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Comment by jimmaswell | Hacker News Reader

"eyeo does mention that smaller websites can be whitelisted for free. In fact, they claim that around 90 percent of their partners are given this service free of charge.

But that means diddly when we all know that nearly all global ad revenue goes to just two companies: Google and Facebook."

So 90% of websites get it for free, and mainly Google and Facebook have to pay. I think the author intends for me to be outraged, but I'm not.

I'm also not having any reaction to the "acceptable ads" the author thinks I'm supposed to find unacceptable. They're clickbait, sure, but they fit the "no animations, no sounds, and no flashy colors" criteria.

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I have basically no sympathy for Google and Facebook here. I think they get what they deserve with their practices.

Perhaps it didn't come across clearly, but the main problem (imo) is the conflict of interest this introduced between eyeo and its users.

The fact that a product named, plainly, "AdBlock Plus" that doesn't make clear that the "Plus" means "Plus all ads from the 2 largest purveyors of Internet advertising" is worth pointing out.

You are being hysterical. The plus is there for historical reasons, way before acceptable ads were a thing.

We ban accounts that do personal attacks and name-calling, so could you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not do that here?

Your comment would be fine with just the second sentence.

As long as those ads are not annoying. I'm guessing that the ads from google and fb still need to pass the acceptable ads guidelines.

Facebook doesn’t pay. They hacked around ABP and blocked THEM from working on Facebook.com.

It seems that the problem is people have different reactions to ads. Some want no ads at all, some don't mind ads as such, but are wary of ads with heavy js and video payloads that cause slowdowns and are potentially malign. There doesn't seem to be a good solution that allows the user to easily modulate what they'll accept.

An added complication is that one party will buy ad space from Google, and then turn around and sell it on to another party that may put up quite different ads from what was initially claimed.

Don't forget all the tracking and the profiling.

They hardly ask your consent for that.

I really wouldn't feel bad about any adblocking.

And for anyone that wants to run ads : just serve them locally in a sufficient format and you'll slip through blocks.

> And for anyone that wants to run ads : just serve them locally in a sufficient format and you'll slip through blocks.

I thought so too. Once you reach a certain size, even 1st party ads get blocked.

Yeah, but...

> Once you reach a certain size

Top 5 annoying ads of all time for me are autoplaying Youtube ads -- which I would think would be self-hosted.

> just serve them locally in a sufficient format and you'll slip through blocks.

In what universe do you live? Every little forum that self-hosts ads is already in the blocklists.

Advertisers want require that ads are served from a 3rd party server for attribution.

I always thought The Deck[1] seemed to achieve a good balance. It was trivial to whitelist them, and I had no qualms in doing so. Too bad it apparently wasn't sustainable...

[1]: http://decknetwork.net/

Carbon (https://carbonads.net/) seems to be going strong.

non-tracking ad networks are pretty niche, you're basically trading revenue for aesthetics.

I have carbon on one of my projects and get 100 clicks on 60k views for $0.95CPC - I think adsense could easily double that revenue but at the cost of more intrusive tracking ads - not really worth it for a side project but I'd be tempted to switch if I had a bit more traffic.

What does your site provide - does it sell any products or services or is it purely ad supported? If it’s ad supported and you don’t care about your brand I’d say there’s no risk in switching to shittier ads, but if you want to keep a quality brand or have other services you sell, be careful as shitty ads could put off potential paying customers making it not worth it in the long-term.

The advantage of Carbon (or any other quality ad network like The Deck) is that the ads don’t really look like ads, so you can use them pretty much anywhere without degrading the UX and getting essentially free money. It might be not much but it’s still free money in exchange for a minimal change in the UX. Nasty ads might pay more but would degrade the experience so much I would no longer consider it “free” money no matter how much they’re paying.

Ad blockers are good enough, I think.

I run an ad network that serves ads server<->server (I just wrote up how it works[1] for someone else) and I suspect this approach will become more popular to cover the people who "don't mind ads as such".

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17000756

I don't think the issue is about the minutiae of who's paying whom. It's more the idea that a service which was created to serve the users by blocking ads, is subverted into yet another ad-tech vendor, skimming cream for themselves based on strip-mining the brand equity of what was once a principled venture.

> I think the author intends for me to be outraged, but I'm not.

Problem is that Google and Facebook are partial monopolies. It's not fair.

Google and Facebook being partial monopolies might be a bad thing, but that would mean it's even less of a bad thing that they're the only ones who have to pay Adblock Plus while the non-monopolies don't have to pay, wouldn't it?

If the choice is between paying nothing to get whitelisted and paying pocket change, then the latter is preferable of course. But there's a third option, adblockers that can't be bribed by these partial monopolies.

I've always used ABP without thinking about it but today I switched to uBlock Origin and it's been amazing, no sponsored links, no annoying popups.

In my view, advertising doesn't create value, the world would be a better place without it.

They're monopolies by user choice, which is a fundamentally different dynamic from monopolies of old. https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/

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