Insane state of today's advertising part 3 | Hacker News Reader

Insane state of today's advertising part 3

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961 pointsarchon810420 comments

Awesome to see that subject #1 on HN.

At my startup Confiant [1], we block bad ads in stream on behalf of publishers. Cedato aka Algovid aka TLVMedia is one of our prime targets, we block millions of their ad impressions daily.

They are essentially buying cheap display ad placements to resell them as fake video preroll ad placements. They sell on video exchanges like AOL's AdapTV and others. To maximize their yield, they resend ad requests in a loop to multiple parties every few seconds until an ad clears, leading to this massive network load.

We're on a mission to drive them out of business (and we're hiring ;) )

[1] https://www.confiant.com (edit forgot link)

The only good ad is a dead one.

With very few exceptions, especially in the consumer space, you won't need advertising if you actually need something. You'll search it out or your friends will tell you what to buy.

Advertising serves as a way for the capitalist class to exert veto power over other aspects of society by yanking funding at opportune moments (see the current Google snafu or Bill O'Reilly's departure from FOX (which was an example of this power being used for good indirectly via public pressure)). It also allows for shows of dominance, strength, and to move fucking product by creating an awareness moat vs your competitors. This means that people often already know they want to buy something, but they'll pick you instead of the other one which is fundamentally different from advertising performing a public service.

An anecdote from 2010: my company had racks of Rackable Systems servers. Every month a server went dead- power supply, board or some such. Rackable Systems were unreliable. Then on Slashdot I saw a square ad for IBM System X servers (unfortunately they have been sold to Lenovo a couple of years ago). That somehow made me do research- although I was aware of IBM System X before. Between 2010 and 1013 we bought perhaps 20 IBM System X servers (rock solid and beautifully engineered). Cost per that ad impression was perhaps $75,000.

I won't deny this has occasionally happened to me, but look at your example: it's B2B when my claim is primarily for B2C. B2B ads tend to be more targeted, aimed at corporations, and purchases are for higher dollar amounts. The product being sold was also competing based on build quality, a material improvement.

Businesses often make more rational decisions because they can assign someone to do research (like you did of your own volition) who will make comparisons and think about it.

Imagine the same process happening for shampoo. I'm sure there are some people that want "the best" shampoo, but most of the products are going to be nearly interchangeable and the marketing will try focus on various kinds of manipulation to dig that moat. These manipulations aren't what most people think of, like a sex symbol hypnotizing you. Instead they work to increase brand familiarity, social proof, and provide a life style narrative you can tell yourself and show off to other people with.

The capital hiding behind these campaigns funds newspapers, television, radio, and civic centers. It acts as a filter on the public discourse. If you're interested, look up Manufacturing Consent for more information.

Here's a clip from a documentary based on the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTBWfkE7BXU

You and I might dislike ads but don't you think there's a pretty big chance that a lot of the products you are hearing about from your friends were only brought to their attention thanks to ads? So without ads your friends would not have known about the products that they do now.

Yah your argument against adverting is bullshit.

Even consumers love ads.

Did you know that they even pay money because they want ads? Those 900 pages of Vogue that they buy every September, do you think they're filled with articles? Because they're about 870 pages of fashion ads. People specifically buy them because of the advertising.

And did you know Sunday papers are a thing, filled with coupons, that are basically ads?

Sorry, but advertising serves a purpose that consumers actually pay money for.

Electronic engineers face a similar problem, everyday:finding the optimal components to build stuff with. And at least in the case of standard components, they do that via parametric search tools(poring over many details), combined with vendors exposing a lot of details about products. And it works very well.

I wish we had that in more fields. Would provide huge value, but it's a hard problem. But i suppose if with the right incentives(banning advertising ?), we could do it.

The other source of info for EE's is education and PR, some of it probably pretty unbiased(at distributors sites), due to incentives.

As for ads ? they exist, but they seem to play a relatively small role, and probably nothing major will change if they stopped existing.

Parametric search tools are great for Digikey, but they're very hard to implement elsewhere. They're much less useful when you only have a small number of options. They're bad at quantifying qualitative properties like fit and finish or ease-of-use. And you can only compare closely related parts, because until you drill down to the level of, say, a parametric search for exclusively PMIC-Voltage Regulators-DC-DC-Switching controllers, it doesn't make sense to ask what the topology or output configuration is.

Plus, it's extremely tedious to collate and filter all of the properties needed to make them work. Ebay and Amazon barely do it at all. Newegg and McMaster Carr do OK. Only EE components seem to be demonstrate the ideal parametric filter systems that negate the need for advertising.

But I'm still a sucker for buying Linear Tech or TI components before, say, Maxim or Toshiba because even if the parametric search say that both options fit my requirements, the former seem to be better documented and more user-friendly than the latter. That's the kind of advertising you only get through years of writing expensive and high-quality technical papers and producing high-quality parts, and I suppose there will always be value in advertising that fact (or suggesting that fact, regardless of whether it's true for other advertisers) to less experienced engineers.

Edmunds has a fairly good parametric search tool for new cars.

https://www.edmunds.com/finder/car-finder-results.html

Can you point at such a search engine for EEs?

Those ads were relevant though, and (I hope) not doing thousands of requests in the background; it was an IT-related ad, on an IT-related website, targeted at a person working in IT that was interested in new servers - what really is what the better ad providers are looking for. The rest is just idk, shotgunning and hoping something sticks.

I dislike relevant ads the most because they are most likely to influence my behaviour.

That’s why we need independent testing, and you should always check the independent tests before buying something.

For example, whenever I need a new product, be it anything from a spoon to a car seat for a child, I’ll check Stiftung Warentest for full tests of that category.

I’ll take the top 2 or 3, enter them on idealo or preispiraten or günstiger.de or hardwareschotte, and then I’ll take the cheapest of those.

At no point in this purchasing process come ads into play, and I get the best results.

Maybe I'm being uncharitable, but what I read from that story is that advertising saved your company from its own incompetence, since it should have someone responsible for managing those servers and subsequently for doing research upon noticing the problems.

For me, that example actually serves as an extra argument against ads.

Crikey, guy shares an anecdote of how an ad helped him and all you can do is be really nasty about it, it's completely unnecessary.

I bought a piano course from Udemy because of advertising on FB (and then spent an additional £150 on a keyboard). I'm really enjoying it. Please tell me what a horrible human being I am.

I think you're being uncharitable, advertising led the company to have a higher degree of competence and understanding.

I don't necessarily disagree with you, but your comment is not relevant to the one you are replying to. You are just hijacking the top comment to rant (albeit a popular rant).

It hints at the blacklist vs whitelist approach to security. I'd rather whitelist good content, then try to detect and blacklist bad content, as that is a game of whac-a-mole.

Everyone thinks advertising doesn't work on them. And everyone is wrong.

My claim is that it does work. Astoundingly well. My further claim is that it is not in the public interest.

I think people will always try to influence others, and I don't think advertising is the worst form of doing it. If you say that it's not in the public interest you'd have to compare it to alternatives that are.

That said, I think there should be restrictions put on the methods that advertisers are allowed to use. What currently happens in online advertising hurts everybody, including those who rely on ad funded business models.

Another issue is aonymity. In a world without advertising, you'd have to pay for everything directly. Making anonymous payments is extremely difficult and easily outlawed entirely.

Eh, I think I've never clicked on an ad on the internet and bought a thing. The only times I've clicked on an ad that I can think of is mobile where I was trying to close something and got fucked.

So, advertising models based on clickthroughs definitely haven't worked on me. (Admittedly uBlock has reduced my exposure somewhat)

But the magazine style "increase awareness of product and hope that leads to eventual interest and purchase" probably works as well on me as anyone else.

Lifestyle advertising is far stronger and more insidious as it doesn't appear to us as if it's advertising. When I was growing up all movies and USA television seemed to have Apple computers only, all the stars drank Coke with every meal, all the footballers wore Adidas boots.

We almost always instinctively are attracted to the familiar, so just seeing a product before makes us value it higher, even if it's intrinsic value is less. That hard-wired instinct is hard to control.

you might be surprised how many "articles" are "sponsored", hard to tell really.

Some clearly doesn't work as intended though.

If I see an advert for Coca Cola, it doesn't make me want a Coke. I hate Coke and I understand that it is not at all good for me.

No amount of advertising is going to make me buy one. Simply being aware of the brand in this case seems pointless, because I'm doing nothing with it.

