
Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson - GraemeL
https://adguard.com/en/blog/ad-blocking-history.html
======
Blackthorn
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 they decided they available needed to have some
terrible new skin that was stuffed with ads and unbelievable ugly. We pushed
back but they were adamant about forcing it, so I took all the content and all
the users and self hosted it for almost a decade afterward. The Wikia site was
completely dead. Sucks for them but their choice.

I paid $10/mo or $20/mo for the site depending on the year, and never ran ads.
At one point I got an offer from a company in the same hobbyist space to buy
it from me. At that point I was extremely sick of being my own sysadmin and
worrying about security vulns so I accepted it. Now some time later they're
trying to pull the "stuff it full of ads in the worst places!" routine. Users
are getting pissed and starting to ask me about taking all the content...and
users...and going off to a server adminned by me again.

If I do this, it will be completely devastating for the site and tank their
traffic. Do they care or realize? Guess we'll see.

All of this could be avoided if they just made the ads less shitty. Not
showing up in the middle of navigation bars. Not being bigger than the
surrounding content, so it completely stretches it and ruin's the site layout.
Not having a completely clashing background color to the site. All extremely
simple stuff.

~~~
rstuart4133
I occasionally go The Guardian's web site, and they displayed a nag say I
should not be blocking their way of making money out of a non-subscriber. I
thought "fair enough" and disabled my ad blocker. About 2 minutes later, which
is what it took for their web site to load with the ad blocker off, I turned
it back on again.

In the end solved my attack of the guilts by becoming a subscriber. However, I
had no sympathy for them no getting money form ads. That was totally self
inflicted. The ad blocker, the thing they were blaming, wasn't the problem.
Without the ad blocker I would not be visiting their site at all.

~~~
Nextgrid
When I see a site that attempts to stalk me (even if my countermeasures manage
to block it) the last thing I would do is to hand them my personal and billing
details on a platter, give them money, _and_ act as a "manual" tracking cookie
by logging into my account every time I visit the website (to bypass the
paywall).

At least beforehand the best they could do is to get pseudonymous network &
browser data (if they managed to get past my countermeasures like uBlock and
nasty IP ranges blocked at the network level), where as once I pay they now
have confirmed billing details they can do whatever they want with. If they
don't respect my privacy before I pay then I have no reason to trust they'll
suddenly respect it after I pay. Most likely they'll just attempt to have
their cake _and_ eat it, aka take my money and _still_ stalk me.

------
SignalsFromBob
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 web site only to have it tell you to disable your
virus blocker to view the web page? Yet, web sites make the same requests of
your "ad blocker" even though the end result is the same. They want you to
disable your security protections and risk infection to view a web page.[1]

Sadly, I believe we've already lost this battle and are worse off for it.

1\. [https://www.networkworld.com/article/3021113/forbes-
malware-...](https://www.networkworld.com/article/3021113/forbes-malware-ad-
blocker-advertisements.html)

~~~
robertlagrant
> 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.

I don't understand this. How are malicious ads the primary way to compromise a
computer?

~~~
korethr
It depends on the ad. In the before time, long ago, ads were a simple static
image or body of text. And in that case, while not impossible, it's rather
hard to compromise a computer with a static image or block of text. You'd have
to have a fairly specific image crafted to adversarially target a specific bug
in the rendering of images to get code execution, and thus compromise a
computer.

It is no longer the before time.

In the now time, ads frequently contain not just text or images, but
javascript as well. And already having code execution by virtue of javacript,
it is a _lot_ easier to escalate the privileges of that code execution from
the limited environment of the browser to installing code on the computer
running that browser. Want to deploy your bot? Buy an ad that includes your
malicious javascript payload. Now, anyone who goes to a site and views your ad
will execute your javascript for free in addition to your offer to sign them
up for credit score monitoring.

~~~
mobjack
Are there any ad networks that allow random advertisers to include custom
JavaScript in ads?

It just seems like a huge security hole and is not in the interest of ad
networks for multiple reasons.

They might have JS in ads, but isn't that from the ad network's
infrastructure.

~~~
teunispeters
Every single ad seller's been caught by companies selling these dangerous ads.
Google, yahoo, etc. They usually catch it within 3-5 days. That's too long.

------
mrspeaker
Great article! It's funny to finally see ad blockers go "mainstream".

My dystopian-future fear is that that Web Assembly will be the end of ad
blocking (and the end of a web of connected web sites). Big sites will
eventually convert to essentially "a web browser inside a web browser" so they
have total control over the content and how it's displayed.

