
AdNauseam – Clicking Ads So You Don't Have To - ryanlol
https://adnauseam.io/
======
convery
As someone whoms business largely relies on ad-revenue: please don't go out of
your way to ruin advertising. It's a shitty system that is sometimes abused,
but it's the best system we have as very few users actually want to open their
wallet for their "free" content. Seriously, we have a single unobtrusive
banner yet 85% of our users are adblocking; it's not an issue of 'bad ads' as
so many like to argue.

EDIT: So the general consensus seems to be that one should not mention
adblocking hurting small companies because these small companies should just:
a) Invent their own advertising platform that can separate users from bots
without any tracking or off-site processing, b) Invent a new payment method
that appeals to everyone in the world, c) Make the content so exceptionally
good that the users will literally throw money at their monitor, d) Look for
investors that can shoulder the costs rather than the users, e) Just create
additional sources of revenue so that adblocking users can still get their
free content. This may be a controversial opinion, but I'd rather people just
said "I don't want to pay" rather than making up impossible criteria for why
they shouldn't pay.

EDIT2: So there's a lot of replies basically saying: "just make content worth
paying for". I do wonder, do you people stand around street-musicians for
45min and when they nudge their hat just say "fuck you, your content is not
good enough to pay for; now shut up and continue playing"?

~~~
tomp
As someone else, I'd gladly ruin advertising and all businesses that rely on
it; it's immoral (involuntary invasion of other people's minds) and a terrible
business model and should die ASAP.

Edit: most ad-blockers don't actually block _ads_ ; they just block cross-
domain, spying widgets. Nothing is preventing you from showing a self-hosted,
untracked image that's actually an ad. The fact that you complain about
adblockers implies that you don't do that, which implies that you're using bad
practices (e.g. spying on users).

~~~
tannhaeuser
I'm hearing this moralistic (and naive IMHO) argument a lot lately. Do you
rather want to read targetted (advertisement-in-disguise and mass-scale
political campaigning aka fake news) content instead? Please don't rant
against "evil ads" like that; rather, think about an economically feasible
model which allows content creation and the web to thrive.

The problem with ads, and the sole reason I'm personally using an ad blocker,
is tracking. For me, mass surveillance isn't an adequate compromise to make
for free content.

I don't have a problem at all with classic banner ads OTOH. By merely
switching off JavaScript you used to able to switch off most tracking years
ago. But today's web pretty much requires JavaScript for even the simplest
interactivity. Thank you W3C and WHATWG and Google for HTML5's lameness.

~~~
DarkCrusader2
One thing I wanted to do was to allow ads everywhere and only block ones with
obtrusive ads. That is instead of whitelisting good ones, I would have to only
blacklist bad ones. But could find out how to do that with uBlock. Maybe
somebody here can help.

~~~
KGIII
You can try uMatrix. Same author. Adjust the defaults. There is a learning
curve.

------
ecomshopowner
As someone who runs a business relying on driving customers via google
adwords, I'd say use it.

Right now, google adwords are the best way to get my products in front of
people. It works and is worth it. I'd love for that not to be the case. Ads
are intrusive. Conversion rates are low but the math still makes sense.

As an aside, my business recently started more aggressively running email
campaigns for previous (ecommerce) customers to get them back. We saw a huge
return for emailing our customers multiple times in a month rather than once a
month.

This is awful, as the conversion rate from email to purchase is something like
0.5%. It's still worth it. All those people are opening email after email. So
much wasted time. But in the end, email marketing works and is cheap.

Marketing is one big tragedy of the commons.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons)

~~~
peepopeep
0.5% conversion on email? Wow.. you are doing something wrong. My clients have
like a 15-21% conversion via email but it probably depends on what you're
selling. So, what are you selling?

~~~
p0nce
15-21% conversion from email to purchase?

------
petepete
As someone who now has a banner advert embedded in the menu of my TV, good.
The advertising industry is awful and intrusive. Yes, businesses will have to
adjust or rethink, and that's a _good thing_.

It's a Samsung SUHD, by the way

[http://i.imgur.com/m3ePBkr.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/m3ePBkr.jpg)

~~~
JetSpiegel
I have a similar model, mine is completely disconnected from the Internet.

Still nags me about "Smart Hub" if I misclick some button on the remote named
"Extra".