In other cases advertisements will merely lead me to avoid that brand or company out of spite, because I hated their advert (as I do most adverts).

That's not the intention. They know it won't work on every single person, but as long as there is ROI then it works.

It's a shame you got downvoted because you're making a reasonable point.

I loathe Pepsi Max ads. I like Coke Zero add. But I never buy Coke, I only ever buy Pepsi Max.

Everyone thinks some specific types of advertising don't work on them, and dependent on their self-knowledge they can be right.

Of course advertising works. And this is a very bad thing, not a good thing.

Can you explain why it's a bad thing?

From my perspective, I've found various things via advertising that I would have never come across by other means.

A lot of people argue that "you'll just search for what you want" except I'm tired of searching for "shirt" and then scrolling for days looking for something that may work. Every once in a while I'm hit with a really good ad, and I'll click it, and maybe even buy.

Depends. How many products are you using which you first heard from via HN? That's a form of advertising too, albeit a lot less sleazy.

Of course advertising works - that's why I resent it so much and go to great lengths to protect myself from it.

Advertising definitely works on me: it helps me decide what not to buy.

I have a different opinion. Yesterday I was cycling and passed by a very good restaurant close to my house, the local was empty, and I was wondering why it's empty if they are very good, they have very good food and relative cheaper prices. I just realised they don't do ads! They are very bad in marketing despite the fact of being an exceptional restaurant, nobody remember them, they waits they customers remember them. I talked to myself many times "I need to go back there", but they passes and I always forget it.

I did a parallel with my software business. You can have an exceptional software, but you can't stay frozen waiting your customers to find out you. Be very good is not enough on a world too much information.

But, I think the traditional ad industry is not sustainable. Nobody wants to see intrusive ads, I believe content marketing and organically ads (I don't know if this term really exists), like in sports, are the best for the long run.

There seems a good possibility that other less 'good' companies are stealing the clientele away with advertising.

That, without the lies and coercion from other companies this place would be doing well, based on its relevant outputs rather than on its [lack of] glossy advertising.

Yes, I am sure lower quality restaurants are stealing the clientele because they do ads and are remembered.

> You'll search it out or your friends will tell you what to buy.

That's a very simplified description of consumption. You make it sound like we only buy stuff we're in immediate need of and therefore actively search for.

The solution is to nationalize the advertising industry and force everything possible into a genuinely competitive market.

Have a government run product listing. Think Amazon reviews, Yelp & Companies house. But with government ID to verify reviewers and harsh police enforcement against fake reviews or miss-leading product descriptions. Make it clear there will be prison time for systematic abuse.

We're at a point where this is technologically trivial & the first country to do it properly will get a big advantage over any that doesn't follow suit quickly.

Any person or company offering a product or service can create an account & list their product (with a price & links to where to buy it). Anyone who's bought the product / service can create a review. Throw in some sensible rules about major product changes requiring listings to be updated.

But what about the advertising industry? Fund a massive nudge campaign to improve citizen behaviour. Tail the funding off over a few years, this is really just welfare for all the anti-workers to give them time to switch into doing something economically productive.

> With very few exceptions, especially in the consumer space, you won't need advertising if you actually need something. You'll search it out or your friends will tell you what to buy.

I typically use adverts to help me decide what to buy, but the adverts count as negative points towards the product, because I feel that if a product needs to rely on persuasion techniques, or to bombard my eyeballs all the time (especially if they're preroll-type adverts rather than passive banners) or if they're beside spammy adverts, then the product is likely crap anyway or the company are.

Blame all the spam for this attitude, and all the obtrusive crap that is shown to me against my will each day (it seems that almost no matter where I look, online or physical world, I'm bombarded with someones shitty adverts)

> adverts count as negative points towards the product > i use adverts to tell me what not to buy

These sorts of attitudes seem odd. What products do thses people buy, since pretty much everything being sold in the west is advertised in some way? It seems like the sort of think someone would say as a sort of virtue signalling, but I can't believe its a policy anyone could stick to.

I didn't say anywhere in my post that if I see an advert, the product is instantly blacklisted -- only that it counts as a negative. So, if I had to choose between two otherwise equal products, I would choose the one with the least (or least annoying/intrusive) advertisement.

I also perhaps should have said web adverts. I don't much pay attention to TV/radio/magazine/newspaper/billboard adverts, so I imagine I buy many products advertised there.

I'm also not saying I don't buy any products that are advertised or that adverts don't work on me, but rather that:

1) If I'm looking for a product, I'll search and read reviews and such, but if I see advertisements, it counts as a negative point. I may still buy the item if it doesn't have enough other negative points.

2) If I see the same irritating advert multiple times, I'll make a mental note to never buy it. A number of youtube preroll adverts have had this effect.

This is total nonsense. Without advertising, how does a new competitor compete with the entrenched incumbents? How does anyone find out about your product? News media? Because media converage is often the result of having a paid PR firm pitching your story to reporters. Reporters then become the gatekeeper for what becomes successful or not. As far as word of mouth, that is very difficult to rely upon as a repeatable business model.

For example, if a smaller local bakery competing with a larger and more popular local bakery starts to make birthday cakes but they didn’t before — how does anyone in the community find out about it since people that buy birthday cakes typically go to the incumbent because they have no idea that the smaller bakery is starting to make great birthday cakes as well? It’s going to take a lot of time before that smaller bakery starts selling some cakes because nobody will know to go there for that purpose.

Advertising is precisely the tool that allows new market entrants to compete with the status quo. As another example how does anyone learn that they can run Windows on their Mac without Apple having advertised that fact? Tech writers? How do they find out? PR? PR is advertising too you know, a different kind, but it is still a paid effort to create market awareness of some product or service.

As far as “searching it out” — let’s take searching on Google or Bing as an example — the top organic results are the result of years of SEO; a new incumbent would be buried on page 20 for perhaps years which means that company will die waiting for word of mouth to start to happen. Meanwhile some big competitor with the budget for the extensive content marketing maintains their market leading position because there is literally no way for the new company to ever be discovered.

Advertising is critical if we are to have competition. If we want nothing but Soviet style companies, then sure, eliminate advertising. Good luck ever launching a new product or trying to disrupt anything especially in spaces where virility isn’t possible. A new, more effective adult diaper for instance — who’s going to run out and tell all their friends about that? How much does word of mouth influence a decision as to what car to buy? There’s some influence certainly, but my family of five has different needs than my single neighbor. So word of mouth isn’t so effective when discussing the finer points of 7 seat vehicles. So I search blogs? Ok, so what providers a blogger to review vehicles? Page views? For what? Bloggers will charge for subscriptions to read their content? Good luck with that. Micro payments could be a solution, but a company would still need to let the blogger know there is even a new car to review right? Or are the bloggers camped outside of dealerships waiting for unannounced new models to arrive?

PR is advertising, albeit a more indirect form and PR is very expensive.

My point; eliminating ads is bad for innovation and bad for companies who want to enter new markets.

you're on point.

Also, we don't need to weigh the pros and cons of advertising as long as all actions are voluntary.

Why is it somebody else's business to make the world suit your tastes, you need to put effort for it, either by paying or creating such a product in the world, not by imposing it on others with regulations

This is what the Cluetrain Manifesto was saying... in 1999.

http://www.cluetrain.com/

Have you ever heard of multi-level marketing? Let's all buy what our friends tell us to buy.

Come'on. When your friends don't have any vested interest, it works quite well.

Agreed. Friends or colleagues who I know aren't materially invested but still have strong opinions are extremely compelling. My usual line of questioning when I have the luxury is to ask what features of $thing they don't like - usually more insightful than pros.

This happens because it's a business problem with perverse incentives across the entire advertising supply chain - and no amount of technical solutions will solve it.

It's the same issue with every anti-fraud vendor and the new hyped blockchain nonsense. Until buyers and agencies vote with their dollars, nothing will change.

The thing is people are voting with their dollars, but it's on credit.

People don't want to pay for "free" content, and "free" software. So instead they pay with malware, insane data charges, markups to pay for ads, markups to pay for dealing with fraud, the indefinite privacy tax of their data, markups extracted from monopoly positions, and much more.

The problem is people don't see all of these exorbitant fees, but they see that dollar in their wallet.

I'm not talking about consumers but advertisers who are the clients and the media agencies they hire to produce and execute these media campaigns.

The internet has increased efficiency and lowered prices but this also has an effect of amplifying any misaligned incentives - so now agencies which are bonused on clicks will deliver cheap clicks, whether it's actually producing sales or not.

