I see new ad/paywall hybrids springing up, whereby adblock users are detected and presented with a paywall / donation / nag screen and regular users are shown display ads.
Ask HN: What will happen when everybody uses an ad blocker?
51–60 of 63 posts
Re: Ask HN: What will happen when everybody uses an ad blocker?
#52Research 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…
Twitch.tv, a live streaming site, has Adblock rates of around 60% (unclear if that just means 40% fill rate) due to the obtrusiveness and frequent over-use of ads by streamers.
The Starcraft website Team Liquid also has around a 60% block rate despite actively encouraging people to disable Adblock on their site and having very minimal advertising.
Sources:
A League of Legends team manager on Twitch.tv Adblock rates: http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/1ewq95/totalbiscu...
And a Team Liquid admin: http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/1ewq95/totalbiscu...
Re: Ask HN: What will happen when everybody uses an ad blocker?
#53That ads will be directly served from the same server where the content resides, and thus be indistinguishable from content?
If it can be identified by any mechanical means, including by element xpath, by id, by class, by CSS properties, by the fact it got inserted after document load, by OCR of the image... then it can be ad blocked. A "sufficiently smart" adblock could be as good at spotting ads as a human.
Re: Ask HN: What will happen when everybody uses an ad blocker?
#54I would imagine they'd move to some sort of out-of-band method, where the servers use something akin to WebHooks (or maybe just WebHooks themselves) in order to rotate their ad stock, rather than loading the ad on-the-fly from a 3rd party site upon each visit. This would allow them to maintain an ad network while still serving the content from the same domain as the ad.
Re: Ask HN: What will happen when everybody uses an ad blocker?
#55The content (and ad) provider will provide a page of advertisement first, then count to ten, then release the content. User can choose to watch the ad, or (with ad blocking technology) a blank screen for ten seconds.
This is already being done with videos.
Re: Ask HN: What will happen when everybody uses an ad blocker?
#56That ads will be directly served from the same server where the content resides, and thus be indistinguishable from content?
If it can be identified by any mechanical means, including by element xpath, by id, by class, by CSS properties, by the fact it got inserted after document load, by OCR of the image... then it can be ad blocked. A "sufficiently smart" adblock could be as good at spotting ads as a human.
How many false positives do you think users would tolerate with such smart algorithms?
Re: Ask HN: What will happen when everybody uses an ad blocker?
#57The web will simply stop being an effective advertising medium. No big deal. There are plenty of others.
Re: Ask HN: What will happen when everybody uses an ad blocker?
#58Interesting question. I really don't know the answer In real life, many of the people who are inclined to use an ad blocker are not the sort to click on ads anyway and are not providing advertisers with any significant revenue to lose. In fact it may save them a small amount by reducing server and bandwidth load. I suspect that you would never see adblockers used everywhere as it simply isn't the case that everybody…
> In real life, many of the people who are inclined to use an ad blocker are not the sort to click on ads anyway and are not providing advertisers with any significant revenue to lose.
This. I recently had an opportunity to chat with the CEO of a well-known blogging platform company and his attitude was that, first, the number of people who actually use ad blockers is much smaller than you'd think, and second, for the type of person who uses an ad blocker, you're not doing yourself any good by doggedly trying to put ads in front of them. If getting people to look at your site is one of your core goals, the fact that some of those people aren't necessarily going to benefit you directly via ad revenue is just a given. They can still benefit you indirectly by helping your site's popularity: enjoying it, linking to it, sharing from it, etc. In effect, "don't worry about it."
I don't think we'll ever get anywhere near 100% ad-blockers. I've never bothered with one and I'm perfectly happy with it. It's a somewhat self-limiting problem because I just end up avoiding sites whose ads are too obnoxious, so it's in the advertisers' best interest to reel it in to the point of tolerability. I suspect a lot of people are like me in that the ads are not enough of an annoyance to want to do anything about them.
Re: Ask HN: What will happen when everybody uses an ad blocker?
#59What will happen when everybody uses an Ad Blocker? I can think of two positives;
The Advertising Industry will finally wise up and realize that the consumers do not like having Ad's forced upon them interrupting their content. This will cause the Advertising Industry to Innovate (which is sorely needed, and good for business)
Online based Businesses will realize that Advertising is no longer an effective Business Model, which will lead them to charge for their content and/or services. Over time this will eliminate the concept of Freemium and reinforce the concept of paying for stuff (which is sorely needed, and good for business)
Re: Ask HN: What will happen when everybody uses an ad blocker?
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it can be identified by any mechanical means, including by element xpath, by id, by class, by CSS properties, by the fact it got inserted after document load, by OCR of the image... then it can be ad blocked. A "sufficiently smart" adblock could be as good at spotting ads as a human.
How many false positives do you think users would tolerate with such smart algorithms?
There are a fair number of sites that simply don't work properly with adblock on. I load the page and I get a big grey blankness. I just shrug and move on - there's plenty more where whatever it was came from. It's well worth not having to look at ads.