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Comment by meritt | Hacker News Reader

Ad blocking is already beneficial for the ad industry. The sort of people who install ad blocking are also the type who never interact with ads. The net result is an improved CTR/CPA because ad impressions are not being wasted on someone who would not convert in the first place.

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This makes the deeply flawed assumption that the only time advertisements have value is if someone clicks them.

Brand awareness campaigns and media buys would be the sort of exception you're talking about and you're absolutely right. Or if you're a company who buys a ton of fraudulent traffic in order to inflate your Alexa/Quantcast/Hitwise/etc rankings, then every impression counts as well.

However, if the advertiser is like the bulk of online advertising (e.g. one of the many for-profit online-degree-mills or someone pushing the latest weight loss pills) they tend to very aggressively optimize towards a desired CPA and eliminating non-converting traffic is always the goal. A better CVR creates happier advertisers which leads to higher bids & budgets and then higher publisher payouts.

It's possible for advertising to have negative value.

There are brands / stores / products I've avoided specifically because of the advertising, whether it was annoying, disgusting, insulting, belittling, bigoted, or whatever. I've got several examples in mind as I speak.

They do only have value when somebody pays attention to them and I am not ever going to buy a no-operation solution for my none existing male pattern baldness, nor am I interested in "losing weight using $N wierd tips discovered by a serial rapist victim".

The truth is ads mostly don't have value -- but the worse your product is the more you need ads.

I have always wanted to make an extension which would use a random cookie (from any of the users) instead of just blocking ads. This would totally mess up their targeting and reports. It would not help the ad industry at all.

Given that I have spent years working in the ad industry and writing ad servers, this is somewhat ironic.

A similarly anti ad-business idea: an extension that randomly clicks ads in a background.

That's already been implemented. With the shift to CPC, there are people who write that kind of software and sell to sleazy publishers. On the other side, ad servers have a fraud detection module that looks for those random clicks.

Sure, but those systems aren't going to flip out when each user clicks one or two ads, because that is what the normal data looks like.

You would get the publisher black-listed by e.g. google. This would target the wrong people.

You assume that everybody stores the visitor data in the cookie. Nowadays only the visitor ids are stored there, identification is made also by all the info you and your browser provides and the rest of the data which actually contains the user's interests and visited sites is in distributed NoSQL/SQL replicated databases.

I work in the ad industry, specifically real time bidding and I am thinking it would be kind of pointless.

While browser/device fingerprinting has made great strides, if this was really pointless, you wouldn't see so much of hue and cry over some mozillas decisions to block third party cookies. (http://www.iab.net/mozilla).

Flashcookie and localstorage based techniques are hardly legal. Store user profiles server side, but you will still be fooled by a different visitor id in the cookie (and fingerprint for that matter), won't you?

Yup. So many work arounds. Simply the IP+UA alone contains enough entropy to uniquely detect the majority of users already, you don't need to store anything at all.

ETag cookies work quite well too and don't require any additional software or "hacking"-esque approaches.

Random cookies probably wouldn't suffice. Evercookie[1] uses thirteen different storage mechanisms, making it almost impossible to delete.

[1] - https://github.com/samyk/evercookie

This is illegal and not in use by legitimate ad companies. They've learned their lessons [1]

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/ad-network-at-center-of-third-...

You just totally blew my mind. I had never considered that blocking ads could ever be beneficial for an ad network. Are there any numbers of this sort published by the industry?

No of course not -- it's mostly specious reasoning that's not really backed by data

EDIT: probably sarcasm, but still will leave this here

If your CTR is twice what it would have been you can command half the eCPM but as you also have twice the inventory it all just factors out... like, if this matters, then the math is broken somewhere. Even more clearly, in the usual CPC case, anyone not clicking on the ads is effectively irrelevant.

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