~~~
petepete
Currently I use the TV for YouTube, Amazon Prime and normal TV (through Sky).

I could go the Amazon Fire route (Chromecast still won't play Amazon Prime)
and disconnect the TV, but it's annoying because apart from the ad, the TV is
great.

The worst thing is that the ads weren't there when I bought the TV, they came
(undocumented) in a software update that I can't roll back.

~~~
chrisper
Amazon fire has more ads than that.

------
dpacmittal
I really hate to see HN's general attitude towards ads. As another poster
said, ads are a shitty system and its abused, but it really is the only way
some people can provide free content.

When I started my first tech blog back in 2009, I was 18yo, living in Nepal. I
had no means whatsoever to make money online but it was super easy to setup
adsense account and in no time I was generating _some_ revenue.

I agree, the ad system is broken, but this is not a solution. This tool will
do nothing but harm publishers, possibly get their adsense account banned for
click fraud, and eventually cause them to shut down their website.

Ad industry is huge and there ought to be better way to fix the problems than
straight out blocking the ads, or tools like these which gets so much kudos on
HN that it makes me sick. It is the same bunch of crowd who call themselves
entrepreneurs and then they cheer for anti-entrepreneur tools like these.

The ugly fact is we don't have a better system in place than what we have now,
and tools like these don't make the situation any better.

------
herbst
Until recently I basically lived of Adsense. But i never use the Internet
without adblocker myself. Even on my phone and I help all my friends to get ad
free as well.

The crazy thing for me is that I still did depend on ads to keep my free
content alive. On the cheapest hosting option one of my sites would run into
around $40 worth of hosting a month plus endless hours of moderation and
'fixing'.

I did experiment with self hosted ads. Sorrily this is a pain in itself
because for whatever reason a lot of adblockers block anything that appears
like a obvious ad. Even self hosted images if they may are in a subdirectory
called ads or have a id therelike. So I called everything 'meow' instead of
ads. A month later a popular ad block list included a filter for my ads... (~3
million sessions/month) and my self hosted, non evil, non JS ads were blocked
again.

Not to mention that the income was not even a 10th.

I still am undecided on the topic. But i want people to understand that
especially Adsense is indeed important for small publishers.

End of the story is i sold the site because Adsense started to pay less and
less for more traffic and now a ad company is milking my back then only
Adsense site with about 5 more trackers and ad networks...

~~~
maxencecornet
>and my self hosted, non evil, non JS ads were blocked again.

It's crazy that ad blockers would block self-hosted, non-js images ads, I
mean, there's no tracking associated with it, it doesn't make any sense IMO

What kind of traffic allowed you to live of Adsense? Millions hits a day? Or
very targeted traffic with high CPC maybe?

~~~
herbst
A stupid gaming site. It wasn't that great I also live a rather simple life.
Best month this site was $1900 or so, usually less.

Also i dont know either. It really still bothers me. We can't fix the ad
industry if we just turn a blind eye.

------
fnl
Ad blocking(edit: or obfuscation like this, obviously) technology that can be
installed directly on the router, to protect everybody on my network.. Now
that would be a thing! Does a usable option of that kind of tool exist?

~~~
johnwaynedoe
With OpenWRT/LEDE you can do that. However, it does not seem to work as well
as a browser implementation. [https://lede-project.org/docs/howto/ad-
blocking](https://lede-project.org/docs/howto/ad-blocking)

~~~
fnl
Thanks! Yeah, I guess HTTPS everywhere is the "enemy" in this case... But at
least it gives us some basic protection.

------
tannhaeuser
Your "Google bans nauseam on Chrome" text appears on top of the time counter,
thus unreadable, on FF mobile. "Read all about it" is only partially visible
on smaller phones.

------
jaclaz
If I get this right, 85% customers use ad-blockers, and (roughly) 5% pay a
subscription on convery's site.

Does it mean that the site is profitable with only 10% of ads delivered?

~~~
convery
Through advertising alone? No. From a purely business perspective, it's shit.
But we subsidize it through our other ventures because we want the users to
have access to the content.

~~~
jaclaz
Then I don't understand.

If (say) 20% of the 85% now using ad-blockers were convinced that they are
hurting you, and stop using the ad-blocker, what will change?

I am assuming that the "conversion rate" (i.e. people actually clicking on the
ads that they now see) will be very near to 0%.

