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Adblock Plus and (a little) more

blog.adblockplus.org

31–40 of 132 posts

Re: Adblock Plus and (a little) more

#31
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you also boycotting every other large company that uses the tax system in a legal way that you don't agree with? Umm, where possible why wouldn't one choose to avoid giving your money to companies that behave in ways you object to?

Voting with your wallet is always the best, my point was that most (all?) big companies will use the tax system in a way to give them the best outcome that's possible through legal means.

[deleted]

Re: Adblock Plus and (a little) more

#32
post #25

What value do advertisers get in losing a portion of their ad spend to those who are even less likely to engage? I would be curious to see what click through rates typically look like post this change.

People who advertise with Google are used to losing a decent portion of their ad spend to bot views. People who use ad blockers are at least human.

And advertising to the guy who sees 100 adverts a day might have much higher impact than advertising to the guy who sees 1000.

From Google's perspective, they want to get paid, so the more ads the better. If the advertisers, users and content creators don't like it, why would that matter to Google? The farmer doesn't care about the turkey's opinion on christmas.

Re: Adblock Plus and (a little) more

#33
post #2

This may be controversial but YouTube ads are surely ones that meet all the reasonable criteria. They're not a surprise, you know it's an ad supported business. They're served from YouTube so it's not random companies tracking you while you use a different service. And you can get rid of them by paying for the service. What's the proposed alternative where you contribute for the service? Just paywall the whole thing?

> And you can get rid of them by paying for the service. Get rid of _some_ of them

Get rid of _some_ of them for now

It only has to be relatively less ad laden than the free version. Whenever ads get cranked up on the “free” normal person YouTube, they’ll get cranked up on sucker pay-pig YouTube in direct proportion. If anything, they have less concern about the small fraction who (amazingly) pay them for what they’re doing.

Re: Adblock Plus and (a little) more

#34
post #25

What value do advertisers get in losing a portion of their ad spend to those who are even less likely to engage? I would be curious to see what click through rates typically look like post this change.

For Youtube/Google it's a win-win: they can show advertisers that the ads that can't be hidden, and annoyed users will be more pressured to buy Premium to hide the ads.

Re: Adblock Plus and (a little) more

#35
post #21

Google is desperate to display ads on YouTube. YouTube videos, even of poor quality, often rank highly in Google search results. This means that Google can double its profits by displaying ads on YouTube, in addition to its search advertising revenue.

Google is too big. All of the giant tech companies are. This behavior is a symptom of reaching across industries in search of growth. Is there any reason a grocery store should be a movie studio? This sucks the air out of the room for smaller companies to innovate. Search would be much better if it wasn't being shoved down our throat by a single company that controls (or buys access to) all of the panes of glass Amer…

Ok, so if Google is too big and YouTube is split away from Google... who exactly will pay for bandwidth, server and transcoder costs for all the adblocking freeloaders?

If you ever tried to host videos yourself, you'll quickly see that it costs a stupid amount of money to manage. Why would a standalone YouTube LLC. allow anyone to access it with an adblocker and without subscription?

(People seem to lose their mind on HN every time someone even tries to recommend something as ridicolous as paying for YouTube.)

Re: Adblock Plus and (a little) more

#36
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't mind paying for YouTube if its subscription cost was anywhere close to reasonable.

I wouldn't mind paying for youtube if I wasn't already paying for it because they are stealing my data.

Noone is stealing anything from you, you just made this up to feel better about your freeloading.

If you gave a shit, you wouldn't use YouTube.

Re: Adblock Plus and (a little) more

#37
post #2

This may be controversial but YouTube ads are surely ones that meet all the reasonable criteria. They're not a surprise, you know it's an ad supported business. They're served from YouTube so it's not random companies tracking you while you use a different service. And you can get rid of them by paying for the service. What's the proposed alternative where you contribute for the service? Just paywall the whole thing?

>They're not a surprise.

Ha! Try getting 10 minutes into this example and not bring surprised by a fucking pasta ad. https://

Re: Adblock Plus and (a little) more

#38
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative might be Google paying their fair share of taxes. I might consider supporting their product then. Ad blocking is not as severe as tax avoidance though. I have no sympathy for the service. If it's not profitable, Google can cover it from their other revenue streams with ease.

That sounds like one of these reasons that people come up with to justify their unwillingness to pay. Are you also boycotting every other large company that uses the tax system in a legal way that you don't agree with? I'm all for big companies paying their fair share, but I'm not blaming the company, I'm blaming the people in charge who don't close these loopholes. Same issue as with Ireland in the EU, undercutting…

The mental contortions freeloaders do to feel better about themselves are always fascinating to watch on HackerNews.

Somehow it seems really hard for people here to be honest with themselves and admit that they really just want YT for free and someone else (Google) to shoulder the cost. And they also whant to rant at Google while they pay for their services. :)

Re: Adblock Plus and (a little) more

#39
post #3

Never forget that Adblock Plus is a commercial product developed by a company which you can pay to get your ads listed as "acceptable ads" which makes them pass the filtering. uBlock Origin is still probably the best tool for blocking ads: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/

i love ublock origin and have used it for years. i recently migrated to macos and was disappointed to find that ublock origin doesn’t work with safari.

what’s the best ad-blocking option for safari on macos?

Re: Adblock Plus and (a little) more

#40
post #3

Never forget that Adblock Plus is a commercial product developed by a company which you can pay to get your ads listed as "acceptable ads" which makes them pass the filtering. uBlock Origin is still probably the best tool for blocking ads: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/

i love ublock origin and have used it for years. i recently migrated to macos and was disappointed to find that ublock origin doesn’t work with safari. what’s the best ad-blocking option for safari on macos?

The first thing that came to mind was "switch to Firefox". Other than that, I have nothing to recommend.
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