Live data from Hacker News

Adblock Plus and (a little) more

blog.adblockplus.org

41–50 of 132 posts

Re: Adblock Plus and (a little) more

#41
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.

Afaict top of funnel ads don't need engagement, they are mostly to spread brand awareness and they influence you in ways other than immediate conversion. That seems to be what most Youtube ads are.

Re: Adblock Plus and (a little) more

#42
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?

I heard good things about Wipr (paid product) but don't use it myself on OSX.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wipr/id1320666476?mt=12

Re: Adblock Plus and (a little) more

#43

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.

Which means eventually they will do something desperate like using WASM on the all pages or requiring DRM trusted by a TPM chip. And adblockers won't work anymore. We are loosing control over the client a little bit more everyday, and given the new generation know only locked down devices, they don't even notice.

Just curious, what more can they do with WASM to prevent ad blockers? Can they prevent an extension that blacks out the ad and waits until it plays out for example?

Re: Adblock Plus and (a little) more

#44
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?

I am not responsible for sustaining Google's monetization. There is no such social contract. If their business model isn't sustainable, they should find a new one. That's their problem, not mine.

You're not, and they're not responsible for delivering you video if you don't want to pay them or watch ads. I'm not sure what's contradictory here.

Re: Adblock Plus and (a little) more

#45
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?

Why not just use Firefox? It's available on macOS.

Re: Adblock Plus and (a little) more

#46
post #35
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

> 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?

Why would anyone host a peertube instance?

https://instances.joinpeertube.org

Re: Adblock Plus and (a little) more

#47
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?

I currently use 1blocker(paid version) and it seems to be working pretty well compared to Firefox with ublock. I use it both on iOS and macOS.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/1blocker-ad-blocker/id13655310...

Re: Adblock Plus and (a little) more

#48
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why not just use Firefox? It's available on macOS.

Firefox has poor battery life on macos.

Re: Adblock Plus and (a little) more

#49

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.

I wonder at what point will Google start splicing ads directly into the video feed? Surely there's a way to do it without transcoding the entire file again.

Re: Adblock Plus and (a little) more

#50
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 learned the other day that the developer(s ?) of uBlock origin don't even accept donation. That's a really dedicated behavior for someone owning on app installed on probably a million devices, that could make money in an instant if he wanted to.
Post reply on HN