

Dev-Metal Shows Ads to Adblockers - cobeck22
http://www.dev-metal.com/show-ads-ad-blockering-visitors-pagefair-com/

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antocv
"But ads are needed to refinance free stuff".

NO. They are not.

Donations are tax-exempt so you can finance free stuff like openbsd and
libressl.

Advertisements are a sneaky way to sell your visitors eyes to sneaky
businesses. They are pollution. In all kinds of media they appear in, TV,
Radio, Internet, books. They destroy the media they target - until people move
on to more greener freer pastures, then the advertisements come and pollute
everything, until the information is so diluted of content it is no longer
serving as a media of information and instead only serves, the people selling
advertisements, disinformation.

If you cant finance your website, the first option should be call for
donations, if that doesnt work then bankrupt it, call it what it is,
unsustainable business, rather than selling it to advertisers and selling your
visitors out. That is actually a form of bankrupt, its just slower and
everyone looses except the people selling ads, and they are so ashamed of it
they dont even call it advertisement business - theyre always switching names,
from propaganda to advertising to PR and social media marketing.

A world without advertising is possible.

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jrabone
No, no they won't. Not my users, anyway, because I block your ads at the DNS
resolver level by redirecting queries to my own Apache instance, which serves
single pixel images or empty JS as necessary.

Despite protestations in TFA to the contrary, publishers CAN'T be trusted not
to create a tunnel for bad actors via adservers. They don't have the level of
control required to do so. If you want the $$$, change your business model. If
it turns out that no-one wants to pay for your content, perhaps it's not worth
anything?

~~~
antocv
Wikipedia is a good example, its been on donations for years and is still
going.

~~~
neiloconnor
Wikipedia is a great example of where donations DO work. I couldn't imagine an
internet without it, and I'm happy to donate and support it.

Sadly the data suggests that for most websites donations are not a viable
alternative to ads. Some numbers here:
[http://blog.pagefair.com/2014/introducing-pagefair-
ads/](http://blog.pagefair.com/2014/introducing-pagefair-ads/)

I think the challenge is that we use many different websites every day. I've
probably visited sites today that I've never been to before and will never
visit again. These guys are not getting a donation from me.

Maybe the future internet will consist of a small number of donation-supported
sites, but wouldn't it be sad to lose all this variety?

~~~
dublinben
If those sites aren't providing anything of value, what are we really losing?

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dublinben
I don't know how to break this to you, but this doesn't work. I'm running a
completely standard installation of an ad-blocker with EasyList, and it blocks
all ads on this site.

[https://mediacru.sh/D8edJpM35tVb](https://mediacru.sh/D8edJpM35tVb)

------
ChrisGaudreau
The problem with ads is when they are abused. Pop-ups, videos, scams, and so
on. I think it might be nice to have some high-quality ads, especially if it
contributes to high-quality free content.

------
theon144
Am I missing something? Why won't AdBlock simply be updated to also block
PageFair?

~~~
dublinben
This new service is _already_ blocked by an ad blocker with a subscription to
EasyList. It doesn't work.

[https://mediacru.sh/D8edJpM35tVb](https://mediacru.sh/D8edJpM35tVb)

~~~
neiloconnor
The ads are only visible to Adblock Plus users who have Acceptable Ads
enabled; other adblocking plugins block the ads

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keehun
Can anyone explain how this works? Won't Ad-Block or other ad blockers block
them out? I've heard you can pay AdBlock to unblock your ads? Is that what's
happening?

~~~
smackfu
Ars Technica shows an "ad" to people using ad-blockers. I'm not sure of all
the details, but they have the ad image binary inlined in the HTML, which
makes it much harder to block.

~~~
dublinben
It's actually very clever. They're using a base64 encoded PNG to display an
'ad' that doesn't actually smell like an ad. It would be pretty easy to just
kill this element without impacting the rest of the content, but that's a
crude tool.

~~~
smackfu
Yeah, they clearly aren't trying _that_ hard because it can still be trivially
blocked by Adblock after right-clicking. If they randomized the URL, it would
be trickier.

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quaffapint
It should be relatively simple to detect if an ad is blocked. Simply after
load check for an element ID or such and see if it exists or not.

In my upcoming mysimpleads ad server release I've been careful not to use
terms like ad or banner and keep it generic. I'm debating about using a per
site key for element classes, but not sure if it's worth the little bit of
extra overhead.

------
dljsjr
Is this already live on Dev-Metal?

I use the MVPS Hosts File + gas mask on OS X instead of an ad blocker, and I
went to the Dev-Metal home page to see if I would get presented with the add
on the left, and I did not.

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smackfu
Just seems like it causes an arms race.

