
Thank you for ad blocking - nichodges
http://thankyouforadblocking.com/
======
quanticle
Given that ad networks are the #1 vector for spreading malware, I view ad
blocking as basic computer hygiene. To me, it's no more controversial than
washing one's hands after using the restroom.

I try to stay out of the moral discussions about "consuming" content without
"paying" for it. The way I see it, ad networks will regain their rights to run
code on my machine when they start taking positive steps to ensure that said
code will not cause harm or copy unauthorized information off my machine.

~~~
ikeboy
The controversial part isn't the adblocking per se, but the viewing of pages
that have ads while using an adblocker.

It's fine to decide that ad networks don't have a "right" to run code on your
machine, but the moral response (assuming you don't have an answer to the
"consume content question") is to configure your adblocker to close any tab
that would otherwise load an ad. If instead, you decide to view the page
without the ad, then you need some answer beyond "I don't give ad networks the
right to run code on my machine".

(I'm not saying ad blocking is morally wrong, just that your justification for
it isn't sufficient. I block ads myself.)

~~~
dheera
I believe that for any electrical signals that enter my private space or
privately-owned devices, I have the right to do whatever I want with,
including decide how to render or display said signals, within the confines of
my private space.

If you want to ask me to pay before those bytes will be sent to my private
space, that's fine. You can recommend, but you cannot impose that I use a
certain way to display your information. If I prefer using Lynx to view your
website, I have the right to do that (and it won't show your ads because it's
not even graphical). If I prefer using a modified version of Chromium, that's
no different.

Ad blocking on a web browser is no different from muting the TV and grabbing a
snack when the ads come on.

Yes, I understand advertising is a business model. That business model should
_take into account_ that a certain fraction of users are going to block them.
If too many users start blocking ads, we can and will develop new business
models to drive businesses. For example, perhaps a new form of advertising
could be fun for the user, such that they wouldn't want to block them.

~~~
pvg
_I believe that for any electrical signals that enter my private space or
privately-owned devices, I have the right to do whatever I want with_

Not really. You can't spy on your neighbours or decrypt and watch pay
satellite or cable tv.

~~~
chrisseaton
I think he's talking about his moral beliefs, not his legal rights.

~~~
pvg
Either way, my point is it's an oddly popular belief that's so inconsistent
with reality it can't serve as a basis for any coherent argument about
adblocking.

~~~
Spivak
Sure it can, the law is neither immutable nor sacred. Just because large
corporate interests managed to create backwards laws doesn't mean we can't
ignore them or talk about what the law ought to be.

The people who make this argument aren't inconsistent, they also likely
believe that decrypting satellite, breaking DRM, or generally hacking or
cracking _shouldn 't_ be illegal but dealt with through proper security or
private contract.

------
userbinator
I'm delighted at the lack of any Google Analytics script on the page. Practice
what you preach. :-)

~~~
julie1
lol, just reminded me I had set up a google analytics on my blog a long time
ago before thinking about it and that I have been complaining about the idiots
putting google analystics for more than one year.

Oh gosh. How much google analytics did I put during the 6 months where I
thought it was the alternative to parsing logs for stats on my server when I
believed in the clown and migrated to it?

PS: I try to quit looking at stats as much as I try to quit smoking ; it is
the only sensible alternative. I should not care about them.

~~~
generj
There are good alternatives to Google Analytics that are FOSS and allow you to
self-host.

Piwik is excellent and simple, and SnowPlow is very powerful if not user-
friendly.

Server logs are pretty unreliable, and don't give nearly the depth of data
that a true analytics service does. I think a self-hosted analytics service
does very little harm, as the main danger with Google Analytics is the
potential for cross-domain tracking.

~~~
julie1
I used to be a sysadmin and have my tools to know what I wanted ;)
[https://github.com/jul/yahi](https://github.com/jul/yahi)

I care about stats as a junkie and I see this as vanity or OCD.

Best solution at my opinion is to not care and just practice.

~~~
generj
That looks like a very nice solution, and probably covers what most people
would want out of Google Analytics for a simple site. Like you said, for a
personal site, stats are for curiosity and the vanity/need to know how many
people came to the site. But still, that's not quite true - you might start
writing more articles about a topic which got lots of traffic, for example.
That's not mere vanity or OCD, that's site optimization.

