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Comment by 31reasons | Hacker News Reader

I never click on Ads so from advertisers point of view I am using AdBlock. But that AdBlock is in my brain. When I use AdBlock on a browser it helps my brain. Advertisers don't care whether ad is on the side on inside the content, all they care is their ROI, so unless I start clicking on Ads I already run risk of getting ads in my content.

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Actually some of the biggest spenders are content with your brain just seeing the ad. It builds awareness (as in: you know that they exist, that they are still in business, that they are relevant). It's all they need to "help you" make a decision next time you're in a store and deciding between buying something from them or from their less-known competitor.

Which is why I make a point of noting advertising and specifically weighing against them in any relevant purchasing mental calculus. They're definitely helping make a decision, but not in the direction they'd like.

That's not really true. There's a misconception that publishers only get paid for clicks, when actually many (perhaps even most for certain types) ads are sold by impression. And that's never going to fully go away; if you sell luxury cars you just want to do a branding campaign. You want to get your logo in front of NYTimes.com readers. You don't care how many click.

tl;dr it's much better for publishers if you see ads but never click them vs blocking them.

Ads should be paid by 1000 views/impressions and be served from the website itself. A pivoted ad network could provide a single Go/Rust binary for website owners. The ad network would scan the website with different IPs to make sure the ads are served to the user and the binary on the website itself sends statistics back to the ad network. Such ads cannot be blocked and would be great for the users privacy. So it would be a win win.

Such ads cannot be blocked

Sure they can. How does the ad network know the ads are being served? It needs some sort of ad detection mechanism, so the ad blocker can implement it too.

No. The ad picture can use the same URL scheme as the normal pictures of the website. The ad binary app can inform the ad network server which Url links serve the ads, so only the website owner and the ad network know which URLs are ad pics. The same for links. The URLs could also change every few hours. Adblockers work with regex based on URL and usually block third party files (different domain) from ad networks.

I would also encourage new "good ad blockers" that only block bad ads (CPU/memory intense ads that crash your browser on iipad)

The ad binary app can inform the ad network server which Url links serve the ads, so only the website owner and the ad network know which URLs are ad pics.

How does the ad network confirm the images being served are actually ads and not blank rectangles? It needs to visually confirm their content, which means there's some algorithm the blocker can use to identify ads.

(Why would a site serve blank rectangles? Simple: it'd allow them to serve ads from dozens of ad networks without making the site an unreadable mess)

Adblockers work with regex based on URL and usually block third party files (different domain) from ad networks.

Current adblockers work that way, since it's easier. They'd adapt. For example, Brand Killer[1] (aka Adblock for Real Life) already works by visual detection, and it would certainly be easier to do that online.

[1] http://challengepost.com/software/brand-killer

Heard about file hashing? (CRC32/MD5/etc) - problem solved.

Your OpenCV prototype is simply too expensive (CPU, GPU, battery resources) on consumer hardware many more years.

It's just a question of thinking about it. For example, having an easy way for users to mark an image as "ad" coupled with a shared DB of URLs (many users marked this as ad → auto-hide for everyone).

You can easily check if a person has adblock installed or not (check https://wordpress.org/plugins/anti-adblock/). And say, due to a prominent survey or report or other means it just becomes a widely known & accepted fact that most users are now using AdBlock, the tilt towards running ads in content will only accelerate.

It's actually really hard to detect adblockers -- they go out of their way to avoid detection and are constantly updating whitelists of test scripts. I haven't tried this particular plugin, but I doubt it detects modern extensions.

A big, high-profile publisher would find it nearly impossible. As soon as they roll out code to lock out adblock uesrs, it would be circumvented in a filter update.

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