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The adblocking revolution is months away

theoverspill.wordpress.com

221–230 of 355 posts

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How long will this revolution last if content providers decide to not show content to iOS users? Which begs the question: How long will content providers last if they decide to not show content to iOS users?

Someone has to pay the bills. It's conceivable that the iOS users are all loss-leaders telling their non-ad-blocking friends to read the article, but that's kind of stretching it.

Considering how ios is the last platform to gain ad blocking, something android, the majority platform has had for years, it's definitely stretching it.

I don't think anyone would be able to make that argument with a straight face.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'll bet Apple won't consider "Install from Apple Store" type messages as ads. Apple won't consider anything as ads. What they provided was the hooks for developers to implement "Content Blocking Safari Extensions" [1]. To quote the docs: "Your app extension is responsible for supplying a JSON file to Safari. The JSON consists of an array of rules (triggers and actions) for blocking specified content. Safari conver…

Apple provides hooks so that a web page can display an official, system supported "there is an app for this web site, tap here to download it" banner. I will bet $5 that Apple does not provide a way to block those.

Regardless of whether they are ads or not, they

  a) do not track you
  b) do not take up disproportionate amount of network bandwidth and CPU/battery
  c) do not interrupt your viewing after the initial scroll down
which is why I personally would be fine with not blocking those. That being said, I can understand why others might be annoyed by these 'reminders' and want to block them.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#223

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…

While in theory it is possible, in practice making it work smoothly over hundreds of content generation platforms and design templates would be much harder and marginal costs of adding ads to your site would increase significantly. It won't be "insert that piece of HTML code into your site" anymore.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#224

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 deserv…

"higher socio-economic status" - might be outside US but aren't the mobile subsidized in US. There was discussion in reddit about an article about Moto on how its going to change the way mobiles are purchased. One of the top commented reply was about people not willing to buy $400+ mobiles.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#225
post #173
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No it doesn't. This is some bizarre myth that keeps being perpetuated.[0] [0] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Does-uBlock-block-ads...

The problem is that even IF it did do this, it wouldn't help publishers. In fact it would probably hurt publishers because ad performance would take a hit. This would lower ad pay rates and possibly even sell-through.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web is 20 years old. I think if this was going to happen, it would have happened by now. Outside of a few niches, people just aren't willing to pay to read websites. What I could see happening is premium content being bundled by ISPs. Pay for X package from Y ISP, get content from A, B and C websites. Kind-of like how TV channels are bundled. In all likelihood though, I think advertising will continue as is. Adve…

What I could see happening is premium content being bundled by ISPs. Pay for X package from Y ISP, get content from A, B and C websites. Kind-of like how TV channels are bundled. That's a different can of worms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality

People need to stop using "net neutrality" whenever the idea of paying for something on the Internet comes up.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web is 20 years old. I think if this was going to happen, it would have happened by now. Outside of a few niches, people just aren't willing to pay to read websites. What I could see happening is premium content being bundled by ISPs. Pay for X package from Y ISP, get content from A, B and C websites. Kind-of like how TV channels are bundled. In all likelihood though, I think advertising will continue as is. Adve…

Before the web, it was quite standard for nearly everyone to pay for their daily newspaper. People obviously have no problem paying a little for the news. Take away quality free content, and natural human interest will lead to a successful pay model, possibly.

But newspaper carried ads as well. It is where i live.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#228
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adaway just modifies your /etc/hosts file to redirect ad domains to localhost. That definitely doesn't seem expensive...

Parsing a huge /etc/hosts for every single hostname lookup certainly is expensive.

It seems unlikely that it's actually implemented that way.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before the web, it was quite standard for nearly everyone to pay for their daily newspaper. People obviously have no problem paying a little for the news. Take away quality free content, and natural human interest will lead to a successful pay model, possibly.

True, but I don't think it necessarily follows that they'd pay for the same content digitally. One thing the web has shown us is that people still value tangible things differently to non-tangible things. You also have to consider the reason's people paid for newspapers... it might have been the only way to get reliable content... to purport a certain image, social status or political allegiance... to keep in-line wi…

Music is somewhat intangible and widely available for free, but it appears it is also moving to a pay subscription model successfully.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#230
post #215

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…

Try CloudFlare? That should get the page weight down a bit while costing you nothing.

He's not concerned about his bandwidth costs, but about the bandwidth costs (in both money and time) to the users.
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