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Firefox: The Effect of Ad Blocking on User Engagement with the Web [pdf]

research.mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox: The Effect of Ad Blocking on User Engagement with the Web [pdf]

#111

Post by aembleton »

swiftcoder wrote: post #36
dmortin wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case of smaller sites page load time would increase, because they still had to contact an ad network to retrieve the ads and assemble the page with ads on server side. It would only improve load time for big sites which have their own ad serving and a server farm on the backend to quickly retrieve ads without having to connect to an external ad network.

It should decrease the variance in load times. Several sites I use routinely have page load times in the low seconds for above-the-fold content, with a long-tail of up to minutes for all the ad content to finish loading (causing the page to re-layout throughout).

That could still happen if the ads are proxied through a local ad server, so that it appears to be coming from the same domain as the content. Only difference is that they wouldn't be able to track you between sites with cookies, though they could use device fingerprinting and it would be harder for you to block.

Re: Firefox: The Effect of Ad Blocking on User Engagement with the Web [pdf]

#112

Post by jonathansampson »

user812 wrote: post #26
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #13

Mozilla should work on a micro-payment system that is inbuilt into the browser. Ultimately that is the only solution to a web that values user privacy and prevents the psychological toll of ads. 1. Obviously, the micro-payment system should not be selling my usage data to anyone. Perhaps some cryptographic techniques can be used to increase trust in the service. 2. The price for each page should be low - a cent or le…

They really should. The time to do this is now. I don't really know why this did not happen already. The only answer I can think of is lack of people with a vision in the management. Mozilla could leverage a user base of 100 million people. But it's an enourmous challenge to build the bridge between readers and publishers. When you start with the publishers, no one will want to participate because there are no users.…

This is happening right now, with Brave and Brave Rewards.

You're 100% correct though that this can be a difficult thing to stand-up, if not done correctly. In the Brave Rewards model, much of the revenue is additive. The site itself (or YouTube/Twitch channel) doesn't have to do any heavy lifting to participate.

Users of the Brave browser who opt into Brave Rewards are given a monthly grant of BAT (from the 300M User Growth Pool) for the purpose of supporting their favorite content creators. Contributions are based on local data; no opportunity to leak data to Brave or any other party. Settlement takes place via the ANONIZE2 protocol to protect the user's identity. Furthermore, as data comes out of the other end of the ANONIZE2 protocol, it does so over an ad-hoc VPN connection established to protect the user's location information.

As was stated earlier though, the web runs on advertising. But advertising has been co-opted to do a great deal of harm. Not only that, but it has been plagued by abuse and fraud, as well as countless middle-men taking undue revenue.

Brave is also standing up a consent-based (user must opt-in) advertising model wherein data is stored locally (your browser knows enough about you to do the heavy lifting itself; nobody else needs to know your information). Ads are matched locally as well via machine-learning operating on browser data. Users are compensated for their attention—as much as 70% of the ad revenue goes to the user themselves.

Brave currently has more than 4 million monthly active users, and 10 million downloads on Android itself. We have also verified more than 20,000 properties in the Attention Token market. We're growing quickly, and looking forward to a more private and sustainable web in the future.

Re: Firefox: The Effect of Ad Blocking on User Engagement with the Web [pdf]

#113

Post by jonathansampson »

manigandham wrote: post #21
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #13

Mozilla should work on a micro-payment system that is inbuilt into the browser. Ultimately that is the only solution to a web that values user privacy and prevents the psychological toll of ads. 1. Obviously, the micro-payment system should not be selling my usage data to anyone. Perhaps some cryptographic techniques can be used to increase trust in the service. 2. The price for each page should be low - a cent or le…

This has already been tried and tested for a decade. Blendle is arguably the best version of it today and Google has the Contributor program. I put together a small team to create an adblocker/payment solution a few years ago that used a flat rate with payments proportional to engagement (combination of time and depth) per domain, similar to systems like Spotify (number of plays vs total). It failed because people fu…

Any system that relies on users paying out of their own pocket will definitely suffer low adoption. With Brave we setup a User Growth Pool of 300M Basic Attention Tokens. Each month we issue grants to users, which are in turn given to their favorite content creators and online properties (more than 20,000 verified to receive BAT, with more joining each day).

