The adblocking revolution is months away • Hacker News Board

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#71

Post by noxToken » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 1:24 PM UTC

forgetsusername wrote: post #17

vilmosi wrote: post #5

The overall article is of good quality but it reeks of Apple bias I personally find distasteful. >>> User experience is what Apple puts above pretty much everything else, and they’ve decided that they don’t like it the experience available through the ad-supported web, and so they’re going to do something about it. The reason Apple does this is to push content creators away from the Web and into native apps. Apple ge…

> I'll bet Apple won't consider "Install from Apple Store" type messages as ads. " Which for me, is the worst kind. When you accidentally click an ad (sometimes unbeknownst to you) and suddenly the browser is closing and iTunes is opening, trying to get you to install Game of War... That said, if ad-blocking works on iOS, I think much of what he writes comes true. It will be interesting.

The worst are pop up ads that occur in the middle of rapid tapping. Multiple taps can register be the OS responds. At least on Android, it will launch a new tab for each tap on the ad with each tab attempting to launch the Play Store. This is mostly confined to mobile games, but it can also happen when trying to quickly scroll.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#72

Post by pjc50 » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 1:24 PM UTC

blinkingled wrote: post #36

How long will this revolution last if content providers decide to not show content to iOS users? I mean if they exist to make money and they can't on iOS would it matter that there were hundreds of millions of them? With ad blocking it would be as if they never existed in first place. Perhaps the idea is for Apple to get the content providers to make apps so they get their cut? Perhaps it is better for the content pr…

It might not be a bad thing if it did trigger a more above-board means of both paying for content and producing content that people want to pay for. At the moment it's a clickbait race to the bottom.

Also, bear in mind that we're having this discussion on an ad-free website.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#73

Post by blinkingled » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 1:25 PM UTC

robmcm wrote: post #62

blinkingled wrote: post #36

How long will this revolution last if content providers decide to not show content to iOS users? I mean if they exist to make money and they can't on iOS would it matter that there were hundreds of millions of them? With ad blocking it would be as if they never existed in first place. Perhaps the idea is for Apple to get the content providers to make apps so they get their cut? Perhaps it is better for the content pr…

This is the start of an arms race. I expect by the time this launches there will be tools provided by the ad-networks to detect blockers and allow the content provider to block access.

Exactly - that will hurt the UX like nothing else ever has. If people find out web sites don't work on their phone or tablet - the dumping of that platform to the competitor will be rather quick. Partly why Windows Phone didn't fly was IE - the websites looked crap compared to WebKit based browsers. Microsoft had to do unprecedented stuff like emulating WebKit to get over it.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#74

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 1:25 PM UTC

profinger wrote: post #42

forgetsusername wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ads with tiny close buttons I recently encountered an ad with a tiny close button that jittered , making it impossible to touch without triggering the ad popup. How clever.

Which is why people want to block them completely lol

Indeed. If you, as a content provider, depend on such ads then I'm sorry, but your business deserves to die.

I wonder how long it takes for people to learn that they can earn money by not being assholes to their customers?

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#75

Post by Nexxxeh » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 1:25 PM UTC

fvdessen wrote: post #2

I've been a happy Android user for a long time, but mobile ads are so bad that I'm seriously considering switching to iOS just for the adblocking.

If you're on Android, there are so many possible different solutions to the problem. You're not crippled to what Apple deem fit for you to have.

Off the top of my head, I can think of four more, other the suggestions in that blogpost.

- Firefox + uBlock. (Superb. Best mobile browsing experience.)

- Xposed Framework and something like UnbelovedHosts. (Probably root required)

- Ad-Free Time with MobiDNS. (Like $3 a month, additional benefits included. VPN/DNS redirect hybrid.)

- An ad-blocking proxy or VPN.

You aren't stuck waiting for a solution from a competitor that's late to the party.

We've been blocking adverts on Android for longer than Apple have let users change their onscreen keyboards...

