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Comment by wkjagt | Hacker News Reader

I know this is probably a very naive question, but what is the end goal putting so much effort into getting past ad blockers? Surely, someone with an ad blocker installed is not going to click on their ads and buy the advertised products anyway. I don't really know what I am talking about, but I guess it's all about ad impressions that generate money, but doesn't this strategy end up making less money, because the money that's put into circumventing ad blockers isn't really generating more sales.

It's like a door to door sales person thinking that if only they could find a way to unlock my door I would buy their stuff.

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You don't actually need to click on an ad or purchase something from an ad site in order for Facebook to make money selling ad space.

The moment these ads are loaded on the page, real time auction occurs, where advertisers place bids algorithmically and automatically, based on your profile. Facebook makes it's money by selling this ad space. It doesn't particularly care whether you click on them or not. But if they don't load in the first place, there's nothing for Facebook to sell.

The real insideous part is that advertisers don't need to actually bid on the auction to participate, and anyone participating gets to havest your ad profile. This is one of the big ways data brokers are able to build profiles on you. They can then do whatever they want with this info, and you'd probably never know.

This is correct, and the extra insidious part is that folks who are tech-savvy and privacy-conscious are more valuable profiles than normies, because we generally work in higher income jobs/industries. So whether we click or not is irrelevant, Facebook gets paid more for showing us ads than they do for typical normies.

and thats why you lock down your privacy, so they get nothing other than "generic privacy enthusiast #1000101010101"

Good luck. I'd wager that most methods to protect your privacy aren't nearly as effective as we think they are. While I don't think it means that you shouldn't try to protect your information, I typically assume that anything short of very extreme measures is only mildly effective.

One of the biggest problems in software development is that our graph of authoritative personal data is cyclical. You might have heard about how difficult it was for someone erroneously declared dead to change the record, and I'm sure most of us have experienced problems with changing an address. A friend recently went through two name changes and one phone number change, and it took like eight months for the bottom-feeders to realign.

We are now in an adversarial situation regarding our personal information, but our adversaries depend on sources we have a modicum of control over. If I signed my dog up for a physical mailer, I wonder how long would it take for a portion of the internet to consider Doctor-Professor Kensington a legal individual.

I've tried signing up for bank accounts with deliberate typoes in my name. It worked. Name didn't match the ID they had me scan. The Revolut sign-up form randomly ignores keypresses so that's my plausible deniability. I just intentionally didn't correct them.

im constanty being asked to fill out captchas (which i close) and am accused of being a bot by many of the sites i visit, so i guess im doing something right?

That's not true. If your ad placements don't perform, people are not going to book them. If ads are loaded or not is also often verified by independent third party trackers that you have to embed on your page next to the ad. There's whole industries built on this stuff and it's not as simple as "we sell the slot and don't care if people see it or click on it".

I mean you are both right, it's been a few years since I have been in adtech, and it isn't black and white. There are few places that will pay for stuff that isn't clicked through, but there are places that are willing to pay on an impression basis for things like video or images. It's just like not worth it to most places to throw those ads on their property since it's fairly low quality advertisers.

More to the point though, if there isn't ads rendered, you can't even get accidental clicks.

The teams spending the kind of money these ad networks care about are doing a lot of upper funnel brand marketing where exposure is more important than clicks and where conversions are expected to be much lower for this segment of spend.

The largest brands (Walmart, McDonald's, Coca-Cola, etc.) put a lot of analytics into their ad spend. I worked on an ad platform with a large audience that these kinds of brands wanted to get their name in front of, but the audience was exceedingly unlikely to click on big-brand ads on our platform. The brands figured this out quickly and pushed hard for cost-per-click rather than cost-per-impression because cost-per-click was essentially free brand marketing for them, even if they were paying $100 per click.

The next tier down was kind of the opposite. They weren't big enough to surface things like this, and they hired agencies for most of their ad spend. When focusing on the top of the funnel, there's this strange incentive with agencies where they often get more budget to spend if they can connect that directly to eye balls. Agencies are incentivized to throw the ads up everywhere and pay well to do so. They love cost-per-impression because we could deliver a large, predictable number of eye balls in a hurry.