But the UGP won't last forever, and users (generally) aren't going to fork out their own cash to support their favorite websites. This is why we're working on Brave Ads in parallel to our browser efforts.

Brave Ads is an opt-in component which utilizes local machine-learning (operating on browser history) to select ads in a non-leaky manner. With matching and more taking place on the user's device, the system is simplified, leading to less fraud and abuse.

What's most exciting about the simplified model proposed by Brave Ads is the ability to share revenues with the user themselves (as much as 70% of ad revenue goes to the user). When you reform ads to the point that they aren't collecting information or monitoring your activity online, and are instead loading quickly, respecting your privacy, and [paying you for your attention], you make the entire system more appealing.

Any Attention Tokens earned by users can go into supporting their favorite websites and/or content creators. This reduces/eliminates the burden on the user to fund their wallets themselves.

Re: Firefox: The Effect of Ad Blocking on User Engagement with the Web [pdf]

#114

Post by jonathansampson »

Animats wrote: post #32
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #13

Mozilla should work on a micro-payment system that is inbuilt into the browser. Ultimately that is the only solution to a web that values user privacy and prevents the psychological toll of ads. 1. Obviously, the micro-payment system should not be selling my usage data to anyone. Perhaps some cryptographic techniques can be used to increase trust in the service. 2. The price for each page should be low - a cent or le…

micro-payment system This comes up regularly. All the enthusiasm for micropayments comes from people who want to collect micropayments. Not from the users who would pay them.

A reliable micro-payment system is attractive to those who understand the benefits. To the average user, this is well-beyond the scope of their interest. They just want the web to work, and work well.

At Brave, we integrate the blockchain for low-friction, private contributions to content creators based on user attention distribution. We do so in such a way that we efface the micro-payment/blockchain integration. The end user has no idea _how_ the solution is implemented, they just know that their favorite websites are getting support (some for the first time ever).

Effacing this technology is the right way. Figuring out how to make it work without burdening the end-user is the clear path of least resistance.

Re: Firefox: The Effect of Ad Blocking on User Engagement with the Web [pdf]

#115

Post by naravara »

zeta0134 wrote: post #67
nattaylor wrote: post #3

If you accept that advertising is necessary to some business models, I hope to see publishers move ads back to the server because I think eliminating all the code from the client would drastically improve user experience. This would make them tougher to block and hinder users ability to control privacy, but it would also restrict tracking to that specific site.

As a regular user of ad-block, I am 100% in support of this model. It's a bit more work (and I expect third-party delivery server-side to be a thing) but ethically it makes a lot more sense. I think it's much harder to stand by a marketing company's invasive tracking code when your own domain has to serve it. More directly though, I find organic advertising (sponsorships, author recommendations and reviews, etc) to j…

Daring Fireball does a great job of integrating ads into the page. Gruber sells a small banner in the corner, which is basically the only part of his page with any color in it so it really stand out. Then he has a weekly sponsor post where he plugs that week's sponsors. He also has an individual sponsor for his RSS feed where he puts an article plugging them into the RSS feed.

Granted, that only works because he has an established enough audience that he can have sponsors come a-courting. But that's the difference between building an audience and trawling for traffic.

Josh Marshall runs Talking Points Memo largely on subscriptions, with ad revenue as a supplement. He wrote an entire article about how he prefers to keep his day-to-day expenses for the year paid through reliable funding streams like subscriptions and using more variable sources, like ad revenue, to support investments for future growth, capital investment, etc. I think he prefers to not feel over-a-barrel to advertisers or traffic as well, just out of a sense of journalistic integrity.

