Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Ad Blocking Wars

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 236 posts

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#131

Post by nitwit005 »

ino wrote: post #65
pjc50 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's true for click campaigns but what about view campaigns? Couldn't Samsung, now releasing their new phone, buy a website's entire ad space for a month or two, let's say techcrunch, and tell them to serve their new phone's ad themselves? Samsung is in for the eyeballs just like when they buy those huge outdoor ads, but even better, no intermediaries. The publisher would even optimize the HTML5 ads for loading and…

You're underestimating the general underhandedness of people. If I can sell all my website's ads once, why not try to sell them twice? Double my income.

If Samsung's marketing people are in Korea, I'll show all Asian IP addresses their ad, and then show some other ad (or ads) to the rest of the world.

Of course, Samsung may notice the low volume, so a better scheme is to also load their ad elsewhere, but placed on the page so it's not visible.

If you look at the Javascript that gets served with the ads, there is generally a hunk of logic that tries to confirm the ad is genuinely visible, to try to deal with that last bit.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#132

Post by Pxtl »

Thinking it over, the end result if this arms-race is a death of sandboxing as advertisers will require back-end access to the service you're hosting so it's completely indistinguishable from your content. Any other proper isolation of ad content will be detected as ads.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#133

Post by dredmorbius »

majewsky wrote: post #97
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

uMatrix isn't an ad-blocker. It uses ... a matrix ... of domains/hosts and content types to determine what is or isn't allowed to be presented/fetched by a client.

Dedicated ad-blockers, such as uBlock Origin, apply heuristics which are specifically tuned to advertising signals -- hosts, domains, and, as noted in parent to your post, various HTML and other entity clues to advertising content.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#134

Post by tracker1 »

deelowe wrote: post #104
pixl97 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

And there are many that are. For those that are you really have two or three options morally: 1) Don't visit the site 2) Visit the site and don't use an ad blocker 3) Pay for premium service (e.g. youtube red) wherever it's available I refuse to accept that there's some moral high ground to using an ad blocking service. Especially for people like us (I assume you work in tech) where a huge percentage of our salaries…

I say fuck the ad services... yesterday I made the mistake of researching something on my phone, half the results were content stuffed, worthless and so many ads it brought my phone to a crawl.

If websites weren't putting 6+ ads on a page, each with iframes in iframes several layers deep, it wouldn't be so bad... and you know what else... if the ads were delivered first party, then the ad blockers wouldn't be able to know the difference.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#135

Post by chowells »

tracker1 wrote: post #129
bunderbunder wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I do go for the content. Oftentimes this is only to be unable to access it because all the ads bring my browser to its knees, or even crash it. Yeah, I suppose the makers of these ads would suggest the solution to this problem is that I spend a few hundred to a thousand bucks on some shiny new electronics. Funny how they manage to be both the cause of and the solution to the problem. Instead I use an adbloc…

Exactly, and why android desperately needs ad blocking ability... So many sites are downright unusable on mobile phones. I'm not a big apple fan, and definitely not into walled gardens... that said, I avoided even considering apple early on because I didn't like AT&T... not I'm considering an iPhone for my next phone, just so I can have ad blocking.

uBlock Origin runs just fine on Firefox Android.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#136

Post by abrookewood »

tracker1 wrote: post #126
seanwilson wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, minimal usage of ad-supported apps). How much are you really worried by this? Amazon know my purchasing history for over 5 years and the best they seem to do is show me offers for things similar t…

Do you have young children? It's far more noticeable in children under 10... but I see it at times in adults too. Just little points of perception that a little shift can mean significant gains to advertisers.

Well, my kids simply don't watch commercial TV. Everything used to be DVD based and now its all streamed, so they never see ads. I remember the first time they actually saw and advertisement - my son screamed! "Where did my show go??" "It's OK .. it's just an ad". A few seconds of silence passed and then he asked:"What's an ad?"

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#137

Post by DanBlake »

chris_wot wrote: post #119
matt4077 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ummm... Wikipedia doesn't show ads and never will.

Thats incorrect. Wikipedia sometimes shows ads asking for donations. Just because its a 'internal' ad means nothing.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#138

Post by deelowe »

tracker1 wrote: post #134
deelowe wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And there are many that are. For those that are you really have two or three options morally: 1) Don't visit the site 2) Visit the site and don't use an ad blocker 3) Pay for premium service (e.g. youtube red) wherever it's available I refuse to accept that there's some moral high ground to using an ad blocking service. Especially for people like us (I assume you work in tech) where a huge percentage of our salaries…

I say fuck the ad services... yesterday I made the mistake of researching something on my phone, half the results were content stuffed, worthless and so many ads it brought my phone to a crawl. If websites weren't putting 6+ ads on a page, each with iframes in iframes several layers deep, it wouldn't be so bad... and you know what else... if the ads were delivered first party, then the ad blockers wouldn't be able to…

To be clear, I pay for youtube red so that I don't have to deal with ads. Same goes for netflix and several other services. My point isn't that I think ads are awesome, but that doesn't make ad blocking OK.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#139

Post by seanwilson »

tracker1 wrote: post #126
seanwilson wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, minimal usage of ad-supported apps). How much are you really worried by this? Amazon know my purchasing history for over 5 years and the best they seem to do is show me offers for things similar t…

Do you have young children? It's far more noticeable in children under 10... but I see it at times in adults too. Just little points of perception that a little shift can mean significant gains to advertisers.

I agree that's different, I was only talking about how I perceive how advertising impacts me.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#140

Post by seanwilson »

WmyEE0UsWAwC2i wrote: post #128
seanwilson wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, minimal usage of ad-supported apps). How much are you really worried by this? Amazon know my purchasing history for over 5 years and the best they seem to do is show me offers for things similar t…

Are you doing peer reviewed reproductible research, with both open source code and data and tyying to disprobe your hypothesis? Even researchers don't agree what are "acceptable" research findings [0]. I think that priming[1] would be an important factor to consider when doing "lot of" research. And, were someone going to dimiss it, they would need "extrordinary evidence" as the say goes. Here is a testimonial of one…

Sure, but I'm saying I don't think the effect (which is non-zero) is manipulative enough to get annoyed about. I read people talking about ads as if you look at them and they compel you to buy something you never wanted.
Post reply on HN