Then ad blocking (and other customization) will be limited to "the analog
hole" \- trying to image detect or OCR things.

I hope I'm wrong, but I've also been asked countless times over the years to
"stop people copy/pasting our text" and "stop people seeing our code" and
"stop people downloading our images"... the browser-in-a-browser feels
inevitable!

~~~
ukoki
> Big sites will eventually convert to essentially "a web browser inside a web
> browser" so they have total control over the content and how it's displayed.

This has already happened: Just look at how many websites pester you to
download their mobile app or even block content unless you access from the
app. From a user functionality perspective the vast majority of apps do
nothing a browser can't do. But the killer feature for apps is how much easier
it is for the developer to get your location data, contact list, and
importantly show you unskippable, auto-playing, 90s-era-popup-level-annoying
ads

~~~
bambax
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?

~~~
ayushgp
Reddit forces you to download the app now. You can scroll like 2-4 pages worth
of content and then it'll pop up asking you to open in app.

On every page you navigate to from within the website you'll first get a pop
up asking to choose between browser and reddit app.

~~~
e2le
I'm using old.reddit.com and wasn't aware they started doing this. Reddit is
turning into a dumpster fire, it's bad enough I have to use the old UI so that
it doesn't burn a hole in the cpu.

~~~
virgilp
Forget the CPU usage, I only use the old UI because it's better/ I find it
more usable.

Or maybe I'm just getting old :D

~~~
e2le
I wont disagree there, it's not useable. I wonder what possessed them into
believing any of this was a good idea.

~~~
cwzwarich
The new UI increases the similarity between posts and ads, making you more
likely to mistakingly click on an ad.

------
jslabovitz
From the article:

> The very beginning of ad blocking is the 90s, just when the ads appeared. In
> 1993, GNN, the very first web advertising service, was launched. Then in
> 1994, the first-ever banner was sold. In the blink of an eye, the online ad
> industry was worth billions of dollars. Double Click emerged, Yahoo started
> to sell ads. And that's when the very first ad blocker was created.

GNN (Global Network Navigator) was not an advertising service. It was the
first commercial online magazine. O’Reilly & Associates, the publisher of GNN,
wanted to see if a website like GNN could be supported through commercial
sponsorship. GNN’s ads were informational — much more like whitepapers than a
display ads. (Wired’s HotWired site, which launched at almost exactly the same
time as GNN in the fall of 1993, invented the banner ad, which of course is
what most adblocking tech has targeted. Cookies for tracking didn’t come along
until later.)

Source: I worked on GNN as technical director, and in fact my first job there,
in the summer of 1993 about a month before we launched, was to assemble the
first ‘ad’ — a set of articles about intellectual property law, sponsored by
the now-defunct Bay area law firm Heller Ehrman.

~~~
lmm
> GNN (Global Network Navigator) was not an advertising service. It was the
> first commercial online magazine.

Isn't that the same thing? With a couple of exceptions, magazines are
advertising services first and foremost, in as much as the overwhelming
majority of their revenue comes from ads.

~~~
jslabovitz
I don’t want to argue about magazines (or newspapers) in general, since it
seems you have quite a cynical view there. I’d advise that you research common
standards of journalism, including the concept of the editorial/advertising
wall.

But I’ll tell you that the the existence of GNN itself, in 1993, was certainly
not for the purpose of serving ads. Heck, as I explained, online advertising
didn’t even _exist_ at that time (besides a few misguided attempts on Usenet),
so there was only conjecture that it might work at all, and lots of room to
experiment.

Also, there was really no other economic revenue model accessible to us, other
than sponsored content, as there were no online payment systems on the WWW of
that era. Heck, there weren’t really any active websites at all — almost all
sites (including GNN) were what we’d today call static sites. (As I mentioned,
cookies came later, so there was also zero targeting of ads besides basic
demographics of Internet users at the time.)

~~~
lmm
> I don’t want to argue about magazines (or newspapers) in general, since it
> seems you have quite a cynical view there. I’d advise that you research
> common standards of journalism, including the concept of the
> editorial/advertising wall.

My cynicism comes not from being ignorant of traditional newspapers but from
having been very close to them. My experience is that people (in any industry
really) may be decent, noble, and above any such influence on any conscious
level, and yet they will nevertheless show an almost magical tendency to act
in alignment with their economic interests, even when they seem to have
reached their position on wholly unrelated grounds.

