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Comment by rognjen | Hacker News Reader

Or is that 80% of HN uses adblock?

> Is GA still relevant today?

Of course it is. While a large part of HN audience might use adblock, very few regular users do and almost no mobile users.

Looking at my logs, however, I get a similar proportion. ~25k in GA, ~100k in logs.

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This is the right answer - HN is absolutely not representative of web users at large. If we were, I'm sure there would be much stricter anti-adblock/ad protection systems on large sites.

Twitch and other services have already started down the road of embedding ads in the video stream rather than loading separately, etc. I use an ad blocker and am torn sometimes because I know my favorite content creator isn’t getting my view and I’m contributing to the coming wave of even more invasive ad tech.

I think paying to get rid of ads is fair. I pay for YT Premium solely for that reason, it comes out to about $5/month/person if you use the family subscription.

It’s expensive but I find it’s worth it to not have my partner and our parents watching ads.

I watched the Euro 2020 games, and even the 5-second soundbite of “the games are sponsored by so-and-so” rubs me the wrong way. Why should I be told the name of some company when I’m watching football? I digress.

I get the hate for increasingly invasive ads (screw the little car that carries the ball), but I chuckled at the last sentence: we've had sponsors on football jersey for 50 years :)

We also had tobacco for many many decades as normal accepted part of life. It took two generations of concentrated efforts, but we're better off without it.

Just because something has been common for long time doesn't make it quite right.

My point wasn’t that it was invasive, but that even 5-second namedrops annoy me. The prominently placed logos on clothing and all over stadiums, even in stadium names lately, also annoy me. However, then I can just focus on the game and ignore the ads. With the “sponsored by” and actual ads, you just can’t ignore it. It is force fed. I think that’s an important difference, and also why forcing me to say some brand name because they renamed the stadium to “COCA COLA ARENA” or something similarly obnoxious is so grating.

It would be interesting to let consumers have access to adtech tools. Instead of a subscription, I could set bidding limits on the ads that would have been shown to me.

I appreciate there are commercial reasons why this won’t happen, but it would be interesting. I’d also personally never trust any of the ad brokers to be honest with individuals without an army of lawyers.

Google tried something along these lines with Contributor ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor), which in it's first iteration would bid on your own ad impressions. It wasn't popular, partly because it didn't cover all ads (not every ad goes through a public auction) and partly because it fundamentally cost you money. They later tried another version, which only worked with specific partners but did exclude all ads; it wasn't popular either.

(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)

All Google ads. Not all ads.

Are you talking about the second version? That one did exclude all ads on participating publishers, because to participate you had to set it up that way

5he problem with pay-to-skip ads is that, as we learned with Cable and Airlines, companies don't like to keep money on the table. You'll pay, and still get ads. In fact, the fact the that you can pay to remove ads makes you even more lucrative target for ads. There is no winning against the targeted advertisement industry.

I too think blocking ads should be worth some money. After all everyone saves a lot of time.

I suggest a small machine with pi-hole :)

Unfortunately the people with disposable income to pay for premium services is exactly who marketers want to advertise to.

But YT Premium only blocks YT ads, it doesn't block Sponsored Content put there by the content creator. Maybe that's okay, since by definition these ads aren't of the tracking variety?

So now you don't need AdBlock, but you still need SponsorBlock. You might be able to get a sponsorless version through their Patreon, but now YT Premium is pointless.

If folks were using the pay version instead of the Adblock route they might spend less effort on it tbf

Also this way your favourite content creator gets paid as if you saw the ads

https://www.twitch.tv/turbo

See that’s funny, because I’m on twitch everyday and I subscribe to half a dozen streamers and always get a little annoyed when I go to other streams where I don’t subscribe and have to sit through the pre-roll ad.

I had no idea twitch turbo existed.

It's kinda weird they never really mention it. Not great for selling ads if all the people with disposable income don't see any ads I guess

Down the line it could go the way of the cable - you will see ads even if you pay.

Premium users are a perfect segment. They already shown they are willing to spend money.

Yes, I suspect the people who can afford to pay for these services are exactly the people the advertisers are targeting. Without them the free part of the model would fall apart.

Down the line unsubscribe from Turbo and go back to using Adblock then I guess

I just recently heard about ads on Twitch. Pretty sure my pi-hole is blocking it.

HN is in the vanguard, though. The crowd here is not representative of the state of the global online population at any given time, but one could say that global online sentiment tends to trail the HN sentiment by a number of years. But it's not just HN. Not by any means.

