
Ad Blocks’ Doomsday Scenarios - r0h1n
http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/05/25/ad-blocks-doomsday-scenarios/
======
beloch
Every once and a while I try using a browser without adblocking installed for
a while, just to see how it goes. It's _always_ gotten worse. Ads simply keep
getting more obnoxious and, in some cases, downright scary. If I'm setting up
a computer for either my less-than-tech-savvy parents or for a child, ad
blocking software is installed for sure. I view ad blocking software as
necessary for their protection.

Adblocking is here to stay. It's not going away. More and more users are going
to use it. The scumbags who create obnoxious, invasive ads aren't going to
suddenly start playing nice so everyone can take a deep breath and uninstall
their blocking software.

If you run a website supported by ads, don't bother trying to convince users
to stop using adblocking software. Given what's out there this is an
_unreasonable_ request. What you can do is make sure the ads on your site are
tasteful, subtle, and respectful of the user's privacy. Then politely educate
users on how to whitelist your site. e.g. In Adblock plus, it's as simple as
selecting "Disable on www.yourpage.here". Be prepared to be blocked forever
the first time a bad ad slips through your review process. The days of letting
advertising companies inject whatever ads and malicious code they want into
your website are pretty much over.

~~~
anonymousab
I would find it hard to believe that giants like Google aren't making
significant investments into solving the ad blocking 'problem'.

It's an arms race that represents an existential threat to too many companies
and too much money.

~~~
healsdata
Google is trying Contributor, which allows you (the user) to spend a few
dollars per month to remove ads while still benefiting the sites you visit.
They're trying to get buy in by showing the amount of money you're giving to
each site. For example, my local newspaper got 4 cents from me today because I
read an article about a bridge closing.

But besides getting people to pay, Contributor is facing a problem with sites
using multiple ad networks. The Onion, for example, is both participating in
Contributor and continuing to run ads from other sources. So if I turn uBlock
off for their site, I see the "Thanks for being a contributor!" message
(instead of one ad) right under two giant ads.

~~~
pen2l
I'm not a 'contributor' yet (but I like the idea... and I _DESPISE_ ads, so I
will look this 'contributor' thing), but I have to say, the "Thank for being a
contributor" message seems too redundant (and corny). I want as little
distractions as possible, I wouldn't want to be seeing the gratuitous thank
you messages filling up the space that ads used to -- please just use it for
content, or just leave it blank.

~~~
healsdata
You do get an option of what to display as the contributor. The message is the
default, but there's a transparent option, as well as an option to show cat
pictures instead of ads.

But it is very muted and I very rarely note it is there. Here's an example:
[http://imgur.com/28jjUjr](http://imgur.com/28jjUjr)

------
themartorana
I wonder - if advertising wasn't so damned creepy - I look at ONE PAIR of
boots on Zappos and they show up in advertisements incessantly - if people
might not be so fast to try to escape the eerie feeling?

Mix super-creepy-stop-watching-me advertising with a tech-savvy group that
understands how cookies can be completely un-deletable, and it's no wonder ad-
blocking is growing exponentially. I'm relatively amenable to looking at ads
in exchange for content, but once ads start acting like or worse than spyware,
the information exchange no longer feels so balanced.

Stop being creepy, and people won't reject you!

Maybe.

~~~
oh_sigh
I find these advertisements to be the worst.

I ALREADY BOUGHT THE BOOTS. I don't need more boots. I have the ones I wanted.
And even if the ones I wanted sucked, now I feel shitty every time I see the
ad, reminding me what a bad decision I made. I'm still not going to buy
another pair.

~~~
whoopdedo
It's worse when the product is for someone else. I bought a XBox game as a
birthday present for my nephew. I don't own an XBox. Guess what Amazon keeps
trying to sell me when I log in to their site?

And I want Amazon to advertise to me. But even they have a hard time showing
me relevant ads. How much more annoying will a smaller, less scrupulous
advertiser be with my spending habits? If targeted advertising actually worked
I might put up with it. Instead it's nothing but industrialized spam that
wastes my time and consumes my bandwidth.

