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Ask HN: What will happen when everybody uses an ad blocker?

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Re: Ask HN: What will happen when everybody uses an ad blocker?

#32

Post by austenallred »

The same thing that happened when TiVo let you skip TV commercials.

If you're on ThePirateBay or are looking up song lyrics all the time you have good reason to use adblocker, but most ads sent intrusive enough for the average person to care about. Therefore there is no need for a tech arms race.

Popups were extremely annoying and came with malware that was on almost everybody's computers. But I highly doubt Adblock will ever reach anywhere near that level of saturation.

Re: Ask HN: What will happen when everybody uses an ad blocker?

#33

Post by threedaymonk »

Jhsto wrote: post #27

Websites start to prevent it. When I used to run a website only financed with ads, I managed to make non-blockable advertisements with some PHP scripting. I think I included the picture on my server, named it something like a book.png and setup a bit.ly redirect with PHP. It all worked even with ad-blocks on. Not sure though have adblocks advanced a lot since then.

It's really easy to thwart ad-blocking at the micro level, as you've found. Third-party ad networks have to be much more predictable, which makes them a lot easier to block.

In some ways, it's the same as with comment spam: if you have a common interface or you're a large enough target, people will write code against you.

Re: Ask HN: What will happen when everybody uses an ad blocker?

#34

Post by calbear81 »

_sabe_ wrote: post #22

Actually, the main reason I block ads is not because I can't stand ads, but because I don't want to be tracked and traced around the web, and also it turns out that as most of this ad-systems are based on extensive javascript and flash, blocking them makes most news sites load so much faster. There's a very easy way to solve this problem for websites, and that is to host the ads from the main site. That would make it…

"There's a very easy way to solve this problem for websites, and that is to host the ads from the main site."

It's not that simple. Almost all display ads are served through 3rd party ad servers like Doubleclick, Zedo, etc. because advertisers want the ability to:

- Control and change what ads they are serving without contacting hundreds or thousands of different site owners and coordinating mass creative changes. This is why ad networks exist. This includes controlling which creative gets served and optimizing for serving the best creative (ad + copy) when they figure things out.

- Account for frequency and reach correctly. By having a 3rd party serve your ads, you have insight across the web by "user" so you can cap the frequency. I don't want to hit you with 100 impressions per day so having global knowledge of how many times you've seen the ad helps eliminate waste.

- Account for impression based conversions / goals. You can correlate goal conversions on your own site with impressions and clicks so you can see if people who saw your ads but did not click behave differently than people who did click. This also gives you the ability to do multi-channel attribution so you can detect if impressions impact your SEM campaigns or do they increase direct-type-in traffic to your site, etc.

Re: Ask HN: What will happen when everybody uses an ad blocker?

#35

Post by metastart »

Subscription Models Could Emerge.

There are already tens of millions of folks using ad blocking.

Anti-ad-blocking technology is not difficult to implement. OKCupid had nice messages asking for donations to adblock users. Reddit thanks users for not blocking ads.

I think that if adblocking grows, a system will come up where users pay a monthly fee to not see ads on content sites & that fee is distributed among the sites. Something like flattr I think is doing something like this.

I think this model could be implemented today if you could get several big media/net companies behind the effort.

The current state where Google pays AdBlock a whole bunch of money to unblock their ads isn't really cool - I think this subscription model would be a win for publishers, win for adblock (revenues), win for users (at least in developed countries, making payments is relatively easy/we're used to it & most want to support content/music/filmmakers,etc.!)

[Disclosure: I am the founder of the Epic Privacy Browser which blocks ads because they almost always involve trackers/tracking]

Re: Ask HN: What will happen when everybody uses an ad blocker?

#37

Post by _sabe_ »

calbear81 wrote: post #34
_sabe_ wrote: post #22

Actually, the main reason I block ads is not because I can't stand ads, but because I don't want to be tracked and traced around the web, and also it turns out that as most of this ad-systems are based on extensive javascript and flash, blocking them makes most news sites load so much faster. There's a very easy way to solve this problem for websites, and that is to host the ads from the main site. That would make it…

"There's a very easy way to solve this problem for websites, and that is to host the ads from the main site." It's not that simple. Almost all display ads are served through 3rd party ad servers like Doubleclick, Zedo, etc. because advertisers want the ability to: - Control and change what ads they are serving without contacting hundreds or thousands of different site owners and coordinating mass creative changes. Th…

I do understand this, but then again you can't both have the cake and eat it too. At the end of the day, maybe it's better to have ads at all if the alternative is getting blocked by users.

Re: Ask HN: What will happen when everybody uses an ad blocker?

#39

Post by pagefair »

Research has shown that the problem is becoming an epidemic, with publishers losing an average of over 20% ad revenue due to ad blocking software. Tech and Gaming websites, along with other sites with a more tech savvy audience, are hit the hardest, with block rates sometimes over 50%.

With the current online advertising model, ad blocking will force publishers to take drastic measures that we as users do not want. We can shut down the ads, but the content will still have to be funded. We as users will still have to pay to view that content. Only in the future, instead of paying passively (by viewing ads), we will pay actively, being forced to deal with things like paywalls, freemium models, and subscriptions.

You can view our brand new report on adblocking here- http://blog.pagefair.com/2013/the-rise-of-adblocking/

Re: Ask HN: What will happen when everybody uses an ad blocker?

#40

Post by mey »

pagefair wrote: post #39

Research has shown that the problem is becoming an epidemic, with publishers losing an average of over 20% ad revenue due to ad blocking software. Tech and Gaming websites, along with other sites with a more tech savvy audience, are hit the hardest, with block rates sometimes over 50%. With the current online advertising model, ad blocking will force publishers to take drastic measures that we as users do not want. W…

I as a consumer prefer to pay for my content, the primary issues I have with ads.

  - A violation of privacy
  - Content creators' incentives are not for me the consumer.  Important in editorial contexts
  - An impairment of my computer systems, between another attack surface to being resource intensive.
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