (as well as the pi being a media centre, IRC, IM and NAS... so versatile!) to block the low-hanging scripts and calls on my family and guests' browsing. It's a shame it blocks Piwik by default, but I can understand the reasoning. Log-based analytics really should be the norm, anyway. The speed boost is non-trivial, as is the peace of mind that most of our private life is not being sold to the highest bidder.
EDIT: I've just gone into the Privacy settings in uMatrix and checked everything on the basis of this post-as-reminder: Cookies, local storage, user agent, strict https... Don't think the last one allows me to drop https-everywhere yet though, only to avoid mixed content. I may end up unchecking that box if it gets too annoying... I know the risks!
The Tor project still bundle NS in with their browser, hardened, I believe (stricter whitelisting, for one) but they clearly still trust it. Better than nothing, but far from perfect IMO.
But when will this game end?
Advertisers should just pay consumers (users). Why bother with a middleman?
Request for Project (RFP): Let all users sign up to be paid by advertisers. (This is not a new idea.) Sign up with enough advertisers and one can have "universal basic income".
Users should not be giving away their time for free. Every time a web advertiser distracts a user, they are "stealing" the user's time.
Advertisers pay for this privilege. But they do not pay the users. They pay off someone -- you know who -- to help them steal users' time.
Just pay the damn users. Enough of this silly game.
Added benefit: It would open up the search engine market and social networking (photo database) market to competition and innovation.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/umatrix/ogfcmafjal...
If companies start doing this, I'll exclusively buy provided products from them rather then from advertised companies. If the data sheet you provide lies, I'll never buy your products again, so keep that in mind.
This is a simple and transparent way to get me to buy your products and it costs you less! Isn't that great!
I'm not saying I outright support, but some ads are useful — The Deck is one example. Amazon's "people who purchased this also purchased" is (kind of) another.
I'm not quite sure how to categorize their affinity analysis in general. Perhaps it could be thought of as a cross-sell / upsell / impulse buy, depending on the item recommended.
And, of course, https://github.com/Mechazawa/FuckFuckAdblock
I do use Adblock Plus because there's a nice fanboy annoyances list that kills the latest scourge of Web UI: the pop up, in particular the "sign up to our newsletter since you've been here for 2 seconds!" pop up.
Is there ublock origin equivalent for this?
EDIT: the specific one you mention is even offered (but not turned on) by default in uBlock origin.
Not only would they all have to sell out like adblock plus, but advertisers would also have to pay each of them before you saw a single ad.
I don't like ads but I still want to contribute to the sites so I just pay with contributor: https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/
Disclosure: I work for Google but those opinions are my own.
Publishers generally don't have to opt in: if you're a publisher advertising with AdSense, and a visitor shows up who uses Contributor, they'll see "thank you for being a Contributor!" and you get a micropayment from them into your AdSense account.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, on things completely unrelated to ads.)
The first guy to invent the Ad-blocker-Blocker will be rich. That is, until someone creates the Ad-blocker-blocker-Blocker. Then that is the guy who will be rich. That is, until the....
When I say "blacklist the site" I mean the domain I'm viewing the content on, not the domain the ads are being served on. Otherwise you're "punishing" poor sods who just happen to be using the same ad network as an abusive site.
I'm not sure any tool allows that right now. They all block-by-default and have a whitelist instead.
Have blocklists configured and activated. Then you can set a global "allow all external resources" rule, which ignores the blocklists. You can then deactivate that global rule on a per-site basis, directly from the extension menu.
(It's less confusing to use than it sounds ;))
No, how about I use an actual product that does what I actually need? Problem is: none exist. The kind of jerks who write ad-blocking programs can't even imagine a universe in which a person may not want to block every ad everywhere ever.
If the ads are being served from the same ad network - then you will be served more or less the same shitty ads you didn't want to see on Site A when you visit Site B. Because it is the ad network tracking you and deciding which ads you see with very little, if any, input from Sites A or B.
Furthermore, since advertisements are a security risk they should be blacklisted by default and only whitelist sites you trust. Which is still no guarantee you won't get infected by the 3rd party Ad Network of that site.
Not true.
> Because it is the ad network tracking you and deciding which ads you see with very little, if any, input from Sites A or B.
I don't care about "tracking". I think that's extremely overblown paranoia.
> Furthermore, since advertisements are a security risk they should be blacklisted by default and only whitelist sites you trust.
That is your opinion; I do not share it.
Regardless of what you "think" I should be doing, the simple fact is that I want a program that does X, and a program that does X does not exist.
