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Comment by endymi0n | Hacker News Reader

Here's what's going to happen. Just a little while longer: nothing. As soon as one big party will try to make a significant impact on the ads market (more than 20% at once), a big shift will happen, uniting Publishers all around and shutting adblocking visitors out completely in a coordinated manner. Just like Microsoft's opt-out only DNT-Field, the tide will quickly turn against Apple, as soon as you can't read 50% of all web pages anymore because ads are blocked by default (or a majority). Same thing with this Filter startup that wants to block ads on a mobile provider level (forgot the name). As soon as people realize that all the stuff on the internet isn't "free", but ad financed, they will finally have to make the real choice themselves by opting in or paying.

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I think it's more likely that ad networks will come up with a way for publishers to start serving the ads from their own domains and with randomized filenames etc. You can't block ads if you can't differentiate them from the content in an automated way.

You give them way too much credit. The simplest ad blocker is just a user stylesheet that hides "class='ad'". The complex ad blockers include variants of that as well as network-blocking bad domains, but publishers+advertisers are really really dumb in aggregate.

I get the impression that today's CTR-driven advertisers would prefer not to show ads to folks who are actively trying to block them, because they would almost never have generated useful clicks anyway. Kind of like how online scammers purposely don't even try to sound legit, so that their leads are better qualified when the gullible do eventually respond.

Effort invested in technical solutions to work around ad blockers might just lower CTRs and be worse for everyone involved.

(edit: I don't mean to insinuate that online advertising is anything like a scam; just that there are parallels in terms of targeting the correct audience so that the effort is effective.)

I know this probably sounds counter-intuitive but the company that provided the report mentioned twice in the article also have a blog post about how adblock users click more ads than non-adblocking users[1]. There's not much detail in the article to back up their claim but it's an interesting idea to play around with.

[1] http://blog.pagefair.com/2015/adblock-users-click-more-ads/

That is definitely interesting. I wonder if it's because they're more likely to be contextually interested in ads on a site that they would go to the effort of whitelisting, but that wouldn't actually be the case overall if they were seeing every site's ads?

I think it's because people who use adblockers aren't used to tuning out ads.

They're not "dumb", it's just not worth the effort for them to obfuscate their ads yet. That will change.

Postulate: there's no automated ad-injection platform that also can't be hidden or blocked by automation.

Google could transcode ads directly into YouTube videos, but they don't. They preroll or popover and both can be blocked. If YouTube did transcode pre-roll ads, we'd have an auto-skipper. If YouTube transcoded hard popovers on videos, well, that would probably upset more video authors than consumers.

Easy - they just get more pernicious. For an example, try this product placement in I, Robot, back in 2004:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HpIZrOH4zc

Even though it's set in the future they manage to sell them as being retro cool. It's almost impressive.

I take the pessimistic viewpoint that ads are going to seep in no matter what. The harder you make it, they more they'll mask themselves. Personally, I'd prefer banner ads.

product placement != invasive advertising. advertorials blur the line a bit, but it's not the same as plastering animated "they hate this ohio school teacher for knowing the secret of eternal youth!" ads all over my news. (free bonus: every 2,000th ad includes a free flash-delivered root kit!)

plus, with a transparent AR setup with proper overlay ability, you can in-reality block photons bounced off or emanated from advertising units (billboards, bumper stickers, old spice commercials, etc) from even hitting your retinas.

Again, IMO, but product placement is worse. I know invasive advertising is advertising. Mentally speaking it's quite easy to disregard. Product placement slowly blurs the lines to the point where you don't know if someone is honestly advocating for a great product or if they're being paid to do so.

If you are watching something produced by a production company (anything on TV or any movie) every brand you see is paid placement.

It's like how before a movie comes out, all the actors in the movie go on all the talk shows. Think it just happens by magic coincidence? It's contractually part of their job to appear and promote the properties they appear in so it drives up demand for their productions (movies/books/tv shows/congresscritters).

>If YouTube did transcode pre-roll ads, we'd have an auto-skipper.

Don't respond to user seek commands until the add is done playing - at that point best they can do is block output and wait - which ends up a similar experience to just watching the ad for classic 2-10 min video youtube browsing or songs - for longer content buffering could work.

For me personally the change between "30s pre-feature ad" to "30s pre-feature darkness/silence" is more important than the change from there to "start playing straight away". I don't mind waiting, but I don't want things fighting over my attention.

Yeah, but is it really worth it for the server to keep track of when the ad should be done playing and refuse to deliver the rest of the stream until then? Because trying to do that in Javascript is a losing game.

That would be really really hard to pull off for most publishers.

As a simple example: it breaks ad networks, which rely on you having a cookie that is shared across many domains to figure out what ads to show you. That doesn't really work if that 3rd party script is blockd.