For a simple site, weblogs probably give enough information to perform site
optimization. I do think that there are lots of stats any website of
sufficient scale needs to fine-tune operation/marketing which are NOT
available via weblogs and in fact require some JS to be on the page.

There should be a way to get this limited information without infringing on
privacy and without having data gaps from ad blockers.

------
harwoodleon
When you are talking about structural failure of a system - how about an
action that fails 80-99% of the time? I'd consider that a failure. Internet
advertising as an action created by companies is a complete failed system
propped up by players like Google.

I bet that as a total percentage of visited sites from webpages, advertising
will account for a tiny fraction.

The perception by advertisers that this is a product they should buy, even
though it fails massively, and is very very hard to attribute value to, means
we are only one small hop away from billboard and radio advertising.

The illusion of statistical/analytical evidence is so frail without a massive
privacy compromise, it makes the whole task seem pointless from both sides.

Now that malware is a part of the mix, makes everyone think - lets just block
this shit and get on with our lives.

The ad business now is like a computerised 80's junk tv ad marketplace.
Offering little or no value to anyone.

The original instinct by the OP was correct, users are at the heart of the
internet - not companies.

~~~
nsns
Well, you could say that advertising companies are actually in the business of
tempting their clients into advertising by promising them the ability to tempt
the general public into buying their products.

The problem imo is that, ever since Google has paved the way, monetizing an
online product has become fixed on a single, double-edged strategy: either
show ads or sell your users' data to advertisers.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Or freemium, or paid subscription ... and then the companies will sell your
data anyway because data of people willing to pay off more highly valued.

------
mattkevan
I've been thinking this for a while: would it be feasible to create a
labelling body for online advertising and privacy?

I see it a bit like Fairtrade or FSC certified, but for advertising and
tracking - an independently verified set of criteria which must be met to be
awarded the standard. As an independent body, it wouldn't have the conflict of
interest of, say Eyeo/ABP.

And unlike offline standards agencies which rely on self-certification and
occasional inspections, the testing would be done at the browser plugin level
to filter out any scripts and ads which don't meet the standard.

A combination of marketing to end-users as to the benefits of ethical
advertising, and real-time feedback to site owners and advertisers as to which
ads were blocked, why they were blocked and how much money that cost them
could be a powerful incentive to clean things up.

~~~
xorcist
> testing would be done at the browser plugin level to filter out any scripts
> and ads which don't meet the standard

I think you are describing pretty much any ad block plugin. If you serve ads
from your own domain with an img tag, they don't be blocked. It's just that
very few people do that.

~~~
mattkevan
Yeah, technically it wouldn't be all that different - but the user-facing side
would.

If a site met a particular level of privacy, the relevant badge would be
displayed - sort of like a SSL padlock - as a reassurance that the site was
trustworthy. Or a bit like, cheesy though they are, those valid HTML/CSS
buttons.

Ten years ago there was a big push for web standards, vaguely defined though
some of them were, and from that it's now unthinkable to build a site which
isn't standards-based. We need a similar push for tracking and advertising.

Like the web standards movement, which wasn't led by browser makers or website
owners, but by developers and designers who realised things couldn't continue,
the ad-tech and publishing industries are not going to be able to do this
themselves, but need pressure from outside.

------
iofj
This issue really feels like an endgame in chess in a game between good
players.

1) publishers can't just switch to serving images with their text and ads,
because advertisers do not trust publishers, and this would enable them to
cheat. So they can't move, they need the 3rd party tags.

2) browser vendors can't "fix" this, despite several browsers being done by
large players in ad selling space (even IE's successor, Edge, seems to be
making efforts to support ad blocking).

3) end-users won't switch on ads because publishers are overdoing ads, or they
are helping malicious actors, or are simply malicious themselves.

4) advertisers can't switch away from the internet, because the internet is
eating the press, TV, radio, ... It just wouldn't work.

Everything is stuck and nobody can move. But somewhere in there is the answer.

~~~
irascible
The answer is for advertisers to die in a fire. There is no content I need
from the web that is worth the cost.

~~~
a_imho
end users are not stuck in this analysis at all

------
tinalumfoil
For a site that hates ads so much, I wonder how many HN readers make a living
off them.

