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Comment by Eerie | Hacker News Reader

>I wonder who will win...

Ad-blocking had already won. I haven't (involuntary) seen ads for several years now. There were a few regressions here and there, but they were all fixed extremely fast. The new fancy ad-block detectors were defeated in a matter of days.

26% ad-blocking is a nice start, but the real fun begins when it is at +96%, and Google/Facebook/InsertNameHere lose their main source of income.

I think a very strong and concerted push to outlaw ad-blocking is almost inevitable, but ultimately it will be as futile as trying to outlaw the BitTorrent protocol.

Will the ad-supported crap-manufacturing eyeball factory that is the modern Internet crash and burn, leaving only Patreon to stand atop the pile of ruins?

We can but hope.

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Some companies are evading it by sponsoring content. It's kind of ridiculous, but now I know companies like Square Cash, Me Undies, Parachute Sheets, Blue Apron, The Great Courses Plus, and Casper Mattress by heart because they keep sponsoring a bunch of podcasts I listen to.

I totally get that podcasts have to earn money somehow, so I'm not mad or upset, but it has been an effective way of evading my usage of Ghostery and ublock / disassociation from social media.

Fellow fan of the pod. They've done advertising really well.

I am not even American and I can also remember every single sponsor and product they've ever advertised.

Only because it's new and relatively unsaturated...every new medium was the same way. When radio, TV and the internet each started running ads you could say the same thing.

>> Only because it's new and relatively unsaturated

Depends how long you've been listening to podcasts. There are lots of shows I listened to regularly for 3-5 years that I've completely stopped listening to because of the sheer volume of advertising (plus the fact that every week/day/episode the advertising is exactly the same). All TWiT Network shows for example are unsubscribed for me despite listening to about 10 of them and not missing an episode for years. So, in some older shows, saturation has definitely been reached. I think a lot of it is to do with necessary spending.

Podcasts are so simple to make yet people put together networks that have these high-end studios and camera systems when all they really needed was some guests, a few $100 mics and Skype.

Well ad blockers dont work with native apps right? A huge number of people use facebook/googles native iOS/Android apps so this most likely won't kill their business.

At least on iOS ad blockers are integrated into Safari so any native app using the Safari View Controller will use configured content blockers. That's why Facebook and others will continue to use the legacy web view.

Yeah which Facebook doesn't use for rendering newsfeed ads. I'd imagine that google does the same thing for its native adverts. Also, I'd imagine that all banner adverts displayed in third party apps are native as well. Disclosure, I worked on the main Facebook app.

Google Revenue:

2013 $57 billion

2014 $66 billion

2015 $74 billion

2016 $90 billion

Facebook Revenue:

2013 $8 billion

2014 $12 billion

2015 $18 billion

2016 $27 billion

If ad blocking has already won, I'm sure Google and Facebook will be happy to continue losing.

Ad-blocking won in a sense that it seems to be unbeatable. It is not widespread enough yet to damage Google/Facebook revenue. However, the usage of ad-blocking continues to rise exponentially, so the next few years are going to be interesting.

Ad blocking is unbeatable? Can you explain? Seems to me ad blocking could be stopped if they wanted to and just not enough.

But in the end if more blocking does not the ones that are not blocked just become more valuable so does not change really anything? I mean advertising is going to continue to grow no matter what.

Native ads will prevail. And the kinds of promotion that is blended in the content. I believe it is already happening.

As long as it's recognizable as an ad, it can be blocked. If it's not, then can you even call it an ad, really? It will be, I suppose, a very sophisticated product-placement. Certainly not something you can do automatically across millions of websites. So ad-blocking still wins.

> As long as it's recognizable as an ad

Are you saying that there are ad-blockers based on image recognition?

Not yet, because there is no need, so far. Here's an article about a proof of concept, though: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/princetons-ad-blo...

There aren't any widely deployed AdBlockers which work on the FB mobile app, Snapchat or Instagram.

Same with the Google search app.

> So ad-blocking still wins.

FB is losing all the way to the bank at the moment.

Yes, I agree. Technically, with text classification/image recognition we can block all forms of ads, but you risk throwing out the baby with the bath water, and from my own experience, these 'plug' ads are not so repugnant, can even add an element of surprise to the content sometimes.

My point is that with adblocking tools being adopted by more users, ad platforms will perhaps begin to use this new format.

Google's ads are as links, served along with their regular search results, and marked as ads. The only way to block those would be to remove all the links marked as ads, and the predictable response would be to stop marking them. So, no, I don't see adblockers hurting Google (at least, not their main business).

That's only google's search ads, though. DoubleClick does a lot more than text ads on google's search page.

What's the revenue breakdown, though? If Google just kept text ads on their search page, how much revenue would they lose?

They would lose about 20% of their revenue, based on 1st quarter 2017 breakdown.

Source: page 33 [1] here https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/20170331_alphabet_10Q.pdf

[1] Page 33 in terms of PDF document, if you are looking at the printed page numbers then it is page 31.

>but the real fun begins when it is at +96%, and Google/Facebook/InsertNameHere lose their main source of income.

You don't really think it'll ever get anywhere near that percentage, right? When the major players start devoting time and resources to defeating ad blockers that's when the real fun will begin.

If the % of ad blockers is high enough, the content providers just switch over to paid subscriptions. E.g. Youtube Red.

>If the % of ad blockers is high enough, the content providers just switch over to paid subscriptions. E.g. Youtube Red.

This would be an amazing development. 99.9% of the providers who switch to paid subscription will go out of business, because their content is toxic garbage that people will never click if it cost them money. The remaining will be those who care about quality and consider the viewers to be their customers, not their product.

Especially when the ad-blockers are running on the browsers (Chrome), which are controlled by the ad platforms (Google). If I remembered it right, reportedly Google had struck a deal with AdBlock Plus to whitelist Google ads.

> If I remembered it right

Serious question. No intention to insult.

You are on the Internet, not sitting in a pub with no wi-fi. Instead of writing "if I remembered it right", why not spend 2 minutes googling, to find out how AdBlock Plus actually operates?

Reportedly. https://techcrunch.com/2013/07/06/google-and-others-reported...

>I think a very strong and concerted push to outlaw ad-blocking is almost inevitable

Is there any indication for such a push? What might get outlawed is paid unblocking, because that is arguably extortion, but free, non-commercial, browser based ad blockers will never be outlawed.

I think what will happen once advertising growth can no longer outrun ad blocking is one or both of these two things:

a) Commercial content producers move to unblockable platforms, i.e off the open web.

b) Google et al come up with a server side solution that creates trust between advertisers, ad networks and websites so that browsers no longer need to make blockable requests to third party sites in order to retrieve ads and send clicks. That would force any ad blockers to become a lot more resource intensive because they would have to analyse the content itself, which would slow down the page massively.

> as futile as trying to outlaw the BitTorrent protocol

It doesn't need to be eradicated, just kept underground to limit adoption. Millions use torrent, yes, but many more do not and the movie studios are still raking in money.

What do you do about ad blocker-blockers?

https://reek.github.io/anti-adblock-killer/

Or use uBlock Origin, which supposedly has it integrated (I'm not sure, as I'm using AdBlock Plus)

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