Ad blocker that clicks on the ads
dhowe.github.io
dhowe.github.io
- They allow shoddy security on their servers
- They track users against their will
- Info on me is sold w/o my knowledge or consent
- Ads are a poor business model since they can be blocked
- There is no moral imperative for me to view ads since I've paid to access the Interwebs
I block all ads, tracking cookies, beacons, all of it... I whitelist my bank and my email provider. Everyone else gets nothing from me. I lie about my browser agent, I disallow scripts, CSS history, I disallow HTTP/S referrer, DOM storage, I use a European proxy where I need to. This all works great for me, as I have the right to move around the Internet as a customer, not a product.
I think if anything, this extension makes ad companies sit up and take notice. I won't be installing it, as I don't need it, but kudos to the authors for throwing the cat in among the pigeons. Ad revenue from most of these sites is based on tracking people and this is something I am against 100%.
You're paying for data transport, you're not paying for the content.
They can construct an "ad-wall" in the same way they construct a "pay-wall" and are free to do so. Otherwise they are offering free content.
World Wide Web works in a way, that I can create a http request, and then do what I want with it, for example I can only take the text and throw away anything else. I paid for the data transport, as you said, and then I don't have any other obligations after downloading those data.
When I go to McDonald's, I don't pay for my Big Mac. I already put gas in my car!
You're paying for the transport of the bits, you haven't paid for the content of those bits.
The content seems to be good - you chose to use it after all. You could boycott ad-supported content but you chose not to.
(I agree with the rest of what you say btw).
Make money by charging for content. I miss the old days when people had to pay for stuff with tangible money, not with their anonymity. I would gladly pay to access content I found useful, just no tracking. Be content with the money and move on. No need to profile me, sell my profile to make more money. I pay to use several sites. I also block ads on these site, because the third parties don't respect privacy.
Did you read the submission before commenting? Because that piece of software clicks all ads, which has potential to harm ad-funded sites.
Just use an ad-blocker if you want to avoid tracking.
Second, it sounds like you would be well served by an ad blocker. Is there some reason why that's not enough and you have to actively try to destroy ad-supported sites?
That said, I don't think the rest of your post is well supported. Surely they are using the info to try and target ads, but what prevents them from using it in other ways (including selling it to other people who want to use it in other ways) if they think it can make them more money? Probably, most of these companies aren't going to knowingly sell it to anyone who will use it illegally because they could be culpable... but there are probably things I don't want done to me that don't involve actual illegality. An example off the top of my head might be feeding embarrassing info to a tabloid. And even that stays out of the realm of "what if things really went bad?"
What you cite as "my preference" is really "what the advertising backend has deduced I'm most likely to buy" - that's certainly better for the advertising company, very likely better for whoever's receiving revenue from showing the ads (averaged over all users because yes, targeted ads do work better), but it's not actually _better_ for me. From my point of view as someone who didn't actually want to spend any money, it's worse, because I'm now more likely to spend the money.
Personally, I feel far less privacy when making online payments and giving out my credit card or trusting some middle provider than I do when visiting a site that has ads which I can disable.
Not every single site. Some people are fine serving their content for free: because they do it as a hobby, because they are financed by donations, ...
But actively trying to disrupt how they make a living goes beyond that. Imagine a museum that has a donation box but where you can go in for free if you want. You don't have to donate, but gumming up the slot so no one else can donate either goes beyond being not thinking the museum is worth paying for (although, for some reason, you're in it) to not thinking it should be in business at all.
By arguing that instead of taking donations they should just charge admission, you're just rationalizing bad behavior.
This kind of behavior will only push the movement even more far away from mainstream popularity, slowly becoming a new form of extremism.
Wait, that is actually how it works. In US typically you pay more for the gas because it has rolled into its cost the cost of maintenance for the roads.
It is a flawed analogy line to begin with. But even here you can see how there are cases where this happens.
It would probably be more accurate to say that you get a free McDonald's if they can send one of their clowns home with you and he can watch you eat it and records everything. Here the author just block the clown from following him. And presumably would prefer to actually pay for a McDonald's sandwich.
(I personally would pay a negative sum for it, but that is just me).
For these reasons and more, it strikes me as likely that advertising as a business model has a limited shelf life. It will exist only so long as there is no better alternative and not one moment longer.
People forget, we half-stumbled into this ad supported content idea. The only thing keeping it that way is inertia. I think we've finally started to feel the limits -- it means being tracked 24-7.
Enough already. We can do better than this.
The difficulty would be determining whether to cut off certain types of content from the site, and where the line gets drawn on extreme material.
[0] http://www.invincea.com/2014/10/micro-targeting-malvertising...
(There are some print publications with quite terrible ads too. Not everyone has the standards or resources of Hearst.)
