
Ad blockers are part of the problem - NeutronBoy
https://www.troyhunt.com/ad-blockers-are-part-of-the-problem/
======
yladiz
I would like to know the statistics of people using Adblock Plus versus the
other adblockers like Ublock and Ghostery (not on troyhunt.com but on a more
general level).

In any case, the argument Hunt makes here is valid; the ad that is being
blocked on his site is pretty unobtrusive, is simple, and I would guess does
not track the user like so many other ads/ad companies do. However, the title
of the article, "Ad blockers are part of the problem," doesn't reflect
reality. Yes, in this case, whoever is updating the block list is specifically
targeting an okay ad, but in general ads are nasty, track users, and are
generally terrible.

The reality is that the author really can't be mad at ad blockers without
really, _really_ being mad at the ad companies that cause people to use ad
blockers in the first place. Sure, in this case, it sucks that the ad is being
targeted and is due to a bad actor. And yes, Hunt has every right to be mad at
this bad actor and Adblock Plus for, through inaction, being okay with it. But
the issue is not with ad blockers, it's with most ad companies being horrible
and consumers rejecting the horrible ad companies. I think if the ads were
less obtrusive and didn't track you (I have heard on multiple occasions across
various cities that people are either joking about or freaked out about
looking up some product and now seeing all of their ads target some variation
of that product) the amount of casual people using ad blockers would go down.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> _The reality is that the author really can 't be mad at ad blockers without
> really, really being mad at the ad companies that cause people to use ad
> blockers in the first place._

That's my policy. You can't spit and shit into a well and then complain that
me drinking bottled water is bad for the well-owners' source of revenue and
environmentally unfriendly.

------
matt4077
I've been singing that song for a while... Overzealous adblocking may cost us
dearly when it succeeds to cut off all revenue streams for quality content
except subscriptions.

I know HN takes a pretty critical view of "mainstream media", but I believe a
world in which NYT/Wired/WSJ and similar have been successfully run out of
business will be a very different one. They are among the last to have the
resources to devote teams to investigate issues. There's nobody capable of
replacing them.

I with there were an Adblocker that takes this responsibility serious,
blocking maybe video and ads over content, but not static images and text ads.

For the commentator saying that "most consumers don't care how carefully ads
have been selected. It still is an ad and we don't like any ads :)" I can only
answer that problem started when you called yourself a "consumer". We need
more citizen, less consumers.

~~~
parenthephobia
> _We need more citizen, less consumers._

Ads are not a public service. Ads are _for_ consumers. Advertisers pay for
them to be placed in the hopes that consumers will give them money as a
result.

Advertisers are wasting money if they're trying to show adverts to people who
are sufficiently disinterested in seeing them that they've installed an ad
blocker.

Any website which knowingly wastes an advertiser's money on aggressive
attempts to display adverts to those who have clearly indicated they don't
want to see them is essentially engaging in fraud.

~~~
matt4077
I doubt that anybody likes ads. Somehow, the still work. Your willingness to
view is surprisingly uncorrelated with their effectiveness on you.

~~~
parenthephobia
I should like to see published evidence of the effectiveness of Internet ads.
I'm of the firm belief that Internet advertising is virtually useless. I think
it almost exclusively benefits the ad networks and a minority of high-traffic
ad-carrying websites.

One paper (DOI 10.3386/w20171), relating to search ads, concluded that they
saw a strong correlation between people who click on ads and people who
already regularly purchase from the advertising vendor. i.e. When a vendor
pays for clicks on search ads, most of the time they're paying for people who
would have bought from them anyway. In that study, for campaigns where naive
analysis implies there was a 4000% ROI, an analysis which takes the
correlation into account indicated a negative ROI.

I know from experience that another confounding factor is that marketing
departments and agencies often have perverse incentives. Campaigns are often
judged by the net revenue from customers who interacted with that campaign,
which incentivizes campaigning towards the people already most likely to buy
whatever is being advertised.

Additionally, even if Internet ads do influence their viewers, the most likely
influence it has on people who see it _despite having installed an ad blocker_
is to make them dislike the host website and the advertiser.

------
omginternets
I've said it before and I'll say it again: if you want me to consume ads, give
me ads I want to consume.

Ultimately, ad-blockers aren't about blocking ads. They're about filtering out
visual noise. Stop putting _crap_ on my screen and FFS stop being-self
righteous when I block said crap. In what world is blaming your users the
right move?

The customer is always right. _troyhunt.com_ is part of the problem.

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
> The customer is always right.

In what sense of the word are you a "customer" of Troy Hunt?

~~~
omginternets
Good point. I should have said "end-user".

~~~
fixermark
And the end-user is demonstrably not always right.

