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The Ad Blocking Wars

nytimes.com

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Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#91

Post by pixl97 »

matt4077 wrote: post #70
kazinator wrote: post #50

Supposedly blocking ads is immoral because ads provide funding for the so called valuable content. Here is the thing though: most pages do not have any such content. One reason I don't want to see the ads because I didn't want to see the page in the first place. I only landed on the page because it's stuffed with keywords that duped the search engine indexer. The ads are part of the delay and bandwidth waste which st…

By that logic, you shouldn't be online at all... I don't quite get fundamentalists like you. I cannot see how people can deny that the New York Times, Wikipedia, or even HN, Reddit & XKCD add something valuable.

>By that logic, you shouldn't be online at all...

That's a strange leap of logic.

>Wikipedia

Asks for donations, it doesn't show ads.

There are many other websites that are internally funded in other ways that exclude direct ads.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#92

Post by manicdee »

adblawk wrote: post #74
lorenzfx wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make it sound like your users are getting a free service. They are not. They just do not pay you directly. Why are advertisers willing to pay you $15/month per user? Because those users buy the advertisers' wares with a hefty "advertisement-tax" on top of the "real" price.

You're misunderstanding the example. Advertisers do not pay $15 per user, that's the amount we would need from 5% of our users to replace the revenue lost from no advertising. The example puts the value of each user per month at $1, which is what advertisers pay.

Are you assuming that the majority of your users don't consider your content to be worth $1/month?

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#93

Post by corin_ »

gyardley wrote: post #9
tosseraccount wrote: post #2

Why 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 tha…

65% your second point, 25% your third point, 8% your fourth point and 2% your first point. (First point maybe higher in terms of number of publishers but not in terms of number of advert impressions across the internet) (My %s are obviously non-scientific.)

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#94

Post by pixl97 »

swang wrote: post #16
tosseraccount wrote: post #2

Why don't sites just serve up the ads from their own domain?

gets advertisers to agree to let website self-host ads, with access to click rates, etc spins up new server setups ad service spend couple days fidgeting with open source ad software ads deploy to subdomain ads.domain.com people start blocking ads.domain.com, assuming ads. .com wasn't already in your blocklist redeploys ads into domain.com/DEFINITELY_NOT_ADS people start blocking that URL its basically a cat and mous…

>people start blocking that URL

That part can be entirely generated on the fly. Even more so you could put important content in random generation parts to foil the people using blockers on occasion.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#95

Post by samlinkl »

I'll be super interested to see where this goes. Every company capable of it that I know of is headed toward native advertising. Ads as part of their content. That might end up being an outcome the ad-blockers are ok with (i.e. it should at least force more integrated and possibly well-behaving ads)

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#96

Post by amelius »

bufordsharkley wrote: post #28
amelius wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relax. Within 10 years, we have AI that is strong enough to recognize advertisements regardless of origin, so that they can be stripped from any content, be it text, images, or video. Make sure you sell your Google and Facebook stocks before that time.

I'm more worried at the point that we have AI strong enough to pass the turing test, and then spends years befriending us... just to advertise products. Pretty far off, but this concept scares the hell out of me.

How would that work on social media? Is FB allowed to change people's messages to contain ads? I don't think so. And I don't think this will ever happen.

Also, I don't believe that ads will ever be merged with the content in an indistinguishable way. Authors (at least ones that take themselves seriously) would never allow that.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#97

Post by majewsky »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #27
tosseraccount wrote: post #2

Why don't sites just serve up the ads from their own domain?

From the blockers side, this doesn't really help as domain filtering is just the first step, then dom elements, url fragments and finally HTML identifiers (like being a standard ad image size). From the user privacy side it's also mixed as there are still large scale efforts to link up users across sites and devices.

Depends on the application. I'm using uMatrix and always allow all content (including JS) that's served from the same domain. The problem for me really is tracking and visual clutter, and I assume that a first-party ad will not track me across domains and likely integrate well within the page layout.

I'm fully aware though that I'm not the mean audience for adblocking.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#98

Post by majewsky »

melted wrote: post #87
byuu wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention embedded advertising. Kevin Spacey on House of Cards: "is that a PS Vita you have there?" Anything from Hollywood: "Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, look it's an Apple. Apple." Aggregator: "New Java framework Zaxybar; The true cost of OOP abstraction; Link'dOut is hiring engineers; How ride-sharing is reshaping cities; Weekly Dealm…

Funny thing is, Apple doesn't pay a dime for product placement.

Source? ;)

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#99

Post by dang »

mschuster91 wrote: post #3

Advertising 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 adverti…

"Please don't use uppercase for emphasis."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#100

Post by [deleted] »

kazinator wrote: post #50

Supposedly blocking ads is immoral because ads provide funding for the so called valuable content. Here is the thing though: most pages do not have any such content. One reason I don't want to see the ads because I didn't want to see the page in the first place. I only landed on the page because it's stuffed with keywords that duped the search engine indexer. The ads are part of the delay and bandwidth waste which st…

[deleted]
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