Pi-hole: A black hole for Internet advertisements • Hacker News Board

Re: Pi-hole: A black hole for Internet advertisements

#71

Post by gcthomas » Thu, May 30, 2019, 2:47 PM UTC

jamiequint wrote: post #58

zelon88 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with the "old" way, where you visit a Mopar automotive related website and saw Mopar car part ads? Or when you visit a computer magazine and saw ads for computer parts? Or when you went to NYT and saw basic shit like paper towels and fall fashion? It became a problem when everyone and their sister started needing to know what kinds of kinks I'm into just to sell me dish detergent.

> What's wrong with the "old" way A couple things: 1. It facilitates a world in which only large content providers, who can afford to individually sell ads to advertisers, to exist. There's a lot of overhead to ad sales and individual companies do not want to work with 1,000,000 providers, they want to work with 10-100. 2. It's substantially less efficient and only works for brand advertising or mass-market direct-re…

Tracking ads are collecting data on people without their explicit consent or knowledge. The trade in bulk personal data is a stain on the internet.

I am quite content to block these sorts of adverts and I'm not worried by the site's loss of revenue. I am not responsible for their slimy choice in business model.

Let's get back to context based adverts like DuckDuckGo use. There was no need for the internet to take this path - it only did so to rapidly monetise after the dot-com bust blew their VC funded rapid growth plans out of the water.

Re: Pi-hole: A black hole for Internet advertisements

#72

Post by bilal4hmed » Thu, May 30, 2019, 2:48 PM UTC

m3rc wrote: post #69

bilal4hmed wrote: post #16

With all the fervor around ad-blocking what I fail to see is how do you propose those sites that you visit, read their content to make money ? Are you willing to pay every site you visit or encourage them to put up pay walls ??

I bought a TV that, because of the pihole, I know phones home approximately once every thirty seconds about my viewing habits. In the world we live in something like a pihole isn't an ideological position, it's a necessity to not have everything we do end up rolling into someone else's ad profile on my household.

blocking your TV from dialing home is reasonable. You have paid for the TV and thats the end of the transaction. It would be another story if you took the TV for free in exchange for ads :)

Re: Pi-hole: A black hole for Internet advertisements

#73

Post by txcwpalpha » Thu, May 30, 2019, 2:49 PM UTC

bilal4hmed wrote: post #32

scohesc wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have to care about if they make money or not. That's not my business. If they want to make money, they'll shift to other profit models that don't involve intrusive tracking and annoying advertisements.

would you support paywalls ?

If the site maintains a standard level of quality of content where their paywall is worth paying, sure. But I think the vast majority of sites (think your average Medium blog, many 'news' sites, or tabloid sites) don't meet that standard, and are probably terrified of the thought of nobody willingly signing up for their subscriptions.

Re: Pi-hole: A black hole for Internet advertisements

#74

Post by mises » Thu, May 30, 2019, 2:49 PM UTC

ChikkaChiChi wrote: post #65

stevesearer wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what we do at Office Snapshots ( https://officesnapshots.com ). We post about office design and our ads are primarily for office furniture or other services related to the industry. We also self-host the ads which are non-animated jpgs and sell them without using any ad networks. What you describe works well for us :)

What type of overhead is associated with this? Are you experiencing an increase in server costs? What about the resources it takes to build those relationships, maintain the content, or manage the infrastructure? I'm very interested in learning more...

I'm also wondering how revenue compares. Every one clearly seems to think that "perosnalized" ads are worth more; can you offer any insight into if you make more or less with personalized vs your approach?

People seem to have forgotten that users are most likely to be interested in what they are currently reading, because it is what their mind is currently focused on.

Re: Pi-hole: A black hole for Internet advertisements

#75

Post by stevesearer » Thu, May 30, 2019, 2:51 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #60

zelon88 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with the "old" way, where you visit a Mopar automotive related website and saw Mopar car part ads? Or when you visit a computer magazine and saw ads for computer parts? Or when you went to NYT and saw basic shit like paper towels and fall fashion? It became a problem when everyone and their sister started needing to know what kinds of kinks I'm into just to sell me dish detergent.