------
Blackthorn
The ad industry has no one to blame but themselves for entering an aggressive
tragedy-of-the-commons scenario. I installed an ad blocker after seeing one
too many websites with auto-playing audio ads. Of course, this blocker then
went on to block everything. All it takes is one bad apple to spoil the bunch,
but I'm not going to shed any tears for an industry that has so utterly failed
to police its own.

------
WalterGR
Enabling click-to-play for Flash eliminates - in my experience - more than 99%
of the truly obnoxious ads. For example, I literally can't think of a time
that I've come across an ad that auto-plays audio when I've had click-to-play
enabled. I'm sure it's happened in my web browsing history, but I can't recall
a time.

I can't help but feel that if people _truly_ believed it when they said, "I'm
okay with seeing ads - just not _the obnoxious ones_ ," then they would enable
click-to-play rather than installing an ad blocker.

As it stands, though, the most-upvoted arguments in favor of wholesale ad
blocking are - and will forever be - presented as the trump cards: "Think of
the children," and "I'm _totally fine_ with ads - but the bad actors ruined it
for me!"

Ad blocking isn't piracy - I want to make it _very clear_ that I believe that.
That said, I find the arguments in favor of ad blocking to often be similar in
flavor to the arguments in favor of piracy: "I'd pay for content, _if only
they 'd charge a reasonable amount for it_." Since "reasonable" is subjective,
there's no response that can be made.

(There are other arguments in favor of ad blocking, such as the aforementioned
Zappos Boots Creepiness.)

~~~
Kronopath
Tell that to the ads that are nothing but fake "Download" buttons. Hell, I
once saw an ad on a webcomic website that was nothing but a gigantic "<< Back
| Forward >>" image, pretending to be navigation. You can bet I turned on ad-
blocking again for that site right then and there.

Right now, the biggest solution to ad-blockers I'm seeing is Patreon. You like
content? Fund it to keep it alive. Content creators aren't placing ads because
they love having ads next to their content. They're doing it because they want
to make a living doing what they like, and so far ads have been the only
option. Solve _that_ fundamental problem, and you solve the "ad-blocking"
problem. The only casualty will be advertising companies and companies that
depend solely on ads, and honestly? _Good riddance._

~~~
quotemstr
> Tell that to the ads that are nothing but fake "Download" buttons

The easiest solution to the problem of fake download buttons is good old-
fashioned consumer protection legislation. There are instances where
commercial shenanigans are, for various subtle and complicated reasons, best
solved by market forces. We are not talking about one of those situations. We
are talking about something analogous to advertising patent medicine and
health-promoting cigarettes.

------
sarahj
This is great news. With the fall of advertising publishers will have to find
new ways of paying for content production and selling produced content - there
are a few options in this area - subscriptions are one, micropayments are
another, crowdsourcing payment upfront like kickstarter/indiegogo is another -
and all of those have a complex ecosystem of models to try.

The reliance on advertising revenue has resulted in a race to the bottom in
many areas - it is no longer about the content but about the views to that
content (see: the influx of # ways to <something> <something>)

If this report is accurate consumers don't want advertisements which is
probably an uncontroversial statement to make - it may take a while for
consumers to get used to paying for content but I think as more effort is
spent in the space and the friction barrier lessened I would hope to see more
sites adopting a paid format (for those who require adverts to operate - there
are plenty of sites out there which don't require ad money which are doing
just fine - or are run with no expectation of profit).

------
diafygi
Hulu used to be able to circumvent ad-blockers (not sure if they still do) by
making their ad content indistinguishable from normal content.