~~~
toephu2
technically and indirectly of any Google employee?

~~~
mschuster91
While Google does make a huge chunk of money off advertising, they're
diversifying.

Google's cloud computing service and especially Google Apps already bring in
monies.

------
mrmondo
FYI the CSS is a bit borked on mobile devices:
[http://i.imgur.com/bex0Kpa.png](http://i.imgur.com/bex0Kpa.png)

------
elcapitan
"Rothenberg Says Ad Blocking Is a War against Diversity and Freedom of
Expression"

That quote was probably the most ridiculous and self-revealing thing I've read
in a long time. Are they really that desparate? Good to hear.

~~~
Hoasi
It seems they are, although the ad industry never shied from hurling gross
statements either.

------
kyledrake
I'm just going to leave this here
[https://kyledrake.neocities.org/adblockbar/](https://kyledrake.neocities.org/adblockbar/)

The bait doesn't work 100% of the time yet, so I wouldn't recommend using it
in production.

Edit: ooh neat, I just found a few better ways to do adblock detection. Maybe
I'll update this code to work better now..

~~~
edwintorok
Why do you link to uBlock instead of uBlock Origin? I thought uBlock Origin
from the original developer is to be preferred, and that uBlock is no longer
actively developed and the donations for uBlock do not benefit the actively
maintained uBlock Origin.

~~~
kyledrake
News to me. I don't think that was the case at the time. I'll switch to
origin. Looks like the link I was using just redirects to the new site.

~~~
gorhill
> Looks like the link I was using just redirects to the new site.

There is no redirection: you are using "ublock.org" directly in your source
code. I consider "ublock.org" to be a scam[1], and I consider your page to be
propping up a scam.

[1]
[https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/1451#issuecomment-1...](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/1451#issuecomment-193013783)

------
Trombone12
The answer for banner ads is that they should simply be removed, because
despite living in the boundless digital space all they can really do within
the format is show an oddly shaped image.

As is clear by now, the only way for ad networks to provide any sort of extra
value to the service is by choosing the exact image very carefully. To choose
the ad carefully, the person browsed must somehow be differentiated, and there
really isn't anything to do but tracking.

So ad networks must by logical necessity turn into unregulated surveillance
networks and try to soak up as much data about every visitor, collect and
collate this data for the express purpose of tracking individual behaviour and
then use this information to choose the image.

This creation of a private surveillance network for tracking of individuals is
basically the minimum level of sinister an ad network needs to have any sort
of "dynamic" product. Yet, at the end of the day, banner ads don't amount to
more than very basic content, so it hardly seems justified to create an
invasive surveillance apparatus just to serve slightly less irrelevant
content.

And there doesn't seem to be much at the other end of sophistication: paid sub
sites with dynamic recommendations for the visitor based on stated
preferences.

Banner ads can never amount to more than those small ads crammed into the
edges of the newspaper, despite being in a domain where companies can talk to
users directly and dynamically. The reason for this is that you don't have a
conversation with someone trough a small hole in a newspaper and as long as
that is how you serve your ads, spying on the user is the best you can do.

~~~
criddell
> As is clear by now, the only way for ad networks to provide any sort of
> extra value to the service is by choosing the exact image very carefully. To
> choose the ad carefully, the person browsed must somehow be differentiated,
> and there really isn't anything to do but tracking.

I don't think that's true.

People magazine is filled with ads that mostly pay for the magazine. The ad
buyers know nothing about individual readers. Why do online ad buyers need to
know more?

~~~
_greim_
> Why do online ad buyers need to know more?

Because they can, so whoever doesn't, won't be competitive. With paper
magazines, they can't in the first place.

~~~
criddell
I think a lot of ad-blocker users use the same justification. They block ads
because they can. Readers put up with ads in paper magazines because there's
little alternative.

------
generj
I've often wondered if an ad blocker more like an anti-virus heuristic system
could be created. It would look for suspicious looking JS and block it, as
well as ban any code which auto-plays video or fullscreens.

Add some machine learning algos with image recognition and the user's ability
to mark "Don't display stuff like this again" and there would be a very good
compromise between viewing ads and keeping a device secure. More persistent
tracking, especially cross-domain tracking, could also be avoided.

