
Why Stack Overflow Doesn’t Care About Ad Blockers - smacktoward
https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2016/02/why-stack-overflow-doesnt-care-about-ad-blockers/
======
toast0
> An important part of the QA process is ensuring that not just the creative,
> but the advertiser is relevant to our audience. Every single ad to appear on
> any of our sites is vetted by the operations team.* We check copy and
> content on the ads as well as the landing pages. What we repeatedly ask
> ourselves in this QA process is quite simple: is this relevant to users?

If other sites did this, maybe ad blocking wouldn't be so prevalent.

~~~
shkkmo
It's not enough.

Privacy Badger
([https://www.eff.org/privacybadger](https://www.eff.org/privacybadger))
blocks a bunch of stuff on StackOverflow.

 _Blocks Scripts:_

www.google-analytics.com

edge.quantserve.com

b.scorecardresearch.com

 _Blocks Cookie Only:_

ajax.googleapis.com

www.gravatar.com

i.stack.imgur.com

 _Blocks nothing:_

cdn.sstatic.net

Add content relevancy is one part of the equation, but not allowing third
parties to track my actions on your site is the other, more important part of
the equation (to me at least). Privacy Badger is the only adBlocker I use
(besides having flash not run automatically), so I will happily view ads that
don't involve tracking me.

~~~
JohnTHaller
The state of website statistics is a sad one. The better site analysis engines
were bought years ago by Google (becoming Google analytics) and the like and
the lesser ones died. A few are still around kicking, including some quite
good ones, but most advertisers, sponsors, etc will _only_ trust third party
analytics in determining advertising rates, sponsorship levels, etc.

Essentially, users who block analytics become a net negative for many sites as
they add no positive value to the site operator and are just a drain on
resources. There are exceptions, of course, in the case of user-generated
content participation where submitting content, making comments, etc may be a
draw to revenue-generating visitors. But on many sites, that user blocking ads
and analytics is only hurting the site operator. If it becomes more popular -
say as the default setting in an ad blocker - I'd wager we'll have some sites
start to block those users at some point in the future.

~~~
cubano
I can't help but wonder...how many real-world businesses could benefit from
the same type of invasive tracking that online businesses seem to think they
have a right to subject us with?

For some reason, though, we don't allow that sort of privacy violation in our
actual lives.

However, most real-world businesses manage to do quite well even with our rude
dismissals of their desire to track us.

[edit]

~~~
chimeracoder
> For some reason, though, we don't allow that sort of privacy violations in
> our actual lives.

Nomi is a startup that does exactly this. They use open WiFi networks to
harvest MAC addresses of cell phones and track people's locations that way.

The only way to "opt out" is to register your MAC address with them. (Aside
from just disabling WiFi on your phone, of course).

~~~
cubano
Well, I won't be using "Nomi" or recommending them to my friends anytime soon,
so good luck to them and their business model.

~~~
danjayh
Um ... it doesn't work exactly like that. If you leave your phone's WiFi
turned on, you and your friends _will_ be using Nomi sometime soon (so
exciting, amiright?)! You see, the store/eatery/prison/airline/casino/whatever
just puts the Nomi WiFi access point on their premises, and when you come in
your phone tries to connect to it, and BLAMO, it harvests your MAC address.
Now they have a unique identifier for 'you' (your phone's MAC), and they can
keep track of how many times you go into the place, where else you like to go,
what sections you like to browse (just a few more of the gadgets scattered in
the store), if you've been to their marketing events, etc. etc. etc. Oh hey,
since it harvests your MAC address, they can also tell who manufactured your
phone. 'you' have an apple phone? Sweet! We've got ourselves a (probably)
high-end customer.

Welcome to the future :(

~~~
voltagex_
Also, because no one gives a damn, your phone will also shout out the names
and MACs of access points it's connected to before. I have no idea why
Android/iOS hasn't disabled / geofenced that yet.

~~~
kogepathic
Phones do this to authenticate faster to known access points.

Instead of waiting for an SSID beacon, they just broadcast their known
networks and if one of them is in range, the AP will reply. It's all driven by
user demand to connect to their WiFi network faster.

Also, AFIAK, this is required behaviour to join networks that don't broadcast
their SSID (e.g. "hidden" networks).