Anyway, I'm not using adblock for the last few years because internet isn't that bad (at least the sites I visit). Before adblock it was awful and I think it was adblock that made it go away. Thanks to users ability to respond we have balance.
So this is good that such extensions exist.
>Ads (and even ads placed by primary distributors and authors) hijacked the internet without permission from browsers/surfers
To see a single text ad? To see a series of gifs? To have an autoplay video start? To accumulate tracking cookies? To accumulate permanent flash storage? Permission to do some reverse lookup and call your phone? Permission to capture later browsing and re-write links in a i-Frame?
I am not currently using an adblocker/clicker (broke too many things). By a similar argument if the site doesn't want to serve content to those not reading they ads they can selectively choose not serve it. Isn't something being placed in public implying some permission? I really don't understand why so many people are unsympathetic to attempting to defend oneself.
>Isn't something being placed in public implying some permission?
If the site is serving up malware why patronize it to begin with? There is a distinction between an ad and malware.
Blocking ads, disallowing cookies (whitelisting), blocking the general ad industry is the only safe way. It's like sex: use protection.
You actively walk into a bar. For what ever reason, you can't pay your bill so the bar owner break your leg as a lesson. Alternative, the bar owner will sell you into slavery so you can pay your bill.
Should we imply that you gave permission for all this by walking into the bar? What if there is a 400 pages long contract, which by entering, you silently agreed to by staying in the bar?
Implied permission created from non-action are a horrible concept that only exist on-line.
I'll throw you and your analogy a bone though. You walk into a bar, bars are smokey, you don't want to smell like smoke, but you want a cocktail more than you don't want to smell like smoke. You've implied that you're okay with smelling like smoke as long as you get your martini.
And that is what the EU is trying to do for private data. When it is illegal to track users, then users can't silently give permission by visiting the website. The whole question about implied permission goes away when rules of commerce specify what is and isn't allowed.
I dislike the ad model but this is dangerously wrong: you pay your ISP for transit – unless you're subscribing to a specific site, nobody else gets a dime from you to pay for their costs. Unless subscriptions or micropayments catch on, that means that sites are either going to rely on ads or will be limited to organizations with significant other revenue streams – neither of which is a particularly healthy prospect.
These sites are instructing my browser to download content from ad networks using the ISP bandwidth that I paid for. I'm fully in my right to tell my browser not to download that content.
Part of the reason that subscriptions and micropayments haven't caught on is that people put up with ads. If ads stop working as a business model, I doubt we'll be looking at a bleak future of watching Love Boat reruns and rereading old Family Circle articles. We will find some other way of funding good content.
Indeed, when I look at the way the quality of television has improved over the last couple of decades, I think it's a reasonable argument that blocking ads would be the moral imperative. As anybody who has worked in ad-supported industries knows, consumers aren't the customers, they're the product. Rather than being served, viewers and readers are being served up to advertisers. The system has a conflict of interest at the heart of it. It's reasonable to refuse to support corrupt systems.
The Onion was right[1]. In the rush to sell out their "users" to to whomever is willing to pay, a lot of people seem to have come to believe that advertising is the only way to the internet can work.
The internet enabled many new ways of publishing due it removing most of the per-transaction costs. I suspect we haven't even seen most of these methods. While "Kickstarter" style funding and Wikipedia's "public television style" requests for donations, while interesting experiments, are only the first generation of what is enabled by the internet.
Unfortunately, untested and unproven (by somebody else) ideas do imply some amount of risk, which scares a lot of people back into the traditional method where the advertisers get to paint over everything.
edit: forgot URL
If you think about the ad model for print and broadcast media, they don't bother trying to track eyeballs. They know it's impossible. You pay for your ad to appear a certain number of times, and hope people pay attention to it. You can't know whether a specific newspaper gets read by a dozen people in a hotel lobby or lands on a driveway in the morning, to be trashed, unread, at night. If an ad runs on television, the advertiser doesn't know if it's being watched by the whole family, or just the dog.
That's why ratings services, like Nielsen, exist. People get paid to have their habits monitored, and those samples are extrapolated.
Ad networks can, if they so choose, blacklist sites based on a perception of "fake" clicks. Those sites are not necessarily responsible for fake clicks, and they certainly can't do anything to stop them. You would not, therefore be harming the site operators. You would be harming the ad networks that pretend that they know more about their own service than is possible.
Destroying the viability of pay-per-click is (arguably) something that would be an improvement in the world of HTTP publishing.
No they can't, however they can tell what is a real user and what is not. Real users don't click every single ad presented to them on every single page. Real users don't click ads as soon as a page loads. Real users don't click on all ads at the same or near-the-same time. (If this worked, without getting flagged/blacklisted, site operators would have built bots long ago to click their own ads as there is a lot of money to be made that way)
You absolutely will harm site operators. Ad networks do indeed blacklist sites that get high volume of perceived "fake clicks", whether they are fake or not. You will only harm the sites you like the most and frequent the most.
