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AdTrap removes ads between your modem and router

kickstarter.com

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Re: AdTrap removes ads between your modem and router

#41

Post by jakejake »

jrabone wrote: post #22
webjunkie wrote: post #7

No ads on the Internet? Seriously, how do you think the economy would work without ads? If everyone got one of these, I could tell my boss on monday to close the company.

Good. It's time for a better business model. Ads suck - they're badly implemented, bloated, bug-ridden, privacy invading security holes at worst, and not much better at best. Every network I have admin for gets a Privoxy HTTP proxy by default and adblock plus/noscript/requestpolicy as strongly advised. My users love it. These guys are right - it's time for change.

I feel like most people are OK with a certain amount of ads when they're getting a free product.

The problem seems to me that a publisher with one ad makes 1x dollars. Then a marketing genius comes up with a great idea, lets put two ads on the page and make 2x dollars! The 2x dollars maybe lasts for a little while until the advertisers realize they aren't getting 2x the sales so the value of the ad goes down. Marketing genius gets another idea. Hey, how about three ads? Four ads? Pop-up ads..?! Now you just have an overload of cheap, crappy ads that everybody hates and people start figuring out ways to block them.

A better solution would be for smaller number of ads with higher cost to the advertiser. They would all be more valuable and get more clicks because we're not so over-saturated with ads.

I don't see how it could ever be that way due to human nature, greed, etc. But it would make a lot more sense.

Re: AdTrap removes ads between your modem and router

#42

Post by momoney »

derleth wrote: post #33
amalag wrote: post #32

I am willing to see ads in return for the free services I get. I get free TV shows without cable and free movies on Youtube. Really, what business model does this kickstarter project advocate?

> what business model does this kickstarter project advocate? One where ads are not so annoying people go to the trouble of buying this and setting it up. Malware ads, video ads, ads deliberately designed to fool people into thinking they have a virus and need to CLICK NOW! are all reasons why people would be considering going to the immense trouble of getting this little piece of gear and making it work for them.

There will always be new bad ads- so that's not a valid argument

Re: AdTrap removes ads between your modem and router

#44

Post by brigade »

spindritf wrote: post #36
Karunamon wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If I'm going to literally route all my network traffic through this device, how can I trust that it's not doing something nefarious? How do you know that your modem, router, and ISP aren't doing something nefarious? Somehow I doubt a product which explicitly does Bad Things© to your datastream will sell well.

> How do you know that your modem, router, and ISP aren't doing something nefarious? I run Linux on my router and encrypt traffic of any value beyond it. This being HN, it's probably not a particularly unusual setup. Which brings me to the most important question about that device, why not move its functionality to the router? Why yet another box?

If you're running a non-vendor version of Linux on your router, why would you buy this product in the first place? It isn't that hard to enable adblocking on e.g. DD-WRT.

Re: AdTrap removes ads between your modem and router

#45

Post by jiggy2011 »

hyperbovine wrote: post #9
webjunkie wrote: post #7

No ads on the Internet? Seriously, how do you think the economy would work without ads? If everyone got one of these, I could tell my boss on monday to close the company.

Radical new model: charge money in return for services. I'd gladly pay Google a nontrivial amount of money each month if it meant I could search and use Gmail without having to worry about them amassing enough personal information to predict the time and location of my bowel movements.

Works for some things, but what about the phpBB forum for enthusiasts of some obscure classic car that is run not-for-profit by an enthusiast who pays the hosting bill by running a few banner ads from a company that sells refurbed parts?

People who host these type of sites often give donate options but in most cases the donations would not cover the hosting costs.

Re: AdTrap removes ads between your modem and router

#46

Post by belorn »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #45
hyperbovine wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Radical new model: charge money in return for services. I'd gladly pay Google a nontrivial amount of money each month if it meant I could search and use Gmail without having to worry about them amassing enough personal information to predict the time and location of my bowel movements.

Works for some things, but what about the phpBB forum for enthusiasts of some obscure classic car that is run not-for-profit by an enthusiast who pays the hosting bill by running a few banner ads from a company that sells refurbed parts? People who host these type of sites often give donate options but in most cases the donations would not cover the hosting costs.

Most often, people who host these type of sites do it for free because they want to contribute to the community the site serves.

I honestly do not know why people are surprised by this. People who play sports (say football) have no issue driving kids to matches. People who goes to bars, sometimes buy a friend a beer.

In a internet community of 10-500 people, someone will have the spare 10$ for a domain name, and someone else will have a other spare 10$ for some server space. sometimes, its the same person. Server and domain names are not expensive, and is about the same cost of a few beers. If you spend hundred and hundred of hours on the site, work on the design and add new features to it, spending 20-30$ a month is basically a non-issue (just look at mmorpg players).