All that said, we put no effort into getting around ad blockers as we were serving these ads on our own site/app and we viewed fighting ad blockers as fighting our users. Our ads were served inline in HTML, but clearly identified in the HTML of the page. It took blockers a while to catch on and block them, but they eventually did.

The further away you get from direct marketing where you can track conversions, and the further up the funnel you go, the less and less analytics help. Another way to think of it is that there are tranches of spend - the central tranche is easily attributable direct marketing but there's a limit to how much you can efficiently spend, but the further from the center you go the less effectively you can measure the efficacy of the spend but there are more options to absorb ad dollars.

Maybe 15 years ago multi-touch attribution was the big push but even that only adds minimal insights into how ad spend affects the behavior you're trying to measure. It helps with high-level channel attribution but it's still at best directional.

So once you reach a point when increasing spend at Meta/Google results in superlinear increases in CAC vs. spend, you eventually end up having to move those ad dollars elsewhere and over time (and a lot of money) you get an intuitive understanding of how these other mediums trickle down to the metrics that matter.

You're totally right about agencies and their perverse incentives and how that leads to sub-optimal spend allocation.

They will not book them once they learn they have been defrauded for a while.

Ad placements can still appear to perform if the targeted user was already planning to buy the product and Google/Meta attribute the sale to the ad impression they shove in at the last minute. FortNine (a Canadian motorcycle gear retailer) published an expose and seem quite convinced that this is an extremely common occurrence. It would also justify why Meta would be so aggressive about showing ads even to an unreceptive audience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfNIRyPi5QA

> That's not true. If your ad placements don't perform, people are not going to book them.

You'd be surprised at how opaque and complex ad attribution and ROAS calculation has become for the average business, and how many marketing departments are operating on high-level metrics without having an intuitive understanding of how their ads are performing. Many of them rely on the ad networks' own metrics to determine ad performance, and don't even have their own internal attribution models.

I would say, then, that Facebook is perpetrating fraud. They are knowingly defeating ad blockers to sell ad space that they know will not lead to any click-throughs and conversions.

They don't know that, and it probably isn't true.

Online advertising is less and less about forcing a pitch to conversion in the moment its viewed. Even if someone with an ad blocker would never click on the ad anyway, repeat "impressions" build implicit trust just through exposure. Six months or even a year from then, when that user is looking for a specific SaaS tool, for example, the brand they saw 40 times already is the one that feels established and safe, and it's more likely to lead to a conversion without ever clicking the original ad.

The second part of putting so much effort into getting past ad blockers is tracking & fingerprinting, especially across devices.

In general, ads work by anchoring a brand name in your memory for when you eventually are looking for said product or service, the goal isn't always to force a conversion on the spot.

What if the conversation is negative? I have very little patience for halfbaked ads disguised as posts. Some companies just show what they are and sell, but too often these days it's a memey post-like advertisement which will be a negative the next conversation "ah, yes that company with those annoyingly fake ads, just like their [product]". But I do not rule out I'm the odd one out and the people deciding the tools to for upon people fall for those ads.

It doesn't matter if your personal interaction is negative if on the whole it's positive across a larger corpus of users. By and large this exposure tactic works more than not.

> repeat "impressions" build implicit trust just through exposure.

This is exactly why I don't want to see their shit, ever. It just doubles my resolve to not see it. They are targeting my underbrain, my subconscious, and do not want it.

There's one particular insurance company that continued to evade my ad blocking attempts for literally years. I will never buy from them. My current insurance is fine and the ad-mongers can get bent until their business dies.

That's logical, but the parent comment "I'm immune to ads, I won't click them" falls flat because no one is immune to ads. That's why it's such a big industry.

But how to you quantify the effect of the exposure? How do you know a particular sale is converted through some impressions you put on Facebook six months ago, and not from a highway billboard one week earlier? If you can't accurate quantify the effect of each ad campaign with their conversion rate, you have no reason to put more funds into this particular Facebook campaign. So naturally it falls on Facebook to prove to you that their ad socket is actually generating conversion, by not showing the ads to people who is least likely to click through ads when shown.

I think it's all a huge make-believe. They have a big name and marketing falls for it. If push comes to shove, they can just simulate click through and views and such, to "convince" people that it all works. They have all the user agent details of a user from years of browser-rape.

I go a bit further - if something penetrates firefox + ublock origin combo, I'll go out of my way to make sure I'll never, ever buy such product or service if I can avoid that (not always possible but reasonably frequent).

