When I sometimes come across ads anyway, they seem like children stories or cartoons...
I don't want them to succeed. I want them gone.
Imagine having smart glasses which seamlessly filter out product placement in movies, sporting events, even the ads in the real world. It's a dream come true. Our reality can finally be clean again.
not exponentially
Say it with me so we can normalize this usage
In any case what year was AI adblock attempted so we can check if this is one of the narrow use cases where exponential performance improvements occurred within computing
“Orders of magnitude” will be more frequently correct and also include “exponential”, whereas “exponential” will be less frequently correct
We don't know that the growth was n^x and not x^n.
Only then will the web change.
Nothing wrong with simply not wanting to see ads either. They're noise, to be filtered out.
That sounds great to me; it means getting cross-domain tracking to work would be much harder. Hopefully that means we'll also get ads that are actually relevant to the page instead of random unrelated stuff.
And no, these are not their own ads, they proxy the requests from their own domain to the Yandex Direct ad network. Even worse, there is some evil javascript that tries even different non-sensical HTML element names to try to get past the blockers.
Visible impact on page: empty right sidebar
Blocked requests:
- https://mc.yandex.ru/metrika/watch.js
- https://counter.yadro.ru/hit?unique_data_here
- https://yandex.ru/ads/system/context.js
I do feel thankful that toolchains like that don't seem to be in widespread use yet.
First reason is the lack of trust. Or limited trust, if you prefer. That is, SomeCompany may trust AdProvider enough to include their ads in its website, but then again not trust them enough to bundle random external code with their own. Letting the user's browser load from different origins does give you some separation.
Then there's the separation of responsibilities. Say something does break -and not because of blocking-, having the code bundled together makes it very easy to start a game of passing the blame. "It works for us", "We're not doing anything weird", etc. And not only that. There's also the question of who pays for that downtime. SomeCompany is kept from earning money, will AdProvider compensate them? SomeCompany'll probably need to provide evidence that the problem comes from AdProvider.
On the other hand, some websites may already be doing a very similar thing... though it's likely just accidental. I mean, I have experienced a fair number of websites breaking when googleanalytics is blocked and I'd bet it's not intentional, just bad programming.
McDonald's ad? Replace it with a McD's Roach Sandwich ad. Facebook ad? Replace it with "Zuck causes Genocide".
We can fight back.
Well one thing webmasters can do is place wrap an image in an <A> element and the URL is some affiliate link that they control. Good luck blocking that since the image is the first party domain. It's a tactic I've been using for years now, and I've gotten thousands of referrals and confirmed purchases of products.
Of course, my adblocker will still block it, using the block element feature (also useful with nag bars etc).
What website(s) do you run so I can make sure never to visit them?