The problem arrives when those 200 people turn into 200k people, but then, the economy tend to change. Members fees, donations, t-shirts, and sponsorship tend to be the solutions in those situations. If you have a site for classic cars with 200k daily visitors, I doubt you will have a problem finding a sponsor, even if you have a no-ads policy. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if a car seller would not happily sponsor such community, and then send some nice profession images of "nice looking cars, just by chance available to be bought".

Re: AdTrap removes ads between your modem and router

#47

Post by jiggy2011 »

belorn wrote: post #46
jiggy2011 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Works for some things, but what about the phpBB forum for enthusiasts of some obscure classic car that is run not-for-profit by an enthusiast who pays the hosting bill by running a few banner ads from a company that sells refurbed parts? People who host these type of sites often give donate options but in most cases the donations would not cover the hosting costs.

Most often, people who host these type of sites do it for free because they want to contribute to the community the site serves. I honestly do not know why people are surprised by this. People who play sports (say football) have no issue driving kids to matches. People who goes to bars, sometimes buy a friend a beer. In a internet community of 10-500 people, someone will have the spare 10$ for a domain name, and some…

These sites can quickly start to cost more than the $10 or so and can ramp up to hundreds of $ a month quite easily. Not always something people have lying under their sofa. Many of these sites can have about 10-100x more lurkers than they do active users and also plenty of people who will pop up , ask one question and then be "kthnxbye".

Once you start selling merch , membership fees etc it will suddenly start to feel more like a business and require more effort on the part of the owner which they may well not have time for.

Besides ads for sponsors or popups saying "buy a T shirt!" will be just as annoying as other types of advertising.

Re: AdTrap removes ads between your modem and router

#48

Post by derleth »

momoney wrote: post #42
derleth wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what business model does this kickstarter project advocate? One where ads are not so annoying people go to the trouble of buying this and setting it up. Malware ads, video ads, ads deliberately designed to fool people into thinking they have a virus and need to CLICK NOW! are all reasons why people would be considering going to the immense trouble of getting this little piece of gear and making it work for them.

There will always be new bad ads- so that's not a valid argument

> There will always be new bad ads

So there will always be people who block ads, then. It's not an argument so much as a simple case of cause-and-effect.

Re: AdTrap removes ads between your modem and router

#49

Post by belorn »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #47
belorn wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most often, people who host these type of sites do it for free because they want to contribute to the community the site serves. I honestly do not know why people are surprised by this. People who play sports (say football) have no issue driving kids to matches. People who goes to bars, sometimes buy a friend a beer. In a internet community of 10-500 people, someone will have the spare 10$ for a domain name, and some…

These sites can quickly start to cost more than the $10 or so and can ramp up to hundreds of $ a month quite easily. Not always something people have lying under their sofa. Many of these sites can have about 10-100x more lurkers than they do active users and also plenty of people who will pop up , ask one question and then be "kthnxbye". Once you start selling merch , membership fees etc it will suddenly start to fe…

$0.10 per GB-month of provisioned storage $0.10 per 1 million I/O requests

Apply to above comment, and how large do you need to grow until hundreds of $ for a month? even if the cost goes up to 100$, isnt that like 5 beers?

Re: AdTrap removes ads between your modem and router

#50

Post by buro9 »

makira wrote: post #26
buro9 wrote: post #14

Interesting. Would love to see how they work on picking adverts out of SSL pages. Would also love to see how they deal with tracking and affiliates stuff in addition to banner adverts. That latter one is an issue for me, I've found some sites to be simply unusable if AdBlock or Ghostery is running in my browser. It's usually tracking code (LinkedIn Inbox is useless to me as are sites that add Omniture to their shop b…

You can block many ads on SSL pages just by denying any DNS resolving to hostnames associated with ads. But that won't catch everything.

That was the problem with the false negatives.

I noted a friend who used this http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/zero/

All looked good, but as it includes more than just banner advertisers (shock sites, tracking sites - privacy issues) he'd have more false positives than I did.

Ghostery and the like (browser plugins) are reasonably easy to just disable when you come across an instance that it breaks functionality in a web page. But using a hosts file or DNS block, it was much more opaque about why it was failing as you'd have to remember something you'd forgotten about: You've blocked this thing at the DNS level, it wouldn't resolve. Or more to the point, it would resolve to a local web server that served up zero bytes.

That's my worry with a black box on the line... how easy is it to override in those edge cases, and will they play safe by sticking just to known banner adverts and not tracking sites which are sometimes necessary parts of functionality (due to the fact that links are redirected via the tracking site).

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