For example, a normal TV show segment would be served from:

[http://hulu.com/v/1tgmeiwe](http://hulu.com/v/1tgmeiwe)

And a commercial would be served from:

[http://hulu.com/v/m3fsn3i6](http://hulu.com/v/m3fsn3i6)

I'm guessing some reverse-proxy stuff was going on behind the scenes, but it
was really effective at forcing people to watch ads. Of course, the downside
to this method is that you need to implement something on your backend and pay
for the bandwidth. But it's there as a nuclear option if needed.

EDIT: I'm guessing that the next wave of ad-configuration is going to ask
content owners to proxy their content through the ad network, so that ad
networks act like a CDN and inject ads as a wrapper around content.

~~~
vitd
I'm not sure what to make of that. Hulu is still alive, though I know for a
while there, they almost weren't. Everyone I know who ever used Hulu mentions
nothing about the service except how bad the ads were. And there's never been
anything that I could only get through Hulu that I couldn't just buy on
iTunes/Amazon or watch on Netflix. And on top of it, you're paying to watch
ads. I'll never go with that model if I can help it.

If ads do start becoming native content, the blockers will find other ways
around them, possibly even resorting to crowdsourcing. Worst case, they can
figure out what content is the same on different users machines and block
anything that's not the same (at least for textual stuff). I just don't see
ads winning this arms race in the long run.

------
meesterdude
I appreciate on the one hand, that sites need to make money, and ads are a way
to make money. And For some sites, it is really the right business model for
them.

On the other hand, I truly, truly hate ads. There is probably nothing that I
hate more than ads. I admit, it's unreasonable. And the reason why is simple:
99 times out of 100, it's either dumb, annoying, or entirely irrelevant to me.
Usually all 3.

But therin is an issue: companies like verizon, esurance, geico and what have
you are the ones with the budgets, and they don't want you to forget about
them. They can afford to advertise on many sites and its not much risk for
them; they'll still make a profit this year. But the ones that are interesting
and worthwhile are more likely to be the ones that can't risk much in
advertising.

And that's what it is, at least for me. Show me ads that I'll actually care
about, that are respectful, and possibly entertaining, and I'll happily turn
off adblock. Duh. But really it just takes one bad ad to ruin it for me, and
few sites seem willing to hardline against advertisers.

------
Puts
The ad blocking problem is extremely easy to solve. Start hosting the ads on
the main domain. Then you cannot block ads without risking to also block other
images and scripts essential to the website. But guess what! If they did that
they would loose the ability to track and trace you around the web.

In this case I have no sympathy for the industry. They can have either one,
the ability to track or they can self-host ads which would make them harder to
block. But they are greedy and want both which does not work.

~~~
gwu78
"Start hosting ads on the main domain."

I imagine if this were to happen users might see significant speed gains in
web browsing.

It is astounding how many pointers to offsite resources are in today's web
pages and, when the user accesses a single web page with a "modern browser",
how many connections occur to various domains the user has probably never
heard of let alone intentionally initiated.

------
anonymousab
Neat article.

ABP's ad whitelist isn't necessarily strict blackmail; Users can effectively
choose to offload the work of ad/provider curation to a third party and the
advertiser faces the direct cost rather than the end user they are trying to
reach.

However, whether or not they have been honest, consistent and fair in how they
curate ads/providers or not determines whether or not ABP's implementation is
worth defending.

I tried to read the article referenced in this article, but was hit by a
strict paywall.

------
pen2l
There is this one other thing though... ad-blocking on smartphones is not as
easy as ad-blocking on browsers on desktops/laptops. A lot of the big great
tech companies (Facebook being the best example) are betting huge on
smartphone... and it seems like they'll make bank there, because again, ad-
blocking on smartphones is not that easy.

Any thoughts on what we can do to make ad-blocking easier on smartphones? Say,
on the iPhone?

~~~
zurn
Addons work in Firefox. I always wonder why that doesn't bring users flocking
to Firefox en masse on mobile.

Hopefully not a long wait for iOS users, Mozilla just did a "limited beta"
blogpost a couple of days ago.