This is a very naive view of how ad networks operate, and a very naive approach to "solving this problem" (likely built by someone who has not worked with ad networks, nor has operated an ad-driven site, ie. someone with little to no experience in the domain they are trying to solve a perceived problem).
Never mind about cyborgs, or script-enhanced humans, which are what users of this add-on will become. You can't even tell if a script was launched by a human or by another script.
It's the Iocaine Powder of ad-serving. The only way to win is to be immune to the effects of playing.
In this case, only ad-serving networks that do not change their visible behavior in response to clicks can win: no site-bans in response to visitor behavior, and no click-through bonuses or payments per impression. And that is the sort of ad network I find most tolerable.
Pay the site operator based upon sound judgement as to what the value of ads on those pages are worth, and toss the site traffic analysis in the trash. You need to have an actual human determining how popular a site is likely to be, because an automated script is never going to be able to differentiate between human and another automated script that knows--or can guess at--the first script's algorithms. Do it correctly, and you won't need to compensate for temporary spikes from HN, or Slashdot, or SomethingAwful, or a Chan, or an SEO firm, or anyone else. The ad campaign pays out according to the agreement, and if the site becomes permanently more popular, the operator and the salesperson renegotiate the rate afterward.
That involves actual ad sales employees with some familiarity with the subject matter. If you purely fight bots versus bots, the programmer with the most knowledge of the other guy's program wins. And in this case, that advantages the attacker more.
The ad networks are using an automated Turing Test based on statistical models to differentiate between "real" and "fake" requests. Until someone commits real dollars to make a purchase, there is no out-of-band verification of the requester's humanness. When you click the ad, your tamper-proof mouse does not take a tiny blood sample to verify that you are a real person, and communicate that via magical ansible to the ad network servers. Until the check clears on a purchase, the only data the ad networks have come through the HTTP requests, as in-band signals.
In-band signals can always be faked. Ask anyone who has ever blown a modified whistle from a cereal box into a phone handset, or modified a Radio Shack tone-dialer to produce the old payphones' "quarter inserted" tone.
So any script writer that either knows or can guess at the algorithms used to automatically sort "fake" from "real" can produce automated behavior that fools the automated sorter. What's more, those models are brittle. If the real behaviors of real humans change, such as by ad-blocking or running other response-modifying scripts, the models become decreasingly accurate classifiers.
A script that blindly clicks all blocked ads on a page is the tip of the iceberg. You can substitute the "click everything" strategy for a "click like a woman pregnant for the first time" strategy, or a "click like a male gamer, aged 17-25" strategy.
If web traffic ever has a significant number of browsers impersonating the browsing behaviors of other types of people with the help of scripts, ad networks can't trust any of their traffic to know "real" from "fake". That is an intractable problem for them.
You have to be able to verify a statistically significant portion of traffic as real humans before your models will work. And that is what Nielsen does with its consumer tracker devices.
As for your other points, I am almost as paranoid as you.
>free marketing - search engines, aggregators, social sites
But, judging from this quote you don't know what you are talking about. Search engines and social network traffic is anything but free in any category that has significant competition.
That said, I agree that if a website respectfully asks visitors with ad blockers to leave, then leaving is the nice thing to do.
Every McDonald's you eat at, has the ability to track your purchases, likes, etc. You are, after all, swiping your card with your name, etc.
That's an extremely juvenile way to view your browsing rights and behavior.
(Or are there addons for my ios Safari that work without jailbracking the device?)
Mmmmh, but I could use a proxy on my own server, through which I route my VPN traffic anyway. Of course, such a proxy product must be light-weight and easy to use. It should be a proxy that I can trust - OSS or self-written. It should enrich a page with a button which sends me to a block configuration for that domain - like that one you would get from a adblock plugin.... git init... ;)
Outside of the extra battery life hit, its extremely effective.
However, I agree with you that display ad networks suck. I'm also not sold on the idea that the web should be free. The happy medium is to have users pay for content, making it so advertisers don't need to track users to verify that they're real humans, and improving the web for everyone except poor people.
One way that this could be done is to use bitcoin for tiny micropayments, billed frictionlessly. Rough for legal reasons among others, but ideas like this are sensible if only for human verification reasons.
If you want the web to largely free content, to pay for that you must accept privacy-destroying ad networks to bear that cost. We've created a situation where the choice is to free ride on other people, or to surrender privacy.
If you want the web to be largely teasers for paid content, then you can have significantly more privacy also. Instead of the articles being articles, you will get articles that are actually big ads for paid content (already the case for a huge number of popular search results).
Spreading tools like these kills free content like snaps fingers loudly that. I'm indifferent. Users might not be.
