Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The adblocking revolution is months away

theoverspill.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 355 posts

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#231

Post by misterbwong »

I've worked in the industry for some time and I can definitely say that this is a big problem for publishers and that it isn't going to turn out how everyone wants. Ads are huge business and the main source of revenue for lots of small-mid sized businesses.

I often see comments about how companies should move to a subscription (or pay per article) model but what you need to realize is that it will work for some (small number of) publishers, but is not tenable for most.

Adblock is just an annoyance to publishers right now but once the industry starts moving on this, you will see MORE intrusive ads, not less.

We're talking native in-content ads, "sponsored content" indiscernible from real content, first party scripts with evercookies...the works. Why? Because the publishing business is built on the 3rd party advertising model and this is the next logical evolution. Every publisher can't (and probably wouldn't want to) have their own sales, ad dev and ad servicing teams.

This is what happens when adblock gains popularity and, unfortunately, it's not pretty.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#232

Post by brazzledazzle »

dublinben wrote: post #142
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…

>I can't trim it any further It seems pretty obvious that you could reduce your page size by 70% by simply removing Google and Facebook scripts.

So obvious that they almost certainly considered it...

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#233

Post by skosch »

STRML wrote: post #162
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.

Related: Heise's Shariff JS. https://github.com/heiseonline/shariff

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#234

Post by kazinator »

Tinyyy wrote: post #199
kazinator wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apps can be written to refuse to run if they can't fetch their ads. This can be baked into compiled code. Apps can be written to download and cache ads periodically as part of their "update" process, and display these ads even when you don't have an internet connection. If they are not able to update these ads for some time (say 60 days), they can then refuse to run: "the application has expired and needs an update;…

I can also not use these kinda apps lol. Whats the point of putting in all these features to stop people if it merely results in an uninstall?

The point is that you may have a really good app that users want/need, and which presents ads, but in some unobtrusive way that users don't mind.

If you don't put in "anti-ad-circumvention" methods, then the ads will fall victim to some simple blanket blocking scheme that users set up before they even installed your app, not targetting your app specifically.

Analogy: a website with great content and very unobtrusive ads has them filtered by AdBlock anyway.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#235

Post by ionised »

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'm an Android user and I didn't really get bias from the article, save a bias against ads and a compliment to Apple for allowing Adblocking.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#236

Post by Domenic_S »

eevilspock wrote: post #219
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…

Another HN front page story compares Power usage of the worlds most popular websites calculated on different browsers : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9974615 While the article isn't about mobile versions of these browsers, it speaks both to the importance of this issue as well adds to the debate about whether "User experience is what Apple puts above pretty much everything else."

Power usage is interesting. I wonder if there's a case where an ad script consumes more $ in electricity per view than it generates in $ for the advertiser.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#237

Post by hammerzeit »

joesmo wrote: post #181

"But wait, what about the moral dimension? The fact that if you block the ads, the sites lose their income?" What a ridiculous point. Sure the advertisers want to make this into a moral issue, but is it? No. It's not. Advertisers just feel entitled. They are not actually entitled to display their ads or make money. Even bringing up this point like it's a valid point for debate drags the quality of the article down. A…

Forget ethical questions, then, and let's talk economics.

If you're not generating revenue for them, why should anybody who hopes to make money off of content choose to show you anything? What value do you represent to them? Why should they believe you?

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#238

Post by hammerzeit »

joesmo wrote: post #181

"But wait, what about the moral dimension? The fact that if you block the ads, the sites lose their income?" What a ridiculous point. Sure the advertisers want to make this into a moral issue, but is it? No. It's not. Advertisers just feel entitled. They are not actually entitled to display their ads or make money. Even bringing up this point like it's a valid point for debate drags the quality of the article down. A…

Forget ethical questions, then, and let's talk economics.

If you're not generating revenue for them, why should anybody who hopes to make money off of content choose to show you anything? What value do you represent to them? Why should they believe you?

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#239

Post by someuser1 »

unprepare wrote: post #214
kuni-toko-tachi wrote: post #84

"People are getting p*ssed off with the huge data loads pages impose without their consent" This is an absurd statement. Users know that many sites are ad-supported. Whether they like it or not is independent of that, but consent is given by visiting them. Complaining that sites need ad revenue to support their operations is childish. The fair solution is not ad-blocking tools, but a general browser settings that say…

>Doing an end-run around ads is no different that sneaking into the backdoor of a venue without buying a ticket. This is a curious statement. Tickets are sold in limited quantities Venues have limited available space Those alone make the comparison completely moot. A better comparison would be: If I video tape (download) a tv show (website), and then watch it by fast-forwarding through commercials (ad-blocking) - hav…

Going back to a statement I made in another comment: I DON'T WANT YOUR SHIT.

My argument is that ads are a waste of your bandwidth and my time. I've literally never been motivated to buy something by a banner ad.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#240

Post by vinbreau »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #149
vinbreau wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AT least many vloggers are moving to Patreon or similar services. I've funded vloggers whose content I've enjoyed and I've seen many make a living that way. I think that's the modal we should shoot for. You build an audience and then you monetize that audience in non-intrusive ways.

Indeed, even my favourite blogger whose articles I enjoy moved to Patreon and I'm planning to budget money for him from next paycheck :). I'm much happier to support people this way than through ads. I'll be very happy to pay for content now that I am an adult and earn money (there's a problem though; I owe my career in part thanks to a lot of free content I could use as a kid). But I suspect that prices will have to…

"Or maybe this will finally incentivize people to build their websites to attract and keep customers instead of clickbaiting and carpet-bombing with unwanted ads."

This is it. We're suffering from the effects the "Content is king" mantra. Instead of sites having highly focused content, the drive is to constantly have fresh content. It's easy for a monthly magazine to have focused content due to the schedule. When a site has to have new content every single day, or worse, multiple pieces of content every day, of course that's going to lead to excessive fluff of all sorts. The sites with the best content I visit seem less concerned with frequency and more focused on quality. We're in a quantity > quality phase of the web.

Post reply on HN