~~~
ryan-c
Unless Apple's rules have changed, iOS Firefox will be little more than a re-
skinned Safari, just like iOS Chrome. I would be _very_ surprised if it has
add-on support.

~~~
zurn
The iOS WKWebView component available for apps does have a "user scripts"
feature in principle lets you do adblocking and other content-munging addons.
But yes it's not a given, might be hard to provide a compatible/full featured
API for addons. Let's see what Mozilla does.

------
foobarqux
The conclusion of the article is questionable, it seems more likely that ad
blocking is about to become ineffective. Everything is moving to mobile, where
Google/Apple have much more control of the platform and make it difficult or
impossible to install ad blockers, particularly those that block ads in apps.

Second even where solutions to app ads exist (AdAway on Android) they are
ineffective on in-stream advertising, which seems to be coming to dominate.
There doesn't seem to be a way to block Twitter's promoted tweets in the
Twitter app for example.

~~~
pwnna
This can be solved if you start allowing the android framework to inspect
other apps and expose these apis to developers. Xposed framework likely do
this already (I'm not positive as I do not run it myself).

My proposal is to start defining this api and adding them into CyanogenMod.

------
nyolfen
>But ABP’s engineers found a way to spot and remove any mention like
“Sponsored Content” or “Sponsored by”, which creates pernicious side-effects
as the user won’t be able to distinguish between commercial and legitimate
editorial contents.

lmao, fucking seriously? 'native advertising' exists to trick users into
thinking that an advertisement is native content, it's the most misleading and
treacherous tactic devised yet by advertisers. fuck this asshole for
pretending there's a distinction between overt and covert marketing

------
kijin
Doomsday Scenario? Okay, let's get serious. What would a "doomsday" created by
adblock actually look like?

All the ad-supported content mills will disappear overnight. Most ad-supported
"social" services will probably also shut down, and the remainder will have to
adopt a paid subscription model. Even Google will have to pivot very hard,
whereas Apple and Microsoft will be mostly okay. Facebook and Twitter are
probably fucked. The NSA will panic at first, but they'll find plenty of other
ways to tap into people's lives soon enough.

Meanwhile, individual bloggers who just write for the sake of it will be
largely unaffected, and will probably continue to produce quality content
because they were never in it for the money anyway. Since they don't have to
compete with content mills, they might get even more readers.

Centralized social networking services will be replaced with distributed nodes
run by volunteers around the world. Many people will spend their own time and
money to contribute, while others might run an exclusive club for paying
customers. Who knows, maybe this will lead to an explosive growth of
micropayment services as well.

Does that sound like the good ol' 90s? Yes! Let's go back to the 90s and try
again without advertising. Only this time, we have the technology to make
distributed networks actually work. Moreover, the cost of an online presence
has become so low compared to 20 years ago that most people in the developed
world can afford to stream live video from their home using a fraction of
their own disposable income, and well-organized charities will easily be able
to bring the same benefits to those who have been less fortunate.

"Sites need to make money" is a big lie, perpetuated by the advertising
industry. 99.99% of websites in this world don't need to make money. Personal
blogs don't need to make money because the desire for self-expression is a
fundamental human instinct and people who want to say things to the world will
gladly pay their own money to post things online. E-commerce websites don't
need to make money _via advertising_ because their purpose is to sell actual
goods and services. Most corporate websites, likewise, don't need to make
money because they make real money elsewhere and the website is just a
customer service portal. Content mills don't need to make money, objectively
speaking, because they don't even have any right to exist.

Now that I've said it, I kinda want to see it happen. It will be the biggest
disruption in the history of the Internet, but the Internet tends to treat
disruptions as opportunities for progress.