I see two solutions to this problem, but neither are really tenable from a
user perspective:

1) run the GPS all the time and geotag known APs[1]

2) leave the WiFi radio on all the time and passively listen for SSID
broadcasts[2]

[1] doesn't work indoors, or if the location of an AP is changed (e.g. 4G
hotspot). Will also have significant impact on battery runtime, and likely to
be abused by ad companies

[2] will have significant impact on battery runtime

~~~
schoen
It's hard to solve this part of the problem using current wifi protocols. I
think this is closely related to other problems that people have studied and
I'm sure protocol improvements could be made using public-key crypto or HMAC.
As an off-the-cuff example, when you join an encrypted network, it could tell
you (over the encrypted channel) a shared secret to use when reconnecting.
Then you could broadcast HMAC(secret, current time) or (nonce, HMAC(secret
time, nonce)) and if the wifi network recognizes one of those broadcasts as
directed to it, it could reply. An eavesdropper who doesn't know the secret
wouldn't be able to determine which base station the mobile device was trying
to contact.

------
vinceguidry
The problem with selectively un-blocking individual sites is that it poses a
management problem, plus it wouldn't take many bad ads to come through to
cause me to go back to just blocking everything.

I'm sorry, but this really is a case of "this is why we can't have nice
things." I would rather give up all premium Internet content than to have to
actually manage the problem or any of the purported solutions to the problem.

YouTube would be the hardest to give up, but most of my favorite producers
have Patreons and their own video-hosting sites anyway, and I might even be
able to eke out a profit helping the rest move too if they needed it. I can
simply curate individual "super-premium" content creators and patronize them,
leaving the likes of Wired and WSJ to their fates.

I already use TheBrowser and use their micro-payment service, but I only ever
put $5 on it, there just isn't that many paid articles. The content industry
is extremely insistent on forcing advertising on me, sorry but no. Especially
for high-volume news sites, the PITA factor far outweighs whatever insight I
get from the news articles themselves.

~~~
XorNot
The value problem: when I think critically about it, the fact I visit a site
doesn't really mean I couldn't function without it. It's disposable.

~~~
a3n
Most sites that have ads are really just entertainment for me, even news. And
there's lots of other entertainment.

It would be a shame if $FAVORITE were to disappear, they have great
journalists, but I don't read $FAVORITE regularly, so if I never see a link
for it on HN I probably won't remember it existed.

I pay for three outlets: NYT, Economist, Guardian. Nothing else in the world
has seemed important enough for me to pay for it, and I won't miss them if I'm
blocked.

------
donretag
StackOverflow does not have to pay editors, they have users that contribute
for free. Somewhat tacky of SO to not mention this fact.

Just like traditional writers have publishing statistics, online writers use
analytics to calculate how much reach their pieces have. It is sad, but
writers count on pageviews, which is why you see many clickbait titles.

~~~
falcolas
But they do have to employ moderators, admins, marketing, sales, software
developers, IT... as well as paying for hosting, bandwidth, office space,
equipment...

What does missing one specific class of employees really matter in the broader
scope?

~~~
dredmorbius
Good creative content is difficult to incentivise for.

Case in point: SO incentivises for it _without payment_. Largely through
providing an "interesting things to work on" dynamic, with rapid review and
improvement of naff responses.

But answers to technical problems (many quite trivial) are a different class
than, say, deep investigative reporting, or solving really hard technical
problems.

On that last, there's an essay written a few years back on how the current
iteration of the Internet seems to incentivise for trivial things, featured on
HN. I'll see if I can't track it down.

(See what you just incentivised me to do there?)

~~~
falcolas
I won't disagree with anything you've said there. Creative types are always
harder to incentivize (just look at us programmers).