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#76

Post by threeseed » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 1:26 PM UTC

blinkingled wrote: post #36

How long will this revolution last if content providers decide to not show content to iOS users? I mean if they exist to make money and they can't on iOS would it matter that there were hundreds of millions of them? With ad blocking it would be as if they never existed in first place. Perhaps the idea is for Apple to get the content providers to make apps so they get their cut? Perhaps it is better for the content pr…

> How long will this revolution last if content providers decide to not show content to iOS users?

Good luck with that. iOS users make up a significant percentage of web traffic and are demographically the most valuable (generally of a higher socio-economic status). By alienating them they won't be coming to your site which means no opportunity to upsell them to a paid version of the content.

Advertisers don't deserve much sympathy from me. They have trashed the customer experience.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#77

Post by patrickaljord » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 1:27 PM UTC

dmritard96 wrote: post #60

And the Ad-network rearchetechture is probably already built. The way all of these adblockers are typically implemented is an IP/DNS Name black list where the requests to those locations are stopped short. There is a super simple solution though, those who want to leverage ads for revenue can just bundle the advertising material into the content of the page rather than including the ads via third party ajax calls. Su…

Indeed, I'm surprised that people never mention this. Google probably has been working on this for a while now. Just bundle the ad and the video in the same stream and check timing to see if the ad has been watched or clicked on, same could be done for text ads, just serve them from the same ip as regular results, at least on mobile native apps. They're probably not pushing it for now as adblocking is not yet that much of a problem on their bottom line and they don't want to give hackers the time to work around these anti-adblocking techniques.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#78

Post by blinkingled » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 1:27 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #72

blinkingled wrote: post #36

How long will this revolution last if content providers decide to not show content to iOS users? I mean if they exist to make money and they can't on iOS would it matter that there were hundreds of millions of them? With ad blocking it would be as if they never existed in first place. Perhaps the idea is for Apple to get the content providers to make apps so they get their cut? Perhaps it is better for the content pr…

It might not be a bad thing if it did trigger a more above-board means of both paying for content and producing content that people want to pay for. At the moment it's a clickbait race to the bottom. Also, bear in mind that we're having this discussion on an ad-free website.

> Also, bear in mind that we're having this discussion on an ad-free website.

That's a totally wrong comparison however. Nothing fits.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#79

Post by AlexMuir » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 1:28 PM UTC

I completely understand why people use Adblock - it improves the user experience. Ironically hiding adverts is a just a side-effect; the improvement comes from speeding up page loads, and cutting down on cpu usage and bandwidth use. (I install Adblock for my mother to stop her seeing scams, but that's another thing entirely.)

I've spent the past week optimising How a Car Works for speed (mobile is 55% of our traffic now).

The average uncached weight of an article is 1.1 MB, of which 70% is Google Adsense and Facebook (the only two 3rd party scripts I include). I can't trim it any further and it's very frustrating - suggestions welcome btw.

Almost the only suggestions that Google's Page Speed tool has left are to minify the scripts that Google and Facebook themselves are serving.

I use Adsense because it's easy, pays fine, and the ads seem reasonably relevant. But the weight of crap being downloaded is absurd and I hate the idea of wasting some Kenyan's precious data allowance on an irrelevant advert that might earn me $0.01.

In fact, I'm going to use geolocation to not include Adsense in countries where I earn nothing.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#80

Post by zubspace » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 1:29 PM UTC

cognivore wrote: post #39

>> If the site generates the ad, it’s suddenly a lot harder to block. Seems to me that this is the loophole in the entire ad-block plan. Seems like it'd be relatively straightforward to make a system that pulls in the ads from various sources, brings them locally, and then displays them from the website's domain. Seems so obvious I'd think someone is already doing it.

What I would love to see is putting this whole advertising market into the hands of the webmasters. A system installed on the webserver, where the webmaster offers ad-space which can be bought directly by the advertiser. Ads will be hosted from the same url as the page. I believe, this could be a win-win situation for the website owner and the advertiser.

- More revenue for websites

- Better adds, because webmasters are interested in keeping their site nice and clean.

- To spice this up, there could be a central authority which simply brings together those offers.

The only one who loses are current ad networks.