------
robobro
Ad blockers exist because of obnoxious ads. Pushing obnoxious advertisements
onto users is a selfish and anti-social tactic. If your business relies on
them as a major source of revenue, you should consider a business model that
produces capital on its own merits rather than using your intended audience
(and their incidental interests) as a more realistic long-term strategy. Ad
blockers will only continue to grow in use.

~~~
qzervaas
My biggest pet peeve are the ads that auto-launch the App Store on iOS. Surely
this can't be difficult for the ad providers to detect.

I wish Apple would auto-ban apps from the App Store using this method.

------
nickysielicki
I unapologetically use an adblocker and have for as long as I can remember.
The critics say, "well then you can say goodbye to all the great content on
the internet. Hosting costs money. You have to pay for it somehow."

I disagree. I don't see why corporations feel they have a right to exist
online and to profit from it.

If you want to put something on the internet, cool. Maybe I'll look at parts
of it. I don't owe you anything for it, though. I pay to host my content
online because I like to share things for other people to see. Some of my
friends do the same. Lots of people on this website do the same.

If you find that people consume the content you share in ways that don't fit
your liking, you should feel free to stop putting content out there. But I
don't owe you anything as a reader, no matter if you're just an individual or
if you're News Corp.

Who has made the bulk of content on the internet? PEOPLE. That is why the
internet is so amazing, the people have the ability to share anything easily.
No medium has ever had that ease of publication. It will continue to shape the
foundation of society, in small ways at first, but in bigger ways as we go
forward.

Unfortunately in our current model, we haven't matured to the point where we
can decentralize things enough. We need websites (and their implied business
models) like reddit, facebook, twitter, google, and so on to achieve all the
great things that the internet and computers can do. You want to translate
some text? You better be willing to send that data to someone else. You want
to talk about news articles? You better be willing to send that comment to
some central server. You want to share a video? Unless you have the
wherewithal to set up a server on your personal line, you better be willing to
send that to YouTube.

I'm very confident that this can and will be fixed with time.

------
theneosam
The main problem is that ads are mainly hosted by tracking sites. If I look at
a micro controller on a online shop, I see it over and over again while
surfing on completely different websites. These advertising provider do not
only display some images or text which is including a link, they're also
tracking and create a profile from me. And this is the main scary part of it:
We don't have privacy anymore.

Additionally it's nearly impossible to browse. People come to me and tell me
their "computer is too slow, I think I catched a virus!". If you install an ad
blocker, the computer works pretty well again. The next thing is that it's
impossible to read a text when fancy animations are displays everywhere on the
page.

If advertising services violence agains privacy, make older computer und
websites unusable, then don't be surprised that people do something against
it. The same counts for the websites who are hosting the ads.

------
Sanddancer
Publishers have no one to blame but themselves. If they actually vetted the
ads that ran on their sites, and didn't act irresponsibly and allow malicious
code to run with the excuse that "a third party advertiser did it," then we
could start having a conversation about advertising. If they didn't allow a
million trackers to run scripts on their sites, then we could have a
conversation about advertising. Publishers shot themselves in the foot here by
taking any dollar they could get, damn the consequences.

------
fiatmoney
If you genuinely get into an arms race between adblockers and ad publishers,
all of the incentives are set up for the publishers to win. Right now they're
not even really fighting, because that would mean acknowledging it as a
problem. But if everyone's business model is riding on it, there's no reason
why we couldn't go to the Bad Old Days of intricately tiled pre-rendered
images, or client-side-rendered obfuscated layouts the adblockers can't
reliably parse.

------
mwsherman
I am reminded of the panic over DVRs and fast-forwarding past ads.

------
aluhut
>First, AdBlock Plus (ABP), the most popular ad blocking software, has its
roots in Cologne. Second, a cultural factor: German opposition to online
advertising that manifests itself in the government’s obsessive anti-Google
stance pushed by large media conglomerates such as Axel Springer SE.

Those are pretty long shots. I would rather say that the historical effect of
Webwashers popularity is more powerful than any of the both reasons above.

------
bamazizi
Couple of years ago I created a workaround for defeating adblockers. I know
the algorithm & methodology still works for all adblockers.

I pitched the solution to many media companies including Google. Google was
not interested at all. They dismissed it due to high chance of losing users
and chrome adopters.

I abandoned the project and I don't regret it.

(note: I will not share or open source it. I use adblockers as well and I
don't want to mess with my internet zen)

~~~
ethana
I have always been afraid that as ad blockers get popular, someone out there
will create a wrapper for contents+ads to combat the issue. If the ads didn't
get a return ping to the host server, then contents would be limited for not
get pushed. This is fairly easy to do and I've seen it implemented on some
sites. But they are still very rare for some reason.