But stepping back for a moment and looking at it from a purely financial point
of view - if you're working for a company with 500 employees, how will it
matter to the bottom line if a portion of them are editors instead of
moderators; instead of software developers?

~~~
dredmorbius
If your goal is to directly incentivise _and reward_ editorial content, then
ipso facto, you're failing at your goal.

More broadly, the problem's nontrivial. Good true talent is rare, and even
then, inspiration often uneven. It's quite possible for someone to turn out
prodigious amounts of content (see Isaac Asimov, say), and even relatively
high-quality content (his was good, though IMO uneven). But there are others
who produce very few works -- Harper Lee, Margaret Mitchell, and Ludwig
Wittgenstein all come to mind.

Incentivising technological creativity has also been quite rocky -- VC-backed
startups, IPO exits, patents, state-granted charters, and patronage are among
the models attempted. Many tremendously innovative individuals died broke, and
the inventors of many of our most valuable creations (fire, agriculture,
weaving cloth, smelting metals, writing) are entirely forgotten. Even the
roster of great inventors launching the Industrial Revolution, about 200 years
ago, shows few who actually prospered _by that work_ \-- several died in
poverty, others were granted government awards or made money elsewhere, a
small handful actually profited directly.

I've just run across Joseph Needham's absolutely stunning 27 volume _History
of Science and Civilisation in China_ , which tells the story of Chinese
invention dating back literally thousands of years (don't ask for details, as
I said, _just_ discovered it, though Needham and the work's Wikipedia pages
offer substantial background, and Simon Winchester has a biography of Needham
giving more detail). One question I've in mind to take to it is _what
motivated China 's inventors?_

Needham himself asked what's eponymously called "the Needham Question": why
didn't China, with its tremendous head start, industrialise before the West.

Other investigation / musing:

For content: a tax / universal content syndication
[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest_proposal_universal_online_media_payment/)

(Phil Hunt and Richard Stallman have markedly similar proposals.)

On information, markets, and why they fit poorly:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2vm2da/why_inf...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2vm2da/why_information_goods_and_markets_are_a_poor_match/)

I can't find a post on the IR inventors offhand, which probably is a good sign
I need to create one....

------
WaxProlix
This addresses a lot of complaints people have with ads from a UX perspective,
but misses some of the technical reasons that a lot of folks (probably
disproportionately represented on sites like SO) have for blocking ads and
tracking scripts, which is that they're _fucking intrusive_ , not just on a
given experience but into one's life. Since most ad impressions are coupled
with some persona creation and event linking these days, it's not as simple as
"we want to make ads more relevant and high-quality".

------
kelnos
It's really great to see that people are paying attention to the problem of
low-quality ads.

But I don't want to see ads. Of any quality level, high or low. Ever. I will
never turn off my ad blocker, for any site.

I just don't want my day-to-day to be influenced by random companies trying to
sell me things. Certainly, I can't avoid it: I live in a city, and walk
everywhere I can, and it's impossible to avoid seeing billboards and the like.
If I could wear a pair of contact lenses that would blank out real-world
advertising, I would. But online ads I can avoid.

I buy things when I want to. If I feel that I have a specific want or need for
something, I'll seek it out, and select the brand and model based on research
pulled from the most unbiased sources that I can find. Perfect? No, of course
not. But advertising is an abomination.

~~~
Drakim
I feel that there is this collective idea that since you can't block out
advertising from your vision while walking around, then you shouldn't be able
to block advertising online either. As if our computers are letting us cheat
the "natural order" by having ad block.

------
fabian2k
Stack Exchange also reduces the amounts of ads for all users that have more
than 200 reputation. This is a pretty easy threshold to hit, and after that
only the ads in the sidebar remain. So many of the active SO users will only
see a small amount of ads anyway.

------
lamontcg
"Our belief is that if someone doesn’t like them, and they won’t click on
them, any impressions served to them will only annoy them-- plus, serving ads
to people who won’t click on them harms campaign performance."

^^^ so much this.

there's this implied assumption that everyone using an adblocker is lost
revenue, but a lot of that is going to be shitty ad impressions that never
lead to clicks.

like it or not, advertisers can't actually put a gun to my head and force me
to click on an ad and buy anything.

even if its a targeted ad that manages to engage me (coincidentally this did
actually happen this morning with an ad from one of the rare newsletters that
i've allowed to be sent to my e-mail inbox) then it probably doesn't work the
way with me that advertisers want it to. i managed to find a product that i
was interested in, but it was too expensive for me. so i did a "brandX vs ..."
search on google to find brandY and now i've bookmarked the product their
competition sells which seems to be more in line with my budget...