What's your point? If they don't drive sales, they'll stop advertising or go out of business.

Not sure what's your concern here

Well if you don't pay, how's the supplier of said free service going to survive.

Note: I'm not supporting viruses and malware, here in my argument

Good grief, it's like an invisible war going on inside your browser.

> We're on a mission to drive them out of business

But if you succeed, won't you go out of business? It's like antivirus vendors: if there were no malware, there'd be no need for AV software. How do you remain ethical? If you win, will you close up shop?

Ad security is very weak by design because it allows any fourth-party to serve html/javascript on any website. As long as this is the norm, we'll be around to protect publishers and their audience. Beyond ads, everything we built applies to the web in general so if we ever run out of bad ads, we'll expand in different directions.

edited for clarity

I think that "effectively rid the world of shitty ad fraudsters" is a strong credential in one's CV. Jobs won't be hard to find!

>Good grief, it's like an invisible war going on inside your browser.

I find it incredibly interesting that the evolutionary-arms-race of ads and viruses versus blockers is mimicking the development of actual genetic evolution.

There's that XKCD comic that mentions if you want to look at 20 years of code evolution, look the source for the google homepage. Now imagine what your genetic code looks like after 800 million years.

I don't have any insight or education to back me up here, but I believe that even if we were to re-engineer the internet from the ground up we'd still get an evolutionary arms race, simply because a space with potential to exploit a system will always exist.

>To maximize their yield, they resend ad requests in a loop to multiple parties every few seconds until an ad clears, leading to this massive network load.

They are stalling for time in every allowed way to get more bids.

A standard tactic for company like theirs is to send duplicate lots for a single impression, and reload the ad few times per second once they get overriding bids even if one of lots was already sold.

> fake video preroll ad placements

Can you explain this further? Who is getting defrauded here?

Advertisers.

Preroll ads are valuable because people are mostly paying attention. eg you went to youtube to watch X, and they show you 15 seconds of swiffer beforehand.

The problem is there aren't enough preroll ad slots available to satisfy demand.

Therefore, companies invent them. One thing I know people are doing is this: film a video every day. Talk about who cares. It could be upcoming movies; the tv show with dragons; whatever. Buy an ad slot. Play your video. Put a preroll or interstitial ad in your video. Tada! You just turned dirt cheap ad inventory into expensive video ad inventory. Of course, if the viewer leaves the page too fast, you lose the money you spent. So this is an arbitrage play.

The problem with manufacturing video ad inventory is that almost all the manufactured stuff is either (1) off onto the side, or (2) not gating something that a viewer wants to see. And hence, they don't receive attention.

Make sense?

Legit video advertisers and publishers are all unhappy about this, because this shitty faked inventory drops the value of the real thing, ie preroll ads in main content that the user wishes to see.

Oh, and publishers get very unhappy because (1) many of them are ok with picture ads but not at all okay with autoplay video ads; (2) if they're going to put autoplay videos on their page and take the hit for (rationally) pissed off users, the pub wants to pocket that $5-$25cpm rather than get paid for still picture ads and let some arbitrager steal the difference.

>Preroll ads are valuable because people are mostly paying attention. eg you went to youtube to watch X, and they show you 15 seconds of swiffer beforehand.

Personal anecdote time.

Preroll ads are the main force for me behind installing the adblocker. I just can not stand something that manipulates my flow. I call it televication of the Internet. It is unbearable.

If for some reason I am not able to block them then I just do not watch them and I am not listening to them (I look elsewhere, say a lalala mantra in your mind).

I also taught my family to do so.

So advertisers actually loose in the long term.

> Preroll ads are the main force for me behind installing the adblocker

They are certainly one of the most annoying classes of ads, which is why I was exceptionally annoyed when Amazon put one before a Prime video I was watching a few days ago.

Granted it was for an Amazon product, but any sort of ad in a paid service is _extremely_ annoying.

> If for some reason I am not able to block them then I just do not watch them and I am not listening to them (I look elsewhere, say a lalala mantra in your mind).

I've started using a similar strategy on YouTube in order to selectively "protest" against bad ads. Whenever I stumble upon a long unskippable ad or a short very aggressive ad (loud and/or offensive), I mute the video and start reading comments for a while, or I alt+tab to a different video, etc. Sometimes I leave the page if the video (or uploader) is not worth the hassle.

In my mind this can lead to 3 different scenarios:

* Google notices this behavior and decides to enforce heavier regulation on ads (they already killed >30s unskippable ads this year).

* Google notices this behavior and tries to fight it (e.g. by pausing the ad if the volume is not low enough, the Spotify way). In the browser this leads to an arms race that Google can't win. In the worst case I would go back to avoiding all advertising using adblock and/or alternative financing if available (YouTube RED, patreon, etc.)

* Google doesn't react, bad ads lose so much value that most uploaders stop using them. They don't want to alienate their viewers for so little benefit.

We need many people to apply this strategy for this to work. However in the short term content creators still get paid, and I get the personal satisfaction of screwing over bad advertisers.

> If for some reason I am not able to block them then I just do not watch them and I am not listening to them (I look elsewhere, say a lalala mantra in your mind).

Ah yes, the realization that all the spy-economy-supported content provides vanishingly little value to your life, and that if they managed to actually lock things down so you couldn't block ads it'd harm you not at all to simply stop looking at their stuff. A liberating state of mind.

Twitch gets me which is unfortunate because they are generally providing a good service. They hit you with one of these ads pretty much every time you change channels, no matter how frequently.

Everyone feels the pain:

Publisher gets paid on a $1 CPM basis while Cedato gets paid $5-10 CPM and pockets the difference.

Advertiser thinks they paid for quality video content preroll but it's actually a tiny rectangle normally used for "display" ads.

Audience is infuriated. Think about what happens on a 4G mobile plan now that VPAID has been fully migrated from Flash to JS...

The only person who cares about that, though, is the audience. Advertisers as a group don't really care that much. Right now, Online Ad Spend is growing industry wide, so fraud like this is just chalked up as an efficiency loss, on growing market. No one else in the chain cares.

The publisher cares because they delivered a worse experience for user for no $

And you can't even install ad blockers on the phone.

"And you can't even install ad blockers on the phone."

Nonsense. I've been using Firefox + uBlock Origin on Android for years. There are even browsers/add-ons that can disable JavaScript completely, but I find it too much of a hassle.

Firefox Mobile, uBlock Origin.

Adblockers are here.

My iPhone has them just fine, and Android being less locked down makes me think it probably does too

But you can install Brendan Eich's ad-blocking Brave browser

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)

My browsing experience on a mobile phone stepped up greatly since I started using Firefox Focus. You don't even need to mess around with plugins because ad blocking is already a built-in core feature.

As others have said, now is actually a really rich time for ad/tracker-blocking browsers:

* Brave

* Firefox Focus

* Ghostery

to name but three.

Great stuff. We do similar work at Publir [1] on behalf of high-traffic news publishers, although we do this largely by maintaining our own exchange. We filter for bad actors on the intake side.

[1] http://publir.com

You're doing gods work. We're a small-ish publisher, and i constantly am battling these pre-roll video ads getting stuffed into display ad placements. The biggest offender I've seen, apart from Cedato, is C1Exchange. At one point, they were serving preroll video ads into 100% of our display units, completely disregarding A) that we turned off video display units and B) that all of the units on the page are 728x90. It's straight-up fraud.

Who is your market? I've built a product that collects data like this, but we couldn't find any buyers. The short end of it, was no one in the market has an incentive to pay for it, except for the advertisers, and the advertisers just chalk it up to an efficiency loss in a growing market.

If I don't get upvoted enough for a reply,I keep a spam account at no.good.email.names.left.16534 a t gmail

How is that not fraud?

It absolutely is fraud. I worked on one of those big video exchanges and we'd sometimes see ads run through our own system multiple times. We couldn't spot it until after the ad ran because of the way the ad actually plays. It ends up a bunch of black box Russian dolls, where the spec says you call methods on the ad unit you are playing, which will just wrap another ad unit, which in turn wraps another ad unit.

We could piece together what happened sometimes after the fact, but not reliably.

As an example, I'm currently diagnosing an issue where an ad refuses to play in our player as it incorrectly identifies itself as being adblocked. We load the advertiser provided ad (really a DoubleVerify fraud protection module) which loads a custom video player which eventually loads the advertiser's media file. The DoubleVerify script is downloading a bootstrap JavaScript file from their server, which then randomly chooses some other JavaScript to eval to check for whatever they think indicates fraud. It's this JavaScript, dynamically downloaded from their server (possibly even dynamically generated) that thinks our ad player is an ad blocker.