The alternative is something I've entitled "Enhanced Do Not Track", which
consists of setting the DNT header and then maliciously editing advertising
information sent by the browser. In time, advertisers would learn to actually
obey DNT calls or face the prospect of terrible data.

~~~
Symbiote
As I understand it, that's the aim of Privacy Badger:
[https://www.eff.org/privacybadger](https://www.eff.org/privacybadger)

~~~
generj
Thanks for the heads up! I'm always very impressed with the EFF and what they
do with my donations :)

I'll install it on my personal computer. An irony I have is that as a worker
in the analytics field, I can't block ads or analytics on my work device
despite knowing better than most the extent to which they track me. But when
doing QA on a screenshare, I can't afford the chance of forgetting I have a
blocking solution on and then not seeing any analytics requests pop up.

------
chflags
Page looks great in my text-only browser (no ad-blocker needed). Thank you
AdTech Operator, even if it was not intentional.

------
over
The main problem I have with the prevalence of adblockers is that now you have
to "block" the meta-advertising people in discussion forums that criticize you
or attempt to make you feel guilty for blocking ads on your own property any
time the subject comes up, and it's a lot harder since the messages are
usually targeted, handwritten, interspersed with useful content, and overall
difficult to detect automatically.

------
timonovici
One interesting idea would be to move the advertising server-side. Just smash
a ruby gem in your project, or a PHP file, and let's see how well you'll sleep
when you know somebody can inject code on your server whenever they feel like
it.

If that would be the standard way to go, I doubt people would just bundle all
advertising scripts they can find around the web.

~~~
usrusr
This will be the inevitable outcome of the ad blocker war. The CDN of today
will become the ad splicing networks of tomorrow.

------
Moru
Adblocking from the small-scale advertiser is a great money-saver. As an
advertiser I would feel that the site is stealing from me when I see that they
require people to turn off ad-blocking. I know their visitors that use
blocking software would never buy from me anyway, so why should I pay to show
ads to them?

------
SixSigma
In the old days, advertisers sent ad copy to the magazine / newspaper and they
added it to their content.

I could turn the page or not read it. Sometimes it was interesting. In
specialist magazines, the editorial content is often secondary to the
advertising. I read "Professional Builders Monthly" so I can keep an eye on
new products being advertised. My experience is enhanced by advertising.

The cost of effort is borne by the advertisers and publishers. The production
costs are covered by the advertisers and the purchaser of the information
(me).

On the internet there is significant cost to me. I risk malicious actors, I
pay for bandwidth and CPU cycles, my attention is stolen by flashing and
sound, data is collected on my habits and traded with who knows who - my
experience is degraded not enhanced by advertising.

------
chris_wot
At this point, I'd seriously like to see that anonymity be built into a
network protocol. Like a version of IP where the source field is removed, and
the next-hop source is progressively encrypted like Tor does.

Then I'd love to see a filtering solution that blocks all third party
tracking.

------
DanielBMarkham
How about this: we make a new tag <advertising></advertising>

Inside this tag can only go text-link ads. Ads in any other form on the page
will be ignored. But for ads with those tags, the text will be displayed at
the top of the browser, in the premium location for users to see it.

This allows ads, reduces the impact of ads on visual clutter, eliminates
delivery of malware via ads, and drastically decreases page weight and load
time. In addition, by enforcing an arbitrary scarcity, advertisers will be
forced to bid-up for one spot on the page instead of being lured into more and
more complex advertising platforms that are unwieldy to operate and many times
have dubious added value.

~~~
a_imho
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_bit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_bit)

First for not rendering advertising tags. There is nothing inherent about
advertising, a unique tag for it feels a bit arrogant.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
You misunderstood. The point wasn't to make an evil bit.

If we're going to have the semantic web, isn't advertising an important part
of any page layout. Good grief, we have header, footer, microtags, and god
knows what else. Advertising is at least as semantically important as the rest
of it.

After all, that's all adblockers are trying to do anyway -- identify the
semantic purpose of those hunks of code used for content sponsorship. This is
semantically important even if nothing else changes in the deliver-render
system.

------
inglor
Nah, we can now formally prove that the code inside an ad is completely safe.
So much that this is proposed since a few days ago for direct inclusion in the
JavaScript language.

This is Mark Miller's work
[http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...](http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/40673.pdf)

Anyone who wants to hold an educated opinion on the topic should read it.

EDIT: sauce for "direct inclusion": [https://github.com/FUDCo/ses-
realm](https://github.com/FUDCo/ses-realm)

~~~
justabystander
What code is "safe" isn't necessarily something that's set in stone. Exploits
could easily deliver code that looks safe but causes problems. And each new
version could introduce a new exploit.

And then there's the upcoming WebAssembly, which is bound to be ruined by ad
networks in the future.