I see it exactly the opposite way. The web IS free, it works that way (unless someone erect a paywall, which I find perfectly acceptable), and no entity is entitled that the web should "provide" it a profitable business avenue. If someone successfully exploited the web and created a business relying on ads, that's fine, but he don't have an implicit right for that. Internet users are not obliged to display data he provides through http the way the creator expects.
>If someone successfully exploited the web and created a business relying on ads, that's fine, but he don't have an implicit right for that. Internet users are not obliged to display data he provides through http the way the creator expects.
No, they're not. As this trend continues, the assumption that underwrites a lot of free content will stop being nearly as true. When the assumption stops being accurate, that business model fails, and more free 'content' winds up being ads gussied up as content. This is not exactly what the visionaries of the web had in mind, but them's the breaks.
In print, there are free publications handed out on street corners and in boxes. They tend to have low ad rates because the distribution is unverifiable. On cable, ad rates are still super-high, because the distribution is verifiable, and the cable networks have all the data they need about you on your cable bill + viewership surveys to aggregate for sale to advertisers.
I am not sure I agree with the implication, but I agree with the conclusion, for a different reason.
If I send an HTTP request to a server, and that server replies with content, this does not imply that the creators or publishers of that content have the right to dictate how I should enjoy that content on my own machine, or that I have any moral imperative to follow their wishes. I may be using an ad-blocker, I may be blocking images, I may be using lynx, I may be just saving it to view it offline later. It's my choice. If you do not agree, do not provide your content for free to anyone who asks.
There may be a moral imperative to support the creators and publishers of content you enjoy. This does not imply that it must be done via the convoluted route of viewing the content in a certain way so that a certain third party believes that a human mind has registered a certain message and pays the publisher for this.
And while I'm at it, is there a way to prevent a website from rewriting a url when I click on it? sites like Google and DuckDuckGo show the actual url in the href, but when you click it (or right click and copy it) it becomes something like http://example.com/something?url=encoded_real_url and I detest that.
For the search links, I use this Add-on and it works perfectly: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-search...
I haven't found the time to do it my self yet but will if someone doesn't beat me to porting Window Name Eraser to firefox from chrome. window.name is great for the site your visiting to use on their site. They have absolutely no business using it crossdomain, period. Not even if they own the other domain. There are legitimate ways to do that but they are too lazy, dumb, or opposed to using encryption.
I will allow a fucking cookie if I want to login or allow them to store or gather anything! No supercookies, no flash cookies, no evercookies. I use cookie monster, cookie culler, cookie self-destruct, and Cookie Controller that applies my regular cookie rules/disposition to DOM storage cookies as well.
Browsers, all of them, should behave and act the way they do after I make them go all green on ip-check.info.
In addition to that they have no fucking business knowing what the monitor resolution is. They ONLY need the canvas/inner window of the browser to render their damn site right. I will pull down videos and watch them offline without flash phoning home or to anyone else to give them anything to fingerprint my devices with.
They aren't entitled to this information and I'm against them having it. If I were like Carrie or the Twilight Zone kid who sends people into the Corn field and does other "fun" stuff they would have very good reason to be worried. >=/
I'm using Firefox with NoScript and I have Firefox set to clear everything except saved passwords when I close it (which I do frequently). I'm hopeful that is good enough because it looks like JavaScript is needed for the leak to occur, right?
There are some other sites that use the same or slightly different tactics to throw everything against the wall and see what sticks. They read your history right out or your cache using timing or logic to know if you've already visited the sites in question they want to query for. They also read the color values of the links to know if you've visited that link before. This was a known issue that someone brought up 10+ years, no 15+ years ago before we had Firefox and they were working on the not production ready Gecko codebase and still just trying to pass early CSS acid tests. Gecko builds early on had this issue and it was raised and to this day no one has fixed it.
No, I'm not a coder/developer as yet and it is over my head and I don't have the time to research it to devise a solution and send a patch upstream. If I could I have serious doubts it would be mainlined. I have the impression that many in the mozilla organization are for improving security and privacy but that some of them are MORE than happy to sacrifice our privacy for money or simply don't take things as seriously as others.
I found a bug report in bugzilla using google that I can no longer turn up regarding silent basic authentication for tracking: http://user:trackingcookieaspassword@example.com/possiblymor... This is proven and observable at http://ip-check.info. In this bug report someone I believe who works with them submitted a test xpi authtest.xpi to negate/nullify/disable this exploit between sites and only allow it on the same visited domain.
The bug report can no longer be found and all current versions of firefox are still susceptible.
But you also know why all the talk about advertising supported models on the web is just talk, and why it is that in the end, all of those models are fated not to work. Because in digital media, when you give people knowledge, you can’t force them to take advertising, because digital media are filterable – that’s the beauty of them.”
