
How publishers are defeating ad blockers and how ad blockers are fighting back - adamnemecek
http://blog.bugreplay.com/post/153861574674/fkadblock-how-publishers-are-defeating-ad#
======
alex_anglin
Not only publishers it would seem: This weekend I tried visiting the website
of a streaming video provider I was interested in subscribing to only to be
informed that, roughly, "there was a problem completing my request. If you
have an ad-blocker, please disable it and refresh this page. <company in
question> uses certain tools for marketing purposes that can be blocked by ad-
blockers"

... ironically for their marketing department, I decided not become a customer
then and there.

~~~
coderdude
They wanted to see information about how you use something they offer. You
wanted something they offer. You declined, which is your choice, of course. I
think you both lost that battle.

~~~
smsm42
I think the company insisting they know better than myself what I need to see
and how I need to see it is not going to be good to do business with. If you
know your tech doesn't work well with adblockers, you have two choices: a)
accept that some part of the audience doesn't want ads and work so that your
tech supports them and b) tell them "screw you" and refuse to take them as the
clients. The company chose the latter. Why anybody would insist on being a
client of somebody that doesn't want you as a client, given the choice?

~~~
coderdude
The bit about them insisting they know better than you what you need to see
and how you need to see it, coupled with the bit about ads, is a non sequitur.
We're talking about tracking usage stats.

Some people simply can't be bothered to disable an ad blocker for non-ad
related things. Others take a more extreme stance and consider analysis itself
to be an affront. Everyone loses. Producers don't know what works or doesn't
and consumers don't get the content they desire.

One thing I've noticed is that these comments tend to come from pure consumers
but rarely from those who both produce and consume. It's partially an issue of
having a lack of perspective of the other part of the equation.

~~~
smsm42
> We're talking about tracking usage stats.

We're talking about refusing clients who use adblockers. There are many ways
to track usage that doesn't require that. I've implemented some myself. If the
reason for refusal is because their tracking can't work with it it's doing it
wrong.

> tend to come from pure consumers but rarely from those who both produce and
> consume

Produce what? And why does it matter? Imagine coming to a grocery store and
being asked to change into store uniform, before you are allowed in, because
it's easier for them to do business that way, marketing and stuff, and when
you ask "WTF?" \- they'd say "well, you don't know how it is to farm, do you?
Did you ever milk a cow or harvested rye? You only consume, not produce, you
lazy slacker, right? So either strip and wear the uniform or shut the heck
up!". No thanks. I wouldn't visit such store. Would you?

> It's partially an issue of having a lack of perspective of the other part of
> the equation.

I am not obliged to serve everybody's perspective. I have no obligation to
make life easy for somebody's marketing department or support somebody's
business model. It's their business to convince me to support it with my
money, and, frankly, telling me I'm too ignorant to appreciate how wonderful
they are is not going to work well. Telling me "we're too lazy/cheap to do it
any other way, so please disable all security features in your browser,
disregard your privacy and risk your safety because our marketing needs some
nice graphs in their next monthly presentation" won't work either.

------
olvar_
I'd just like to point out that the "war" developing is not so much between
advertising and ad-blockers. I think most of us would be fine with advertising
on some page you are visiting. The real problem comes from trackers and other
tactics that don't try to show a product TO you, but try to show YOU to a
company. The problem is not that I don't want to see advertising, I just don't
want to share my information with someone I don't even know. Maybe there is a
way in between.

~~~
wernercd
Personally, I wouldn't mind SOME ads feeding companies... Hell, I'll watch
short videos to get ahead in some games I play...

the problem is massive ads, 3 line stories turning into multi page ad fests,
"Around the Web" type crap, security risks injected via ad networks, etc...

It's not the ads per-se: it's the MASSIVE abuse of ads. it's why we can't have
nice things.

Same can be said of TV shows and how it went from a minute of ads... t0o 10
minutes out of a 30 minute slot being ads.

