How publishers are defeating ad blockers and how ad blockers are fighting back
blog.bugreplay.com
blog.bugreplay.com
... ironically for their marketing department, I decided not become a customer then and there.
Some people simply can't be bothered to disable an ad blocker for non-ad related things. Others take a more extreme stance and consider analysis itself to be an affront. Everyone loses. Producers don't know what works or doesn't and consumers don't get the content they desire.
One thing I've noticed is that these comments tend to come from pure consumers but rarely from those who both produce and consume. It's partially an issue of having a lack of perspective of the other part of the equation.
Also from people that feel entitled just to get services for free.
So if it isn't with money or advertising, it has to be whatever else they can extract from the users.
So let's imagine someone serves supper on the street (i.e. street food), with the setup that it's take it yourself service. The incentive is that people would line up and pay, but some people don't - so would such company owners have the right to collect saliva and extract DNA to sell such personal information to some other companies thereby extracting value?
I'm asking because paid services are treating me this way, and honestly I resent it.
We're talking about refusing clients who use adblockers. There are many ways to track usage that doesn't require that. I've implemented some myself. If the reason for refusal is because their tracking can't work with it it's doing it wrong.
> tend to come from pure consumers but rarely from those who both produce and consume
Produce what? And why does it matter? Imagine coming to a grocery store and being asked to change into store uniform, before you are allowed in, because it's easier for them to do business that way, marketing and stuff, and when you ask "WTF?" - they'd say "well, you don't know how it is to farm, do you? Did you ever milk a cow or harvested rye? You only consume, not produce, you lazy slacker, right? So either strip and wear the uniform or shut the heck up!". No thanks. I wouldn't visit such store. Would you?
> It's partially an issue of having a lack of perspective of the other part of the equation.
I am not obliged to serve everybody's perspective. I have no obligation to make life easy for somebody's marketing department or support somebody's business model. It's their business to convince me to support it with my money, and, frankly, telling me I'm too ignorant to appreciate how wonderful they are is not going to work well. Telling me "we're too lazy/cheap to do it any other way, so please disable all security features in your browser, disregard your privacy and risk your safety because our marketing needs some nice graphs in their next monthly presentation" won't work either.
But I do get the content I desire. I'm quite capable of choosing by myself. And what's worse is that the opposite also happens -- I may get content that I actively resent.
You see, I bought an Amazon Fire TV stick the other day. I was dismayed to realise that it plays a (short) ad before showing me the content I asked for.
I pay for Amazon Prime. I resent them still forcing me to watch ads. I'm seriously considering whether the downside of enduring a 5s ad outweighs he convenience of the device (which is quite nice TBH). Because you're right, I do consider it an affront.
> Others take a more extreme stance and consider analysis itself to be an affront.
Indeed. Süddeutsche Zeitung, a newspaper which my family has been subscribed to since about the 1960s, now rejects me if I use an adblocker, and am not logged in. I've actually left their site because I resent being tracked and subjected to ads, after paying them a good chunk of money already.
the problem is massive ads, 3 line stories turning into multi page ad fests, "Around the Web" type crap, security risks injected via ad networks, etc...
It's not the ads per-se: it's the MASSIVE abuse of ads. it's why we can't have nice things.
Same can be said of TV shows and how it went from a minute of ads... t0o 10 minutes out of a 30 minute slot being ads.
I'm also fine with some advertising, but auto-playing video with sound is where I draw the line (especially when bandwidth sensitive).
Efficiency is a primary feature of uBlock Origin, it's not going anywhere, regardless of whether it blocks tracking or ads, or whatever else.
Just pick your filter lists according to what you want to achieve.
In any case, I fail to see the difference between ads and tracking, as I have often mentioned, ads are just the visible tip of the tracking/profiling iceberg.
I agree for most ads as they are implemented now but things like the common audible.com mentions in YouTube videos I'm totally fine with, that's how advertising was done for decades before the internet and there's no reason it can't still be done. Web page standards give too much power to the page author by default, if the things they use to track people had never been allowed by default, we never would have had this problem because no sane person would agree to them if asked.
If those guys could stay in the sane bounds, the problem would be much less. But right now it's completely out of hand, browsing without adblocker became a nightmare.
(yes, I've got the "Disable HTML5 Autoplay" in chrome, and no, it mostly doesn't work)
I've even had some sites do this where during the autoplay the site would autoscroll back to the location of the video and then not let you scroll away from the video until it was done playing. You'd be somewhat interested in the article, so you say "Fine, I'll watch the whole fucking ad" and then go back to reading only to have your fucking reading inter-fucking-rupted 15 fucking seconds later. FUCK!!! Seriously, fuck these web developers who do this absolute bullshit.
Open an article on protectionism, head off to Wikipedia to look up some unfamiliar terms, suddenly, "COMPANIES AROUND THE WORLD ARE DEVELOPING SEXBOTS. WHAT DOES THIS MEAN TO THE FUTURE OF HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS?"
Now my wife wants to know why I was researching sex bots, and the more I try to explain the situation the deeper I dig myself thanks to the Othello Effect.
It can even block external fonts (bandwidth's not cheap for me)
I would have given you a step by step tutorial but my PC is down ATM.
Many of you don't understand how that could be a huge nuissance, because your systems are powerful enough to shrug it off, but for my old system, those fucking ads would freeze up the UI of the page.
Even with my new system, many of the ads offered enough of a slowdown to the experience of using many sites on top of sometimes causing the system to crash completely that an adblocker became necessary.
You look at people who visit your site without seeing the ads as "stealing" your content without paying the price (suffering, apparently I guess) of viewing the ads. Forcing them to view ads is a dumb move that you've been forced into because of the bizarre incentives in the business, but it's not a sustainable strategy.