Its quichotesque effort but the only thing that can move the needle a bit since everybody involved cares only about money here - waiting for some toothless legislation is useless when harm is happening now.

There is a ton of shady stuff that UBO let's through. Some of it can be filtered with the optional lists but not all. You really need NoScript and LocalCDN in the arsenal to pare back the invasive abuse of privacy.

Literally nothing works through NoScript any more since all the bootcamps started teaching React.

Ads do a lot more than advertise. They track and collect data about you without you interacting at all. I don’t use an adblocker to not see ads, i use an ad blocker to not load ads or interact with their providers servers at all.

Yeah, I'm less-concerned about seeing an ad than I am about the spyware/surveillance networks behind them.

If some magic-genie offered the tradeoff of "You can't install third-party adblockers, but your privacy will be magically guaranteed", that would be really appealing.

Facebook does that, even when you aren't seeing an ad.

The biggest buyers of ads are not promoting products, they're shilling for politicians. The same way junk mail props up the postal service, political ads keep the lights on at local TV channels. They are unwatchable during election season, and there's some election campaign happening all the time. Mayors, governors, senators, congress.

Facebook and Youtube are just the newest battlefields. If it's not politician ads, it's military ads, partisan "nonprofit" ads, or ads for podcasts. I don't need to see any of them.

That said, as long as UBO keeps up the good fight on the open web, I'm good. Facebook is basically a memory now, and there are other ways to access Youtube that are actually less taxing on their bandwidth because they don't have auto-play enabled and don't show a 45-minute podcast episode as a pre-roll.

Ads are for surveillance as much if not more than they are for money

Presumable the ads on Facebook are served by Facebook and they know who you are and what you are doing on Facebook.

I believe that, as long as you add that the surveillance is also for money.

in that money is the atomic unit of economic control, sure.

government's don't surveil for money, unless you bend the argument a bit to say the government has finite resources and is run off money itself. which is kinda true, but also kinda fuzzy (the Fed).

I don't think governments are the majority buyers of the surveillance, no doubt they buy a little bit.

Ads are a type of malware, they're often used to bootstrap more aggressive types of malware.

The door to door sales person wants to unlock your door so they can sell the info to somebody else who shows up and steals your TV.

I don't like ads and don't want to buy random stuff, but they totally work me sometimes, and I'm sure there has got to be many like me. It's one of the big reasons I don't go on social media really anymore. I mostly have willpower, but in moments of weakness I'll see a perfectly targeted ad, it'll be for something affordable, and I'll but it. It was never a big problem for me as it's only happened a handful of times, but everything I've bought this way has been useless and I've gotten rid of it all.

Story time? I want to know about the useless items.

lol, no, it's mostly embarrassing :P Well, they included a silicone sponge and a massive blanket.

Did you notice any change in the adverts targeting you after an impulse purchase?

Good question but I honestly can't remember, even though it wasn't even that long ago. I've given up services slowly over the past few years, but since I used all the big stuff: Google search/email, instagram, and facebook, and am (still) addicted to YouTube that the ads were already soooooo specific to me that I doubt they got any more specific. I would assume that after I bought that stupid sponge that didn't work I probably got more cooking ads, but I honestly can't remember.

I've mostly ditched everything but YouTube now. Honestly, just not using Google seach and gmail makes a HUGE difference in how targeted ads get. I still have an instagram account that a very rarely check, but since I'm not a big cookie blocker, I'll see ads for stuff I was recently searching for. Oh! And I feel like one of those "I don't have a TV" people from the 90s, but I no longer carry a smartphone either. I haven't bought anything from an ad in a few years at this point. It likely still counts but the closest is buying something a YouTuber has recommended from a video I sought out for an interest I already had.

Cheers.

A silicone sponge seems so oxymoronical: that was my responsible impetus.

Hard to avoid commercial interests. Sell poets on the block.

Ha, ya I'm just calling it that for eases sake. It's a "cleaning tool" sponge replacement. It did not work. The blanket was actually good quality but it turns out I did not even want a really massively huge blanket.

Aren’t ads payed also via „impressions“, like 10k people saw your advertisement so please pay x money?