~~~
omginternets
In what sense?

I'm using "the customer is always right" in its idiomatic sense, not in a
literal sense. The point is: arguing with your customer that what he wants is
wrong is not a fruitful approach to ... well... _anything_.

~~~
fixermark
Arguing with your customer that what he wants is wrong at the point of sale
is, in the short-term, not a revenue-optimizing strategy.

1) Commenting on one's own blog about things one has observed that could be
adjusted to improve the market as a whole is perfectly fine and doesn't
usually do any short-term damage to one's brand (you can touch a nerve and
trigger a boycott, but that's probably unlikely given this topic). Comments on
this topic are important, because people who use ad blockers may not realize
that their short-term gains are pointing to a world where content creators
have to bake the ads into the content itself to get paid. If they don't want
that, it's good this signal is in the zeitgeist for them to consider.

2) Sometimes, even deciding a specific customer is too damaging to your
ability to serve customers in general and service needs to be refused is the
right choice.

To pop out of the analogy and into the world of web transactions: people are
very much allowed to run ad blockers. And I'm very much allowed to craft a
site to detect ad blockers and begin 400'ing requests or failing to load page
content if I can't verify the ads are shown. It's, ultimately, your content to
display _and_ my content to vend. It's a two-sided transaction by the very
nature of the protocol.

------
NoGravitas
I think it's perfectly legitimate for ad blockers to block even tasteful
sponsorship notices.

That said, his sponsorship notice is really good, in just about every possible
way it could be. Just a text link with the name and motto of the business,
overlaid on the hero image in muted colors. It reminds me of NPR sponsorship
messages. Given a reasonable way of recognizing this kind of sponsorship
message, I'd unblock them generally.

~~~
anexprogrammer
Can't agree or we're not going to progress back to an acceptable median.

Locally hosted, tracking free, messages of sponsorship or static images of
some relevant tool or service should be reserved for an Easylist "hard line"
optional file that I opt into. The default lists should be removing, with
extreme prejudice, items that carry cross site tracking and attention grabbing
overlays, sound and animations. There'll always be some who go into options
and tick everything.

I don't much like adblock's approach to taking money for letting acceptable
ads through either.

We might be able to achieve some level of sanity if sites like stackoverflow,
troyhunt or the ad network that was trying to do it right got some benefit for
trying to be ethical about it.

~~~
NoGravitas
I agree that it would make a lot of sense to pull ads that meet this set of
criteria into a separate blocklist, and that ad-blockers should not enable
that list by default.

------
forgotpwtomain
> Deliberately modifying sites like mine which are making a conscious effort
> to get us away from the very things about ads that led to ad blockers in the
> first place makes them part of the problem

This is entirely disingenuous. Add-blockers aren't modifying sites _like
yours_ , they are allowing users to control what content _their machines_
access and display.

While it's silly for your single-line sponsored banner to be blocked, your
complaint should be about easy-list, furthermore users are free to modify
their lists to block the content that they _want_ to block.

If you will, uMatrix without configuration breaks plenty of reasonable sites
and it takes some work to get everything working. And I'm definitely _not_
going to stop using it while bloggers like you feel the need to serve me
third-party Javascript assets which send my IP / usage information to a
tracker.

Edit: Would one of the at least three people that down-voted care to offer a
comment?

~~~
FussyZeus
I'm normally a very pro-blocker person but this story is shedding bad light on
what is an important movement among Internet users in terms of protecting our
investments and our safety.

> This is entirely disingenuous. Add-blockers aren't modifying sites like
> yours, they are allowing users to control what content their machines access
> and display.

When this blocker trend started it was because the ads in use were obstructive
to the user experience, damaging to our machines and later on, using up our
data plans for things we didn't intend to download. Trey's solution here is to
provide a sponsor message that is tailored visually to the content it
surrounds, is not intrusive to the UX, and is extremely lightweight (just a
few bytes of text). If the blocking community insists this is fair game to
block, then the publishers have no reason to even attempt working with us.