Forcing people to view ads won't make those ads effective, and it'll make your viewers hate you more. Ads are likely not a long-term stable source of income either. Precisely because people are becoming more and more savvy when it comes to figuring out what to buy and less and less tolerant of being told what to buy.
I know that advertising is one of the easiest ways to make money, especially with a content site on the internet. But you need to put serious effort into finding a better way. If you don't then you'll be caught flat footed when both your ad revenue and your viewers gone. Foster stronger bonds with your viewers, figure out how to monetize them without ads (there are a zillion ways without paywalls), keep innovating, laziness is how you die.
At the simplest level if you offer a quality product and you let people pay whatever they want for it, even nothing, you will still make money. That alone may not be enough to cover your costs, but it's an important realization. The difference between the "you need to control your customers, sell them to advertisers, and force ads down their throats" mindset versus the "you need to engage with your users and they will support you no matter what" mindset is like night and day, being so diametrically opposite can make it difficult to make the transition.
The easy level of monetization is to let people give you money in exchange for "nothing". Offer donations, or patronage support with token rewards (such as being thanked, put in the credits, etc.), and merch that allows people to show off their support or that allows people to express their identity through a connection to you or your content (this works for everything not just rock bands or web comics).
Up from there you can offer more substantive rewards. You can offer subscriptions that gain people access to extra content, to content earlier than it will be publicly available, to higher levels of credit, or to higher levels of engagement and connection with creators.
You can package your content in different forms and release it as a compilation, charging money for it or offering it to subscribers. Say you're a web comic, you can print books containing your comics by year or by story line or whatever. If you're a musical artist you might release all of the tracks you're working on at any given time freely (through youtube or mp3 downloads) but then cut an album of the tracks (perhaps after re-recording them and having them professionally mixed/mastered) and sell that (either digitally, in physical form, or likely both). If you write you can compile stuff into books focusing on certain themes. And so on.
You can break your work up into specific projects and crowd fund each project. This also gives you the advantage that you'll typically end up having to figure out how to produce various products out of that project to use as rewards, which you can also sell afterwards.
And that's just a start, there are tons of other options.
These things aren't viable for "content" creators who don't produce a lot of original content or that don't produce content of high enough quality to engage strongly with their fans, and I'm mostly ok with that. There are tons of clickbait and tabloid content creators out there who survive not because they produce anything of value but because today eyes can be monetized through ads. The main problem here is that income inequality is at such an extreme level that a lot of people have hardly any disposable income to support anything, no matter how much they value it, but the effects of that are even more wide ranging.
So, whatever 90% of publishers do... we follow along and do the same. If most publishers are use advertisements, we do that because it's proven to work at least marginally. If most publishers user subscriptions services as they did in the 90s/2000s, then we follow along and do the same.
I'm like you though; I actively avoid reading sites that do this. I also block JavaScript by default, which helps to mitigate a lot of other annoyances and privacy invasions.
I work for a midlevel publisher. Nearly of our content is syndicated, with very nearly none if it being unique. Our value -add is our selectivity, and great on-site user experience when it comes to filtering and subscriptions.
20% of our readers use adblock. For video content which is a mere fraction of our site, that comes out to $700 a day in bandwidth costs going to adblock users, or $21,000 in the average month. That's a lot.
What publisher wouldn't fall over themselves to get 20% more profits in a given year?
In the last year, we grew approximately 20% but our % of adblock users soared so while costs are up, revenue is flat. This isn't a sustainable situation. I have a lot of sympathy for people who do not want to see intrsuive advertisement, and I myself feel the same way sometimes, but when it comes down to sheer costs---we can't afford to subsidize adblock users.
I'm unconviced that adblock users add more value that they take away. Since we know how many of them they are, and how much they cost, we can ask is $21,000 better spent subsizing adblock user who may tell their friends about our site, or is it better spent on traditional advertising? I think that people do follow word-of-mouth better than traditional ads, but that also means the friends of adblock users are more likely to be adblock users themselves---thus just an additional cost ontop of one we can't handle already.
These aren't ads. They have to click play for anything to happen.
It's sad really
Short of that I really don't give a damn. It's not my problem.
The p element would be blocked. This will also be great for getting rid of non ad content that you just don't want to see.
On other sites you look at what they want to include and you just think "yeah, no, let's not do that" and just close the page.
Which is all the justification you need to block it.
Apple's new hooks for blockers only allow regex filters, so the blockers can never win without being able to add code.
There are other browsers besides Safari but then you have other problems:
1). Do they have daily updates to their ad blockers to keep up the arms race?
2). How do you use important Safari plugins like LastPass?
This is a dupe of the exact same article posted 2 hours earlier. The URL is only different because this one, the dupe, had a # at the end of the URL and bypassed dupe detection. Why isn't that something that is identified and fixed automatically? Even better, if HN detects that someone is purposefully trying to bypass dupe detection, does HN punish that user? This case looks like it could have been a simple mistake, but there's zero reason that HN shouldn't be stripping a trailing # and in general having the dupe detection flag URLs that only differ in fragment ids.
Maybe one that limits cross-domain traffic, so requests for more than, say, a megabyte get nixed?
I added my own custom script into Appnexus (ad provider) and attempted to load it. Ad-blockers, I discovered do one of two things in this case. The first is to just block the loading of the content, in which case it was easy to detect. Others would inject their own custom content, hence adding a custom script and then checking the contents for a special string.
A fun task for sure though.
One example I know of that I believe is ad-free is theinformation.com which has a yearly subscription of $399. https://www.theinformation.com/payment-policy Running an institution like the NYT or the WSJ must be much more expensive.