Partially, yes. Ads are also psychological, and tracked cross-platform. If you see a BMW ad on Facebook, drive by a BMW billboard on the highway, search BMW on Google, and then go buy a BMW, they have ways of fractionally allocating the conversion to the different impressions. It's pretty crazy.

I always thought last-click attribution was generally used even though partial attribution was technically possible. But my info is a few years stale.

Yes, but if a user doesn’t convert the advertiser will see worse performance metrics as cost per click/conversion/install is higher. That isn’t a good long term outcome for the platform, since advertisers can switch their budgets elsewhere (to Google/Youtube)

There’s a delicate balance, more impressions isn’t always a good outcome. Id assume here given the battle against ad blockers that the platforms do believe the aggregate impression mix leads to good performance for advertisers though

Advertising is and always has been a fundamentally adversarial relationship between the consumer and the publisher. Everyone knows that, with few exceptions, no one ever wants to see ads. So I guess I'm not sure why you're surprised that advertisers still want to show ads to people who would rather not see them. That's everyone.

First it's literally how they make money. Selling ads. Meta doesn't have any other real source of income. (RayBan glasses don't count.)

If they don't show you ads, they lose money. (Because they need to pay for the servers, traffic.)

Second. Lots of people say "I don't look at ads, I don't care, they don't work on me", but actual behaviour says otherwise.

Third some people just install uBlock to their families and they don't even know they have it.

First thing is that Facebook makes money by showing ads, not by selling the product shown on the ad.

Second thing is that besides a small minority of people who refuse to buy advertised products out of spite, some would be blockers still do if the ad get shown. Maybe less than those without ad blockers, but still more than zero.

Third thing is that the point of advertising is not just direct sales. Some companies put up ads just to "take space", to establish themselves as leaders in their sector and not let others in. That's why you see som much advertisement for Coca-Cola. They don't expect you to buy a can of Coke just after you have seen the ad, you probably already have some in your fridge anyways. But by doing that, they make sure that when you want a drink, you think about Coca-Cola and not something else.

Do we no longer habitually install an ad block for friends and family? There's gotta be some naive users with an ad blocker that way, or default within brave or whatever

They are no longer handling Facebook in the ad blocker. Installing an ad blocker won't help.

I believe tracking and privacy invasions cannot be solved through technological means, it needs to be solved through laws and regulations.

We need to prod our representatives to ban the selling of our private information. Websites themselves can use the information but they're prohibited from selling it to anyone else. Why? Because the data changes hands and borders several times after which we lose all control over it.

It can be solved through technological means, but these ones aren't sufficient. I remember how that Luigi guy tried to solve a different problem by technological means and it worked for a few months.

No it can't. The only thing you'll end up with is an arms race. An arms race companies like Google and Facebook are destined to win because they have unlimited budgets to fight ad-blocking because it's what made them filthy rich.

uBlock Origin is one guy holding back the sea with his finger in the dike.

ads are like billboards. the company doesn't make money by making sure your buy the product, it make money by getting the product in front of you. You might not buy the product today, but there is a chance that since you've seen the product, you might buy it in the future.

many of times, i have looked to purchase a product or service and remember an ad that i saw that has alter my decision.

And by raising awareness, they cannibalize sales from their competitors. So their competitors have to buy ads to compete. And everyone ends up spending lots of money, which consumers pay for. And that is why I gravitate to cheaper, unknown brands when the market allows it.

> is not going to click on their ads and buy the advertised products anyway

Even cringy ads that digust or anger users in the moment have a subtle effect of making them more likely to buy or recommend that brand in the future. The name recognition is what advertisers are buying, it doesn't have to immediately persuade the user to click for them to get what they want.

I have ad blockers everywhere apart from the instagram app. I have bought a ton of stuff off the ads on there. I'm not proud, but have to admit I am powerless against them. Underwear, t-shirts, soap, online courses I have never used, I am a sucker, which is why I need these ad blockers.

If you have android phone, you could try Instander, even though the last update was ~3 years ago, works like a charm for me

>someone with an ad blocker installed is not going to click on their ads and buy the advertised products anyway

This is not true. Most people with ad blockers are everyday people. And even for people who are hardcore against ads, they may find a useful product or see something that they will think of again in the future.

100% higher up decision, I bet they loose more on this than the powerpoint slide says they are earning.

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