Ad Blocks’ Doomsday Scenarios

Every once and a while I try using a browser without adblocking installed for a while, just to see how it goes. It's always gotten worse. Ads simply keep getting more obnoxious and, in some cases, downright scary. If I'm setting up a computer for either my less-than-tech-savvy parents or for a child, ad blocking software is installed for sure. I view ad blocking software as necessary for their protection.

Adblocking is here to stay. It's not going away. More and more users are going to use it. The scumbags who create obnoxious, invasive ads aren't going to suddenly start playing nice so everyone can take a deep breath and uninstall their blocking software.

If you run a website supported by ads, don't bother trying to convince users to stop using adblocking software. Given what's out there this is an unreasonable request. What you can do is make sure the ads on your site are tasteful, subtle, and respectful of the user's privacy. Then politely educate users on how to whitelist your site. e.g. In Adblock plus, it's as simple as selecting "Disable on www.yourpage.here". Be prepared to be blocked forever the first time a bad ad slips through your review process. The days of letting advertising companies inject whatever ads and malicious code they want into your website are pretty much over.

I wonder - if advertising wasn't so damned creepy - I look at ONE PAIR of boots on Zappos and they show up in advertisements incessantly - if people might not be so fast to try to escape the eerie feeling?

Mix super-creepy-stop-watching-me advertising with a tech-savvy group that understands how cookies can be completely un-deletable, and it's no wonder ad-blocking is growing exponentially. I'm relatively amenable to looking at ads in exchange for content, but once ads start acting like or worse than spyware, the information exchange no longer feels so balanced.

Stop being creepy, and people won't reject you!

Maybe.

The ad industry has no one to blame but themselves for entering an aggressive tragedy-of-the-commons scenario. I installed an ad blocker after seeing one too many websites with auto-playing audio ads. Of course, this blocker then went on to block everything. All it takes is one bad apple to spoil the bunch, but I'm not going to shed any tears for an industry that has so utterly failed to police its own.

Enabling click-to-play for Flash eliminates - in my experience - more than 99% of the truly obnoxious ads. For example, I literally can't think of a time that I've come across an ad that auto-plays audio when I've had click-to-play enabled. I'm sure it's happened in my web browsing history, but I can't recall a time.

I can't help but feel that if people truly believed it when they said, "I'm okay with seeing ads - just not the obnoxious ones," then they would enable click-to-play rather than installing an ad blocker.

As it stands, though, the most-upvoted arguments in favor of wholesale ad blocking are - and will forever be - presented as the trump cards: "Think of the children," and "I'm totally fine with ads - but the bad actors ruined it for me!"

Ad blocking isn't piracy - I want to make it very clear that I believe that. That said, I find the arguments in favor of ad blocking to often be similar in flavor to the arguments in favor of piracy: "I'd pay for content, if only they'd charge a reasonable amount for it." Since "reasonable" is subjective, there's no response that can be made.

(There are other arguments in favor of ad blocking, such as the aforementioned Zappos Boots Creepiness.)

This is great news. With the fall of advertising publishers will have to find new ways of paying for content production and selling produced content - there are a few options in this area - subscriptions are one, micropayments are another, crowdsourcing payment upfront like kickstarter/indiegogo is another - and all of those have a complex ecosystem of models to try.

The reliance on advertising revenue has resulted in a race to the bottom in many areas - it is no longer about the content but about the views to that content (see: the influx of # ways to <something> <something>)

If this report is accurate consumers don't want advertisements which is probably an uncontroversial statement to make - it may take a while for consumers to get used to paying for content but I think as more effort is spent in the space and the friction barrier lessened I would hope to see more sites adopting a paid format (for those who require adverts to operate - there are plenty of sites out there which don't require ad money which are doing just fine - or are run with no expectation of profit).

Hulu used to be able to circumvent ad-blockers (not sure if they still do) by making their ad content indistinguishable from normal content.