if you want to 'game' my purchasing habits you'd be better off not advertising
at all in the classical sense, but instead send your product to review sites
and/or just buy reviews in order to saturate google results. however, when all
i see is obviously bought off review sites i'll go looking for relevant forums
and look for user threads. by far the best thing there is to have a social
media presence and have a staffer that surfs through forum sites and answers
questions.

plus, you know, just have a good product for a good price to get people
talking well about it... i realize that's some fucking crazytalk there
though...

~~~
rhino369
Most advertising is just general brand awareness. They don't need you to click
or to consciously decide "hey that looks cool."

They want you to be standing in the soda isle of the grocery store when you
are going to a party and someone asked you to pick up a drink. You don't have
a strong preference. But you buy Coke because you know it. Just knowing about
it is a huge advantage.

That's why a lot of advertising is priced in "per impression."

A lot of people will claim advertising has no effect on them, but that's BS.
It does.

So using adblockers costs the website roughly .2 cents per ad impression.

I don't think you have some moral duty to view the ads, but they don't have
some duty to give you a free website either.

~~~
massysett
This stuff works. Sometimes it seems to me that TV ads must be ineffective.
Unlike a Web ad there is no direct link between the ad and a buy. So why does
the advertiser bother?

Then I was buying life insurance. So I go to some lead generation website. I
see a whole bunch of companies I had never heard of. Then I see Prudential.
Rock. I see Metlife. Snoopy. I see ING. They sponsored the NYC Marathon that I
ran in.

I didn't get Metlife, so much for Snoopy...but I didn't get a company I had
never heard of either. For a few I said "never heard of them" and for others
I'm sure my eye just skipped right over them.

Ads work and I bet they do work even on people who say "ads NEVER work on me."
Really? When you are buying a new product, all the ad impressions you have had
make absolutely NO difference? Are you sure?

------
jxramos
Kudos to StackOverflow! Especially the sentiment recognizing "scantily-clad
women selling flight deals" as a low quality ad. I'm a married man, I don't
need that sort of noise and nonsense in my life. This blog further deepens my
loyalty to the StackOverflow community.

------
fascinated
I thought the actual reason they don't care is that the Careers program brings
in much more revenue?

~~~
frandroid
Let's see what happens when ad blockers block that content.

------
makecheck
I love what Daring Fireball does; simply a paragraph describing some sponsor:
who they are and what they do. I find myself reading it every time and even
being interested. I can say with 100% certainty that I have _never_ had that
reaction to any "traditional" ad however.

~~~
wingerlang
Possibly because you are "loyal" and respect the blog author, I doubt
websites/blogs that are not of this caliber would get away with it.

------
ck2
EXACTLY

 _Our belief is that if someone doesn’t like them, and they won’t click on
them, any impressions served to them will only annoy them-- plus, serving ads
to people who won’t click on them harms campaign performance._

and you know what, it's not the ad so much that bothers me, it's the 27
trackers added to the page by three ads in adsense and all their roundtrips
and javascript lag

I wish we could bring back the days of text ads that were interesting.

------
Joof
Stack overflow has an interesting difference to most websites: their users
provide their content. Users that run ad-block are still potentially valuable.

------
gwbas1c
Honestly, I never wanted to enable ad-blockers. I started doing it because of
ads that flash, make noise, slow down the site, obscure content, ect, ect.

I really wish ad-blockers would default to an "block annoying ads only" mode;
or some kind of whitelist mode; or even some way to crowdsource so that only
annoying ads get blocked.

~~~
stevesearer
I make my living from advertisements but have had to enable blockers on
certain sites which are not just aesthetically unusable but actually unusable
because of ads. I'm talking to you Bon Appetit and Epicurious!

~~~
massysett
I just have stopped visiting sites with annoying ads like that. Which really
means I have stopped visiting a lot of the free Web.

News? Economist and NY Times. Recipes? Cooks Illustrated.

Of course the Web is still useful to buy things from a merchant; there, the
site obviously has no incentive to be annoying. And sometimes for free stuff
it's better to go to the site of someone who is already selling you something.
You mention Bon Appetit and Epicurious. If you want free recipes, go to food
manufacturer's website or to a grocery store's website. They are loaded with
free recipes and there are no annoying ads...of course, the whole site is an
ad. But it has what you need.