— Eben Moglen, Free and Open Software: Paradigm for a New Intellectual Commons, 2009-03-13
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Free_and_Open_Software:_Parad...
I'm now "ad-aware" so I know how to differentiate content from ads, but I will click on an ad if it's something that's of interest to me. I support the publisher this way and also get some value out of it. I don't like sites filled with ads but my way of "punishing" those is to avoid visiting that site.
I wonder if it can be disabled for ad networks that don't collect user data.
Right now people don't have to pay for content. Almost everything is ad based. Because of this people almost never pay for the really great premium content. Well what if there was no free, good content? Would that lead to more great content? Probably not... but maybe! What if suddenly people expected to pay a small subscription fee to a small number of sites in exchange for great content. That'd be, well, great!
How do you guys think it would play out?
[1] I think they literally make the world a worse place but that's a separate discussion.
If you have to pay to access most sites, the only websites left would be owned by the already wealthy that can cover losses till they're big enough that people are willing to pay for the content.
Not in my experience. Most offer "exposure" to writers, who go on to die of exposure. Even the sites that pay don't pay much. $20-50 isn't bad for the effort, but you only get it if they accept your pitch.
It's called the GopherSphere.
It's simple, think of all the completely-non-ad-supported sites you've used, and imagine an internet where those are the only ones around. Basically that would largely be sites hosted by the government, companies (whose profit comes from something else), educational institutions, nonprofits, and individuals.
From my experience, I've seen a lot of great content on non-ad-supported (mostly personal) sites.
Stackoverflow in its current incarnation would likely not exist, but I'd guess something similar would appear in its place. P2P systems might become more popular too. It's hard to say but I doubt such an internet would really be worse than the one we have today - it would just be different.
There is no model better than advertising. Nothing beats free. Get used to it. It's not going anywhere and such initiatives are futile.
* blumkvist maximizes back the SAS Miner window and laughs.
Search is 10 SOBucks; search using tags is 15 SOBucks; asking a question is 20 SOBucks; reading the answer is another 20 SOBucks.
Like a bittorrent for websites. This needs to exist for wikipedia.
Frankly, if that existed, we would be so much better off, and them immediately after that got implemented, ISP's would go on a rampage with bandwidth clampdowns.
Anyway, I'm not even remotely afraid of the world you posit.
And that's a huge weakness that deserves more attention: You can easily ruin your competitor's ad business that way.
Maybe this extension is a valid way to draw attention to that weakness?
This also does not corrupt the algorithms most adtech companies use by even a little bit. Weeding out the bogus clicks of people who would never, ever click on an ad anyway (because only those people would install this extension) does not in any way change the ability to project from the people who do click on ads.
And, as others pointed out, by 'clicking' on the ad instead of just blocking it, you provide information to the ad network anyway. If you really don't want to be tracked online, block third-party cookies (or clear your cookies at the end of the day), and turn off flash. (If you don't want to be tracked offline, call your congressperson, and good luck.)
I would be OK with ads that went straight to the site selling an item with no tracking other than click-thru stats but not using the IP address, not fingerprinting the browsers, etc.
It's sick that sites show one price to mobile users and another to desktop users. I've seen this by testing it myself. It's a sham. It's the seedy side of capitalism. Everyone should get the same price. Another reason to block ads, since allowing them means you're buying into the way they do business.
Nothing mean-spirited about blocking a very strong vector for malware, which we all know ad networks have become. I have a moral imperative to protect machines under my control, so we block all ads, disallow all tracking, use Disconnect, Ad Block Plus, and HTTPS Everywhere, along with other in-place tools to allow users a clean Internet experience. Let's not even mention how much bandwidth is saved by adblocking... That alone makes it worth it.
Meanwhile, unless this has something like >50% adoption, ad networks won't even notice.
Edit: When I say "people who run ads", I mean the ad networks, ad suppliers, etc.
If you've got ads on your site, you're someone that runs ads... Not that I disagree with your point.
Out of curiosity, which is cheaper?
I understand why you think this is unfair, but it just doesn't seem like that big a deal to me.
As you don't have any contact on your profile so there was no way for me to reach you. I even contacted YC admin and they confirmed you haven't left an email in your profile :( Since then I've been tracking your comments page to maybe catch you live.
So let's talk? I can answer any/all of your queries and the ones I don't know the answer to I can figure out. Think of me as no-obligation, friendly discussion to clarify all your doubts. I hope you see this message.
It's also just kind of mean. By design it only messes with the sites that you yourself think are worth visiting.
> It's the seedy side of capitalism. Everyone should get the same price
This rant against price discrimination seems like a tangent. The behavior you're describing is something e-commerce sites sometimes do. It doesn't have much to do with ads and blocking ads won't make hotels.com show everyone the same price.
