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Comment by Tenoke | Hacker News Reader

In all fairness, if the rest of us didn't run adblockers, they probably wouldn't need to be so aggressive with the ads for those that currently don't.

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What's this mythical world where industry execs leave profit on the table because they aren't being squeezed by ad blockers? Have you tried watching cable TV? You know, the service that was originally billed as a way to watch tv without ads?

This strikes me as wishful thinking, adblockers are such a small minority. They are just following the incentives they would always follow, adblockers or no.

From the article, 27% of users; this is higher than I thought, and not negligible anymore.

Note: I tried a few google search to find accurate data, but it goes all over the place; is there an accurate estimation somewhere?

Finding out if someone is running an ad blocker is not easy. After all a good ad blocker tries to be stealthy about it.

(anti ad blocker leads to anti anti ad blocker)

There are plenty of websites that detect that I'm using an adblocker. It's mildly annoying, but then I get to decide if what I was about to read was worth it.

Most of the time it's journaldemontreal.com (and other Quebecor-related websites) that prevents me from reading their articles with my adblocker. Which is a blessing in a way, because it's basically a glorified tabloid with a lot of articles of dubious quality.

I'm on Firefox with both AdBlockPlus and uBlock Origin.

Adblockers are at 27% just in the US looking at statista and other random sources, and the number is much higher if you look at the more relevant younger demographic.

0. https://www.statista.com/statistics/804008/ad-blocking-reach...

There was a time back in the IE6 era where firefox didn't really have any market share and adblockers weren't really a thing.

The advertising industry was really aggressive even then. Some publishers put as many popups and banner ads as they could. I'm not saying all publishers would do this, but I have to admit the worst actors are the ones I strongly remember.

Only difference now is that there's a lot more tracking and ads are more insidious where they blend in with content now.

Yep, the first punch was thrown by the ad industry. Popups, pop-unders and even full window advertisements were rampant before popup blockers became commonplace, to the point of being added directly to browsers.

I doubt that. Even if adblockers weren't a thing they'd push more ads since it generates more revenue. It's probably also effective at annoying users into buying a subscription to avoid (most) ads.

You've put the cart ahead of the horse. Ad-blockers took off once they started throwing animated banners at us. Punch the monkey, win an ipod.

That's not really true. Youtube ads specifically were way way milder and rarer years ago when way less people used Adblock.

And global warming was much milder when we had more pirates in the world [1]. Correlation is not causation. In the same period, YouTube's management style and public-facing attitude have changed dramatically, Google's general attempt at being the "good guys" has pretty much vanished, and beancounting has taken over as the guiding principle in many respects. I have zero reason to believe that had Adblocking not been a thing, there would have been any significant difference in the frequency or intrusiveness of the ads YouTube shows.

[1] https://swizec.com/blog/pirates-downfall-causes-global-warmi...

Correlation is not causation but negative correlation is even more surely not causation and what I was replying to was

>Ad-blockers took off once they started throwing animated banners at us

which is still not true. When they took off the ads were still minimal.

That was when it was still a growing business. Uber was cheaper when investors paid for it, too.

I wouldn't call them "milder". They weren't static ads. They were video ads. Often loud and un-skippable for a certain small amount of time. This is definitely equivalent to a "punch the monkey" ad.

To be fair, if people stopped blocking ads I don't see them backing off on Ads any more; the increase in revenue and ad watch time would be kept as profit, since the current YouTube paradigm where they show 2 ads at the start and sometimes multiple mid-roll ads is so that they annoy you enough to sign up for Premium.

This is exactly the case. Every time someone starts ad-blocking, someone else has to assume that ad watch for them.

Of course this isn't 1:1 parity in reality, but the ultimate manifestation of ad blocking is that.

Google had a good system a few years ago that I was probably the only sucker who paid them for it (and probably why they stopped it). You could pay a chosen amount monthly, and they would not show you ads as a result. It wasn't perfected, but the concept was good for those who understand the problem and want to work towards a solution.

Which year was this ? Can you share more information regarding this ?

I want to say they stopped it in 2018? I don't remember the name of the program, and searching "google paying for no ads" brings up a ton of unrelated adwords stuff.

I payed $5/mo and they would roll over unused funds. It worked pretty well, except that it would still show where the banners were, just blank whitespace instead of an ad.

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

Yeah thanks, that was it.

Thank you (:

Aren't the people who use adblockers by definition those who are irritated by advertising enough that they wouldn't buy the products and services being advertised? If anything ad people should love things like uBlock Origin, it means they're not wasting their ad spend on people who aren't going to buy their products anyway.

I think that's wishful thinking. I might even think this about myself, that I don't care about ads. But they still have some effect I think. Sure, I rarely buy stuff online or anywhere, I just don't shop much, but I still get affected by ads.

Some things about our brain we just can't change: we like things we've seen before. Both brands and people. Recognition makes a big difference, for example in arbitrary choices when shopping.

>> Every time someone starts ad-blocking, someone else has to assume that ad watch for them.

This is a completely unsubstantiated claim, and also false if you think about it.

I'm gonna guess that isn't the case, and that the percentage of people using ad blockers is still fairly low.

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