I understand if sites have a business model that needs annoying ads. I just
don't visit them. It seems hypocritical to me to visit the site while not
respecting its business model, especially when there are other sites out there
whose business model is more aligned with your needs. I would rather support
them with my money or clicks rather than visiting annoying places and then
installing more software to suppress annoyances.

~~~
stevesearer
Good points. We have actually recently started to just check cookbooks out
from the library which is even more cost effective than a subscription to a
site.

------
lyschoening
Most of StackOverflow's income comes from their job postings. When I posted a
job on SO a year ago, I asked them about Ad blockers. The salesperson told me
confidently that they were not concerned because only 'around 5% of visitors'
or some other small number used an Ad blocker.

I was, and still am, quite sceptical about that claim. (At any rate, I don't
know how to feel about a web developer who does not use an Ad blocker in this
day and age.) It began to make more sense to me recently when the Jobs section
was added to the SO front page and the new CV was introduced: Their approach
now is to help developers and employers actively look up ads/CVs when they are
in need of them.

------
vuldin
"At this point, it’s pretty clear that ad blocking is a big deal. A recent
study suggesting the advertising industry is set to lose over $22 billion in
2015 alone as a result of ad blockers is setting off alarm bells. That is a
LOT of money."

This line of thinking makes me livid. They aren't losing money if they never
were entitled to it in the first place. Get used to seeing my adblock, and if
you or anyone else is interested in getting any money from me, then your only
hope is to focus your efforts on coming up with an awesome product.

~~~
cbd1984
One of the things ad-blocking will force people to reconsider is deals of the
form "Person A pays Person B for the time and attention of completely
unrelated Person C, who is not only completely unrelated to A and B but who is
not even known to them beyond the most generic statistical demographic
concepts."

There's obviously nothing legally wrong with that contract, we're just forcing
a re-evaluation of the moral rights Person A has over Person C given the above
transaction.

------
vitd
Can anyone explain this quote to me? They say:

>we permit users to downvote or close ads that they don’t like.

Before I used an ad blocker, I noticed that they had a thumbs up/thumbs down
icon you could click and choose from why you didn't like the ad. I did this
literally dozens to hundreds of times on the same "Azure" ad, and it never
stopped showing up until I installed an ad blocker. Is that what he's
referring to? If not, what does he mean?

------
bluedino
>> Bret and the ad server team dug in and investigated screen size of every
user across the Stack Exchange network and concluded that only about 2% of
users would be affected by the change.

While no users might have cared, the meta thread was pretty controversial.

[http://meta.stackexchange.com/a/272617/178809](http://meta.stackexchange.com/a/272617/178809)

------
yeukhon
The ads are targeting at the right audience. They are not accepting ads
selling baby toys or the next movie discount. That's a huge difference.

------
amelius
> Our belief is that if someone doesn’t like them, and they won’t click on
> them, any impressions served to them will only annoy them-- plus, serving
> ads to people who won’t click on them harms campaign performance.

Okay, so why not then make ad-blockers unnecessary by providing a "don't show
ads" option?

~~~
jc4p
As stated in the full comment thread here we limit ads for users above 200
reputation. That puts it right between "Vote down" at 125 reputation and "View
close votes" at 250.

Funny enough, we often get asked to implement the opposite:
[http://meta.stackexchange.com/a/273653/229741](http://meta.stackexchange.com/a/273653/229741)

------
captainmuon
Ad Blockers wouldn't matter so much if

a) people would self-host ads or b) the target of the ad would host them (but
not a third party). You could randomize ad source code and layout such that an
ad blocker would have no chance removing it.

An alternative would be c) if there was much more diversity on the advertising
market, and every site would serve ads from multiple competing agencies (with
different formats and different URLs). This would also make it harder to
block, and also make it harder for advertising agencies to create profiles
(one of many reasons people block ads).

------
bobby_9x
It's true that if a person just doesn't like them they won't click on them.

However, if Adblock becomes a default install, you will have more and more
people never clicking on the ads because they never knew about them in the
first place.

I hate annoying ads, but this will eventually make it impossible for small
business owners to make a living through ads.

The playing field will be only big corporations, because they can handle ad
blocks. The same thing has happened with the music industry over the past
decade and it's just repeating in a new industry.

I feel like the new generation is pushing for more government and corporate
control.

