Comment by rjknight | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rjknight | Hacker News Reader

> This means that we're working twice as hard as other sites to sustain our company

This must be wrong. Surely if Destructoid are seeing a 50% block rate, their competitors must be seeing something similar too? A world with ad-blockers is the new normal for everyone.

Ad-blockers aren't going away. The fundamental architecture of the internet and the web makes it almost impossible to force people to view ads that they don't want to, and no advertiser is going to win the technological arms-race against the ad-blocking software. For now, at least, I have sufficient control over my own computer that I can dictate what appears on the screen.

I think the right conclusions are reached in this article though. Destructoid clearly understand the marketplace they're operating in, and a membership option of some kind is a good, non-exploitative way of earning money from content creation. It might not work, and there might be better alternatives, but someone is going to find a way that does work. The existence of ad blockers is providing "evolutionary" pressure toward business models that don't rely on spamming people with crap, and this is a good thing. (Assuming, that is, that the new business models aren't somehow worse, at which point we'll have to start blocking those...)

> it almost impossible to force people to view ads that they don't want to

It's trivial to do, technically. Just embed the ads with in-page (not externally linked) JS, or proxy 3rd party ad network requests through the hosting server, or splice them in on the server side, etc. I think we are going to see this widely adopted if the adblock rates continue climbing up.

This will obviously rub the adblock users the wrong way, but if you are generating the ad revenue from a lot of one-time visitors, it should be fine. Then, to not alienate repeated visitors, offer a paid, ad-free subscription. Perhaps of a freemium flavor. Done.

Now the question is why we don't see this being done at scale yet?

You seem to be assuming that the only way to block ads is a blacklist of domains that JS won't be loaded from.

That doesn't really help. A simple crowdsourced "see an ad? highlight it and it goes away" system would work against that. Adds have content, and that content can be used to find and block them, even if their source is the same as the page content.

Yes, that could happen, but it almost certainly wouldn't.

The general problem with ad blockers is that they are a set-and-forget scorched-earth solution to the problem of annoying ads. As a web publisher, it doesn't matter if you carefully tweak your ads to be as unobtrusive and relevant to the user as possible, because users running ad blockers won't see them to begin with. Asking users to whitelist your site is a non-starter.

If you use some fairly trivial tactics to prevent your ads being blocked by the default settings of the ad blocker, the vast majority of users with an ad blocker will never bother to set up some custom filter to block your specific ads because the default settings are the program for 95% of people.

If you have some really obnoxious ads then yes, perhaps more people will go to the bother of blocking them. But if you don't, I assert that almost no-one will bother.

If you're facebook, the people who maintain blocklists for popular ad-blockers will write some custom rules for your new ads. But most sites aren't facebook.

The most popular ad blocker, Adblock Plus, not only supports blocking URL patterns, it can hide elements within a page via arbitrary CSS selectors. Any large-scale attempt to bypass Adblock Plus would be a cat-and-mouse game requiring advertisers to constantly change their DOM "signature" to keep ahead of the filter writers.

Adblock can already block stuff like this, easily.

It's much easier to update ad blockers to block new ways of displaying ads, than it is to come up with new ways of displaying ads that can't be blocked.

I thought so too.

But not necessarily. It wouldn't be that difficult to embed the article in an image, with the ad inside the image -- you could then redirect clicks with a box around the ads the advertiser.

Leave the first paragraph or so as text for google purposes. That would be really annoying to work around but rather trivial to implement.

The article text could be extracted trivially with OCR.

Ad blockers can block this the same way they currently block JS links, by searching for ads embedded in the page and removing them. If the ads contain any sort of recognizable div wrapper, blocking them will be trivial.

But even if they don't, you should be able to deploy a statistical ad blocker in the same vein as Paul Graham's spam filter (which is mainstream at this point).

None of this stops the situation from continuing to be a cat and mouse game, but hopefully the above points demonstrate that the game is far from over for either side.

I don't know what kind of block you use, but adblock plus can be used to block certain elements on sites -- it works even for non-ads such as facebooks "spam your friends inbox and alinate them all" box.

So I don't really care where the ad comes from.

I think one day we'll head in the direction of paid content with an app store-like micro-payment system that allows us to chip in .05-.25 to view a single article if we deem it worth it. I'd personally rather do this than pay a $10/mo subscription fee for content I won't use every single day.

Been thinking about how the architecture for this will work for years now, lol. If I don't get to it, I hope someone executes it someday.

>This must be wrong. Surely if Destructoid are seeing a 50% block rate, their competitors must be seeing something similar too? A world with ad-blockers is the new normal for everyone.

Surely not. Depends on the target audience of each site. Direct competitors with the same target group maybe, but sites appealing to the general public or specialized non-techy publics surely not.

I would have assumed that competitor sites were the most relevant comparison to draw. It is highly likely that Destructoid sees a higher rate of ad-blocking than, say, yahoo.com, but that's not really relevant as Destructoid isn't competing with Yahoo!.

it's even likely that they see higher rates of ad blocking than IGN, because they are a bit more niche among gaming blogs.

Maybe, but the point remains.

While having having X readers PLUS the infrastructure costs to support X readers, they see the same revenue as more general sites having X/2 readers.

If there weren't ad-blockers, the absolute reader count would be the only thing that mattered.

As it was in the press era. It didn't matter if you were the New York Times or the LISP Quarterly, if you had managed to have X readers you got the same amount of ad money (well, not 100% the same, because it also depended on the demographic, but LISP and NYT would rank close enough).

As long as ads are in the markup, they can be blocked. It might take a hand-crafted CSS selector, but that's nothing impossible.

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