While these anti ad blockers may succeed confusing pattern matching ad blockers, how are they going to work against domain/IP list based (i.e. hosts file) ones?
Many major websites are taking silent anti-ad-blocking measures
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Re: Many major websites are taking silent anti-ad-blocking measures
#22Interesting how the response of sites with terrible user experiences caused by ad tech is not to say “oh, how can we change our ads so people will accept them?” but rather to find ways to make their user experiences even more horrible, e.g. popping up new unwanted interruptions accusing you of having an ad-blocker. Hey big web sites, here is the solution, and I won’t even charge you for it: stop making terrible user…
> Interesting how the response of sites with terrible user experiences caused by ad tech is not to say “oh, how can we change our ads so people will accept them?” but rather to find ways to make their user experiences even more horrible, e.g. popping up new unwanted interruptions accusing you of having an ad-blocker.
That's not how online advertising works. If a user doesn't like ads, they block all ads indiscriminately. Changing ads doesn't do anything, because users will always block ads regardless of their quality, at least until the vast majority of ads are "acceptable" -- and even then, many demographics will continue blocking anyway. What is "acceptable", anyway? Make the ad small enough and/or dumb enough that it is no longer worth anything to the advertiser?
> stop making terrible user experiences.
There are plenty of websites with acceptable UX (or UX that isn't practically made worse by ads) that use ads. How many of them are on your whitelist? Do you even know which sites are showing ads if you use an adblocker?
> I’ll even tell you how to fix this: make more simple text ads, or images that are not animated and not peppered with distracting colors.
While this is a reasonable request, it doesn't change the fact that many/most people now have an adblocker on their browser.
There's no doubt this problem has been exasperated by malicious ad creatives. But the onus of correcting the problem lies in the hands of BOTH adblocker developers AND the online ads industry (including publishers, exchanges, and advertisers.)
Re: Many major websites are taking silent anti-ad-blocking measures
#23Some adtech startup should just quit playing games and go full creeper mode:
* simple text-only ads
* give the advertisers the tools to generate text content that is minimally distracting, maximally invasive, maximally creepy, and maximally personally-identifying
"$35,000 in debt, unemployed, recently dumped and insecure about your male sexual identity? You deserve this special price on Axe Body Spray..."
The buzz alone would get people to turn off their ad-blockers just to see what content gets generated for them.
Re: Many major websites are taking silent anti-ad-blocking measures
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any site that doesn’t control the content of their ads deserve to be starved out of business as fast as possible by ad blockers. That is: I don’t mind ads, I just don’t accept “adtech”.
Advertisers tend not to be willing to give that much control to whatever medium they're advertising in. More often than not, they can dictate terms because they drive revenue.
I understand that. But once adblocking ensures that the cost of an impression via an “ad network” is an order of magnitude higher than the alternative - their trust will likely increase.
Re: Many major websites are taking silent anti-ad-blocking measures
#25I recently saw one site that said "It looks like you are using an ad-blocker. So you must wait 10 seconds.". And had an overlay with a countdown.
Maybe they're getting paid per unit of user suffering.
Re: Many major websites are taking silent anti-ad-blocking measures
#26If you're in a niche with decent prospects for contextual advertising, there's an easy way around most ad-blockers. Set up a small piece of editorial content and embed some affiliate links into it.
If I came to a site, liked what it was about, noticed it didn't get any hits by uBO and saw an affiliate link with text (no images hosted elsewhere) like "Do you need AAA batteries and would like to support our site? Click Here", it's very likely I would click the link if I will need the thing any time soon. It doesn't have to be related to the content of the page or fit the genre of the site, it doesn't need to try and guess exactly what I need at this very second or prey on my insecurities. Just links to basic necessities.
Re: Many major websites are taking silent anti-ad-blocking measures
#27I recently saw one site that said "It looks like you are using an ad-blocker. So you must wait 10 seconds.". And had an overlay with a countdown.
Maybe they're getting paid per unit of user suffering.
Or maybe they were using a cryptocurrency miner during those 10 seconds as a substitute for ads.
Re: Many major websites are taking silent anti-ad-blocking measures
#28Some adtech startup should just quit playing games and go full creeper mode: * simple text-only ads * give the advertisers the tools to generate text content that is minimally distracting, maximally invasive, maximally creepy, and maximally personally-identifying "$35,000 in debt, unemployed, recently dumped and insecure about your male sexual identity? You deserve this special price on Axe Body Spray..." The buzz al…
So an updated version of the classic browser/IP/country/OS sign people used in their forum signatures?
Re: Many major websites are taking silent anti-ad-blocking measures
#29Interesting how the response of sites with terrible user experiences caused by ad tech is not to say “oh, how can we change our ads so people will accept them?” but rather to find ways to make their user experiences even more horrible, e.g. popping up new unwanted interruptions accusing you of having an ad-blocker. Hey big web sites, here is the solution, and I won’t even charge you for it: stop making terrible user…
> Interesting how the response of sites with terrible user experiences caused by ad tech is not to say “oh, how can we change our ads so people will accept them?” but rather to find ways to make their user experiences even more horrible, e.g. popping up new unwanted interruptions accusing you of having an ad-blocker. That's not how online advertising works. If a user doesn't like ads, they block all ads indiscriminat…
I always forget to install my ad-blocker after an install. Once I start browsing the web I re-install it. If ads weren't so terrible, I would likely just forget to install it.
Re: Many major websites are taking silent anti-ad-blocking measures
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
> “oh, how can we change our ads so people will accept them?” If a single website -- say, your local or regional news site -- overhauled its ad experience to become more user-friendly, how would you even notice, if their ad server was added to your ad blocker's blacklist?
Maybe not use 3rd party banner systems infected with cancer and malware code. Adblock systems are not an AI, they just operate on a database of known, obnoxious and annoying shit.
Or privacy badger that does behavior based blocking. Somehow all the ads are still blocked though. :/
(or is that what this article is about? fiine i'll read tfa)