I like the idea of an ad-free 'net, but it's not really up to me to dictate to site owners what they can do, which this seems to be.
--edit--
Having read the comment parallel to mine I'd like to say I agree that there are two sides to this - it may be mean spirited to use this plugin, but it's not exactly friendly to attempt to track everyone, all the time.
Ads are, to me, unsolicited. You can maybe imply that by visiting your site I'm requesting them, but that'd be twisting it. Whereas donation is more user-initiated and/or site requested.
Would you like to guess how our donations stack up to our ad revenue? We currently have to raise $200/month to break even.
...
So, why..?
It's only a matter of time before advertising revenue is no longer a feasible solution. ABP/E are household names now. I like the thought of an ad-free internet where only sites that are worth paying for or those that are doing it for the love of doing it are the ones that last.
Edit: Seriously, how is this a good idea? You disproportionately harm the sites you actually visit, and ultimately the result is A) Big ad networks shut them off .. or B) Independent ads think their ads aren't converting and pull them.
This is how you kill the sites you actually visit. They don't magically find a new business model before hosting/payroll/whatever catch up to the fact that their ad revenue has been shut off. I can't fathom what you stand to gain from getting their ads shut off instead of just hiding them for yourself with a standard ad block that is much more acceptable.
In my personal opinion, WWW was invented for free spreading of information. The company beyond ad network, or any company for that matter, shouldn't have a guaranteed right, that WWW have to provide a platform for commercially exploit it. Also, those ad network does that by tracing users and selling that information, and that is not ethical to do without visitors content. So I believe such an extension has the right to exist.
Charge people for your content and hosting, but this ad business doesn't work because of one reason: the user has control now.
Can't be as shady anymore.
Edit: I can't reply further down. However, I included in my original statement that using adblock is an acceptable measure. Why do you actually have to shut down the publishers revenue stream and ultimately their website to show off your dislike for ads? If you want to go with your street musician example, the way I see it is that you are free to not pay him money, however to punch him in the face after listening to his music (and presumably enjoying it) is completely pointless.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
> This is how you kill the sites you actually visit.
Good. Kill your darlings. Maybe they'll come back with a way of making money that doesn't involve infecting people's computers with malware.
But this could also be a fatal flaw. If a lot of people wanted to, they could destroy payperclick advertising. It would be almost impossible to know which clicks were real and which were fake. Companies would lose a lot of faith in the industry because an update to the script could play havoc with the online ad budget of this company or that on a whim. I don't know why anyone would chose the attack the online advertising industry and it wouldn't be a good idea, but it's interesting to that it's possible. Online ads is a huge market space but also one could also be severely disrupted by a greasemonkey script. They'd better be careful not cross the line with tracking and privacy invasion because this is one of the rare cases where people can take direct action to fight back.
So it seems like this might kill smaller indie sites if it became popular. Is that the goal?
With ad blockers that prevent the HTTP request, those third party sites aren't able to track you. The publisher can always track you but that won't be shared with their advertisers or networks.
Disclaimer: I work in the adtech industry.
You cant get around that fact, and the information is not some firehose they cant take or something ( also this kind of behavior is eminently detectable by the ad network, nobody clicks ALL of the ads).
All they need to track you is either access to your device (by serving you code, or saving data in it, like cookies), or ip address + http headers and timestamp (which they would definitely get if the HTTP request goes through by clicking on the ad).
The only result would be filtering out their traffic from counting towards any PPC ads and more accurate tracking of the individual users. There isn't an upside to running this extension.
When you see and click on an ad, you might be also getting tracked by DSP / retargeter / affiliate / analytics companies.
I suspect the hypothesis is wrong for two reasons. Those clicks make the network money, and a small percent of bad data across their network is noise.
I had no problem with ads up until the point I went to the official online source for a number of print comics, and had my browser forcibly minimized, with a new window spawned in the bottom right corner of my screen designed to look like a Windows alert, trying to trick me into installing malware.
At that point I installed an Adblocker, and have never looked back.
I don't mind disabling it when reminded (Hulu and the like), for certain sites, but until I can be certain that websites with positive reputations won't deliver such scurrilous ads, it stays on by default.
Also if this succeeds, many small publishers will die and large publishers will accelerate the introduction of native ads.
Also if this succeeds and most sites switch to paywalls, most poor people(billions of them) won't have access to quality content.
The short-sightedness is so strong, I doubt the general ability of the HN community to reach an educated consensus on the topic of ad supported business models.
Not a nice move, but good social/thought experiment.
I don't mean this to sound insulting but if you're not (let's say) "wise" enough to block ads, then you're exactly the target audience for 99% of the stuff out there.
This is similar to the way Nigerian scammers purposely use bad grammar to target the less sophisticated.