For example, a normal TV show segment would be served from:

http://hulu.com/v/1tgmeiwe

And a commercial would be served from:

http://hulu.com/v/m3fsn3i6

I'm guessing some reverse-proxy stuff was going on behind the scenes, but it was really effective at forcing people to watch ads. Of course, the downside to this method is that you need to implement something on your backend and pay for the bandwidth. But it's there as a nuclear option if needed.

EDIT: I'm guessing that the next wave of ad-configuration is going to ask content owners to proxy their content through the ad network, so that ad networks act like a CDN and inject ads as a wrapper around content.

I appreciate on the one hand, that sites need to make money, and ads are a way to make money. And For some sites, it is really the right business model for them.

On the other hand, I truly, truly hate ads. There is probably nothing that I hate more than ads. I admit, it's unreasonable. And the reason why is simple: 99 times out of 100, it's either dumb, annoying, or entirely irrelevant to me. Usually all 3.

But therin is an issue: companies like verizon, esurance, geico and what have you are the ones with the budgets, and they don't want you to forget about them. They can afford to advertise on many sites and its not much risk for them; they'll still make a profit this year. But the ones that are interesting and worthwhile are more likely to be the ones that can't risk much in advertising.

And that's what it is, at least for me. Show me ads that I'll actually care about, that are respectful, and possibly entertaining, and I'll happily turn off adblock. Duh. But really it just takes one bad ad to ruin it for me, and few sites seem willing to hardline against advertisers.

The ad blocking problem is extremely easy to solve. Start hosting the ads on the main domain. Then you cannot block ads without risking to also block other images and scripts essential to the website. But guess what! If they did that they would loose the ability to track and trace you around the web.

In this case I have no sympathy for the industry. They can have either one, the ability to track or they can self-host ads which would make them harder to block. But they are greedy and want both which does not work.

Neat article.

ABP's ad whitelist isn't necessarily strict blackmail; Users can effectively choose to offload the work of ad/provider curation to a third party and the advertiser faces the direct cost rather than the end user they are trying to reach.

However, whether or not they have been honest, consistent and fair in how they curate ads/providers or not determines whether or not ABP's implementation is worth defending.

I tried to read the article referenced in this article, but was hit by a strict paywall.

There is this one other thing though... ad-blocking on smartphones is not as easy as ad-blocking on browsers on desktops/laptops. A lot of the big great tech companies (Facebook being the best example) are betting huge on smartphone... and it seems like they'll make bank there, because again, ad-blocking on smartphones is not that easy.

Any thoughts on what we can do to make ad-blocking easier on smartphones? Say, on the iPhone?

The conclusion of the article is questionable, it seems more likely that ad blocking is about to become ineffective. Everything is moving to mobile, where Google/Apple have much more control of the platform and make it difficult or impossible to install ad blockers, particularly those that block ads in apps.

Second even where solutions to app ads exist (AdAway on Android) they are ineffective on in-stream advertising, which seems to be coming to dominate. There doesn't seem to be a way to block Twitter's promoted tweets in the Twitter app for example.

>But ABP’s engineers found a way to spot and remove any mention like “Sponsored Content” or “Sponsored by”, which creates pernicious side-effects as the user won’t be able to distinguish between commercial and legitimate editorial contents.

lmao, fucking seriously? 'native advertising' exists to trick users into thinking that an advertisement is native content, it's the most misleading and treacherous tactic devised yet by advertisers. fuck this asshole for pretending there's a distinction between overt and covert marketing

Doomsday Scenario? Okay, let's get serious. What would a "doomsday" created by adblock actually look like?

All the ad-supported content mills will disappear overnight. Most ad-supported "social" services will probably also shut down, and the remainder will have to adopt a paid subscription model. Even Google will have to pivot very hard, whereas Apple and Microsoft will be mostly okay. Facebook and Twitter are probably fucked. The NSA will panic at first, but they'll find plenty of other ways to tap into people's lives soon enough.

Meanwhile, individual bloggers who just write for the sake of it will be largely unaffected, and will probably continue to produce quality content because they were never in it for the money anyway. Since they don't have to compete with content mills, they might get even more readers.

