amorgan

Adblock Analytics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10662793

The CueCat actually has a connection to the Oak Island Money Pit (http://www.oakislandmoneypit.com/).

The inventor of the CueCat, J. Hutton Pulitzer (formerly J. Jovan Philyaw) is prominently featured on the tv show The Curse of Oak Island and claims to have found a "magical" Roman Sword off the island's coast: http://www.inquisitr.com/2704626/oak-island-roman-sword-j-hu...

Factoring that the CueCat lost investors $185M I think it would be fair to say that it's also a "Money Pit".

I'm seeing 11 trackers (6 advertising, 1 essential, 2 analytics & 2 social media) per Ghostery, but didn't receive any popups.

The "how much have you read?" indicator is pretty neat.

You're right - it's about sites that display advertising gaining a better understanding of how their revenue is affected by ad blockers. Once they know that they can have an informed discussion on what, if any, changes are needed.

I'm not sure what tools and content you're referring to though. Can you send me an email with details? https://www.adblockanalytics.com/contact/

The purpose of our method is to detect the usage of ad blockers for informational purposes. For example, if you have a site that displays ads you'd probably like to know how many of your visitors are blocking them.

I couldn't agree more and it'll probably remain that way for awhile longer.

3rd party scripts can be included via a CNAME record at the root domain level.

You could add a rule to allow ads.js for each site's domain that's using the method as we've described, but a site could easily dynamically cycle through the thousands of file name combinations contained within EasyList.

I'm the creator of Detect Adblock and will be around if anyone has any feedback or wants to discuss anything related to ad blocking.

We have no interest in tracking anyone and can't given our implementation. If you checkout our sample report (which is the same one that clients receive) all of the data is highly aggregated:

https://www.adblockanalytics.com/sample/

The JavaScript screen & window variables have been removed.

https://www.adblockanalytics.com/analyze.js

var abaA; if(!document.getElementById('abaA')){ abaA='N'; } else{ abaA='Y'; }

var r=new XMLHttpRequest(); r.open("POST","https://www.adblockanalytics.com/analyze/"); r.setRequestHeader("Content-type","application/x-www-form-urlencoded"); r.send("abaI="+abaI+"&abaA="+abaA);

Truly appreciate your thoughtful response - thank you! I don't believe ad blockers are going away nor do I think it's time well spent or an effective strategy asking visitors to disable them or try to sneak ads past them. What I do believe though is once decision makers within these companies learn the % of their visitors that are blocking ads it will spur a productive discussion on what they should do about it - such as a shift in revenue strategy as you suggested.

As thomasahle pointed out earlier, ad blocking visitors seem to be more engaged because they bounce less and visit more pages. Now this is based on a relatively small sample size, but so far the trend is holding true. That is a huge takeaway that cannot be understated. Ad blocking visitors are valuable but in a slightly different sense.

And you're right, some websites will signup for a month and cancel after they've analyzed a large enough sample size and we're ok with that because it's all about education & gaining knowledge. Prior to using our service they could only guess, now they know with relative certainty.

We're checking if the display of an ad is possible, but the only reason we're doing this is to inform the website owner of how ad blocking is affecting them. Once they have this information, a lot of good can come from it that would benefit all of that websites visitors.

Excellent tip that we'll definitely implement asap. Nice username.

Screen resolution & viewport size aren't being used. They were added many months ago when we first started development.

That's what we're seeing so far. Nice attention to detail.

You nailed - this is the exact purpose of our service.

You are correct - no cookies or any visitor tracking is being used. We only track if the display of an ad is possible. And thanks for reminding me of the screen & window JavaScript variables. They aren't being used at all.

Totally understand that some people don't want to be tracked, but our service doesn't track anyone nor has any interest in doing so.

My response is also raising a question which I'd love to hear your thoughts on.

Purely out of curiosity, why are you opposed to websites knowing how many of their visitors are blocking ads? I get that you're against being tracked, but if they can't find out how their revenue is being affected, then how can they decide if a change in revenue source is necessary?

We spent a lot of time discussing pricing and so far it's seemed reasonable, but your feedback has been noted. Definitely true that someone with the right skills, time & resources could leverage existing APIs or build a similar service.

Received your emails - thanks!

From what I understand, PageFair is also running an advertising network to cover their costs and that's why they need to be whitelisted. Our solution doesn't display any ads or messages to the visitors of websites which use our service. I've heard their reporting is very basic compared to ours, but would love for someone to do a thorough review. We also offer an API.

The PageFair hack was very scary and a good reminder to all companies that require the use of external JavaScript by their users. We currently don't support subresource integrity, but it's now at the top of our to-do list. Thanks for the great feedback!

That does seem to be the result so far and it'll be interesting to see if that charges as more sites use the service.

Typical LAMP stack is being used & service hasn't been advertised yet.

We don't track visitors, we're only interested if a visitor can view ads or not.

I hope that doesn't happen because Adblock Analytics is 100% cookieless and doesn't track visitors via any method, we're only interested if ads were displayed or not, but we do have some ideas if it does happen.

I'm the creator of Adblock Analytics and the reason I built it is because a lot of websites seem to be struggling with determining how many of their visitors are blocking ads. I'll be around to answer any questions that might pop up and would love to receive feedback - good, bad or otherwise. Thank you!!