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Comment by robmcm | Hacker News Reader

You may also want a website you a reading to stay in business and proffit from their work.

I think ad blocking days are numbered, the more mainstream it becomes the more likley the ad networks are to respond.

There are responsible ways to advertise which I completely agree with (that the adblocker I use respects) - and personally I do make an effort to turn it off for sites with a polite message and clearly need the revenue to function... however it gives me a warm feeling when getting caught out by linkbait articles that I am not feeding a fire I dislike.

How would ad networks respond to that? I can't think of any technically possible way for them to do that (except somehow getting operating systems to build in some crazy DRM scheme).

By making ads indistinguishable from content. Or serving content from ad servers.

Simply serving the adds from the same domain as the content. Ad blockers are really simple currently.

After that I imagine the blockers could step it up and start looking for script names, or reporting on common scripts shared accross domains, by which point we are in an arms race :)

Sure there is, you start making the distinction between ads and regular content impossible. If all of the images on the site and all of the ads all map to something like www.sitename.com/resource/somekindofhash, then how would you tell programmatically whats an ad? You could even assign each visitor a mapping seed, so that caching still works. Blocking would have to be done on a user-by-user basis, turning this into a MAD-scenario, where some users just start blocking EVERYTHING that isn't textual or generated.

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