And that's just diagnosing a bug, now imagine if you were trying to find some malicious JS.

It was definitely worse when it was all flash. At least JavaScript has ubiquitous debug tooling.

VPAID 3.0 (or is it 4.0?) has some proposals to fix this. It makes fraud analysis a first class citizen of the spec, sort of like companion ads. This allows them to be downloaded separately, as well as cached.

it's fraud.

This is a scam that should be investigated by the FTC.

To be clear, what exactly are you referring to by "this"?

Where's your hiring page?

Went to your website, don't see a careers or jobs page?

In related news, uBlock Origin has finally (today) been converted to a WebExtension and is now fully compatible with Firefox 57 and beyond.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin

it's been a webextension for a while now, the only reason it has been listed as otherwise by Mozilla is because of the update wrapper

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/2576#issue-22541793...

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/2862#issuecomment-3...

Yep. I've been running it on nightly for a while now just by going to the development channel version.

I’ve switched to Ghostery, and it seems to work fine. Should I go back to uBlock Origin?

Ghostery has or has had some controversial analytics called GhostRank that it collects(it may be opt-in I'm not sure). But uBlock Origin is definiently the best content filtering extension I've ever used.

I think it’s opt-in. All the “share data” checkboxes in the “Support Ghostery” panel are unchecked for me.

It's opt-in, and has also been acquired by a company building a privacy-focused browser (I think?).

From what I see, it’s a small German startup that puts emphasis on user privacy. Sounds fine to me.

I personally prefer privacy badger over both. You can't add trackers to Ghostery, and I don't much care about ads that don't track me (I don't watch internet videos, I might not have this opinion if I did), and any particularly annoying ads just get blocked manually in privacy badger.

On mobile, there unfortunately is no such thing (no user scripts on chrome or Firefox, no privacy badger either), so I usually just disable JavaScript or use whatever privacy browser I have installed (currently Firefox Focus).

Privacy Badger is available on Firefox for Android. You might want to take a look at it if you use Android.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/privacy-badge...

Firefox Focus also applies its privacy features to Safari browsing; are there any benefits to actually using Focus as a browser?

I use both. uBlock Origin catches pre-roll ads on YouTube as well as some other things that Ghostery lets through.

I use Disconnect rather than Ghostery in addition to uBlock.

Note that updating to the web extension version will wipe all your ublock settings, custom filters, rules etc. Back up your settings first

It means it will work in Edge out of the box as well?

There has been a uBlock version for Edge for quite a while now; or am I missing something?

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/p/ublock-origin/9nblgg...

Yeah but it's a fork to work with Edge. But AFAIK Edge can work with all webextensions because it is using exactly the same APIs as Firefox.

Ah, interesting, I hadn't heard about that. Seems like it should work in Edge then, at least with minimal changes:

WebExtensions APIs are inspired by the existing Google Chrome extension APIs, and are supported by Opera, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge. [1]

On the other hand the Edge version seems to no longer be very actively maintained, but the original repository[2] still links to the Edge repository[3] for installation.

[1]https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Wh... [2]https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/ [3]https://github.com/nikrolls/uBlock-Edge/

I'm actually rather surprised that companies like Google aren't offering solutions to integrate ads into the delivery of the page content itself rather than JavaScript at this point, as it's pretty easy to block the specific domains serving ads. It seems relatively straightforward; the ads would be pre-rendered on the server providing the response and could send the same info a script would for the most part, especially if there was an auxiliary script you could load from your own domain. Not that I'm endorsing the idea, it's just that it seems like an obvious solution to the usage of ad blockers.

I never quite understood why domain-blocking works so well for ad-blockers. I'm surprised why sites don't just use a reverse proxy or something to serve from those ad domains. What am I missing?

If the ads were static (e.g. advertiser A bought a specific place on one of publisher B's pages, for a month), and advertiser A didn't want independent verification that the ads were seen, then your proposal could be simply implemented.

"What am I missing?"

Many ads are served after real-time auction: whilst your browser is loading and rendering the page, an auction is going between advertisers for the ad spot(s) on the page. The auction happens quickly, but it adds latency. Adding a reverse proxy would add further latency, and would remove the ability for ad networks to properly target ads (e.g. using cookies) and account for impressions.

Which reveals a problematic truth. The tracking is worth more than getting rid of ad blocking.

Or some amount of well-targeted advertising is worth more than a larger amount of poorly-targeted advertising.

Would you mind expanding a bit on this real-time auction thing, like how common it is and what the process looks like, or could you point me in the direction of the sources you used to make that claim?

Thanks!

There used to be a great article on Searchengineland about it but I can't find it now. And it was originally patented by GoTo[1] and Google was sued by Overture[2] with mixed results[3]. It did give Yahoo! which owned Overture at the time some Google stock (2.7M shares).[4] (Which, interestingly enough, if they had held would be worth more than $2B today)

[1] https://www.google.com/patents/US6269361

[2] https://www.cnet.com/news/overture-sues-google-over-search-p...

[3] http://www.waltmire.com/2014/06/02/inventor-of-pay-per-click...

[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/10/business/technology-google...

If you search for the terms "real time bidding" and "ad exchange", you will find a lot of literature on how it works. The explanation and the technical underpinnings are a bit involved, which is why I'm not just outright explaining here, but you will find explanations pretty readily.

If you poke around AppNexus, you will find what you are looking for. The process is basically: a visitor comes to the site, each connected ad network/buyer has 100ms to provide a bid, the top bidder wins.

It's called Real Time Bidding. It gets very complicated, and performance is usually priority #1.

The proxy suggestion seems to have merit though, it would still give advertisers the ability to run auctions, track users and ad views, etc, while avoiding domain filtering.

OTOH I suspect ad blockers would adapt quickly... it's not clear it would be worth the investment to set up.

It would generally stop advertisers from being able to verify ad impression, or to correlate users across sites. killing the most successful advertising whale (retargeting) in the process.

So what happens when ads are being blocked? Does the real-time auction still occur?

Offtopic: The website in your profile http://encona.com/ seems to be down.

Probably a bad idea to let ad companies serve from your domain. It would give them access to cookies and local context javascript.

That's exactly what the adtech industry is starting to do. They've even got WordPress and Cloudflare plugins that can dynamically reinsert blocked ads via their proxy.

Maybe not with the techniques they're using now, but if humans can tell it's an ad, then an ad blocker with say an image recognition model can too.

Just wait for Bayesian filters that block specific areas of the downloaded content.

As long as I am able to block any element I want using my browser (and god help us if we reach a state where we can't), I won't have to look at any ad for more than 2 seconds. Any website that has too many ads to disable manually, or is in some way embedded with critical parts of the website is simply not worth my time.

> They've even got WordPress and Cloudflare plugins that can dynamically reinsert blocked ads via their proxy.

Using https with CDNs is basically a very funny large scale practical joke.

Advertisers/ad networks need to serve ads from their own domains so that they can identify the visitor via 3rd-party cookies and serve the most appropriate ad.

> serve the most appropriate ad

Is it just me, or is this approach not very useful? I'll google for a certain product, do a little bit of research and then buy what I finally picked. Then I'm stuck with seeing ads for similar products for the forseeable future. Ads for a product I already bought and no longer have an interest in.

I think ads would actually do better if they're just targeted to the demographic that fits the page I'm currently looking at without being personalized.

No, they don't "need" to do that. Not any more than newspaper, magazine or television advertisers "need" to know anything about the individuals seeing the ad, beyond the target demographic of the publication. They do it because there's money in it, but if website owners could put the welfare of their customers ahead of the relentless pursuit of profit by serving manually curated, static, untargeted ads we could have a much nicer web.

It's the easiest way to serve an dynamic ad, it will require further configuration to get it to go through your own domain, and ad blockers block by element selectors and ad placement, so even those served through your domain will eventually get blocked. To avoid adblocker one would have to actually blend the ad with page moving it in the page to avoid getting detected, which might not be acceptable UX/UI.

Please elaborate. I assumed just the opposite was the case.

Sites do this. For example, see Instart Logic: https://github.com/gorhill/uBO-Extra/wiki/Sites-on-which-uBO...

You've just described internet advertising circa 1997. Then Google came along...