Then it becomes like any other industry where there are ads and they target the demographic instead of the person. It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to figure out that someone visiting a parenting site's probably gonna be interested in things like childrens clothes.

That would rally hurt small publishers. For example, American Express is more or less willing to buy ads that appear pretty much anywhere so long as the the viewers have a certain income level. Absent an ad network, would ever publisher have to work with AmEx individually to try to convince them they have an appropriate audience?

The industry's dirty little secret is that for all the hand wringing about tracking and targeting, the tech is still really in its infancy and doesn't work very well.

Network ads already don't pay very much (IMHO) and removing the ability to build profiles on demographics would make them worth much less.

You're right that it's not a dealbreaker -- my startup would be OK since we ads direct to clients -- but mostly people aren't in a position to do that. It takes a team of ad sales and support staff, and a very particular kind of niche content.

It just means the publisher has to proxy delivery of the ad for the ad network. This will not be hard. It's effectively what happens inside apps anyway - the ad network gives you an SDK with an API and you integrate it in to your web site.

No, that won't do it. The ad network won't know who you are because it can only see what you've done on that site. With no way to carry an identifier between different domains, the value of the ad network is destroyed and ad techniques like retargeting (when you put something in your cart on one site and see a coupon for it on another) are impossible.

> The ad network won't know who you are

You (and the ad networks) seem to be under the mistaken impression that you have some sort of a right to that information. You don't, and acting like a stalker should be treated as such.

As another poster said, you target your ads to the content it is being published next to. Seriously, can you not see the damage you're doing by pushing "surveillance as a business" model? If your hopefully-profitable idea relies on a key aspect basically every single dystopian story ever told (fiction and non-fiction), maybe that's a sign you should find another way?

The alternative, if you want to keep pushing stupid gimmicks like that "coupon" thing, it will just push more and more people into treating the advertising industry (and later, internet commerce in general) as the enemy.

>> No, that won't do it. The ad network won't know who you are because it can only see what you've done on that site. With no way to carry an identifier between different domains, the value of the ad network is destroyed and ad techniques like retargeting (when you put something in your cart on one site and see a coupon for it on another) are impossible.

That sounds awesome.

The ad could just be targeted to the content it's next to. If I'm reading about surfing, try and sell me a surfboard.

OK so the Safari 'No Ads' button effectively becomes a 'Do Not Track' button. Users still see ads, just not targeted at them specifically.

This is a very effective response by publishers because many users who would have enabled 'No Ads' simply will not bother to enable 'Do Not Track'

> because it can only see what you've done on that site

I'm not sure what the problem is - all they need is to ask the publisher to set the cookie for them. Then it's a first party cookie that is relayed on the back end to the ad network, who gets all the same information from it that they used to get.

I go to Site A and get a cookie. Now I got to Site B and since it's on a new domain I have no cookies set and am basically a brand new visitor, so I get another cookie. Even if both those cookies are being relayed to some backend, how can it ever tell that I'm the same person on Site A as Site B?

Then they'll have to start implementing workarounds. The EFF made an interesting tool [1] a few years ago to show how easily you can be tracked from your browser configuration and installed plugins/fonts/etc. There might be more advanced tricks nowadays.

[1] https://panopticlick.eff.org/

Mobile is exactly where you don't want to rely on this kind of fingerprinting. Especially on iOS, it's a platform with only one rendering engine and no plugins.

Here's what it managed to get from my iPhone 6[1]. This would be the same 'fingerprint' as virtually every iPhone 6 user in the UK.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/IkccCei.jpg

The ad network is able to serve content natively through the domain of both A and B. That means they can send back a beacon pixel to Site B from Site A's domain, which will let them link the two ids. They only need to do it one time to link up the ids for a pair of domains.

Said beacon pixel is what will be blocked by blocking the network domain.

cookies are domain specific. If you could get and set cookies from any domain you wanted you would basically be God.

I wish they did that today: no more 3rd party requests that will track you!

Could you create checksums/signatures of ad videos/banners then add the signatures to the distributed block-list?

I guess the next step would be to automatically add noise/tiny amendments to the content to get around the checksum...but then you could use object/character recognition to identify content and block the ads based on that.

You're looking for perceptual hashing: http://www.phash.org

At this point the CPU resources consumed hashing every image from a website will probably outweigh the cost of just displaying the ads (since they are downloaded anyways).

Would hashing every image be much more resource intensive than rendering the images? Images would only need to be hashed once whereas images need to be rendered in various states at ~60Hz when a user scrolls through a website.

Network-level blocking gets you a long way: https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/60774597464404377...

Publishers have been brainwashed that everything must have: an ad, a tracking widget, and a user survey. Oh, and each page gets ten of those elements and each element comes from 3 to 5 unique externally hosted providers.

