The Ad Blocking Wars
nytimes.com
The Ad Blocking Wars
1–10 of 236 posts
Re: The Ad Blocking Wars
#2Why don't sites just serve up the ads from their own domain?
Re: The Ad Blocking Wars
#3Advertising is the maybe best example of Capitalism going raving mad.
We consumers tell the media with every single installation of Adblock: fuck off, we don't want to be data-mined. We don't want to be interrupted every time we open a new tab that we might like a penis enlargement.
And especially: WE CONSUMERS FUCKING HATE THE LIES OF ADVERTISING.
Prior to the internet, people tended to actually believe what advertising told them (e.g. that smoking is good for your health)... now, thanks to the Internet, people can inform themselves and are ready to look through the veil of ads and see the shit.
And we don't just turn on adblockers because ads are intrusive. We turn them on because we want to be free. Free of lies, free of bullshit, free of having proxy wars executed with us (e.g. Coke vs Pepsi, BK vs McD)... we want to live in peace of the non-stopping torrent of crap that screams "BUY BUY BUY" at us, every second. The sheer amount of advertising is Too Fucking Much.
Just look back 50 years, how many ads an average Western person saw a day and how many today... I'd roughly guess that the amount of time a person had to spend with ads in the 60s in a year is about 1/12 of the time he has to waste (!) with ads now.
There's only one solution for companies that will be long-term successful: create high-quality products that consumers can tell their friends about.
Re: The Ad Blocking Wars
#4Why don't sites just serve up the ads from their own domain?
Because with own domains sites lose the ability of tracking. A central entity can track users across all websites where the entity has a tracking beacon, and target ads to a specific customer as a result.
Tracking makes advertisements much, much more expensive and thus profitable.
Re: The Ad Blocking Wars
#5Why don't sites just serve up the ads from their own domain?
Fraud.
The dozens of domains and tons of javascript are all there as part of an effort to establish that the ad has been served to a human who might concievably be a customer for the product, and not a robot or some sort of third world ad-viewing farm.
Re: The Ad Blocking Wars
#6There would not have been such a uptick of ad blocking software if advertisers had "self policed" just like the consumer ISP market so I have very little sympathy for them. You made your bed, deal with it.
So I'm all for the FCC to come down much harder than before and advertisers to feel the pain, the lack of good privacy protection in the US will hopefully improve as a result of these events.
Re: The Ad Blocking Wars
#7Why don't sites just serve up the ads from their own domain?
Because with own domains sites lose the ability of tracking. A central entity can track users across all websites where the entity has a tracking beacon, and target ads to a specific customer as a result. Tracking makes advertisements much, much more expensive and thus profitable.
Can't their servers contact the mothership?
And cache potential ads?
I don't even mind the ads so much as the delay.
Re: The Ad Blocking Wars
#8There would not have been such a uptick of ad blocking software if advertisers had "self policed" just like the consumer ISP market so I have very little sympathy for them. You made your bed, deal with it. So I'm all for the FCC to come down much harder than before and advertisers to feel the pain, the lack of good privacy protection in the US will hopefully improve as a result of these events.
> the lack of good privacy protection in the US will hopefully improve as a result of these events.
Nope, it will be not. Facebook, Twitter and Google depend on lax privacy laws for their business, and the NSA/FBI/CIA/... depend on private companies mining and analyzing the data for them.
Two very politically powerful entity groups that will do everything neccessary to prevent proper privacy on the Internet.
Re: The Ad Blocking Wars
#9Why don't sites just serve up the ads from their own domain?
The biggest reason is that most publishers completely lack the ability to set up and manage an ad server.
Next would probably be that the advertisers, fearing fraud, want the publishers to use a third-party ad server with reporting that they trust.
Only after that comes concerns about behavioral targeting and tracking, and the absence of that affecting ad revenue.
Finally, if they thought about it, they'd realize that ad blockers would just switch strategies and carry on blocking, so it hardly seems worth the effort.
Re: The Ad Blocking Wars
#10Why should others control my monitor?
If they detect my software and don't let me on their site, that's their prerogative, but my computer is my property, not theirs. If their business model requires them to control other people's computers, plenty of other entrepreneurs will be happy to overtake them in the market.
Once they feel entitled to control my monitor, they start lobbying for laws to support them, making their readers their enemies, trying to force their business plan on others.