Yes, but shortly after Google came along, ad blockers (or simply adding 127.0.0.1 analytics.google.com to your hosts file) also became popular.

Why hasn't anyone responded to that?

I suspect the only way ad companies would trust this is if the pages were served from a third party (someone not directly making money off of the ads).

Too easy to fake impressions. And it would break with caching.

I've thought of a few ways to do this, as you say there are a handful of good ways to do it. My issue has always been that (1) I'm not a good salesman (2) I wouldn't know where to get advertisers.

Would love to help build the tech if someone could deal with the business.

> I'm actually rather surprised that companies like Google aren't offering solutions to integrate ads into the delivery of the page content itself rather than JavaScript at this point

Isn't that what AMP is?

AMP still requests ads separately from the page and it still loads any ad without objections. It's just that if the ad is also written in AMP and signed by a validation service, it qualifies for faster loading instead of being delayed by at least 2 seconds (or is it more?) after page load and throttled to 1 ad load per second on top of that when there are multiple ad slots.

> I'm actually rather surprised that companies like Google aren't offering solutions to integrate ads into the delivery of the page content itself rather than JavaScript at this point, as it's pretty easy to block the specific domains serving ads.

You mean native advertising?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_advertising

https://developers.google.com/doubleclick-publishers/docs/na...

I was under the impression that while some pure domain blocking occurs, a lot of the rules engines seem to be written against page content that matches specific patterns, not specific domains, so I don't know if it would help serve more ads that much.

Doesn't Accelerated Mobile Pages offer something like that? That puts all your content on the Google domain, including the ads (or some version of them, I think?).

AMP ads are still served from other domains; but you have the option of writing them in AMP and having them validated & signed by a service to qualify for faster loading.

Blockers already have content rules.

Kind of like youtube content creators now put ads in the actual video?

To be clear, it's against YouTube's rules to embed advertiser-supplied content (like a video, image, audio clip, etc.) directly in a YouTube video. YouTubers are free to take money for product placements and endorsements, though, as long as Google is notified.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/154235?hl=en

There are plenty of ad servers that offer APIs for doing that.

Proposed Transfer Size Policy will allow site owners and ad networks to block abusive ads - https://github.com/WICG/transfer-size

Ability to pause iframes, which Transfer Size Policy depends on, is already on Chrome's radar: https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5141555102875648

Alternatively, capping the number of network requests would be valuable.

It's a brilliant idea! And so simple at the same time. +1

If anyone is curious (like I was) what exactly is being shown here, the author initially wrote a post in 2016 describing VPAID ad interfaces[0].

It appears this whole thing got started when the Author (who founded AndroidPolice) got a bug request about an AP site ad[1].

[0]: https://plus.google.com/+ArtemRussakovskii/posts/VgrLdYcoifr

[1]: https://github.com/archon810/androidpolice-public/issues/67

This may actually explain why watching videos in the browser sometimes causes the computer to heat up comparably to a new AAA gaming title.

That's more likely a lack of hardware acceleration I recently learned, if you're talking about youtube. They use VP9 by default, which isn't hardware accelerated in most cases.

I installed this recently and the difference in heat and battery life on my Macbook Pro is astounding. https://github.com/erkserkserks/h264ify

I didn't see any ad blocker recommendations in the comments, so I searched and came across a list on Tom's Hardware of the best ad blockers of 2017. The funny part is that Tom's Hardware was FILLED with these exact kind of ads from algovid and adaptv. Even worse, the list is in a carousel / slideshow format so you have to keep clicking if you didn't GTFO like I did.

If you are still looking for an ad blocker, I have had great experiences with ublock origin.

I also think this is the common suggestion on HN for a year or two now.

I'm looking for something to block YouTube adverts on iOS (not in the browser, but a standalone app). I hear that ProTube is good, but apparently its only available in the US app store and I don't feel like making a US AppleID right now... Does anybody have any recommendations?

Any advantages over adBlock?

Their acceptable ads policy turned into "pay to whitelist" which basically pissed people off on all sides. The advertiser's weren't happy about being held to ransom, the users weren't happy with ad blockers that didn't.

> I searched and came across a list on Tom's Hardware of the best ad blockers of 2017

For some reason Tom's article is missing Pi-Hole [1] and AdGuard [2] which are network and computer-level ad blockers respectively. Both are good for people who regularly use multiple browsers on multiple devices since there isn't any need to install an ad blocker extension for each one then.

[1] https://pi-hole.net

[2] https://adguard.com

Adguard is nonfree software that intercepts and modifies TLS connections locally. Not my cup of tea at all. Maybe if it was free and open source software...

I'd recommend uMatrix, it can be used to block add, but it can also do so much more. It really helps if you want to disable most JavaScript where you don't need it too. Really great addon.

uMatrix is very powerful, but I feel like its interface might be a bit complicated for less sophisticated users. In the wrong hands, it can really "break" the web.

Exactly. I'm a huge uMatrix fan but I have some grounding in web dev. It's not really aimed at or suitable for anyone else.

The trouble is that selectively blocking scripts gives the greatest benefits to the user (removes ads, annoying videos, popups, trackers, practically every nuisance) but usually requires user intervention to enable only the minimum to get the page to function.

Hopefully the more user-friendly options can work out how to do this en mass.

I'll just add Brave to the list here. The blochchain related browser by former firefox founder. Out of all the actors in this space its the only one I know of that sees the bigger picture and news flash google its not gonna be "higher quality" ads :)

I really hope Brave stays around and does not burn in the current ICO dumpster fire.

>the only one I know of that sees the bigger picture

Could you elaborate?

Free content needs paying for somehow. At present it's by advertising, which has a variety of problems (see rest of conversation).

Brave's idea (AFAIK) is for the browser to pay the owners of the pages viewed directly for time spent on it (or some other metric). How they do this I don't yet know. A bit like flattr etc. but without user intervention.

If you are willing to do some extra work, I highly recommend blocking javascript, e.g. with Firefox's NoScript extension. Enable only the javascript you need, when you need it.

No harm in using ublock origin and privacy badger on top of it.

Navigating the web without Javascript today is just silly. Use uBlock, or Ghostery, and be done with it. I understand, and respect you're in the static web minority, and that's fine. But telling someone to globally block javascript is bad advice.

I see your point but think it's worth a couple comments. First, blocking javascript globally is a bit different, in my mind, from blocking it by default (i.e. whitelisting).

Second my wording wasn't great, I more meant "try blocking javascript by default and see how you like it". I agree it's not for everyone, but in my A/B tests it's my clear favorite.

Some benefits of a whitelist approach: You can set preferences to allow javascript for pages you regularly visit and trust. Meanwhile, if you're visiting an unfamiliar or unusual site, you're completely protected by default and still only one click from full functionality.

Try uMatrix, you'll probably love it.

Will try it out now, thanks!

Looks like they are calling other ads or reselling fake inventory. This is against every single supply source and publisher's rules. They're not only screwing the browser, they're screwing the advertiser too.

IMO the way to solve this is a single-click "pay this tiny amount to keep reading" UI.

Now that Amazon's one-click checkout patent has expired this is actually legally viable.

But it won't happen until Chrome is overturned by a new browser because Google will never let such a model succeed :(

It's possible Firefox may successfully do the "phoenix re-viral" thing, in spite of the fact that it would be a literal miracle.

I co-founded Flattr and one of the things we learned is that even a one-click is to much effort. So we now have a zero-click solution that measures attention and visits in your browser locally (as Archon810 wrote.) and then your monthly subscription is distributed based on that. Happy to answer anything and or give an invite.

Would like to chat further. As CTO in a previous "fintech" start-up I tried to make something like that work: a tiny-pay-per-view is indeed something like the right goal for funding content.

Sure, drop me an mail at linus at flattr

Done.

Do you generate reports with how much was spent on each site? If I were using such a browser / add-on, that would make for an interesting reading at least once in a while.

Yes, everything flattred is visible for you on your dashboard.

But not all data or everything you visited etc, as that is a to high of a privacy invasion.

How the hell does that work? you just automatically spend your clients money for them without even asking? Sounds shady af

I've never liked those things that popped up but, as I was reading I thought I'd definitely go for it if I had something like a digital wallet in the browser that I could preload with a balance and simply use to pay for websites like that with one click.

Doing a quick google search hasn't shown anything like that. Does anyone know if a browser extension or something like this already exists?

