
Yahoo escalates war on ad-blockers--by keeping people out of their own e-mail - 001sky
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/11/23/yahoo-escalates-the-war-on-ad-blockers-by-keeping-people-out-of-their-own-e-mail/
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isomorphic
If the ad-block-blocked content is of sufficient value, this will inevitably
give rise to stealth tech in ad-blockers. If one isn't concerned about
bandwidth, then an ad-blocker could operate at the level of hiding or
obscuring ads, rather than not loading them. And so an arms-race develops,
which site operators would likely lose.

Worse yet, measures against people running ad-blockers are sure to annoy some
of them into retaliatory responses. For example, there are already plugins
which attempt to click on _all_ the ads on a page, so advertisers become
concerned about click-fraud and offer less return to the site operator.

It would be very interesting to know the rates at which users disable their
ad-blocker for Yahoo Mail, versus the ultimate account-abandonment rate from
this "small" A/B test.

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mmebane
> which site operators would likely lose

I keep hearing people say that, but I really don't think that's how it will
turn out. Adblockers rely heavily on pattern-matching to work: scripts loaded
from certain third-party domains, resources in particular subdirectories,
markup structured with predictable element IDs/CSS classes, and the like.
There are ways to break all of these: first-party ads, either by directly
hosting them or by proxying your ad network; media served via embedded data:
URIs or hash-based URIs; CSS which is minified, and randomized every few
weeks; etc. These techniques may not be widespread yet, but I'm sure they will
grow in popularity as the adblocking war rages on.

But hey, maybe ads will get a bit less egregious in the process.

~~~
lewisl9029
I was actually thinking about this a while ago, but I couldn't figure out how
to get around community-reported, site-specific element-blocking using CSS
selectors (structural selectors, not id/class selectors, which can be easily
defeated by randomization). You'd have to periodically change the placement of
your ads and/or the layout of your site, and that's not really viable as a
long term solution.

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jackvalentine
(This is a direct copy of my post on another thread about this)

As a staunch advocate of adblockers: as is Yahoo!'s right and adblocker makers
should not attempt to circumvent it.

Yahoo! doesn't have an implicit right to their code running fully on my
machine but by the same token I don't have an implicit right to their
services. If they've made it clear they think I am not making a bargain with
them that they like then I respect that.

What I can't respect is whinging about adblockers in editorials but still
serving me the content (cough, The Verge).

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darrmit
I would be really curious to see if this sort of strong arm tactic actually
works for them. Part of me wants to see them implement it just to see if their
users cry loud enough to make them revert, but I have a feeling the vast
majority would just disable Adblock and go on about their business. Most
anyone serious about privacy likely quit using free email services long ago.

~~~
bsg75
Y! Mail is already on the slide. I can't see how this would result in anything
but temporary ad revenue.

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SBArbeit
I find amusing that WaPo is publishing this article, after the way they
blocked users with ad blocking software for about two months themselves. Safe
to say that wasn't an accident....