It's a win for the ad network because they're not wasting bandwidth pushing an ad to someone who would never consider whatever they're selling.
Ad servers get a somewhat smaller but receptive audience.
We'll look back at the 2000's and 2010's as the golden age of the web, when it was economical to publish content for free without relying upon the DRMish guarantees of the major mobile OSes. In five years the desktop web available to general-purpose browsers will be dominated by pay services (Netflix), micro-payment supported sites, NPR-like fund drives (Wikipedia, Internet Archive), academics who don't need to raise revenue, and sites with super-low cost structures due to their reliance on user-generated content (Reddit).
Is it really a privacy issue to track what ads you click and use that information to target advertisements to you later?
I never understand the outrage against targeted ads. You are going to get ads no matter what. That is how "free" content works. Would you rather the ads be catered to your interest and show things you that you might actually like an not know about, or would you rather have the ads be random things that you may have no interest in at all. Either way, you are getting ads. The ad companies are using this information to rob your house when you are away on vacation, or to reveal your embarassing secrets on social media, they are using this information to target ads to you and show you things that might actually interest you.
Why the anger over this?
ii) I am[1] a person with alcoholism / gambling addict / person with anorexia / etc. This informs my search habits. Showing alcohol ads is immoral anyway, but showing those ads to a person with alcoholism is sub-optimal for many reasons.
iii) I like gory movies. My 5 year old son enjoys watching some YouTube clips. There's no mechanism to prevent fucking YouTube from showing me ads for gruesome videos even when the clip I'm watching is some child's show.
iv) I am ad-tolerant. But ads just fucking suck and targeted ads suck about the same as random ads. They don't push what I'm interested in, they push what the ad-buyer wants me to be interested in. When I search for "metal detector" I'm not shown ads telling me how to chose a metal detector or why detectors differ. I'm shown ads from metal detector sellers who are peddling some kit of unknown quality at me.
[1] I'm not, but imagine a person that is.
For i, a single data point is not creating all of your targetted ads. And so what if it is, it is still closer to what you might be interested in than completely random ads.
iii. Is your own problem for sharing devices and accounts with a 5 year old when you use it for "adult" things.
iv. Sure, ads suck, but that metal detector ad is at least close to something you might be interested in. What if you searched for metal detector and got ads for high heeled shoes and candy bars?? How is the metal detector ad not better?
You have made some good arguments though, and I think ii. really makes the most sense. I wouldn't be surprised if that very thing is happening.
This is projection; "interest" is not the only criteria add are judged by. For instance, I immediately killfile anything animated on a page; something moving next to what I am trying to read often makes the reading impossible. Even though "interesting" ads may be somewhat popular preference, when humans are involved the variance is going to be large.
> Is your own problem for sharing devices and accounts with a 5 year old when you use it for "adult" things.
You are assuming more than one device even exists. Regardless, in the real world there idea that there is any kind of clean separation between devices and accounts is patently false.
The basic idea that it is even possible to predict interest from record of which ads were clicked on or what queries are searched for is very presumptuous, but it the larger problem is "data mining", especially in the long term as the data accumulates. I recommend this[1] very interesting article published couple years ago, about some of the data mining that Target has been doing for at least a decade.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h...
I found it hard to reply to this and I think its because you framed the question in a strange way. Targeted advertisement is not only based on what ads you click, but also the sites you visit and the stuff you view on them. If targeted advertising only worked based on what you'd click I wouldn't have a problem with it since I never click ads and it would be that easy to opt-out of it.
Targeted advertising itself is a whole other thing. In order for it to work, they need to gather data about you and this doesn't always happen in obvious ways (e.g. clicking on an ad) and that means you can't always opt-out of it, which makes it a breach of privacy in my book.
They don't present a choice. Most non-tech people don't have a clue they're being recorded. Especially not that they're being recorded in great detail across multiple sites so that advertisers and marketers (many of whom have exceedingly questionable ethics anyway) can target them better.
It may be semi-public, but its also done secretively and without permission. If someone followed you out of your house and took a note of every shop window you looked at, every book you picked up, everything you did, would you be happy?
There is some expectation of privacy even in public spaces. The balance has not yet been struck properly with the net yet. For now the technology is just making it easier to violate.
Ad networks track quite a bit more information than just what ads you click.
So no, targeted ads are no different to random ones - spin, misinformation, occasionally outright lies.
The problem is that out of these three choices:
* highly intermediated advertising ("adtech")
* user privacy
* fraud control
...we can only have two.
Nobody in the industry will even take notice that this exists. If they do accidentally come across it, far from being scared or "taking notice," it would at best circulate around a few internal email lists to give everyone a good laugh.