There are a lot of scummy advertisers out there and very good reason to be
paranoid, but we cannot use that as justification to throw someone else under
the bus who is clearly trying to meet us in the middle.

~~~
forgotpwtomain
> There are a lot of scummy advertisers out there and very good reason to be
> paranoid, but we cannot use that as justification to throw someone else
> under the bus who is clearly trying to meet us in the middle.

I'm not throwing Troy under the bus, as a matter of fact uBlock has 'toggle
cosmetic filtering for the site' and I've turned it off to allow this sponsor
message to be shown.

But I will note that Troy is _still serving tracking code_ from his site and I
have no intention to stop using an Add-blocker for his livelihood or anyone
else's.

Could the curated lists be improved? Yes, I conceded that position in my above
post as well. But the whole-scale attack on 'Add-Blockers' by someone serving
tracking code is, as I have said totally disingenuous. It's not about 'the
level of intrusiveness' it's about 'my right to control what code/content is
executed/displayed on my machine'.

------
bryanlarsen
From the comments:

> Dustin Moris Gorski

> Yeah I understand your frustration. I think there are two separate issues.
> Your issue is that you follow all rules of EasyList and still get blocked,
> which is wrong. The second issue is the general issue that most consumers
> don't care how carefully ads have been selected. It still is an ad and we
> don't like any ads :)

------
seqizz
There is no such thing as 'ad blocking'. The web is a pull medium, not a push
medium. I merely decline to request ads. - Anonymous

------
arikrak
One issue I've noticed on occasion is that Ad blockers can silently break
websites, and the users don't know what's going on. This is a reason it would
be better to reduce ad blocking and encourage websites to follow acceptable ad
guidelines instead (though I work for a company that earns most of its revenue
from advertising).

~~~
mhw
> One issue I've noticed on occasion is that Ad blockers can silently break
> websites

Unfortunately the same can be said about the ads and their javascript, and
with much higher frequency. I got sick of pages that randomly scroll back to
the top after you've started to scroll down, or when you go back a page to
follow a different link part way down the page. Using an ad blocker on iOS
fixed the problem.

Recently I did wonder whether the passage of time might have caused the ad
networks to fix their code. I lasted about 10 minutes before I could confirm
that nothing had changed and the blocker was reinstated.

~~~
arikrak
While some ads can cause UI nuisances, I was referring to more problematic
issues, such as a not being able to checkout from websites and not knowing the
cause.

------
nimbix
I think it's only a matter of time before Google starts fighting back and asks
ad blockers to allow AMP ads or face being kicked from the Chrome extensions
store. AMP ads are relatively lightweight, built from a short list of approved
components, and signed by a validation service, so all the usual arguments
about why people are blocking ads go out the window. And Google certainly is
in a position where they can start demanding a change like this.

~~~
cronjobber
One of the usual arguments about why people adblock is tracking. These people
don't use Chrome anyway.

~~~
tombrossman
Tracking is the primary reason I use an ad blocker. The ads themselves aren't
that obtrusive to me since I won't install Adobe Flash and I use NoScript and
Privacy Badger with Firefox. Even using someone else's machine I can tune ads
out pretty quickly and focus on the page content.

Troy uses Google Analytics on his site and has no privacy policy which means
his site does not comply with the Google Analytics' Terms of Service.[0]

When I queried this on social media, he dismissed it as 'legal arse
covering'[1] and indicates to me that while he's undoubtedly a bright and
talented guy, he still doesn't 'get it' when it comes to privacy. Not at all.

Not everyone is wearing a tinfoil hat and worried that the big bad NSA is
coming to drone them. Many of us are far more more concerned about corporate
surveillance and data brokers tracking our online activity.

[0][https://www.google.com/analytics/terms/us.html](https://www.google.com/analytics/terms/us.html)

[1][https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/651723191144976384](https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/651723191144976384)

 _(Note I have a cronjob deleting most Tweets 30+ days old so my replies in
that thread are gone. Old tweets are worthless and I see no need to preserve
them...)_

------
paol
Classic example of collateral damage.

No one would have objected to his sponsorship message by itself, but in a
world where advertisers and blockers are involved in no-holds-barred arms race
this kind of thing is inevitable.

------
kriro
The problem is that it's too much hassle for people with ad blockers to white
list the good guys...and there's very little incentive to do so (you feel
better by supporting someone for their work which isn't really actionable).

Additionally it's sensible to run an ad blocker by default because of all the
crap that's out there so the "good guys" suffer from the bad practices of all
the "bad guys".

------
rwmj
In other news, websites aren't magazines. They are rendered on my computer
using my CPU time in the way I choose them to be rendered.

~~~
johneth
Come on. This type of ad is the most efficient possible - text only. Bandwidth
isn't free for the host, either. The money has to come from somewhere.