Have you tried browsing popular sites on an iPad? Every 3rd site has an ad unit that ejects you to the App Store to download a freemium game. It's insane. Block those advertisers and never look back. (Yes, Apple shouldn't easily allow eject-to-app-store from a Safari tab, but they also want users to be able to click-to-go-to-appstore on demand. It's a hacky abuse of javascript by ad networks to simulate false user intent.)

Since all of those elements are "as a service" you just block the invading services and all is well again.

> Oh, and each page gets ten of those elements and each element comes from 3 to 5 unique externally hosted providers.

This is the primary problem in my opinion. Having ads present doesn't seem terrible to me (and like other people have said, having promotional content clearly demarcated is a bonus). Having ads become an obstacle to the main content sucks, and third-party script injection that makes at least a handful of additional third-party http calls is an obstacle.

"Brainwashed"?

Imagine you're a small publisher. You want to spend most of your time creating awesome content and you don't want to put up a paywall. So do you try to hire an ad sales person to sell direct placements on your site? Or do you use some sort of network, which necessarily requires some level of aggregate tracking and profiling to deliver ads that are at all relevant.

Just because it's easy doesn't make it right.

I don't follow what part of that is wrong. What do you think publishers should do instead?

I'm a small publisher who wants to spend all her time creating awesome content. I hate paywalls. I hate ads. Thankfully, I'm making enough money off of Patreon that I've long since reached my first goal of "no more ads on my current comic". Everyone who wants to see it can see it for free, thanks to the generosity of a small part of my audience.

> the tide will quickly turn against Apple

I would think that the people savvy enough to install 3rd party ad blocking extensions are smart enough to know that the issue is their extension. Not Apple. But who knows.

And yet, I constantly see people filing bugs that occur because they installed the "cloud to butt" extension and then forgot about it.

I used to forget about it and then I'd get a few chuckles.

Of course I'd never go and raise a bug for such behaviour, as I instantly remembered what it was whenever it struck.

Haha there is no way this would come to fruition. Users, on average, abandon websites within 10 seconds or less. 10 SECONDS! If someone blocked out the page because of an ad blocker the user will go to it, not see the content they wanted, and leave less likely to return.

Yup. The publisher won't want those users on their site anyway if they can't be monitized.

I was confused because your comment seemed to support and not support my statement. But I disagree with your statement of:

> The publisher won't want those users on their site anyway if they can't be monitized.

Remember if those users with ad block find it a bad experience and never come back, this means less times they click on links to that site which means less referrals to use as ranking in search engines. If it's a large enough group (hell even a small group in a highly competitive area) can make a difference causing the site to lose readers due to search rankings.

Can you reliably check that ads are blocked?

I don't know what counts as reliable, it works most of the time.

You can check for cosmetic filtering (CSS reapplied to your ad-divs) by checking their width or something like that. You can check for blocked domains by getting this information channeled back somehow.

There are only so much relevant filter lists (maybe 15?) out there. They are freely accessible & parsable, so generating an URL on the fly which should be blocked on your domain in one of those filterlists shouldn't be too hard.

Sure, with the existing methods. But since Apple is in control of the browser, couldn't they come up with something undetectable?

Hmm. I can't imagine how. Maybe if the Browser would simulate a pageview without adblock but somehow manages to hide the ad page elements. I'm sure that might break pages and (since resources can't be blocked) might reduce the use of adblockers drastically.

Sounds pretty good to me, looking forward to that day.

There are some problems with this theory though. (a) On average iOS users have more disposable income than Android users, (b) iOS users have shown a proclivity for spending that money on mobile content and (c) iOS are responsible for more web traffic than Android.

So if publishers adopt a freemium model (the most common) and they present a crappy experience to users who block ads then they won't be willing to buy a subscription. That's why most websites today don't punish users who block ads and that position will likely continue on mobile as well.

Your third point is completely false.

According to Opera Mediaworks, as of Q1 2015, Android makes up 65% of mobile traffic, 3x more than iOS with 22%, as well as beating iOS out of the top spot for ad revenue. You can read this report here: http://operamediaworks.com/sites/default/files/file_attachme... (page 2)

Not completely false. From that document the revenue for iOS/Android is nearly identical across all media types and for video/rich media (the most lucrative revenue wise) is much higher for iOS. It just reaffirms my argument that iOS users are too much of a valuable and lucrative audience to treat poorly.

And I am sure those numbers are worldwide when really US revenue is the most relevant for US publishers (which are the bulk of major news sites). In which case Apple dominates:

http://www.cnet.com/news/apple-outshines-android-in-us-mobil...

True. But don't underestimate the efforts of a multiple billion dollars content industry with their back against the wall (a lot of them ads only without any freemium option). Robbed of any monetization strategy for a whole segment (unlike the ads vs. paywall wars between publishers), I see much more collaboration coming against a too invasive force with their own objectives.

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