~~~
nerdponx
Good point about TV. I'd happily subscribe to cable if it weren't for the fact
that I'd be paying to have ads blared at me every 5 minutes.

~~~
smsm42
I just DVR everything and then skip ads. I can't watch non-recorded TV anymore
- not only ads are extremely long and mind-numbingly boring, they insist on
showing the same ads several times during the same show! I don't know how
people tolerate it.

~~~
jghn
You're still affected as the time allotment for actual content is going down.
Even reruns are getting compressed

------
drewg123
My largest annoyance after ads is autoplay html5 videos from news sites. CNN
is especially bad. I wish Ublock could have an option to stop all html5
autoplay.

(yes, I've got the "Disable HTML5 Autoplay" in chrome, and no, it mostly
doesn't work)

~~~
cmurf
CNN are dicks for this but I also blame Chrome and Firefox for not enforcing
click to play.

~~~
reustle
When so much is controlled by JS these days, is it reasonable to expect they
can block it all the time? With flash, at least it is one element that the
browser can lock until you click it. With JS, who knows what/where the
developer will inject and start playing audio / video.

------
RandomInteger4
I never used an adblocker until recently when Youtube started showing those
fucking World of Tanks ads and ads for similar games from the same fucking
company.

Many of you don't understand how that could be a huge nuissance, because your
systems are powerful enough to shrug it off, but for my old system, those
fucking ads would freeze up the UI of the page.

Even with my new system, many of the ads offered enough of a slowdown to the
experience of using many sites on top of sometimes causing the system to crash
completely that an adblocker became necessary.

~~~
raybb
If your company is really that slow because of adds you might want to think
about blocking some ad providers with your host file. I tested it with a verge
page and it went from about ~50mb down to ~10mb. (Disclaimer it was 50mb
because of an auto playing ad video)

~~~
petre
Or a custom DNS cache if you want to block on all of your network. There is a
Perl script on github that generates a local rule set for unbound using Dan
Pollock's list. There are other services as well.

------
InclinedPlane
Dear publishers: you're fighting the wrong battle, and the wrong people.

You look at people who visit your site without seeing the ads as "stealing"
your content without paying the price (suffering, apparently I guess) of
viewing the ads. Forcing them to view ads is a dumb move that you've been
forced into because of the bizarre incentives in the business, but it's not a
sustainable strategy.

Forcing people to view ads won't make those ads effective, and it'll make your
viewers hate you more. Ads are likely not a long-term stable source of income
either. Precisely because people are becoming more and more savvy when it
comes to figuring out what to buy and less and less tolerant of being told
what to buy.

I know that advertising is one of the easiest ways to make money, especially
with a content site on the internet. But you need to put serious effort into
finding a better way. If you don't then you'll be caught flat footed when both
your ad revenue and your viewers gone. Foster stronger bonds with your
viewers, figure out how to monetize them without ads (there are a zillion ways
without paywalls), keep innovating, laziness is how you die.

~~~
ec109685
What are some of the zillions of ways?

~~~
InclinedPlane
There are two important things to understand when it comes to monetizing
content production effectively. One, when you have a strong, unique brand that
produces content that people love and identify with people _want_ to give you
money. Two, the concept of consumer surplus, market segmentation, etc. (see
here: [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-
rubber-...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-
duckies/)).

At the simplest level if you offer a quality product and you let people pay
whatever they want for it, even nothing, _you will still make money_. That
alone may not be enough to cover your costs, but it's an important
realization. The difference between the "you need to control your customers,
sell them to advertisers, and force ads down their throats" mindset versus the
"you need to engage with your users and they will support you no matter what"
mindset is like night and day, being so diametrically opposite can make it
difficult to make the transition.

The easy level of monetization is to let people give you money in exchange for
"nothing". Offer donations, or patronage support with token rewards (such as
being thanked, put in the credits, etc.), and merch that allows people to show
off their support or that allows people to express their identity through a
connection to you or your content (this works for _everything_ not just rock
bands or web comics).