Centralized social networking services will be replaced with distributed nodes run by volunteers around the world. Many people will spend their own time and money to contribute, while others might run an exclusive club for paying customers. Who knows, maybe this will lead to an explosive growth of micropayment services as well.

Does that sound like the good ol' 90s? Yes! Let's go back to the 90s and try again without advertising. Only this time, we have the technology to make distributed networks actually work. Moreover, the cost of an online presence has become so low compared to 20 years ago that most people in the developed world can afford to stream live video from their home using a fraction of their own disposable income, and well-organized charities will easily be able to bring the same benefits to those who have been less fortunate.

"Sites need to make money" is a big lie, perpetuated by the advertising industry. 99.99% of websites in this world don't need to make money. Personal blogs don't need to make money because the desire for self-expression is a fundamental human instinct and people who want to say things to the world will gladly pay their own money to post things online. E-commerce websites don't need to make money via advertising because their purpose is to sell actual goods and services. Most corporate websites, likewise, don't need to make money because they make real money elsewhere and the website is just a customer service portal. Content mills don't need to make money, objectively speaking, because they don't even have any right to exist.

Now that I've said it, I kinda want to see it happen. It will be the biggest disruption in the history of the Internet, but the Internet tends to treat disruptions as opportunities for progress.

Ad blockers exist because of obnoxious ads. Pushing obnoxious advertisements onto users is a selfish and anti-social tactic. If your business relies on them as a major source of revenue, you should consider a business model that produces capital on its own merits rather than using your intended audience (and their incidental interests) as a more realistic long-term strategy. Ad blockers will only continue to grow in use.

I unapologetically use an adblocker and have for as long as I can remember. The critics say, "well then you can say goodbye to all the great content on the internet. Hosting costs money. You have to pay for it somehow."

I disagree. I don't see why corporations feel they have a right to exist online and to profit from it.

If you want to put something on the internet, cool. Maybe I'll look at parts of it. I don't owe you anything for it, though. I pay to host my content online because I like to share things for other people to see. Some of my friends do the same. Lots of people on this website do the same.

If you find that people consume the content you share in ways that don't fit your liking, you should feel free to stop putting content out there. But I don't owe you anything as a reader, no matter if you're just an individual or if you're News Corp.

Who has made the bulk of content on the internet? PEOPLE. That is why the internet is so amazing, the people have the ability to share anything easily. No medium has ever had that ease of publication. It will continue to shape the foundation of society, in small ways at first, but in bigger ways as we go forward.

Unfortunately in our current model, we haven't matured to the point where we can decentralize things enough. We need websites (and their implied business models) like reddit, facebook, twitter, google, and so on to achieve all the great things that the internet and computers can do. You want to translate some text? You better be willing to send that data to someone else. You want to talk about news articles? You better be willing to send that comment to some central server. You want to share a video? Unless you have the wherewithal to set up a server on your personal line, you better be willing to send that to YouTube.

I'm very confident that this can and will be fixed with time.

The main problem is that ads are mainly hosted by tracking sites. If I look at a micro controller on a online shop, I see it over and over again while surfing on completely different websites. These advertising provider do not only display some images or text which is including a link, they're also tracking and create a profile from me. And this is the main scary part of it: We don't have privacy anymore.

Additionally it's nearly impossible to browse. People come to me and tell me their "computer is too slow, I think I catched a virus!". If you install an ad blocker, the computer works pretty well again. The next thing is that it's impossible to read a text when fancy animations are displays everywhere on the page.

If advertising services violence agains privacy, make older computer und websites unusable, then don't be surprised that people do something against it. The same counts for the websites who are hosting the ads.

Publishers have no one to blame but themselves. If they actually vetted the ads that ran on their sites, and didn't act irresponsibly and allow malicious code to run with the excuse that "a third party advertiser did it," then we could start having a conversation about advertising. If they didn't allow a million trackers to run scripts on their sites, then we could have a conversation about advertising. Publishers shot themselves in the foot here by taking any dollar they could get, damn the consequences.