Seems like that's the idea behind the Brave browser [0]. If I could have some tool that I could put funds into and then frictionlessly pay publishers as I read articles (preferably in a way that didn't let my spending habits be uniquely tracked everywhere) then I would sign up in a heartbeat: I do want to support content producers, don't really want to sign up for n different accounts to do so.

[0]: https://www.brave.com/

Flattr.com is about to relaunch with something like that. You set an allotment for the month, then Flattr sites using their extension, and at the end of the month, they get the share of your allotment, based on how much you visited them.

I've already signed up both our sites, just waiting for them to relaunch.

This has existed in multiple forms for years. Small micropayments instead of ad views. I believe Google has this feature right now if you opt-in.

Not really, Flattr distributes your subscription automatically between the content and sites you engage with. Without the need of user interaction.

I think Google would be just as happy owning a large share of the micropayments industry as they are owning a large share of ad inventory.

I really think for this to work well, the payment system needs to be tightly integrated into the browser, something like Steam.

"Now that Amazon's one-click checkout patent has expired this is actually legally viable."

It would require you to add your credit card to every site that wants it at least once. It wouldn't be very convenient and people shouldn't be giving out CC info on the internet that freely.

https://www.w3.org/community/webpayments/

An aggregate service would probably have to service those transactions as credit card usually have $0.30 fee's per transaction so you'd probably need to aggregate all fees to mitigate the minimum charges.

The problem changes from "tiny amount" to "I have to make yet another decision". Decision fatigue is a thing.

Something like bonqis mentions where the amount of attention I give to each page is automatically measured would be much better.

Exactly, you can not ask people to "care" and make "informed decisions" around tiny amounts. Then they will just skip it.

Has anyone attempted to quantify a rough cost for me to just pay for the http request I'm making and get rid of the middlemen?

I look at some of my spur of the moment purchases in shame, yet paying say $0.001 to browse a page somehow is the unthinkable?

Most don't like ads, as others have said they add latency and are easily subject to fraudulent clicks for the advertiser.

I get the feeling that content-creators and end-users are on the same side here and those in the middle are in the wrong. Not saying get rid of all ads, but it's amazing in 2017 there's no easy pay-to-play on the internet.

I quite like this idea. I run a basic http server with a nodejs backend. It gets ~3000 hits a month. It costs around $6 on AWS. It costs around 0.2c per request.

It would be simple to build a system that charges per use - most SaaS companies do this.

The problem is that someone is willing to pay for that content and repost it on the "free web". 99% of people will read the free version (see freemium mobile games).

While content creators agree that they would prefer to charge directly for their content, we live in the attention economy. This means if you don't make yourself hyper accessible then people will go to other places to get their dopamine hit.

I would never be willing to pay per page view. I could pay some specified price on yearly basis, but per page is way out of the question.

I'm fine with web sites that use adblocker-blockers. I just don't read their content. Imo that is the way of the future. Obviously these "publications" will lose readers, but maybe we also get rid of most of the junk that's floating around.

My problem is advertently blocking the small sites just to get at the big sites. It's not fair, and some really good content gets screwed over inadvertently by it. I am certainly guilty of this.

Adblocking is the hammer that thinks everything is a nail

Excellent points. Seems I was oversimplifying a single part of a bigger problem.

I want to pay, but never feel satisfied with time-based subscription models, especially for news, would be so happy to pay upfront for 1000 articles, no time limit, yet to see that offered.

https://contributor.google.com/v/beta

Alternatively, you could set up a bidder that bids for inventory that has paying customers' cookies and doesn't show an ad when it wins an auction.

Thanks, this is cool, for a fiver I'm in.

Not many sites, but it's enough, will see how it goes. My main business news website is listed there, which is nice.

Edit: ok hang on was very confusing at first, hopefully someone at google has a look at the layout, really comes across as though you can only use the $5 for one website, but you have to add other sites you want.

Also unsure about recurring payments, that should be opt-in.

Just bought 500 articles. Awesome. What a ride!

Contributor page gave me a 404 trying to go to direct to the website I added.

Restarted browser, no ublock origin, the ads are still there. Ahh the folly of beta testing.

Good game. Will try later.

Google Ads, interstitials, multiple Tag Manager accounts, Analytics' tracking cookies, Facebook and Twitter buttons + embedded feeds, Video pre roll ads, Nielsen Tags...

At every new request from marketing you die a little bit inside, because you know you'll never win if you try to make a case against this stuff.

Then one day a manager finally emails you and goes "the website is a bit slow". And you smile while you start preparing your technical report.

Holding up AOL One (Adap.tv rebranded) to represent modern digital advertising is like holding up IBM to represent modern Database design. It's bad context bordering on negligence. Adap developed their ad manager before the IAB produced video standards. Utilizing a team in India, which made it compatible with strange workarounds and primitive browsers from decades past, it has been monkey patched to the current clusterfuck it is today...it will take you awhile to detangle it but you can watch the IFrames in IFrames making async requests all along the way.

Adserving platforms are more primitive, the older the company is. The reasons are the same as any other mega-system. Entrenched process and existing revenue stream (fear of change). That being said, look at an actual modern adserver and they don't have the massive multi-call overhead.

A bit off topic, but something I'm interested in: would it be possible for a website to generate revenue by using client machines to mine crypto currencies? I would rather go to a website that uses up my CPU and network resources doing that than use up my CPU and network resources AND spam me with intrusive ads.

Edit: solid answers to my question. Thanks everyone.

I've recently done some quick calculations and based on WebAssembly (i.e. near native) mining for the most profitable crypto currencies, you're still almost an order of magnitude below regular ads unless your users leave the page open 24/7

A related tangent that's not quite the same but similar is borrowing localStorage on n x (large exponent) devices and turning it into a virtualized block storage system.

I've heard rumors of systems like this existing but not yet seen any concrete implementations of it.

More efficient to separate the mining aspect and just send a micropayment in a web request.

Brave (the browser) implements of version of this.

While true, using a browser for mining doesn't require the user to have any cryptocurrency, or even know what cryptocurrency is. It also has a similarly opaque cost to them (in the form of electricity).

Brave is getting around that with built-in support for their "Basic Attention Token" which will be rewarded to users just for using their browser.

It will be interesting to see how it works out.

Personally I am just sad that it takes so much energy to maintain the current cryptocurrency networks and they are already too slow for really interesting stuff -- which is why I wouldn't want to add more waste by mining in a browser :).

It's been done, but they ran into trouble with New Jersey for a bit.

https://www.eff.org/cases/rubin-v-new-jersey-tidbit

"And the state itself echoed the comments of Judge Furnari, noting in its press release announcing the consent order "we do not believe Tidbit was created for the purpose of invading privacy.""

What about every other ad network in existence? They are specifically designed to invade privacy. Why isn't NJ going after them?

Maybe this is a "whoosh" but (legit) ad networks are specifically designed to sell ads (and thus make the network owners some money); it is hyperbole to claim that each and every one of them has only an ulterior/illegal motive in place of the stated (unpopular one).

This was discussed in 2010 on hacker news and there was a JavaScript pool miner site. I might have even mined a few worthless coins then and forgotten about it.

Here's one of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2566365

By this time, the complexity was already about 1000 or 10k... There was an earlier one I can't find

A team where I worked looked into that as a hack day project - the idea was that you'd mine coins for charity while using our product.

They built it, and was it was feasible, but so underpowered that it wouldn't generate a useful amount of money even across our entire userbase.

I actually did that in my tumblr's theme once, tumblr didn't like it at all lmao.

What would the legal situation be for that? It seems fairly easy to spin as unauthorised use.

In the old days, not anymore, CPU's are too slow to compete with ASIC's for mining.

I wish ads were sandboxed and given resource limits. I'd like - network limits (rate limited, bandwith capped), animation limits (low fps), sound limits (no sound), CPU usage limits (not much CPU - maybe a burst at page load), etc. Maybe a sandbox option for an iframe?

If it was in Google's interests, we'd probably have that already.

Why isn't it? I'm sure Google can make well behaved ads that bring them lots of money. Implementing this would make it even harder for any competition to get a foothold into the market.

Now a google ad is treated (by customers with adblock) the same way as the most shitty ads = gets blocked. Maybe if chrome blocked the worst kinds on its own, less people would use adblockers in general.

Ad blocking is not a hobby. It's a must nowadays. Google needs to step in or face the possibility of 80% of users adblocking. And when you install Ublock you don't pick and choose only "light" filters. You go all the way, to zero ads. Mozilla should have bundled an adblock with firefox ages ago. They could start with blocking only the worst ads. That would be some pressure on the market.

