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The adblocking revolution is months away

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Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#161

Post by x0 »

redblacktree wrote: post #131
zodPod wrote: post #25

>>Of course, at this point we should step back and ask “why were the adverts there in the first place?” Oh yes, because they help pay for the content. In some – well, many, almost all – cases, they pay for all of the content. Honestly? I don't give a crap. Too many places have abused it and thrown stupid crap in just so they can make money. Just like the idiots who are careless with fireworks and then states ban them…

When I'm presented with "answer a survey to continue" ads, I purposefully don't read the question and pick an answer at random. I hope others do the same, so that the survey results are entirely useless.

Well, I do as well, so that's two at least.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#162

Post by STRML »

AlexMuir wrote: post #79

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…

One optimization I do often - don't load the FB scripts until someone actually hovers over an FB like button or share box. 99.9% of the time, they never do. In the meantime, just mock the look of the button. We even mocked the like counts et al by polling FB's API from teh server.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#163

Post by quadrangle »

bargl wrote: post #144

Yesterday I started looking for an ad blocker that would randomly click ads in some of the sites I visit so as not to punish the website for the ads they are adding. I couldn't find anything, does anyone know if that exits?

https://dhowe.github.io/AdNauseam/

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#164

Post by bargl »

austerity wrote: post #150
bargl wrote: post #144

Yesterday I started looking for an ad blocker that would randomly click ads in some of the sites I visit so as not to punish the website for the ads they are adding. I couldn't find anything, does anyone know if that exits?

Why do you think punishing the advertisers is any better? They seem to be even less deserving of it.

Honestly I haven't fully formed my opinion on this, I was really just curious. It sounds like an interesting problem.

Right now, I tend to lean toward the idea that rather then fighting people tracking me I'd prefer to add white noise so they can't really tell where I'm at, but I really prefer this more for GPS then ads. I don't really care if ads know what I'm doing, if I want someone who won't track my searches I go to duck duck go.

EDIT: If I REALLY don't want to be tracked I go to TOR + VPN, but I don't typically want to go through all that.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#165

Post by quadrangle »

Vexs wrote: post #151
AlexMuir wrote: post #79

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…

Thats one of the reasons I like uBlock origin- supposedly, it says the ad was displayed/clicked on a webpage, which means I don't deal with ads and websites don't deal with money loss.

uBlock doesn't click ads in the background.

That would be https://dhowe.github.io/AdNauseam/

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#166

Post by u02sgb »

pakled_engineer wrote: post #47
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 have SU/root, or build your own system.img you can use a hosts file to kill 99.9% of all in-app ads or apparently Adblock Plus has this feature too. The only time my hosts file failed was some simple weather app that refused to work when it detected no access to it's ad server so I rewrote it myself. If you don't have root you can build your own VPN that can kill all ad traffic, a service that offers this must…

I use Privoxy at home to block Ads, only works connected on wifi at home but it's easy to setup.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#167

Post by e40 »

Steko wrote: post #152
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…

> The reason Apple does this is to push content creators away from the Web and into native apps. This is baloney, Apple hosts free apps at a loss. The idea that Apple wants you to have an app for every website is absolutely ridiculous. Safari is one of the most used iOS apps today and will be so for at least the better part of the next decade. > Bullshit. They have their own advertising network they want to push. iAd…

iAds is a rounding error on Apple's business.

It may be now, but I'll bet they don't think it will be in the future.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#168

Post by yc1010 »

dmritard96 wrote: post #96
pjc50 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently the reason they're loaded separately in the first place is fraud detection. Bundling it into the page provides no easy way of independently verifying impressions.

That makes some sense. So if I understand the logic, loading the resource (perhaps executing some js) = verified impression. Its interesting because it seems like you could come up with some sort of phone home to the original contents domain to validate the ad loaded as well. So it sounds like the real innovation here is going to be figuring out a way to validate impressions through the content sites. It doesn't seem…

This can be done with Pay per action and referral links

such as site X has sent us 1000 users and 10 of those have signed up so we pay them for these 10 signups/purchases whatever

interestingly amazon are the leaders here...

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#169

Post by LoSboccacc »

Mobile Safari account for 10% of the whole browser market share (desktop + mobile) and ALL other platform already had the possibility of installing an adblocker, so I don't share the sensationalism of the article.

what is pushing the adblockers is the resurgence of annoying ads that spam windows all over the place and/or redirect the current page to a temporary site.

internet population at large can now use a search engine and look up 'block annoying advertisement' (first result, adblock plus) and 90% of them are in a position of installing an adblocker, Mobile Safari is just jumping late on the trend because awareness of it's customer, not because apple is ahead of the game.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#170

Post by Steko »

ethbro wrote: post #159
microtonal wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's too simple. Apple (and others) have relentlessly tried to optimize power saving. People like phones with a good battery time, plus I assume that there can be significant cost saving if you can use smaller capacity batteries. They have probably come to a point where a significant amount of power use during mobile browsing is caused by ads (both rendering and the extra network use that it incurs). Blocking ads c…

While this pay be true, at some point profit trumps UX. Look at how the iPod+iTunes morphed as soon as Apple realized how much money could be generated by adding DRM and a store.

Come on, Apple didn't want DRM, labels insisted on it.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080107121341/http://www.apple....

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