Ask HN: do advertisers pay for impressions if I'm using adblock?

2 pointslmg6435 comments

I use adblock plus, so I almost never see online ads. The only website I've found smart enough to address this is hulu. What about all the others? Do they charge for impressions even if I can't see an ad?

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Yup. The ads are removed on your client, not on their server, so advertisers end up paying for impressions that you never see (if they're paying for impressions).

How do you know? Usually Ad-blockers replace the ads, so the server doesn't deliver the ads.

What do you mean? To my understanding, the ads are removed from the HTML before/during rendering. Unless that ads are on an external server and a request hasn't been made before the ad is removed from the page, a request should be registered and an ad subsequently served.

yes the ads are removed _before_ rendering, and the ad is never delivered.

So if this is true, seems like a pretty significant detail for online advertisers - ad rate inflation.

Alternatively, seems like this could be a problem to solve for a startup - reliable ad delivery.

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