The audience for our website (gambling) tends to be both technologically sophisticated and very conscious of their privacy. Their behaviour has also been quite reliably an early indicator of a wider change. As it stands, more than 80% of page requests block analytics, trackers and other external crapware.

The players in other industries have to prepare for the coming wave, because it will hit them soon. About time, too.

I think for your site that's true but not for HN. Your users are advanced but regular users. HN, on the other hand, are not regular users but professionals.

Car enthusiasts vs mechanics in a way.

If HN was universally the vanguard, a lot more normal people would be using VS code right now.

And most of them would have transitioned from Vim or Emacs.

After iOS added Adblock capability I fully expected them to either add one enabled by default, or ask the user a yes/no question of whether they wanted one. This would make Adblock on mobile easily 25% very quickly, and Android would be forced to follow too.

I don’t think they would add a default adblocker to Safari. You can’t use any other browser engines, and a system wide ad blocker would seem pretty anti-competitive.

Asking the user yes/no on first start would be easy. Then it’s opt-in.

They stopped tracking by default in safari which is similar.

> a system wide ad blocker would seem pretty anti-competitive.

Only to advertisement agencies. And they can go cry up a river.

You make it sound like Apple doesn't have a search and mobile advertising arm.

https://searchads.apple.com/

By your same logic, a secure operating system would be anti-competitive against malware authors, gas and/or electric heating would be anti-competitive against chimney sweeps, and electric cards would be anti-competitive against oil companies.

How so? Apple isn't in the ad business, are they?

Now if Google were to do something like add a default adblocker that blocked all non-Google ads... yeah, that'd be anti-competitive.

But if Apple isn't even competing, how can it be anti-competitive?

I know Apple used to have an ad network, I don't know if it's still running.

iAd is still alive in Apple products, but it’s not an ad network anymore.

https://developer.apple.com/support/iad/

Did I miss some other product?

But do you know how many of your log hits are bots with a spoofed UA that GA filtered out?

I was just looking at one URL that hit the front page a day or two after publication so I don't think there were many bots.

Referral sources usually give away whether the hit is organic or a bot.

Hmm. So what's the other three quarters, is it really all bots or just misattributed?

The other three quarters are HN users with adblock so they don't register in GA but register in Cloudflare (and my logs) because that cannot be blocked.

Firefox blocks GA by default

GA uses first-party cookies so Firefox does not block the data. Only third-party cookies mentioned here: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browsers/compare/chrom...

I just double-checked my real-time analytics and looked back in the last 30 days to double-check. It's all coming through GA while I am in Firefox or other users are using Firefox.

The first vs. third-party cookies are confusing as hell.

No it doesn't. Go to nytimes.com and look in the developer tools for 'gtm.js'. That's Google Tag Manager, which is a container for GA.

I think increasingly more browsers (except Chrome and Edge) come with strong privacy centred defaults nowadays so it doesn’t require a tech savvy person to stay private or anonymous.

I wish Google Analytics had an option to run a small proxy in a Docker container so I could run it on my server and collect all traffic without being blocked.

You can exfiltrate the data via an http request or websocket and have your server submit the pageview hit directly to GA's servers. For me, this makes GA unique visitors numbers about 89% of Cloudflare's.

For this specific application, it's a game (digdig.io), so these 11% might likely be browsers that didn't fully connect to the game, or bots that don't fully support the apis I'm using.

> For this specific application, it's a game (digdig.io), so these 11% might likely be browsers that didn't fully connect to the game, or bots that don't fully support the apis I'm using.

...or people that simply refuse to correctly resolve google analytics' domains, or people who simply block google analytics' IP addresses at the firewall level...

And you know why people do that? Probably because there are developers out there that think it is a good idea to "exfiltrate the data via an http request or websocket and have your server submit the pageview hit directly to GA's servers".

I don't think you read properly. Simply blocking GA domains won't do anything. Open the website, there isn't a single request to GA. The data is collected when the game starts and sent to the game server which sends it to GA. The 11% is not caused by client side blocking.

Also, I don't care if you don't want some VERY basic info about your browser collected. If you're connecting to my servers, you already gave it to me through the headers, I'm giving it to GA too.

I think it's about developing better log analysis tools. GoAccess does a pretty good job but it's missing a couple of features that would make me entirely stop using GA. Namely: stats over time, and better source grouping.

Even events can be replaced by triggering calls to your own endpoints.

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