------
bubblethink
So a survey article about adblocking without mentioning the main ad blocker in
the world (and their competitor), ublock origin. Well played! As for the
history lesson, the main meta lesson is that adblockers need to be completely
detached from any monetory incentives. No company, however noble, should be
trusted at all. Only open source + community ad blockers have survived and
flourished. Time and again, people have tried to make a quick buck by becoming
the middlemen in the adblocking industry by promoting their flavour of ads,
whitelisting ads, or just hijacking ads.

~~~
ameshkov
Sorry for that, we don't mind mentioning anyone, it's just there was no
historical event that we could tie to uBO. I'll ask the author to add a
footnote about uBO and others we missed to mention, we love them all.

upd: done

~~~
samatman
I haven't read the article, and I'm not what you'd call well-versed in the
history of ad blocking.

But even I know that uBlock was bought out and introduced 'acceptable ads',
and that uBlock Origin became the community fork which maintains the spirit of
the original uBlock.

That deserves more than a footnote, imho.

~~~
ripdog
Acceptable ads was introduced by adblock plus, and it remains their primary
revenue source.

uBlock is the original version of uBlock origin. Both were started by gorhill4
(sp?). Gorhill got sick of the constant support burden of people coming into
his repo and reporting unblocked ads, which he then had to redirect to the
filter list repos.

He handed the entire project off to some teenager with little programming
experience. Said teenager did little but make a new website and request
donations, core work basically halted.

Afterwards, gorhill got sick of seeing his old project be abandoned and get a
bad reputation, and forked it as uBlock origin.

Thus, uBlock origin is not a community fork.

------
izzydata
If I can't block the ads on a page I'm simply not going to visit it ever
again. I've never seen a website that was actually necessary for me to visit
that had ads or couldn't be blocked.

~~~
marssaxman
I feel the same. There is nothing on the web I need to read _so_ badly that I
am willing to put up with advertising to get it; I can just go waste my time
somewhere else.

------
einpoklum
Commercial companies being able to force themselves onto our consciousness is
unacceptable.

Personally, seeing ads in public spaces feels just like in totalitarian
countries you would see large portraits of the supreme leader or government
propaganda. Somehow this is legitimized because they're private corporations.
Not in my book.

More power to ad blocker authors, and a particular shoutout to:

* Raymond Hill of uBlock Origin fame: [https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/)

* The EFF, for blocking trackers and other 3rd party nasties with Privacy Badger: [https://www.eff.org/privacybadger](https://www.eff.org/privacybadger)

------
throwaway55554
Websites started off with a glass storefront and an open door. You kinda had
to poke your head in the door to look around to see if you wanted to go in.
Then the glass storefront had some sales prices shown. Then slowly you could
no longer even see the glass storefront for all the ads. Then the spinning
sign men showed up to annoy. Now, there's a bouncer with a clipboard blocking
you from getting in.

It's mostly just not worth the effort any more unless you have an ad blocker
in some form.

~~~
Agenttin
This is a really good metaphor.

------
mrlala
Who is honestly clicking on all these ads that makes advertising worthwhile?

I am honestly baffled sometimes how this all works... In my 30+ years of
internet usage in one form or another I have rarely, rarely, rarely ever
clicked on a freakin ad. Yes, I've generally had them blocked for the most
part. But when they aren't blocked, I see what the content is and why would I
even want to click on one!

Color me confused who is keeping the web running by clicking on ads.

~~~
tayo42
Part of me thinks theres an internet ad bubble. I think its really hard to
know how much value an ad provides, so it gets handwaved as being critical to
success and worth tons of money. A lot of big internet companies rely on ads
or provide services to companies that provide ads or make it easier to use
ads.

~~~
Nextgrid
I wouldn't say that ads are completely ineffective (there's a significant
chunk of the population that doesn't resent ads like we do, and will actually
click on them even if they're aware that they're ads), but I agree that
there's definitely a bubble going on.

I've seen many non-tech people search for a certain brand or product, and
despite it being the first non-sponsored search result, they will instead
click on the sponsored result/ad ad the top even though it's the same product.

The above causes the metrics and conversion rate to look great, so the waste
of oxygen that is the marketing department can justify their salary and
budget, the ad providers and all the ecosystem around it also gets paid, but
at the end of the day that ad wasn't _actually_ providing any value because
the user already had the brand in mind and only clicked the ad by mistake.

------
jsjddbbwj
I miss the days when barely anybody blocked ads. Those of us who did didn't
have to worry with defeating anti ad block systems.

~~~
gjsman-1000
uBlock Origin is shockingly competent at defeating those "please turn off your
adblocker" warnings.

~~~
Karunamon
On most sites, at least. There are a few out there that go well out of their
way to be annoying. Facebook likes to construct their ad text out of multiple
randomly-named divs. TVTropes uses randomized IDs on their ad popover.

