
Attack of the Ad Blockers - antouank
http://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2016-06-01/mobile-ad-blocking-s-surge-shows-digital-media-must-change
======
zipwitch
I find the mindset behind, "analysts estimated that ad blocking had cost web
publishers nearly $22 billion in lost ad sales" to be both hilarious and
terrifying. It's something right out of Max Headroom I watched as a kid, where
having an off-switch on your TV was a crime.

~~~
antisthenes
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits)

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Johnny555
If publishers would get together and come up with a single micropayment
system, I'd gladly pay them 10 cents or so for each article -- the same
revenue that they'd get from the ads I'm blocking.

But I'm not going to give out my credit card number to dozens of sites where I
can "pay just a few dollars per month" to access their content.

I don't want an annual subscription that renews automatically, and I'm
probably not going to look at another article on that site for weeks, months
or maybe never, so I don't want to pay dollars for an article that they are
willing to show me for a few pennies worth of ad revenue -- just let me give
them the pennies directly.

~~~
trolly
Screw that. I'm not paying for an article before I even know whether it's
hacky garbage or actual journalism.

As if the temptation for these sites to pump out clickbait isn't bad enough as
it is....

Unless you mean a completely passive option to give them a "tip" so to speak.

In which case I'm not saying it's a bad idea but how is that any different
than donating once a year to NPR and PBS during their "Oh-God-Kill-Me-Now-
athons." Or in the case of for-profit sites, paying for however many months of
subscription fees you feel is appropriate for the value you received.

~~~
Johnny555
I guess it could be some honor system "pay when you leave". Or maybe let you
review the article "Was this worth 8 cents to you?" and display the votes
before you pay so you can decide if it's worth the money. Or maybe you can
flag an article as clickbait and get your money back.

~~~
w-ll
Could it be a function of time on page, maybe even with scroll distance. You
generally know if the article will be garbage in the first paragraph or two
and always before the fold (doubly so before the fold if there wasnt ads
taking up the top 75% of the page)

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nthitz
Opening the article Incognito in Chrome and examining the network tab, over
170 requests in total weighing in at around 4MB (for me anyway). That is one
reason I choose to use adblockers.

~~~
jlarocco
Hilariously, the site opens a popup claiming that my ad-blocker may negatively
impact the performance of the site.

The pop-up is now blocked by my ad-blocker ;-)

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Blaaguuu
I believe it just said that ad-blockers will 'impact performance' \- Which is
technically correct... they didn't specify if it was negatively or positively
;)

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waterphone
> _…which may adversely affect the performance and content…_

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0x0
With all the malwaretising going around on even "reputable" networks, using an
adblocker is simply a basic step for maintaining enduser security, much like
antivirus software.

"Attack of the malware blockers" would be a more accurate title.

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nfriedly
I've seen a lot of sites recently that either work around my ad blocker to
still load ads or else pop up some other annoyance (e.g. Bloomberg). I'm
starting to think about going back to noscript and just selectively enabling
things.

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waterphone
[https://github.com/reek/anti-adblock-killer](https://github.com/reek/anti-
adblock-killer) (if you use uBlock Origin, you can turn this on with just a
checkbox)

~~~
21
So then the question is, why is that not checked by default. I made my
intention clear by installing the ad-blocker.

~~~
angry-hacker
Because it's not always reliable and can cause things not working properly.
It's really easy to create ad block killers/popup modals etc. It's just that
lately site owners have began fighting back.

It's really interesting where it leads us, site owners and more importantly ad
networks have been lazy trying to defeat adblock.

Let the war behin I guess.

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bitJericho
I don't watch regular tv because of the ads either. It's time to change
revenue models.

~~~
nickpsecurity
They tried all kinds of models. People rejected them for free stuff with ads.
So, it's correct to build on the only thing that works for most content most
of the time. The market is the problem.

Here's a nice write-up on the beginnings:

[http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advert...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advertising-
is-the-internets-original-sin/376041/)

~~~
chris_wot
Except that Netflix and even Apple iTunes show that if you price your content
to be reasonable and allow people to actually choose what they want to watch,
read or hear when they want to do so you can actually make a lot of money. And
you don't have to show ads.