~~~
convery
> and stop using the ad-blocker, what will change?

The site would become less of a burden on our company. It would still not be
profitable, but there's quite a difference between losing 100$ a month and
losing 80$ a month to provide users content they've come to expect.

~~~
jaclaz
No, I was assuming (maybe wrongly) that those that currently use adblockers
also never usually click on any ad.

The question, if you prefer was:

Is there a difference between preventing ads from showing on the page
(adblocker) and seeing them but ignoring them?

------
maxencecornet
AdNauseam is just not a good approach to malware/ads/surveillance blocking.

The creators clearly haven't been on both side of the ads spectrum: As content
creators and intrusive ads blockers

They don't know the inside of this market enough, they don't know what happens
when a website get it's ads clickbombed

Some websites really have no other way to finance themselves other then using
ads, and use not intrusive ads network and AdNauseam will just get them banned

AdNauseam is just about wrecking avok publishers revenues by getting them
banned from ads networks, so like always, it's the small publishers that will
get punished, and not the big shit ads companies.

Buzzfeed-like companies will find a way to counter AdNauseam,they have the
ressources for it, but not the smaller tech blogger that you like reading

I wrote something about it a few months ago:

[https://medium.com/@MaxenceCornet/please-consider-
carefully-...](https://medium.com/@MaxenceCornet/please-consider-carefully-
what-using-adnauseam-really-means-c39c111b74a0)

I'll stick to ublock.

If you hate ads but like some content, stick to ads blockers as well

~~~
balazsdavid987
Something like that ran through my mind before I clicked on the install
button. It's the small publishers and individual content creators who suffer
from AdNauseam, not the big media companies. It just kills the small players
and helps big companies grow bigger.

------
craigds
I'd love to use this, but I can't afford for Google to block my Google
account.

Yes, this is not really tied to my Google account, but would Google associate
me with it and delete my account anyway? I think they might.

For that reason I'm happy to continue just blocking ads, since that's much
less likely to put me on their radar

------
gasull
I would like to see how this compares in speed with uBlock Origin. I'm also
not convinced you gain more privacy using AdNauseam than just blocking the
ads. See this other discussion:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/privacytoolsIO/comments/6lq3k6/is_i...](https://www.reddit.com/r/privacytoolsIO/comments/6lq3k6/is_it_safesecure_to_use_adnauseam_instead_of/)

------
zb3
It seems obvious that since this would damage Google, Google will defend
themselves by detecting and blocking this kind of traffic. Optionally they may
also suspend accounts.

------
kwoff
All of my addons are "Legacy" in Firefox now. How do we get updated versions
of these?

------
quuquuquu
"There’s an emerging movement in the online ad industry to use sites that
don’t track you. We collaborated with our friends at the Electronic Frontier
Foundation to make exceptions for ads on these sites. So in the rare event you
see an ad while using AdNauseam, cherish it as it is probably being served by
one of the good guys.”

EHHHHHH i mean i'd like to agree 99% of the time with this, but since were
being moralist and absolutist here....

why not just have absolutely no loopholes, and let the "good guys" do HTML
text ads, or just a good ol image file?

~~~
corobo
I hate the idea of AdNauseam clicking ads, like another thread says the big
ad-covered sites will have the resources to protect against this. This just
punishes the random bloggers who have slapped adsense on their site.

Allowing loopholes though - Isn't that how Adblock Plus first introduced their
pay to win system? My bet would be these guys are going to start taking
payments for whitelisting.

~~~
quuquuquu
I am absolutely inclined to agree and will never forgive Adblock Plus for such
a busted and hypocritical business model!

Fortunately for us, we have uBlock, which is open source and is also the basis
for AdNauseum.

If it really is futile to spam the spammers, then small blogs indeed will be
the sole losers here.

What is worse though, is that the internet is already a terrible place in
aggregate for intelligent content to make money.

It's basically given away for free, or sold to very specific buyers (usually
people who are purchasing consulting or are hiring smart people for full
time).

So, not many people make ad money off of high quality content, for two
reasons: too much bad content is drowning them out, and too much good content
being given away for free

------
jakozaur
[deleted]

~~~
balazsdavid987
Who should decide which ads to block?

------
ge96
Is this the one that clicks on random stuff to trick trackers from knowing
your true interests? I heard about that