You can see Google and co stand on ads here [1]. Enforcing Coalition for Better Ads standards were marketed as adblocking is coming to Chrome for example [2] recently.

[1] https://www.betterads.org/standards/ [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/01/google-confirms-ad-blocker-c...

I don't know why it isn't in Google's interest, but you can bet it isn't.

My guess: they don't want to feed and speed up the cat-and-mouse game, so whenever ad-blockers become ubiquitous they still have a chance to outsmart them.

Anyway, I think at some point AI will bust all ads, and Google will have to come up with really smart ways to still make money while not annoying its users.

maybe they could be incentivized getting a feature into adblockers that makes them a little more lenient towards sandboxed iframes as opposed to cross-origin javascript

maybe make it part of the "acceptable ads" requirements

Once again I bring out my trusty analogy of ad tech consistently shitting in a well.

Except this time, that's basically where it stops. These guys are shitting in a well, for no good reason, full stop.

I've seen some other pretty abhorrent behavior as well. The specific instance that comes to mind is an ad that would load all the resources and content of its click-through landing page into a hidden part of its own iframe. Then in the off chance you click the ad, your browser cache is already warmed and the resulting landing page loads fast. All of that for the 0.1% of us that click ads. It boggles the mind.

That's not the reason, it's ad fraud. They are most likely paid on CPC (cost per click) and forcing clicks in a hidden iframe. Or they are "stuffing cookies" for an affiliation link, betting that you might buy on that store later on - and getting a commission out of it.

Standards should never have allowed third-party scripts to load without insuppressible user prompts. This cluster-fuck could have been avoided.

Third-party script loading is as old as the <script> tag and predates any applicable standards. That is, browsers added <script> before standards did, and allowed cross-site loading of scripts, just like cross-site loading of everything was allowed at that point.

Simpler days, 25 years ago...

Now I have in mind the Terminator scenario, except we need to send it for the guy who though on this <script> tag.

I know what you're saying, but think about things like jquery that every site uses. It's reasonable to source it remotely because everyone has it cached. Unless you had some content ID system in the browsers to pull locally sourced scripts up, we'd lose that instant CDN effect.

That said. It's hard to compare the benefits of that to the cost of the nonsense in OP's story. For every 50ms we've gained from cached jquery we've lost 3s to stupid advertising.

My experience (as a uMatrix user -- I get to manually whitelist domains all the time) is that most sites host their own copy of jquery anyway. And the sites that download scripts from external domains are usually the worst offenders -- they download a crapton of things from external domains, definitely not in my cache. As in they probably couldn't care less about performance. Name resolution often takes longer than it would take to serve these request first hand.

What did you expect when the "standards" are specified by an ad company?

Might be off-topic. It seems a majority of people are against ads. What are the top few reasons why people dislike ads, excluding reasons such as them just being a nuisance?

My own guesses are:

* People don't like the idea that the platform serving the ads is making money through ads which is not directly tied to the main value they derive from that platform

* Maybe people feel that they are also indirectly contributing to the platform and that they also should have some stake in the revenue

Personally, I have found ads to sometimes remind me of certain things that I could do, or given me new information altogether which I wouldn't have otherwise been aware about normally. And for the most part, my mind mostly tunes them out even when they are there.

Are there other good alternatives to get a product known besides ads that can cover the same breadth?

I don't like ads on the Internet, because I don't want to feel like I'm in a shop when I'm searching for information about something.

However I do like ads when I'm actually in a shop. The problem is that 98% of ads I see on the Internet are served on pages that don't sell anything.

It's mostly about context; I want to discover new services/goods/whatever only when I want to discover them. Most of the time I don't.

There are also lots of technical issues. One technical problem is described in OP's link, so I won't go there. There are also examples when the ad opens a new window. The ad steals focus -- window's focus, and my focus. It switches my context, it wants to hijack or steal my concentration. I didn't give my consent to that. It can track my fingerprint. It slows down my connection by issuing lots of HTTP requests.

Also, ads lie. - 20% discount on something? Only with payments $399 and above. - Price goes down from $200 to $50? How do I know that the price was $200 in the first place? Maybe it was always $50 and you just told me it was $200 few weeks ago? - Price that says $200* for something? The asterisk basically tells you that this is a lie. - Best company in the market? Best service in the world? Lowest price in the country? Those are most overused, empty and incorrect sentences in the world.

Simply put, ads are wasting my time (most of the time). Most ads are low quality eye catchers and nothing more.

There is nothing wrong with the idea of an ad, it's the implementations that are the major problem. Malware risks, completely unreasonable consumption of resources (battery, locking up the CPU), tracking, and more.

No one would really run screaming from ads if they were simply text and images. And indeed, in magazines, they are. It's just that the dynamic nature of the web is too much power and greedy companies go overboard.

Loss of privacy, for one. I don't want to be tracked at all. Tracking and user-tailored ads should be opt-in, not opt-out. Advertisers don't respect the user and their chosen settings.

They kill web performance. I use Firefox Mobile with uBlock Origin, and it's blazing fast! Ads REALLY hurt mobile web.

Their purpose is to manipulate users in order to extract money. They never serve the user's interests. Ads will lie and manipulate you in any way they can, in order to milk you dry.

I have a very limited attention span, and I don't think advertisers deserve any access to it. I'm the one that gets to decide where I spend it.

At most, ads should be a static images or a snippet of text that gets sent along with the page. You can pick what ads to serve based on the page content.

The only time I might be fine with ads is when I'm actively searching for something which is directly related to the product or service. But even then I'd be weary. I want unbiased sources to compare and review different competing products or services, so I can pick the best one for my needs. That's at odds with the advertiser's desire to sell me something.

To answer your question, I'm a little extreme in this regard, but I view ads as malware for the human brain. They hijack my limited attention span to make me desire products that I would have a happier life if I never knew existed and that I don't have to spend my limited willpower resisting. It's been an extraordinarily rare event in my life that I see an ad for a product that makes my life better. If I want something, I will proactively research it, or if something is popular enough, my friends will tell me about it.

I view ads in their totality as bad for my mental health, and there's no level of advertising which is acceptable to me. All these issues concerning security, privacy, CPU/network usage are important, but they miss the mark for me.

The main reason I despise ads is because I believe in privacy and anonymity. The goal of Internet advertising is to remove that from me in order to shove more impressions at me. I want to know what I'm choosing to download to my computer, what data is being communicated back, and to whom that data is going. In other words, I demand privacy for myself, and I ask for nothing in return, but when you ask something of me, I demand to know who you are. These services do everything they can to obfuscate that.

Beyond that, while this might fall under your "nuisance" category, I don't have a very fast or strong computer; that's why I use Firefox over Chrome (with 4+ processes all running at once, I can barely load Chrome let alone a webpage in it). When ads load, that takes up memory and time that should be spent loading content.

I think for me it's mostly about not being in control over the content I choose to view.

I'm the kind of person who want involuntary ads to disappear entirely (so basically all ads on the internet). But at the same time I don't mind reading about new products, services, cheap offers etc as long as I can control when.

I look at ads in real life in grocery stores. Here in Norway (and I would assume elsewhere but I don't know what it's called) we have a wall at the entrance where people can put up things. It's usually missing cats, piano lessons, local cleaning services, etc. It's there at the entrance but you have to get close to read anything.

Maybe instead of ads disappearing entirely I just wish they were put in one place.

My thoughts exactly. If put in one place, maybe they would start competing for attention by increasing their quality. Because today's ads are at their lowest quality possible.

I don't mind advertising as a way of paying for content. As long as there isn't a better micropayment strategy, I realize there is no better model (donations and expensive per-site subscriptions I don't think are a viable model).

BUT

- I do mind being tracked. I think it's an extreme violation to even show me a shoe ad because I googled shoes yesterday, or visited a shoe store online on monday.

- I do mind annoying ads (Animated ads, ads disrupting the reading etc).

- I do mind ads that aren't clearly marked (Instagram "influencers" without obvious disclosure, "native" advertising in newspapers etc)

My hope for the online ad industry is that it will backtrack 20 years to a point where it works like print and billboard ads.

Advertisers pay X dollars to buy N impressions of static images with vanlilla hyperlinks, untargeted and unverified on some known range of sites.

This might seem like a ridiculous idea today. Who would want to pay for unverified impressions with little or no fraud detection? Who would want to pay to show ads that should be shown to 20-23 year old females to ALL visitors?

