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Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

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Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#151

Post by birdyrooster »

Blackthorn wrote: post #137

I posted this deep in a thread but feel like it should be a higher level comment so here we go. Websites can be so ridiculously short sighted and just want to squeeze out every penny they can not thinking of the users they end up losing in the process. And they do lose users And fast. Personal experience time! I ran a pretty popular wiki for Dungeons and Dragons homebrew on what used to be called Wikia. At some point…

This reminds me of A/B testing that likely was the method Google unwittingly used to obfuscate sponsored results in Search. The A/B test KPI they were measuring clearly was creating more click through to sponsored properties and it eroded trust and utility in exchange. I am sure they increased their short term Ad Words profits.

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#152

Post by binarytox1n »

Blackthorn wrote: post #137

I posted this deep in a thread but feel like it should be a higher level comment so here we go. Websites can be so ridiculously short sighted and just want to squeeze out every penny they can not thinking of the users they end up losing in the process. And they do lose users And fast. Personal experience time! I ran a pretty popular wiki for Dungeons and Dragons homebrew on what used to be called Wikia. At some point…

Uh... if you sold it, did you retain the rights to the content in the sale? If not, I'd say your users are going to have to suck it up.

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#153

Post by Blackthorn »

binarytox1n wrote: post #152
Blackthorn wrote: post #137

I posted this deep in a thread but feel like it should be a higher level comment so here we go. Websites can be so ridiculously short sighted and just want to squeeze out every penny they can not thinking of the users they end up losing in the process. And they do lose users And fast. Personal experience time! I ran a pretty popular wiki for Dungeons and Dragons homebrew on what used to be called Wikia. At some point…

Uh... if you sold it, did you retain the rights to the content in the sale? If not, I'd say your users are going to have to suck it up.

I didn't sell the content, I sold the site.

The content was all licensed to the wiki under CC-BY-SA. So even if I could have legally sold the content, which I couldn't have because I didn't own it, I and my users could fork it however we want.

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#154

Post by karatestomp »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #119
imhoguy wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Web Assembly is just a runtime, like obfuscated JS it is sandboxed and still needs to access some standard APIs to at least conform to CORS. I don't see a problem to let plugins/browsers control `window.fetch` or whatever connection method the WASM code is going to use.

Not going to work against a CDN delivering all content through a websocket.

IMO Cloudflare's a huge threat to Google for exactly this reason.

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#155

Post by Macha »

binarytox1n wrote: post #152
Blackthorn wrote: post #137

I posted this deep in a thread but feel like it should be a higher level comment so here we go. Websites can be so ridiculously short sighted and just want to squeeze out every penny they can not thinking of the users they end up losing in the process. And they do lose users And fast. Personal experience time! I ran a pretty popular wiki for Dungeons and Dragons homebrew on what used to be called Wikia. At some point…

Uh... if you sold it, did you retain the rights to the content in the sale? If not, I'd say your users are going to have to suck it up.

Nearly all wikis have content licensed under some form of creative commons. e.g. Gamepedia used CC BY-SA for older wikis and CC BY-NC-SA for new ones.

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#156

Post by anotherevan »

SignalsFromBob wrote: post #109

I feel that we've done ourselves a disservice by referring to them as ad blockers rather than content blockers or, better yet, virus blockers. With malicious ads being the primary vector for compromising a person's computer, calling these tools virus blockers would not only be more accurate, but it would make it harder for sites to counter their use from a public relations point of view. Could you imagine visiting a…

Yes, I call them HTML firewalls.

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#157

Post by dvh »

TranceMan wrote: post #59
bambax wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many websites indeed pester us to download their mobile app but I have yet to find one that forces me to? Do they actually exist?

I tried to use imgur on mobile to upload a random image today but couldn't［FireFox］ Using FF on my desktop worked fine.

That is the ultimate end of every free image hosting service.

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#160

Post by Scottn1 »

jakub_g wrote: post #110

I feel like the article is missing an important milestone about release of Brave browser for Android circa 2017/2018 (it's only briefly mentioned at the end). It changed the landscape on Android in my opinion: it was the first browser that was as good as Chrome (fast, same look & feel -- being a fork of Chromium -- plus regularly updated and having strong, credible technical team behind it) but also having ad blockin…

You have your timeline backwards. Opera was the first browser to implement a built-in native adblocker in 2016. Here is the blog announcement: https://blogs.opera.com/desktop/2016/03/opera-built-ad-block...

Opera was and actually continues to be a pioneering browser with many "firsts" over the years. I was an avid user of it for a decade but I am saddened that it has become surrounded in controversy with a shady Chinese owner and predatory loans and stopped using it two years ago.

https://www.engadget.com/2020/01/19/opera-accused-of-predato...

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