Up from there you can offer more substantive rewards. You can offer
subscriptions that gain people access to extra content, to content earlier
than it will be publicly available, to higher levels of credit, or to higher
levels of engagement and connection with creators.

You can package your content in different forms and release it as a
compilation, charging money for it or offering it to subscribers. Say you're a
web comic, you can print books containing your comics by year or by story line
or whatever. If you're a musical artist you might release all of the tracks
you're working on at any given time freely (through youtube or mp3 downloads)
but then cut an album of the tracks (perhaps after re-recording them and
having them professionally mixed/mastered) and sell that (either digitally, in
physical form, or likely both). If you write you can compile stuff into books
focusing on certain themes. And so on.

You can break your work up into specific projects and crowd fund each project.
This also gives you the advantage that you'll typically end up having to
figure out how to produce various products out of that project to use as
rewards, which you can also sell afterwards.

And that's just a start, there are tons of other options.

These things aren't viable for "content" creators who don't produce a lot of
original content or that don't produce content of high enough quality to
engage strongly with their fans, and I'm mostly ok with that. There are tons
of clickbait and tabloid content creators out there who survive not because
they produce anything of value but because today eyes can be monetized through
ads. The main problem here is that income inequality is at such an extreme
level that a lot of people have hardly any disposable income to support
anything, no matter how much they value it, but the effects of _that_ are even
more wide ranging.

------
fapjacks
This article concludes that adblockers are "losing"... But do you know what
happens when I see a modal asking me to whitelist the site? See ya! This isn't
some critical thing I rely on to survive. It's Forbes. I don't _need_ any of
their content, and I'm totally fine walking away until my particular blend of
adblockers can block the garbage on their site again.

~~~
iLoch
Shortsighted, wouldn't you say? Eventually this will choke out all competition
except for companies with the smartest people/deepest pockets. We'll end up
creating monopolies around content by refusing to pay for it when there was
healthy competition.

~~~
andromeduck
I for one am willing to pay for content as long as it's large enough to o
cover most of the sites I frequent, fixed rate subscription, no extea fees for
content (pay per comment/timed exclusivity for paid members to drive
membership fine by me), and most importantly, a way to personally choose who
gets a portion (at least 25%) of the subscription fees.

Short of that I really don't give a damn. It's not my problem.

------
frozenport
My eighty year old grandparents can't [be trusted to] browse web pages with
internet ads. If internet ads were billboards in the same way we see highway
advertising, I wouldn't mind. Today a significant percentage of them are
scams, with victims.

------
paulryanrogers
The cat and mouse game between publishers and blockers continues to pollute
the web for everyone. Sad to see things escalating so quickly.

------
MiddleEndian
The victory I'm waiting for is CSS selectors to finally get updated, so I can
block something like so: div > $p > .adindicatorclass

The p element would be blocked. This will also be great for getting rid of non
ad content that you just don't want to see.

~~~
majewsky
Won't happen. The point of CSS is that all selectors and properties only ever
trickle downwards. If they could propagate upwards (from `.adindicatorclass`
to its parent, in this case), the cost of evaluating them would become
prohibitively expensive. (And even worse, you could probably construct self-
contradicting stylesheets.)

------
electic
Basically, after reading this article, use uBlock instead of AdBlock. It
works.

~~~
rosstex
Specifically, uBlock Origin!

~~~
hrrsn
I wish someone would port Origin to Safari. :(

~~~
raybb
Looks like you got your wish! UBlock Origin for Safari -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13112280](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13112280)

~~~
hrrsn
It's like an early Christmas!

------
hprotagonist
Its amazing how much of this I am unaware of because of tools like noscript.
Anti-adblock tech that relies on js just doesn't matter much..