~~~
V-2
I wouldn't want adblocking to be the default setting, but does anyone actually
propose it?

~~~
cm2012
A good proportion of HN, judging by comments, thinks all advertising should be
illegal in all circumstances because trying to persuade someone to do
something is immoral.

Edit: "A good proportion", not all. Probably 20%? The other 80% indeed are
just against tracking/privacy/bandwidth/security, and the last 10% are fine as
is.

~~~
thirdsun
That's really not the impression I get around here. I think it's clearly the
intrusiveness with which ads are displayed and all those strings (trackers)
that come attached with them.

I think most people on HN would agree that ads which don't require huge
amounts of scripts, show video, play audio, connect to 17 tracking networks or
make up 70% of the page weight would very much be tolerable.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Yup. I'm total ad hater, and yet I'd be totally fine with plainly marked, non-
intrusive, simple ads, that don't waste bandwidth and CPU power. E.g. what
AdWords originally was. If they don't distract, I'm more willing to actually
read them, even out of curiosity.

------
glossyscr
Wait until Adblock blocks your 'Jobs near you' ad and your other job ad links
which is StackOverflows main revenue stream—paired with 40% Adblock desktop
users.

And you tell us you do not care?

------
voltagex_
Is there any point to running ads on a small site / blog any more?

It's a lot of work to curate your average stream of garbage coming from
AdSense etc. I really want to find a targetted ad network from a smaller
company who might actually care about individual customers (if anyone knows
such an ad network for {food,cooking,photography,travel,restaurants,health}
let me know).

------
hardwaresofton
Sure wish this post covered the financial impact of these decisions more
thoroughly.

------
irascible
And importantly.. add servers brought this on themselves. If they had catered
to users and given them the tools they needed to tailor their experience, they
wouldn't be in the situation they are now. Salty tears...

------
ttctciyf
I share the dislike of and militancy against ads evinced by some of the posts
here.

I started reading the piece thinking "Oh, another marketing guy who's drunk
the ' _relevant_ ads are good for people and everyone apart from a few
contrarians really likes them' kool-aid.

So I was surprised to read what seems to be a rare example of sane thinking in
an advertising person:

    
    
      The truth is: we don’t care if our users use ad blockers on Stack Overflow.
      More accurately: we hope that they won’t, but we understand that
      some people just don’t like ads. Our belief is that if someone doesn’t
      like them, and they won’t click on them, any impressions served to them
      will only annoy them-- plus, serving ads to people who won’t click on
      them harms campaign performance.
    

Yes! I will never click on an ad that somehow gets past my ad-blocking stuff,
it is just a big fat waste of money serving me the ad that I will never click
on.

Isn't it a bigger waste of money, though, serving me the page that will never
monetize because I will never click on the ads?

Let's assume that the only reason for the existence of the site is to make
money. Then by blocking ads, I'm signaling my intent to frustrate this
purpose. Shouldn't the site just not serve me any pages at all since my intent
is clear?

Interestingly, the site-owner's view of the intrinsic (i.e. non-monetary)
value of their site figures into this calculation, it seems.

If the site is (at one extreme) disposable click-bait with no substantial
content that can't be found at a dozen similar sites, then it's a reasonable
assumption that if you disable access for ad-blocking users, they'll just go
and get their meaningless content elsewhere rather than enable ads. Since
their ad-blocking ways are a good indicator that even if they enabled ads for
whatever reason, they'd probably never click on the ads anyhow, it makes
economic sense in this case to just dispense with the users.

At the other extreme, if your site is (let's say) a premier source of useful
information in some sizable field, it's a good bet that if you force ad-
blocking users to enable ads they will often continue to visit your site,
either participating in an ad-blocking arms-race that makes it increasingly
expensive for you to circumvent the blocking, or capitulating by loading the
ads but just never, ever, clicking on them, costing you more money either way.

So even from a purely financial POV, the strategy of just not caring about ad-
blocking looks like a win, without having to invoke the nobler-but-woolier
considerations about wanting to "make the world a better place for
developers."

Other ad-ops people in charge of intrinsically valuable web estate would do
well to follow SO's thinking, IMO!

------
teambob
Does Stack Overflow have ads? I have been running ad blockers since they
started

~~~
darkstar999
You could read the article to find out. It's literally in the first sentence.