If you genuinely get into an arms race between adblockers and ad publishers, all of the incentives are set up for the publishers to win. Right now they're not even really fighting, because that would mean acknowledging it as a problem. But if everyone's business model is riding on it, there's no reason why we couldn't go to the Bad Old Days of intricately tiled pre-rendered images, or client-side-rendered obfuscated layouts the adblockers can't reliably parse.

I am reminded of the panic over DVRs and fast-forwarding past ads.

>First, AdBlock Plus (ABP), the most popular ad blocking software, has its roots in Cologne. Second, a cultural factor: German opposition to online advertising that manifests itself in the government’s obsessive anti-Google stance pushed by large media conglomerates such as Axel Springer SE.

Those are pretty long shots. I would rather say that the historical effect of Webwashers popularity is more powerful than any of the both reasons above.

Couple of years ago I created a workaround for defeating adblockers. I know the algorithm & methodology still works for all adblockers.

I pitched the solution to many media companies including Google. Google was not interested at all. They dismissed it due to high chance of losing users and chrome adopters.

I abandoned the project and I don't regret it.

(note: I will not share or open source it. I use adblockers as well and I don't want to mess with my internet zen)

> several major mobile operators intend to deploy ad blockers on their network to put pressure on large mobile ad providers such as Google, Yahoo!, or AOL. They want to protest against what they see as excessive use of their bandwidth by those internet giants

This part seem kind of troubling.

Shameless plug for my site. My buddy and I have started pennypledge.co as a hopeful solution to this problem. It may not solve the ad problem for everyone. But we think that it can solve it for most.

I would like to read a version of this article not written by someone in marketing...

> The reasons for the epidemic are unclear...

Sure, sure they are. Nobody's really sure why users don't love the advertising networks embedded in everything, making greater and greater incursions into privacy and carrying a greater threat of malware than email. Not sure at all.

> German opposition to online advertising that manifests itself in the government’s obsessive anti-Google stance...

Snowden who?

> Technically, Eyeo GmbH, the company that dominates the trade has “improved” in every dimensions.

"I put improved in quotes because I'm trying to write a 'fair and balanced' article about a product that threatens my livelihood."

> In January the company announced a new feature that allows large scale deployment of Adblock Plus (ABP) in corporate networks.

Good, that will be a big help to corporate IT. They'll have a lot less, "um, my computer says it's infected" calls.

> According to Shine’s chief marketing officer Roi Carthy, the proliferation of invasive formats displayed on mobile — popups, auto-play videos — accounts for 10% to 50% of a carrier’s network capacity.

"...reasons [for ad blocking's spread] are unclear..."

> ...the ad community is quick to forget that it dug its own grave by flooding the web with intolerable amounts of promotional formats.

...and by not policing its own networks, which moved the debate over ad-blocking from convenience to security, which was huge.

> ...branded contents are seen by publishers as a credible alternative to invasive formats that disfigure web sites.

In their latest giant act of contempt for their readers, publishers have entirely abandoned ethics and are now quietly mixing commercial content in with actual content and then wondering why anybody doesn't love that.

> In Scandinavia, Schibsted is hard at work on an initiative to raise user awareness by getting many sites to close down access to browsers carrying and ad block extension.

lol. Good luck with that. I think the best-case scenario there is that the internet becomes less of a time sink.

> ...opt-in, i.e. register with a valid email address. Yes, you will get ads, but on a selective basis...

"Trust us, we'll be as selective with our advertising as we've been for the last 10 years."

> Branded Content that I see as another form of editorial

"My opinions and reputation are for sale, I don't see a problem with that."

Good grief.

I've been dumbfounded that online advertising has continued for so long, seemingly unaffected by the continuing rise of ad-blocking. Ad-blocking's ubiquity has been making the rounds in the news every year or so for at least a few years now, but the online advertising market has only gotten more obnoxious in response.

I'm intensely curious what will happen once things do come to a head. Publishers and ad networks keep promising that the web can't survive without advertising; users keep promising they aren't going to tolerate the tactics that advertising networks and publishers have been using for years.