~~~
boring_twenties
They seem to do this for more than just straight ads. I use uBlock Origin to
filter out the "Stories" div. It comes back every week or two.

------
paulie_a
Basically ad blocking makes the internet useful again. I am no longer
bombarded with popups or distractions. Therefore I won. Tracking is
pathetically useless on the internet. It's easy to screw with the metrics and
your "profile" but even without doing so tracking is simply snake oil

------
wespiser_2018
There is a great paper on the arms race between Ads and Ad Blockers out of a
group in Princeton.

They propose a perceptual ad-blocking scheme where ads are always rendered in
a DOM, but elements only displayed to the if they are not "ad like". This is
makes it much easier to evade ad-block detectors, since your browser appears
as if it does not have an ad-blocker!
[https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/ad-
blocki...](https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/ad-blocking-
framework-techniques.pdf)

~~~
asdff
The alternative to the arms race is to stop having browser extensions. In a
browser like chrome made by an advertising company with 80% of the browser
market last I checked, the results could be devastating for the vast majority
of internet users. We nerds will always be fine.

Mobile will of course fare far worse unless you root your device, for ios and
android. Can't wait for the inevitable day where the unskippable 10 min
youtube ad pauses if I look away from the screen...

------
kurehajime
Ad blockers were born earlier than the Internet and personal computers.

\---

A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages

Alan C. Kay

Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 1972

[https://www.mprove.de/visionreality/media/kay72.html](https://www.mprove.de/visionreality/media/kay72.html)

>A combination of this "carry anywhere" device and a global information
utility such as the ARPA network or two-way cable TV, will bring the libraries
and schools (not to mention stores and billboards) or the world to the home.
One can imagine one of the first programs an owner will write is a filter to
eliminate advertising!

------
droithomme
I don't turn off my virus blocker for anyone. No way no how no sir. Sites that
refuse to show content without opening up for viruses are intrinsically
suspicious, no matter how fancy their brand name.

------
ck2
When adsense first came out it was text only and ads were actually fascinating
and interesting to read. They were regulated and meaningful.

Then images and javascript were eventually allowed and it was all downhill
from there. Now it's a race to the bottom of how many hundreds of external
objects and tracking that can be added to a page as well as malware since so
many badly behaving ads slip right through any attempt at automated bans.

------
superkuh
I don't block ads but I do block all javascript by default. They are
essentially synonymous now.

------
m3047
"It means that an ad blocker of the future will have to monitor traffic of the
entire network." (towards the end)

This is already a concern in the DNS world, with Response Policy Zones (RPZ)
on one hand for DNS-based control
([https://dnsrpz.info/](https://dnsrpz.info/)) and DNS Over HTTP(S) (a.k.a.
DoH) on the other.

------
8bitsrule
Here's another history (the dates in the OP are fuzzy).
[https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2019/12/20/monetizing-the-
ba...](https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2019/12/20/monetizing-the-banner-ad-
crisis)

------
einpoklum
I wonder if the legal action against AdBlock Plus / Palant made a dent in the
download or use of ad blockers in general. The article doesn't provide any
evidence of this.

Also - don't get your apps on Google or Apple's app stores! Use APKMirror, APK
pure, etc. Some of these even have app-store-like apps to use instead of
Google's, that don't need a Google account.

Also, there's at least one app "store" app specializing in FOSS purely:
[https://f-droid.org/en/](https://f-droid.org/en/)

------
jakub_g
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 blocking built-in and other additional privacy
measures. Soon Opera added ad blocking as well, and other browsers (except
Chrome) followed.

~~~
Scottn1
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...](https://blogs.opera.com/desktop/2016/03/opera-built-ad-blocking-now-
beta/)

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...](https://www.engadget.com/2020/01/19/opera-accused-of-predatory-
loan-apps/)

~~~
jakub_g
Good catch! Here's a better link specifically talking about mobile:
[https://blogs.opera.com/news/2016/06/ad-blocker-android-
ios-...](https://blogs.opera.com/news/2016/06/ad-blocker-android-ios-windows-
phone-download-free/)

------
Causality1
I personally think we're nearing the end of a golden age where sites can
support themselves through advertisements that 90 percent of users see while
we, the nerds, are able to easily block almost all the ads. The more
widespread blockers become, the more incentive there is to create unblockable
ads, e.g., YouTube inserting a video ad directly into the video stream so that
even if you had some kind of content-aware AI blocker running you still
wouldn't be able to continue your video until the ad is over and the unedited
stream resumes.

------
mwsfc
Please correct me if I am wrong here regarding Ghostery functionality: In
current Firefox & Vivaldi versions it behaves as you would expect....blocks
ads according to your settings for every tab load. But in chrome, the default
behavior (assume chrome induced) appears to be to auto disable the plugin
until you manually re-enable the plugin then reload the tab....repeat process
for every new tab load. Do I have a Chrome setting misconfigured or is this
another example of Google's "what's best for you is what we say it is"
attitude?