One big problem with entirely static ads is that websites are global but the ads running on them are for brands that are likely local (at least to a specific country.) If I visit the NYT website in e.g. Norway, should I still see ads for an American brand of paper towel that doesn’t exist here; or should I see ads for Norway paper towel brands? The flip-side of this is that I’ve noticed that YouTube shows me PSAs fro…

This is a good question that I've thought about a lot because the services who advertise with us are regional.

We fully control and host our static ads and try to keep them high quality, so I've decided that minimally using IP to loosely serve a more relevant ad is okay. MaxMind offers a downloadable Geo IP database that we use to do this and are not needing a 3rd party service for this.

Re: Pi-hole: A black hole for Internet advertisements

#76

Post by canadapups » Thu, May 30, 2019, 2:51 PM UTC

stevesearer wrote: post #57

zelon88 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with the "old" way, where you visit a Mopar automotive related website and saw Mopar car part ads? Or when you visit a computer magazine and saw ads for computer parts? Or when you went to NYT and saw basic shit like paper towels and fall fashion? It became a problem when everyone and their sister started needing to know what kinds of kinks I'm into just to sell me dish detergent.

This is what we do at Office Snapshots ( https://officesnapshots.com ). We post about office design and our ads are primarily for office furniture or other services related to the industry. We also self-host the ads which are non-animated jpgs and sell them without using any ad networks. What you describe works well for us :)

We started doing that too, in addition to Google ads. We deal directly with the advertiser, self host a specific ad for them. It's MUCH more profitable than Google ads. Will phase out the Google Ads soon.

Minimal work involved. A bunch of emails back and forth, where we tell them our ad size if they provide an image. Or they provide a logo and we manually ad the text if they aren't technical enough to provide a custom image.

Re: Pi-hole: A black hole for Internet advertisements

#77

Post by f00_ » Thu, May 30, 2019, 2:51 PM UTC

bilal4hmed wrote: post #16

With all the fervor around ad-blocking what I fail to see is how do you propose those sites that you visit, read their content to make money ? Are you willing to pay every site you visit or encourage them to put up pay walls ??

They should just find a new business model, if their currently one can be bypassed so easily.

giantbomb.com sells premium subscriptions and merch and does okay

Re: Pi-hole: A black hole for Internet advertisements

#78

Post by wlll » Thu, May 30, 2019, 2:51 PM UTC

bilal4hmed wrote: post #32

scohesc wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have to care about if they make money or not. That's not my business. If they want to make money, they'll shift to other profit models that don't involve intrusive tracking and annoying advertisements.

would you support paywalls ?

I support them, in the sense that they don't particluarly bother me. When a site asks me for money to read an article or to subscribe I tend to just close the browser tab and do something else.

The thing is, most articles are a distraction, a diversion. Something I do instead of the thing I should be doing and as such they are very very low value to me.

Re: Pi-hole: A black hole for Internet advertisements

#79

Post by wlll » Thu, May 30, 2019, 2:52 PM UTC

bilal4hmed wrote: post #16

With all the fervor around ad-blocking what I fail to see is how do you propose those sites that you visit, read their content to make money ? Are you willing to pay every site you visit or encourage them to put up pay walls ??

I'll turn off my ad blockers when sites stop serving intrusive CPU burning malware laden memory hogging shit to me, which will be never.

Re: Pi-hole: A black hole for Internet advertisements

#80

Post by IceWreck » Thu, May 30, 2019, 2:53 PM UTC

HugoDaniel wrote: post #63

The pages you use the most serve some ads from their own domain. E.g. Youtube et. al. Also beware as most ads in your phone apps come from ad intermediaries that are either dynamic or constantly change. Pi-Hole is a cool project but please take in consideration those two when using it. We are far from the 90's in ad-tech.

Yes, this isn't the ultimate solution, but what you said is an overstatement. The biggies like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc serve ads from their own domains, but almost everything else uses an ad network which can be blocked.

> most ads in your phone apps come from ad intermediaries

I don't know about the intermediaries you are talking about, but all the ad-ridden proprietary mobile apps that I use (the ones that don't self host ads) are blocked by DNS based ad blockers.

The one thing that these DNS based ad blockers can't do however, is block in page annoyances which is why using an extension like uBlock Origin is still necessary.