~~~
jbooth
Every WSJ article on HN has instructions to circumvent the pay wall as top
comment. And it's not like we couldn't afford it.

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angry-hacker
Exactly. Top comment is always how to bypass the paywall and the readers here
are wealthy than average. Having everything behind paywall would make the
content available for selected few. How would HN even work if everything is
paywalled?

~~~
nickpsecurity
I believe the academics' comments in the Elselvier threads show how it would
work. Hint: it wouldn't. ;)

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chris_wot
Oho so now they are claiming that net neutrality is being violated? So
basically publishers are attempting to expand "neutrality" to not transit
paths but onto end-points.

I do hope that Springer disables their firewalls, virus scanners and spam
filters. Could be a boon to sci-hub once their systems are compromised and all
their data leaked...

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brownbat
The most useless survey in the world finds that most people use adblockers "in
order to block ads."

Great article, but c'mon, maybe don't offer a tautology as a survey response.

~~~
JadeNB
It's an obvious conclusion, but I'm not sure that it's a tautology. The name
of something doesn't define what it is, only tries to describe it. As others
have pointed out, it is, for example, perfectly possible to be interested in
an adblocker mainly from a security point of view, without taking any position
on ads themselves.

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Pulce
I use Ad Blockers because - for me - find something browsing the web is like
run into a street artist performing while I'm walking around my city.

Often the artist didn't contribute to build the city in which he's performing
(taxes, etc...). He is just using an already crowded street. I don't wont to
be obligated to be distracted by commercial ads.

Off course, after seeing the performance I'll be happy to donate some money or
to support the artist in some way.

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ikeboy
Bloomberg now has an adblock detector, although it incorrectly triggered on
mobile chrome which doesn't even have adblockers.

~~~
waterphone
> _We noticed that you 're using an ad blocker, which may adversely affect the
> performance and content on Bloomberg.com. For the best experience, please
> whitelist the site._

The dishonesty of it saying that the adblocker will ("may") negatively affect
the _performance_ of the site, when it's in fact blocking an absurd number of
requests unnecessary to the content people actually want to see, is
astounding.

~~~
ikeboy
Eh, plenty of sites have broken on umatrix for me, and I need to go in and
whitelist certain servers. Bloomberg for instance I needed to whitelist
alternate bloomberg domains and disqus for comments.

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chris_wot
Which servers? And why should Bloomberg break if you block servers on
different domains?

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ikeboy
bbthat.com, bwbx.io. Both owned by bloomberg, and I've had articles break
without them.

Many other sites have cdns with different domains.

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tux3
Or perhaps it would be more fair to say "Defense of the Ad Blockers".

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abiox
interesting that the survey didn't have the option "to protect myself".
malware is a thing. ad blockers wouldn't be as pervasive if the ad industry
was less user-hostile and more discerning of it's clientele.

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mschuster91
The solution is so obvious, at least for big media outlets who complain the
most: INSOURCE YOUR ADVERTISING.

This means: no external services to track the f..k out of your users, and you
yourself provide a platform for bidders to upload banner images or plaintext
ads (Google Adsense-like) to.

Benefits, aside from making it harder for people to ad-block:

1) you don't hand over a sizable chunk of your ad income to middlemen with
incentives for fraud (they charge the advertiser, but claim fraud towards you
and keep the change)

2) you can be (relatively) sure that your site doesn't get a nasty Google
penalty for serving malware.

Is there any (F)OSS/SaaS platform available for an individual to provide such
a platform for bidders?

edit: I forgot offering paid content and referral links (Amazon!), these can
be worth quite a chunk of money if your site is popular enough.

~~~
jlarocco
That would be very expensive, requires a huge amount of work and maintenance,
and at the end of the day it's unlikely to change anything.

~~~
mschuster91
Yet we see that, thanks to adblockers, 3rd party advertising, tracking and
data milking won't work for much longer.

I give the ad industry, especially the fraudsters, not much longer than two
years, given the rising trend of adblockers.

Native ads are the only way that's left, and turns out that the big media
houses usually already have an ad acquisition and disposition department for
print ads.

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112233
That's why HEVC screen content coding extensions are so important. They enable
you to present your web content as a video of someone scrolling the article
page, with no loss of advertisement quality.

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anotherevan
They are not ad blockers, they are HTML firewalls.