~~~
throwaway9878
[https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-
chromium](https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium)

~~~
jiveturkey
how's that related to parent's question? I can't find a correlation. are you
suggesting he not use chrome? that's isn't much of an answer.

parent: I've not seen this problem. I only use chrome on mac. maybe on
windows/linux it's doing something differently. as each new tab is a new
process, it smells like a goofball file system permissions issue to me. does
it still happen if you create a new profile?

it works as you'd expect both with google sync on, off, paused, and never-
been-setup for me.

hard to imagine that this isn't some bug of installation for you. there's no
way this would be tolerable behavior and if it were because of chrome per se,
there'd be lots of uproar so you'd find your answer right away.

~~~
mwsfc
Yes, agree, expect would have seen more of an uproar if this was wide spread.
Was trying to stay out the troubleshooting rabbit hole, thus posting the Q
here in case other have observed the same. Still, with the other browsers
proclaiming more privacy features and google somewhat begrudgingly trying to
slow that conversation its hard to know what to expect in chrome without going
deep into their roadmap.

------
kristianc
> Now it’s surprising to see a lot of comments like: "Why do you need an ad
> blocker? Just use the hosts files".

I often wonder if people realize that they’re being that person.

------
mariushn
I guess we all know Chrome on Android doesn't support extensions in order to
prevent ad blockers. If there wouldn't be Firefox, Chrome on desktop would
have surely limited ad blockers as well.

------
aSplash0fDerp
Is part of a digital detox turning off java by default and enjoying the Text
Web in its full glory?

What do you estimate the cost is annually for all of the wasted bandwith
(especially mobile data) on predatory marketing?

------
monksy
I remember using Naviscope and sometimes dealing with DNS blocks with the
hosts file. Those were the days. (I had a very rudimentary ad blocker via my
web browser back in the days [404Browser])

------
notRobot
No one (or a much lesser percentage) would use an ad-blocker if ads were just
_ads_ , without all the tracking, privacy and malware concerns.

Go back to contextual static-image ads, folks.

------
ddevault
1\. Click

2\. Open network panel

3\. Google Analytics

4\. Close tabs

It's disgusting how so many so-called privacy advocates can't even get this
right even when _talking about privacy_.

------
jiveturkey
> 2015 — Content blocking comes to Safari and iOS

typo. He means "Safari _on_ iOS". Safari on desktop had normal extension-based
ad blocking since day 1. Then the content blocking API came to iOS then later
the same API in macOS.

> • No debugging tools

perhaps in 2015 -- I wouldn't know -- but today it's certainly debuggable with
the help of a macOS host. Much like remote gdb.

> The maximum number of rules limitation is a huge problem,

not a problem at all. rules limitation is _per filter_ but each adblocker can
install multiple filters. I suppose the rules limitation is for latency
reasons, in case of a poorly designed blocker.

> It was disproportionately hard to maintain a completely different filter
> list for Safari alone.

Completely false. filters are regex's. It's trivial to use the same source
list with whatever filter technology.

I guess because this article is content marketing, and not academic research,
these errors (and omissions) are ok. But I do wish, that given the title, the
author had bothered to mention that Bing inserts ads that are not blockable
via simple URL filters. adblock+ currently doesn't handle them and I believe
they are not handle-able at all via the Safari content filter API. By
extension => ad blockers are doomed. So yeah, he's not going to say that
because he's selling an ad blocker ...

~~~
ameshkov
1\. The only debugging tool we have is the browser console, and the only thing
printed there is the blocked URL, you cannot even find out what rule did that.

2\. The maximum number of rules IS a problem and it is there only because the
current implementation consumes to much memory and slow to compile a content
blocker. WebKit devs may allow us to pull request an alternative
implementation (there’s an ongoing discussion on bwo), and if there are no
performance issues, the limit will be increased.

3\. Regarding maintaining a filter list, traditional blockers do not use
regexes unless it is really really necessary. What’s written in this post is
by people who maintain filter lists for over 10 years.