In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if this was actually developed by an ad network as a joke--they know that ad-block users aren't going to be making them any money anyway, so why not put them to use as what would essentially amount to a free bot network of very natural-looking traffic to send to their advertisers? Sure, it might lower conversion rates by a fraction of a fraction of a percent, but any amount of natural-looking traffic coming through to advertisers that isn't obvious bot traffic only increases the perceived quality of the ad network. It's much easier to shuffle the blame for poor conversion rates off to the advertiser themselves than it is to explain away low traffic volume or bot clicks.
Bot traffic is usually pretty easy to identify--very low quality traffic all coming from the same block of IPs, geographical region, or publisher. The quality is basically a measure of conversion rate for that subset of traffic compared against the average conversion rate across the entire network. In the (unlikely) event that something like this product catches on and sees a high enough adoption rate to actually affect the numbers across entire ad networks, it would lower traffic quality equally across the board, thus making it essentially undetectable. It's when that starts to happen that advertisers and publishers start to get desperate and we start seeing them play new and shadier games. You might be happy and safe behind your ad-clicking blocker, but grandma and gramps who don't have the technical know-how to protect themselves will start to see new fake download button ads, pop-unders, auto-playing video ads, and other gross tactics being used to try to compensate.
My time in the industry has pretty heavily biased me against online advertising quite a bit (I run ad blockers, no-referrer, strict whitelist-only cookie policies, etc), but I can definitely say that running this extension is pretty antithetical to its stated intention.
At least in the mid-term, Google can keep charging the same rate for the clicks and still take their cut. If anything, this is making the networks more money.
In the long term, this devalues a click. The very moment things turn, the publisher will bear the full shortfall.
I get that some people don't like bad advertising. Point that out directly to a publisher. Shame them publicly if they do nothing about it... But undermining the incoming stream for every little publisher out there is irresponsible.
Charge directly. The users have control now, better make with the changes or face loss of business.
In the long term, this devalues a click. The
very moment things turn...
Let's say I run a billing service and I've placed ads on searches for "billing service". I find that it costs me $X of advertising per incoming visitor, Y% of these convert into customers, and a new customer is worth $Z to me. I'm willing to bid up to $X x Y% on ads. Now lets say a lots of people switch from blocking ads to giving them fake clicks and now half the clicks on my ads are from this extension. Y% drops by half, because half the visitors from this source are now just browser-extension bots, so I'm only willing to bid half as much. But so is everyone else, which means my new 1/2 x $X x Y% bid is still competitive, and there's twice as much traffic to bid for, so it all comes out the same.
Ad networks take click-fraud very seriously because it's important to their reputation, but the market is actually pretty robust to it.
(Plus this browser extension sounds like it would be really easy for the ad networks to filter out.)
I would really like to use this project, though, on websites with paywalled articles, not on others, but I would never bother creating or maintaining a black/white list. So I might just go ahead and install it.. :P
I know all the other websites are suffering because of this, but as a user, I don't really care, unless I get more problems than benefits.
I prefer being shown useles add that don't interest me, than being shown ads for the thing I just bought or googled as it is today. Most as networks and advertisers probably find that completely bonkers "but you get consumer information that is relevant to you!"
Get off my lawn
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adblock_Plus#Controversy_over_a...
" [...] to obfuscate browsing data and protect users from surveillance and tracking by advertising networks."
So while it may be a negative side effect the point of the extension is not disrupting online advertisement, but disrupting online tracking. Even though you will be effectively doing both.
The only thing this deprives them of is your ad preferences. But given how few ads most people click on, this information is sparse regardless.
Don't know why they assume extension should click all links, clicking random ads would be much better strategy if you ask me, this would be less likely to be detected as it mirrors actual users behavior.
Maybe the days of site/advertiser direct partnership will come back (see strobist/ midwest photo exchange or xlr8yourmac.com and otherworld computing.)
I have installed ad-blocker; but the level is self-righteousness is the only nauseam thing here.
I'm pondering about creating a script that blocks users that use this one; if you weren't expecting a fight back you are delusional.
If you don't like sites with annoying adds why send them revenue from click throughs? There are also a lot of hard working companies out there that would rather not pay $0.25 every time some ass hole with a browser extension visits a page.
edit:toned down.
http://www.google.com/ads/adtrafficquality/invalid-click-pro...
if you don't want to see ads, use adblock and be done with it. why do you now have to be a child and "one-up" the ad agencies by sending fake clicks to the them?
you do know that legitimate businesses and people advertise on these networks and the only thing you're going to be doing is draining their accounts. if you _think_ you're hurting the ad networks themselves by use this extension, you are living in a fantasy world. i'm sure the ad networks are laughing their way to the bank with an extension like this.
Definitely not. If this were to catch on, the whole ad ecosystem would feel the impact. Ad networks have advertiser relationships to look after. If the numbers looks fishy, they are held to answer by clients and usually instructed to stop running ads on sites where the suspicious activity originated.