The Ad Network tracks you and knows which ads to show you. It doesn't give a damn if you visit Site A or Site B it is going to show you the ads it thinks it should be showing you because it knows who you are. If Site A is about cars and Site B is about cleaning supplies, you may see more ads for cars/cleaning supplies on the respective sites - but any "irrelevant" ads will be shared between the two sites based on your user profile. I'm not bringing up the tracking aspect as a reason for blocking because some people don't care about that, as you mentioned you don't yourself. I'm bringing it up because it is what determines what advertisements you see - and no matter what site you visit, as long as they are using the same Ad Network, you will receive advertisements based on your personal profile with that Ad Network.
The company I work for exists to get people like you to click ads. Every large Ad Network works like this.
>That is your opinion; I do not share it.
I hope you have absolutely nothing important on your computer, are never the target of ransomware, never have any of your personal accounts compromised, etc. You're probably the first person I've ever met who doesn't care about personal security. For many people it is even a concern of financial security (identity theft) with the rise of online banking, but I'll assume you don't do any of that and you never make any purchases online.
[0] https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/113771?visit_id=1-...
[1] https://support.google.com/adsense/troubleshooter/1631343
Even though I'd prefer Site A, because it doesn't have those nasty takeovers or anything, if I blocked the ad exchange I'd be fucking over both Site A and Site B. Site A would become collateral damage, in effect.
Believe me, I worked for Atlas for 5 years. I know how ad networks work.
> I hope you have absolutely nothing important on your computer, are never the target of ransomware, never have any of your personal accounts compromised, etc.
So do I.
> You're probably the first person I've ever met who doesn't care about personal security.
I do care about personal security. I don't see what blocking ads has anything to do with that.
> For many people it is even a concern of financial security (identity theft) with the rise of online banking, but I'll assume you don't do any of that and you never make any purchases online.
I've never seen or heard of anybody who's ever lost any money due to an ad load. It's just irrational paranoia.
Do you have absolutely zero personal information tied to or stored on your computer? A compromised computer would be compromised security in such a case.
>I've never seen or heard of anybody who's ever lost any money due to an ad load. It's just irrational paranoia.
Look into malvertising and especially ransomware. Just because it hasn't happened to you or someone you know doesn't mean it hasn't happened. It's also happened on big name and high trafficked sites like The New York Times, Yahoo!, the Huffington Post, and more. We're talking hundreds of thousands of people who have been financially impacted due to malicious ads on otherwise "trusted" sites. Even sites that specifically requested they disable their ad blocker, like Forbes.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising
[1] http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/03/big-name-sites-hit-b...
||acceptableserver.com^ and might as well ||combotag.com^
* AdBlock
* AdBlock Plus
* AdBlock Ultimate, now AdBlocker Ultimate
uBlock has:
* uBlock
* uBlock Origin
...and I can never tell the difference.
I suspect AdBlock(er) Ultimate is yet another unrelated extension from completely different people.
It's a similar story with uBlock. I think the uBlock dev wanted to stop, handed off dev to someone else who fucked up. So it was forked into uBlock origin.
tl;dr they're all adblocking software from different people, who don't work together.
how many people know what a host file is ? that will answer your question. ad-block is the simplest way to block ads for a non technical user.
An in-browser ad blocker is also more effective, regardless of your technical skill. Hosts blocks only work if the ads are served from their own server, which is certainly not always the case. Either you don't block the hard ads, or you block way too much and break a bunch of sites.
Not that the hosts file thing is wrong, it's a bit of a sledgehammer approach though.
But, I suppose to each their own.
Ads are how people who provide free content make money. Yes, they are often offensive (visually, not necessarily the content), slow to load, and contain or utilize some of tracker or retargeting mechanism. But if you can remove those and you basically just have a PNG telling you about a product or service, that is the very definition of acceptable.
But to freely consume content from someone (whether a single blogger or a massive company) then bitch about unobtrusive, nontracking, inoffensive advertisements is a pretty good example of entitlement.
Hehe, I guess that's why one would use an ad blocker, right?
I hear you, but this isn't about helping sites survive, it's about ads in an ad blocker that is keeping their money for themselves, and is used mostly by people who dislike ads.
But the fundamental problem with ads is that, even when they are unobstrusive, don't invade my privacy and don't compromise my security, they still are inherently manipulative and therefore unethical. The Internet was designed to exchange information. How I then choose to display that information is up to me. Ad-based businesses are tolerated, but have no claim to the internet. I will continue to block every ad I can and businesses will have to adapt, or die. I won't shed a tear for them.
How are ads manipulative?
What does "claim to the internet" mean? The internet isn't a piece of land.
That's been done for a long time: uBlock Origin for Firefox has been around for ages, and Firefox has had an Android version for quite some time.