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.)
[1] http://blog.pagefair.com/2015/adblock-users-click-more-ads/
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
That sounds awesome.
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'
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.
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.
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.