~~~
tyingq
I believe it's also common to just create a safe, but high CTR ad (OMG 60%
off) and save the malicious javascript for the landing page.

------
Gratsby
>Many think that security’s choke hold on privacy started post 9/11, but this
is not accurate. It had started half a decade earlier in the advent of the
internet, and the popularization of mobile phones. Edward Snowden’s
allegations much later, they too largely were part of the debate that started
around 1995.

By the time Snowden came around, I felt like the battle over privacy had long
since been lost. I felt like every passionate statement was a point in an
argument made a decade earlier that lost largely due to apathy from the
general community (though the tech community always held privacy at a high
level of importance).

The way things related to privacy are today, they are irreversible, IMO.
Forget governments, private companies have long understood the value of
information. Whether it's good or bad, the point is moot. Now we're in the era
of figuring out what to do with all the data. Luckily for the world, I feel
that the data has much more indirect commercial value than direct. Yes, it's
nice to be able to target users with ads about phones when you know they are
ready to upgrade. But it's more valuable to be able to answer questions like
"what are the top 30 locales in the U.S. where a x business would succeed", or
"what elements would provide the most compelling story-line to a high budget
movie targeting x customer base".

It's not that users' individual privacy is being held in particularly high
regard, it's simply that collective information provides the answers to more
interesting and more profitable questions.

Where government treatment of privacy is concerned, that's a pendulum that
sways too far in either direction at any given point. It's a tough debate in
general because people are constantly asked to weigh the balance between
preventing their worst fear and creating it. You want the government to be
able to break down any wall to get your lost child returned home, but you
don't want the government breaking in your door because you happened to order
pizza from the same restaurant as the kidnappers. At some point the person
with the kidnapped child will be the most sympathetic character in the
argument, at another the person who ended up in the hospital because of an
unnecessary raid. Politics isn't about cooler heads prevailing, it's about
garnering support and creating passionate followers.

One thing for sure, the U.S. government interest in technology and information
has spawned some inventions that otherwise wouldn't exist. Things like
realtime translation, advances in battery technology, gps navigation, and the
internet itself are all examples where we wouldn't be where we are today
without the enormous amount of interest and funding that follows a government
project.

~~~
jacquesm
> The way things related to privacy are today, they are irreversible, IMO.

Fuck that. Defeatism is definitely not going to help. Things are only
irreversible if everybody gives up.

~~~
Gratsby
I woke up to this and had to laugh. I've never considered myself anything but
an idealist, but I see your point.

I wish it had changed my opinion.

Yes, there are a lot of issues surrounding privacy that will change and I was
being overly general. But in some ways it's pandora's box.

------
CalRobert
The weird thing about opposition to ad blocking is that downloading a page via
curl or wget means I see no ads at all, just links to JS hosted on other
servers. But nobody says those tools are unethical (I think).

Incidentally, I wonder why we don't see more ad networks implemented server-
side as a way to help prevent blocking? Is it too hard to track with
reasonable accountability?

------
recursive
What is meant by "third party tracking tag"?

~~~
irascible
A single pixel image loaded from a domain that tracks the ip of the
downloader? There are probably lots of variations.

~~~
jessaustin
Don't forget, that single GET also comes with cookies so tracking isn't
limited to a single IP.

------
gumby
Quite apart from the malware problem, the privacy problem may be unfixable. I
have a friend working at $major-site-we-all-use who is tracking people who
don't even log in and who have ad blockers installed. He cares less who they
are IRL and just how he can send them "native" content. Bleagh.

------
mirimir
> One of the pioneers of Javascript, the most widely used technology in the
> web today, Douglas Crockford argued that the most reliable and cost-
> effective method to inject malicious code on to a user’s device is to buy an
> ad.

Wow. Just wow.

Worse than email spearphishing, even. Totally automatic.

I wonder if anti-malware apps catch any of this.

------
chopin
With regard to malware delivery via ad networks I'd think it would help
already if web site providers where held accountable for _all_ content
delivered via their site. I don't understand that there hasn't been a law suit
over this yet.

------
st3v3ndungan
Third party Javascript is the problem, right?

Is it feasible for a domain to only accept ads with static content?