Re: Firefox: The Effect of Ad Blocking on User Engagement with the Web [pdf]

#116

Post by naravara »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #13

Mozilla should work on a micro-payment system that is inbuilt into the browser. Ultimately that is the only solution to a web that values user privacy and prevents the psychological toll of ads. 1. Obviously, the micro-payment system should not be selling my usage data to anyone. Perhaps some cryptographic techniques can be used to increase trust in the service. 2. The price for each page should be low - a cent or le…

>Mozilla should work on a micro-payment system that is inbuilt into the browser. Ultimately that is the only solution to a web that values user privacy and prevents the psychological toll of ads. >1. Obviously, the micro-payment system should not be selling my usage data to anyone. Perhaps some cryptographic techniques can be used to increase trust in the service.

This is honestly the first and only legitimate use for crypto-currency anyone has ever presented. Unfortunately that whole field is too full-up with investor speculation nonsense and overblown utopian fantasies to come to any use.

Re: Firefox: The Effect of Ad Blocking on User Engagement with the Web [pdf]

#117

Post by dest »

gwern wrote: post #68

> In the group that installed an ad blocker, we find significant increases in both active time spent in the browser (+28% over control) and the number of pages viewed (+15% over control), while seeing no change in the number of searches. I'm struck by the almost numerical identity of their adblock correlate on page views with the long-term causaleffect on total site traffic I estimated in my banner ad A/B test ( http…

I do adblockradio.com. Thanks for the link about Pandora's AB testing!

Re: Firefox: The Effect of Ad Blocking on User Engagement with the Web [pdf]

#118

Post by manigandham »

majewsky wrote: post #31
manigandham wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about browsers or tech, the extensions were universally available with a single click on modern browsers.

Extensions are very much not single-click: 1. Locate and open Addons screen (~2-3 clicks in the browser menu). 2. Locate and click "Get more addons" (1 click). 3. Wait for store page to open, search for desired extension. (Around a dozen keypresses for average-length extension name.) 4. Locate and click "Install" (1 click). 5. Confirm modal dialogs for installation and permissions (1-2 clicks). That's nowhere near on…

People weren't searching for this (why would they?). They were linked directly to the extension on participating sites, which does install in 1 click. https://developer.chrome.com/webstore/inline_installation

We also did plenty of other marketing and onboarding to get users interested, it wasn't just slapping together an extension and calling it done. 99% of the friction came from people not wanting to pay for content, not the technical workings.

Re: Firefox: The Effect of Ad Blocking on User Engagement with the Web [pdf]

#119

Post by manigandham »

swiftcoder wrote: post #36
dmortin wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case of smaller sites page load time would increase, because they still had to contact an ad network to retrieve the ads and assemble the page with ads on server side. It would only improve load time for big sites which have their own ad serving and a server farm on the backend to quickly retrieve ads without having to connect to an external ad network.

It should decrease the variance in load times. Several sites I use routinely have page load times in the low seconds for above-the-fold content, with a long-tail of up to minutes for all the ad content to finish loading (causing the page to re-layout throughout).

If the browser is waiting for it then the server would be waiting for it too. The endpoints for adexchanges are the same and wouldn't be any faster just because it's coming from a server instead.

Re: Firefox: The Effect of Ad Blocking on User Engagement with the Web [pdf]

#120

Post by kasbah »

dest wrote: post #117
gwern wrote: post #68

> In the group that installed an ad blocker, we find significant increases in both active time spent in the browser (+28% over control) and the number of pages viewed (+15% over control), while seeing no change in the number of searches. I'm struck by the almost numerical identity of their adblock correlate on page views with the long-term causaleffect on total site traffic I estimated in my banner ad A/B test ( http…

I do adblockradio.com. Thanks for the link about Pandora's AB testing!

Super cool, hadn't heard of this, trying it out right now. I have often thought about trying to do something like this for the AntennaPod pod-catcher. Do you have an ETA on your open source release?

https://github.com/AntennaPod/AntennaPod/

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