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Comment by Akujin | Hacker News Reader

I used to work for a small company that did print (and web) medical journals targeted at dentists and dental professionals. We handled all the ads ourselves and hosted the images on our server as any other image. This meant we were basically impervious to adblock. Except for the occasional iframe embedded ad that was given to us by the client we basically never had an issue with adblock.

Same thing on a nightlife website I worked on. Ads hosted by others were blocked but our own hosted ads were never a problem.

Granted our own ads also had zero chance of being hijacked by a bad actor since they were simple <a><img></a> ads.

If only everyone did this we wouldn't be having this arms race.

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Pretty much. If Ads were without JS and videos (or, at least autoplaying videos) I really wouldn't care. Hell, if they were relevant ads to the website, I'd probably even click on them and buy things occasionally.

But when a modal pops up or I get redirected, or your ad floats over your content and tries to follow my scrolling not only are you not going to sell to me, but I'm going to leave your website.

> Hell, if they were relevant ads to the website

I had to watch youtube without an adblocker recently for the first time pretty much ever.

The ads were not only extremely irrelevant. They were extremely sexist, strongly offensive and discriminating. Without exception (note I'm not in the US, so these probably aren't the same you're seeing!). I was incredibly surprised that most of the population watching youtube was exposed to this daily but not completely outrage.

Or ads that significantly slow loading, make the page jump around...

90% of the reason I block ads on mobile is performance. Even on a newer phone, any news website takes forever to load all the junk and ads.

I don't know. For me it's as simple as right-click on the link and choose "block this item" from context menu. Ok, often I need to adjust the suggested css-selector to block the item permanentely. But the general rule is that I have full control over how websites are shown. It's more than just ad-blocking. I block menu panels or whole parts of websites which I don't use. On youtube, for example, I blocked everything except the video-frame. No comments, no logos, no headers, only video.

The images were being served through a PHP passthrough script at /media/$ID

You would have no way of knowing if the image was an ad or part of the article content since they were all served through the same thing. No silly subdomains like ad.domain.com either.

> You would have no way of knowing if the image was an ad or part of the article content since they were all served through the same thing. No silly subdomains like ad.domain.com either.

Still quite feasible to detect by size and styling.

Not if they mimic the size/styling of, say, images in the articles.

If you make your ads look exactly like content, devaluing your actual content, then yes, you can mask ads more easily.

That makes it a native ad and not a display ad, which can change the discussion quite a bit.

That doesn't change anything, it just makes your site more annoying. I block "one off" ads like that every time I notice them. If I have to keep doing it then I just turn off images for the page.

I wish web developers had more respect for their audience. If I say, "No ads," I really mean "No ads." Your site is not a special snowflake where I suddenly don't mind seeing advertisements.

I think you missed the part where I mentioned the content was targeted towards dentists and dental professionals. Our typical visitor would be a dentist in his 50s or 60s looking up some medical text. They generally had almost no technical expertise with the web or computers. Let alone ad blockers.

I'm also not sure what you mean by "respect for their audience". If I put an ad on a website I didn't ask your opinion and frankly I don't care what you think. Unless you wanna pay my bills. If what you're saying is I should detect the existence of ad block and actually proactively stop writing the code for said ad into the website.....well... that's just silly.

I wonder if eventually ad companies will just host the content themselves. Or at least route it through their servers. The ads then get served through the same domain and can't be blocked that way.

But that only defeats simple adblocks that blacklist domains. It's theoretically possible to make an adblock that detects ads through machine learning and removes them. Doesn't matter where they are hosted.

But advertisers can run scripts to detect modifying the web page and stop it. So adblock would have to move to having a headless browser that renders the page, and then copies it and removes the ads.

Then the advertisers would have to try to trick the machine learning itself. Adversarial machine learning is a thing, with neural networks trained to fool other neural networks. And images that are highly optimized to exploit subtle defects in other neural networks.

As ML ad detection improves, the only way for ads to get past it will be to make ads that look more and more like real content, even to the human eye. Perhaps in the limit, ads and content will become completely indistinguishable.

> I wonder if eventually ad companies will just host the content themselves. Or at least route it through their servers. The ads then get served through the same domain and can't be blocked that way.

This is already happening. Further, embedding paid for content in the middle of original content at the server side is also already happening.

> As ML ad detection improves, the only way for ads to get past it will be to make ads that look more and more like real content, even to the human eye. Perhaps in the limit, ads and content will become completely indistinguishable.

This is also already happening. Brand placement deals are nothing new to advertising and they are basically table stakes to most content purveyors.

The real question isn't if those things are going to happen, its how those sorts of deals will handle the analytics side of the equation. How will you prove that your instagram feed is the best place for the yoga pants provider to spend their marketing budget?

Google AMP content and Facebook Instant Articles are served from Google's and Facebook's servers now. "Served" is not quite the same as "hosted" but it's close.

Perhaps in the limit, ads and content will become completely indistinguishable.

I don't know whether this is a deliberate reference, but there is South Park episode playing with this idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sponsored_Content_%28South_Par...

We are already doing this on our sites. We run a whitelist of ads, and when we encounter Adblock we just serve an image tag and HREF with no JS. Works well for us and the user.

> I wonder if eventually ad companies will just host the content themselves.

They are already doing it: Google AMP, Facebook Instant Pages.

Like popular music lyrics dropping brand names...

The basic "problem" with this approach is that the customer (be it a client or an agency) can't be 100% sure if the view data you deliver them is correct, they can only count the clicks. If the ads are on your server and there is no external content involved, only you get the stats. It's not a problem only for in-house ads, or when the customer doesn't care about the views and is only interested in clicks.

If you handle the ads yourself Google doesn't get their middleman cut.

That's not the problem. The problem is ad networks where the publisher never even serves the ads. You vetted the ads before serving them; but other publishers do not.

One my sites has always hosted our it's own ads; they're small images and some are just text. They all get blocked by modern ad blockers.

And this would limit tracking of users across websites, which would be another benefit.

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