Or, for dynamic content, share the relevant portions of their own JS /
envelope third party JS into their own code base (and presumably scrub it/test
it)?

------
paulddraper
Isn't Web ad blocking is the equivalent of DVR for TV?

Should there be more of a controversy for DVR, or less of a controversy for
Web ad blockers?

------
nxzero
Wondering if public awareness of how much money is made via malvertising will
do more harm than good.

------
tszming
The page can be improved if you remove or self-host your Google Web Fonts.

------
hobs
Great article, misspelling "reuqired" only issue I had.

------
SimeVidas
Website protip: If you’re making a dedicated domain for your long blog post,
also write a summary (so that _all_ visitors can get something out of it, not
just the 5% who are actually going to read the post).

------
ngrilly
Who is the author?

------
foobarbecue
What is "experdience"?

------
rehevkor5
Who wrote it? And when?

------
irascible
When the police get hit with ransomware.. they pay the ransom.. and by they, I
mean me.

------
based2
tx for manageable proxies

------
avodonosov
you are welcome!

------
sp332
This page is basically unreadable on my phone in portrait orientation. The
enforced margins means the text has only a half-inch column down the middle,
and often wraps in the middle of long words.

~~~
slashink
For someone interested in how bad it is, this is how it looks on a iPhone 6S:
[http://i.imgur.com/LFL0QgJ.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/LFL0QgJ.jpg)

Content seems nice but I really can't read it on my phone sadly. Hope author
can fix it!

~~~
ZainRiz
It could be worse, like on my phone:
[http://imgur.com/Ig90s55](http://imgur.com/Ig90s55)

In wonder what happens if someone has an even lower resolution phone.

~~~
mikkokotila
Very sorry about this guys. I've figured out what was wrong and it should work
now for any modern phone. Thank you for flagging this, as otherwise I would
have totally missed it.

------
dbpokorny
> In the current situation, it seems that at the very least we are going to
> see an increased use of ad blockers, resulting in further damage to internet
> advertising and national economies

This is absurd. Destroying my focus so you can sell your product does not
"damage the national economy".

~~~
roymurdock
In a weird, perverse way, blocking ads really does damage the economy. Think
about what subsidized newspapers, televisions, what drives google, facebook,
and youtube - what galvanizes consumption, the great engine of any economy.
While ads are annoying, intrusive, and even _dangerous_ at this point, they
play a huge role in "subsidizing" important goods and getting people off their
couches and into stores, increasing the velocity of money and putting cash
back into corporations where it can be pooled and turned into new products.

~~~
Terr_
>In a weird, perverse way, blocking ads really does damage the economy.

Sort of like how healthier individuals "damage the economy" by consuming fewer
treatments and pills.

~~~
Retra
Also known as the broken window fallacy.

~~~
edanm
I don't think that's an example of the "broken window fallacy", actually. It
is generally true that people who consume less, are putting less money into
the economy, making aggregate demand lower, making the economy overall
smaller. This might not necessarily be _bad_ , but it's not the same line of
thinking as saying that e.g. "breaking a window" will cause economic
improvement.

~~~
cronjobber
The analogy is accurate. Breaking windows creates artificial demand, just like
advertising. Advertising wants to break your _contentment_ with the status
quo, to make you "realize" that you need product X before you can be fully
happy again.

~~~
XorNot
This is one-sided. A lot of modern consumer advertising and especially web
advertising works this way, but there is also the goal of simply letting
someone know a service or product exists (and might fill a need they presently
have).

The problem is this is a lot like search on the internet - if Google were
"perfect", advertising wouldn't work, because it would always find exactly
what you were looking for exactly when you needed it.

~~~
sirclueless
> ... if Google were "perfect", advertising wouldn't work, because it would
> always find exactly what you were looking for exactly when you needed it.

Advertising will always work so long as there is producer surplus[1] in the
economy. If firm A and firm B both earn $10 of economic surplus on the
purchase of some product, then either supplier will be willing to spend up to
$10 to convince a customer to switch from their competitor to their product.
If a customer considers the two firms' products to be substitute goods[2],
then both products may be "perfect" search results, because the customer
doesn't have a preference between them and considers them both to be
equivalently useful, which is why Google can extract money from advertisers to
show their product first without significantly harming their user experience.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_surplus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_surplus)
[2]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitute_good](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitute_good)