My hope for adblocking is that this will be the only ad space you can buy online. The first effect will be that advertisers pull out of the web and start advertising on native apps, in video clips etc. But once people start preferring their adblocked web version of facebook to the ad-bloated app (and so on) maybe that will change too.

I would love to be able to block JS files individually based on energy usage.

That would be fine until

  jquery-1.9.1-min.js: 3,389 hours of battery usage

would refuse to budge from the absolute top of the "probably the best to block" list.

The heuristics would be tricky to implement here...

That it’s only a heuristic would be rather the point; users would be able to select urls they wished to disable.

In fact you could probably crowd source training data for a deep learning model so that it could eventually be automated.

What's the problem with blocking this? Remove JavaScript and you basically fix the Web.

I wonder how much junk like this gets through Adsense.

I would have thought Google keeps the ads on their network under tight control. But I see tons of requests to other domains even on pages with just one Adsense ad and no other external content.

Example:

    googlesyndication.com
    google.com
    voicefive.com
    gwallet.com
    doubleclick.net
    doubleverify.com
    mediaplex.com
    scorecardresearch.com
    t4ft.de
    r1-cdn.net
    afy11.net
    dotomi.com

All contacted multiple times on a single pageview with a single adsense ad and no other external content.

What is all that?

Trackers, beacons, telemetry; stuff to follow you around the internet and compile a profile on you.

[EDIT: As other commenters have mentioned, the simpler answer is that OP's ad is probably an instance of click fraud. Setting that aside, though, the phenomenon I describe below is likely still in effect, even with players playing by the rules.]

I imagine that every stakeholder wants verifiable information that the ad was viewed. It would seem to be a problem of both trust (if some centralized ad server was to stream the analytics server-to-server to the stakeholders, there's no guarantee that that central entity is telling the truth, no way to verify unique IPs, and every economic reason for it to lie) and scale (why pay for bandwidth/CPU for a centralized server to make server-to-server connections when the end user can foot the cost).

The problem is that the number of stakeholders has ballooned significantly, the same way that any sizable financial market will attract intermediaries like flies. And now we have an untenable situation.

AppNexus is possibly the only player I can think of who's built both trust and infrastructure to address this, and indeed they are rolling out products like this: http://productblog.appnexus.com/get-your-logs-streaming/ ... but it's very possible that the ecosystem becomes fragmented faster than it becomes consolidated.

There are other ad server as API companies that provide raw logs of event data. Even DFP has that.

It seems so bad that uMatrix is not even allowing me to access the website. I opened up Chrome Dev Tools, and I really wish I hadn't. Holy hell.

whenever there is a problem with ads: assume malice until incompetence is proved.

Yep, especially with the advertising industry: if you give them an inch, they will take a mile.

Unfortunately we're in the annoying position where they view themselves as top-shit and "gods gift to the internet" (and admittedly they do provide monetary support to a lot of things) but I don't think that excuses them from behaving as poorly as they have and do and it's long overdue that they're brought into line.

I had to install an ad-blocker today because I got an ad trying to scam me served by Microsoft's news website.

If they're not going to take any responsibility for what they're attaching to their pages, then I'm not going to load their random bag of crap.

I'm actually surprised it took you this long.

I have had an ad blocker in one form or another continuously installed since the first ad blockers appeared on the scene. And I'll always have an ad blocker installed.

The first ad blocker (that I know of) was Interenet Fast Forward which was a Netscape Navigator plugin made around 1996 by PrivNet.

https://youtu.be/pvzR_bON9qM?t=3m46s

Well, normally I only use IE for intranet related activities, so it's less of an issue.

That'll teach me to read the news on the work browser. Back on HN on the other browser it is!

I'm still holding out!

Wow. What was the ad about? I'm curious, I like filing away disasters like these.

Ad that redirected my page to some shady hosting site with a red background and scary text about how I had some virus and needed to call "Microsoft" at the number they provided with a bunch of personal information to fix it. (I assume a JS "vuln" to take over the page -- not that they really regulate ads from how often it happens.)

...Which is particularly goddamn egregious for a Microsoft website to be serving.

If advertisers want me to feel the least bit bad for them and their woes, they need to take some kind of responsibility for those antics. They wanna keep that up? I hope the whole industry dies: getting a warning like that from a Microsoft website could easily have caught my grandma.

tl;dr: Fuck ad networks, fuck Microsoft.

Oh wow, it was one of *those( scams - and [redirected] from the MS site itself. I'm impressed.

I recently tried to browse Groupon to see whether they had any interesting deals. After opening a couple of deals in new tabs, the site became completely unresponsive and every page that I opened to ages to load. I noticed that uBlock was blocking hundreds of things and only after the counter stopped increasing, the page would become responsive.

Solution was to open a browser that doesn't have an ad blocker and the site became pretty responsive.

I understand that it's probably a bunch of tracking to predict what I want to see. But why would they need to much stuff if I'm probably there to buy stuff anyway?

There is a trivial solution to this problem. If you don't like ads, just start paying for the content. Don't support publishers that use advertisement as their business model. Alternatives exist.

Yes, but then the whole ecosystem is missing micropayments. I subscribe to some sources, but sometimes I just want to read a single article. Would gladly pay 20 cents, if it was a matter of a click.

Not that trivial in practice. How do I negotiate with the 100s of sites I visit to accept a small payment and not show ads? Now installing uBlock is trivial.

I don't understand. How can a big company like Cedato aka Algovid aka TLVMedia get away with this apparent abuse? I'm thinking that they would be shut down by the ad company immediately.

The reason number 2567 why I am using and will keep using adblockers.

And let's not forget about the "Ad Blocking DMCA Debacle" A good summary here: https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2017/08/15/explaining-ad-blo...

My takeaway is that DCMA is a powerful weapon to use against ad blocking. It'll be interesting to see how this aspect of the industry plays out.

It would be interesting to see how advertising works when Google blocks competitor's ads as "bad ads" in chrome & Apple blocks most ads in safari (iOS 11).

Not sure if the requests are faking clicks or sending tracking information.

We had similar incidents before where the requests are for analytics firms to track you:

http://donw.io/post/github-comments/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14170041

What's actually happening is they're loading ads in iframes, destroying them, then rinsing and repeating over and over, thus causing all those insane requests.

Why are they doing it?

Money. They’re faking ad delivery.

Reflecting on your statement and the 'incompetence' statement... maybe they're trying to prove an ad displayed for a given duration of time. (As a consumer, I actually hate all ads; they belong as suggested discount incentives after searches; when I'm actually /looking/ for something.)

> maybe they're trying to prove an ad displayed for a given duration of time.

If that was their goal then 1 request per second would be more than sufficient (and also excessive), but the animated image seems to show a continuous flood of requests.

Do the ad suppliers have some sort of analytics in place to catch fraud like this? "This ip viewed 200 adds within 10 seconds!"

Not really, all these shenanigans occur in a nested series of iframes. The original webpage that served up the initial ad iframe can't see down into these. Whatever supply partner the webpage is using doesn't want to shed light of this to the publisher or else that supply partner may be replaced.

This issue is illuminated to some degree by 3rd party ad analytics companies that monitor this via crawlers and user panels. This problem is also attacked from the advertiser side that will use 'viewability' providers to ensure their ad is, well, viewed.

Advertisers should have a centralized reporting service that pays bounties for submitting violators. Is fraud worth enough to support a whitehat community exposing the ad equivalent of "vulnerabilities?"

The Software Engineering Daily podcast has a good ongoing series on ad fraud that explores why that isn't happening.

Some do, but like in most fields, fraud is a moving target, so you will always be a bit behind on the defense.

It’s a cat and mouse game like any kind of fraud/prevention.

DDOS?

Possibly best represented by this ridiculous infographic: https://martechtoday.com/infographic-marketing-technology-la...

Javascript is the new Flash.

If we can't fix this problem, no one is going to be able to do it.

"uBlock Origin has prevented the following page from loading: http://adap.tv/"

Is this what is bricking Safari on the occasional YouTube video? Sometimes a reload works, other times I need to copy the URL and paste in a new tab.

Hope ads like this will drop form internet soon. You are right, they are annoying and useless.

Looks like cookie stuffing.

I can't make it work, what does the ad do?

Brave browser?

How has it been hardened? It's not just about blocking ads, it's also about preventing malicious content. I'm not willing to risk a beta browser for ads.

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