~~~
gruez
...until you visit a site that gives you a blank page without javascript.
speaking of which, i wouldn't be surprised if more and more sites start to
require mandatory js to view their content.

~~~
mioelnir
Happens frequently to me with uMatrix. Then you look at the list. You know the
usual suspects like jQuery, google ajax, bootstrap, Akamai etc. fairly fast.

On other sites you look at what they want to include and you just think "yeah,
no, let's not do that" and just close the page.

------
nojvek
As a JS guy, I open the devtools and just delete the modal div elements.
Problem solved.

------
gottam
It reminds me of the music/movie industry in terms of how these adblock
detectors mimic something like DRM. Anyway the problem is with the business
model. People are installing adblockers in response to more aggressive
advertising, and then the ad companies get more aggressive because of it. It's
a never ending cycle.

------
RRRA
How are the ad blocker not moving to the rendering engine already...

~~~
callalex
See: the Content Blocer system on iOS. The interface is a rules specification,
and the implementation is delegated to the OS/hardware manufacturer to save
power and performance.

~~~
WhitneyLand
Right, too bad the entire architecture is useless because blockers are not
allowed to use JS. Filter expressions are not enough anymore.

------
WhitneyLand
What's the best iPhone/iOS solution?

Apple's new hooks for blockers only allow regex filters, so the blockers can
never win without being able to add code.

There are other browsers besides Safari but then you have other problems:

1). Do they have daily updates to their ad blockers to keep up the arms race?

2). How do you use important Safari plugins like LastPass?

~~~
WhitneyLand
Found an answer, this is working well so far: [https://purify-
app.com](https://purify-app.com)

------
lsaferite
So, this has nothing to do with the article itself and is instead about the HN
post.

This is a dupe of the exact same article posted 2 hours earlier. The URL is
only different because this one, the dupe, had a # at the end of the URL and
bypassed dupe detection. Why isn't that something that is identified and fixed
automatically? Even better, if HN detects that someone is purposefully trying
to bypass dupe detection, does HN punish that user? This case looks like it
could have been a simple mistake, but there's zero reason that HN shouldn't be
stripping a trailing # and in general having the dupe detection flag URLs that
only differ in fragment ids.

------
RangerScience
Interesting. Is there an adblocker that blocks or prevents the most annoying
parts of ads - sounds, animations, taking over chunks of the screen?

Maybe one that limits cross-domain traffic, so requests for more than, say, a
megabyte get nixed?

------
boyter
Interesting to see how others are doing this. I recently was tasked with
adding some logic to determine the number of ad-blocking users across the
network of sites I help maintain.

I added my own custom script into Appnexus (ad provider) and attempted to load
it. Ad-blockers, I discovered do one of two things in this case. The first is
to just block the loading of the content, in which case it was easy to detect.
Others would inject their own custom content, hence adding a custom script and
then checking the contents for a special string.

A fun task for sure though.

------
jasonkostempski
Does anyone know of a blacklisting plugin that will, for example, let me add
wsj.com and then remove all links to that domain from any page I'm on? Ideally
it would have a community driven list of known bad players. If something like
that became very popular, I think companies would start to fear "disappearing"
from the internet and start behaving a little more sanely.

------
faebi
Why can I not pay a reasonable amount of money to get past advertisments?
Usually I do not need the subscription for 300$ a year but I want to read one
article in a adfree way and pay for the advertisments they are losing. Unlike
in apps, I haven't seen a website where I can give them money for no-ads. So
for me their business model is broken.

~~~
grzm
I'm curious as to the actual breakdown, but I know that most subscription-
based journalism still receives the majority of its revenue from ads. I
suspect that ad-free experiences would be prohibitively expensive for most if
not all subscribers. This is largely speculation though. Anyone in the
industry have some harder numbers?

One example I know of that I believe is ad-free is theinformation.com which
has a yearly subscription of $399. [https://www.theinformation.com/payment-
policy](https://www.theinformation.com/payment-policy) Running an institution
like the NYT or the WSJ must be much more expensive.