> the sponsor message is loaded by a request that returns a 242 _byte_
> response so we're talking 0.03% of the overall page size.

~~~
mhurron
> The money has to come from somewhere.

It can't be that important, I don't see it in the troyhunt.com rss feed.

------
firegrind
Troy tell us that "it doesn't directly impact me", so let's close this issue
as not a problem.

------
lorenzfx
While it may be tastefully done, it's still advertisement and therefore
deserves a place on EasyList.

I'm willing to pay for interesting content, but _really_ don't want to see any
adverts (1. they steal attention, 2. you pay for the advert when/if you buy a
product).

I'd love to some more more innovation in (mirco)payment options, all I see
instead is "innovation" in ads.

------
supergreg
More than ad blockers they have become annoyance blockers for me. I'm always
adding sidebars and other stuff to either my adblocker, to remove them; or to
stylish, which allows you to add CSS to the site, when I just want the
annoyance to be less annoying (smaller font, less flashy colors, move aside so
the main content can get the main spot in the page).

------
lmm
I held off installing an adblocker for a long time. But now that I've gone to
the trouble of installing one (because the web was simply unusable otherwise),
I use it mercilessly. I don't have time to vet hundreds of sites because maybe
one or two have acceptable ads. I just turn them off, all of them.

------
bluefox
Guy is mad that ad blockers block his ads.

~~~
CountSessine
Did you read the article? He has a small sponsorship message, not an
advertisement. And someone still submitted it to Easylist.

~~~
omginternets
It's still an ad. Calling it a sponsorship doesn't change that.

Granted, it's an _unobtrusive_ ad (at best), but it has every reason to be
filtered out by a gosh-darn ad-blocker.

~~~
__s
Yet ABP seeks to not block 'acceptable ads' so your categorical line of
thought here isn't one they claim to follow

~~~
omginternets
1\. ABP does this as an _option_ , and does this for financial gain [0].

2\. This is why I don't use ABP anymore.

3\. This is about _EasyList_ , which ABP uses, but the two should not be
confused. EasyList seeks to block adverts.

[0] [https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/sep/13/adblock-
plu...](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/sep/13/adblock-plus-
launching-platform-to-sell-acceptable-ads)

------
sp332
While I'm sympathetic to Troy, his solution does strike me as a bit backwards.
I'd much rather pay for the site as a visitor and get no ads than as a sponsor
who pollutes everyone else's experience on the site.

------
tmptmp
I'd like to suggest to people like Troy to put some sponsor links/images (with
plain non-tracking links) inline in the content. Explain this decision right
at the beginning of the articles. As a reader, I will support such move
(unless the content creator becomes greedy and starts putting many ads, of
course I am not talking about Troy here) and ad blockers mostly cannot do
anything to it. It'd be a win-win for both the content creators and the
readers.

Ad blockers are here to stay and that's good in general.

------
princeb
wonder if one way is to get your CMS to insert a big bolded line "this blog
post was made possible by So-And-So Company" into the beginning of each post
content? just add a db hook or stored procedure or something.

If you're going to go full minimalist message anyway... just make it part of
the content. adblock can't block part of the content without blocking all the
content, can they?

------
elementalest
I would white list a few sites I regularly visit that don't have;
excessive/obtrusive/annoying ads, ad services that track me, or a potential
avenue for malware from ads. Problem is, for me, there are almost no sites
like this.

Honestly, the ball is in their court. Its the ad industries problem to fix,
not ours.

------
joesmo
No, they're not. The author is running an ad and is complaining about it being
blocked.

If he really wanted to run this ad, he should make a random CSS class name for
it that changes with every page render and try to fight the ad blockers like
Forbes does. At least then I wouldn't have to read this whiny complaint about
programs actually working like they're supposed to.

------
kevin_thibedeau
I don't block ads. I block zero day vectors through untrusted Javascript. If
the ad networks would get their act together and stop sending executable
payloads I would consider whitelisting them.

~~~
Nadya
Over the years, the NY Times has delivered malware multiple times. In 2009 it
turned your computer into a slave in the Bahama botnet and just recently it
served ransomware, along with some other high-profile, high-traffic websites.

Third party (Javascript-based) ads should be blocked for _security concerns_
if nothing else.

As for the sponsorship banner that Troy is talking about - it's still an ad. A
rather minimal, tasteful ad - but an ad at the end of the day.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising)

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/03/big-name-sites-
hit-b...](http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/03/big-name-sites-hit-by-rash-
of-malicious-ads-spreading-crypto-ransomware/)

E:

So jsnell's post does not seem insane, after finishing my full read of Troy's
post I figured out why the parent post had been downvoted: almost nothing to
do with the article. I then removed my line questioning why from my post.

~~~
jsnell
The comment was probably downvoted since it had nothing to do with the
original post, and might as well have been posted based on just reading the
title. The post does not suggest that people should not use ad blockers. It's
lamenting that even a custom ad that's as technically benign as possible (text
only, no tracking, no JS, not part of an ad network, unobtrusive) is getting
blocked. And not just blocked as a side effect, but in a targeted manner.

If someone really is only interested in blocking malware rather than in
blocking ads, they should be furious that his ad blocker is over-reaching like
this and blocking something totally harmless. While if they actually don't
want to see ads, at least be honest about it.