As for Google, they've already paid Eyeo to be whitelisted , so they're not
interested in this kind of solutions as it would harm their user base. This
however hurt Google's smaller competitors which couldn't get Eyeo to whitelist
them.

------
mulligan
> several major mobile operators intend to deploy ad blockers on their network
> to put pressure on large mobile ad providers such as Google, Yahoo!, or AOL.
> They want to protest against what they see as excessive use of their
> bandwidth by those internet giants

This part seem kind of troubling.

~~~
whoopdedo
It also sounds like "the lady doth protest too much." Mobile operators are
well known for pushing advertising and tracking to their customers. If they
save any bandwidth by blocking Yahoo ads I expect it will be made up for by
inserting their own.

Oh, that's right, AOL was just bought by Verizon. What a funny coincidence.

------
crobertsbmw
Shameless plug for my site. My buddy and I have started pennypledge.co as a
hopeful solution to this problem. It may not solve the ad problem for
everyone. But we think that it can solve it for most.

~~~
frandroid
How about "shamefully" tl;dr what your solution is in the comment here,
instead of making us go to your page.

~~~
aluhut
Well, click baiting won't go away just like that ;)

------
thaumaturgy
I would like to read a version of this article not written by someone in
marketing...

> _The reasons for the epidemic are unclear..._

Sure, sure they are. Nobody's really sure why users don't love the advertising
networks embedded in everything, making greater and greater incursions into
privacy and carrying a greater threat of malware than email. Not sure at all.

> _German opposition to online advertising that manifests itself in the
> government’s obsessive anti-Google stance..._

Snowden who?

> _Technically, Eyeo GmbH, the company that dominates the trade has “improved”
> in every dimensions._

"I put improved in quotes because I'm trying to write a 'fair and balanced'
article about a product that threatens my livelihood."

> _In January the company announced a new feature that allows large scale
> deployment of Adblock Plus (ABP) in corporate networks._

Good, that will be a big help to corporate IT. They'll have a lot less, "um,
my computer says it's infected" calls.

> _According to Shine’s chief marketing officer Roi Carthy, the proliferation
> of invasive formats displayed on mobile — popups, auto-play videos —
> accounts for 10% to 50% of a carrier’s network capacity._

"...reasons [for ad blocking's spread] are unclear..."

> _...the ad community is quick to forget that it dug its own grave by
> flooding the web with intolerable amounts of promotional formats._

...and by not policing its own networks, which moved the debate over ad-
blocking from convenience to security, which was _huge_.

> _...branded contents are seen by publishers as a credible alternative to
> invasive formats that disfigure web sites._

In their latest giant act of contempt for their readers, publishers have
entirely abandoned ethics and are now quietly mixing commercial content in
with actual content and then wondering why anybody doesn't love that.

> _In Scandinavia, Schibsted is hard at work on an initiative to raise user
> awareness by getting many sites to close down access to browsers carrying
> and ad block extension._

lol. Good luck with that. I think the best-case scenario there is that the
internet becomes less of a time sink.

> _...opt-in, i.e. register with a valid email address. Yes, you will get ads,
> but on a selective basis..._

"Trust us, we'll be as selective with our advertising as we've been for the
last 10 years."

> _Branded Content that I see as another form of editorial_

"My opinions and reputation are for sale, I don't see a problem with that."

Good grief.

I've been dumbfounded that online advertising has continued for so long,
seemingly unaffected by the continuing rise of ad-blocking. Ad-blocking's
ubiquity has been making the rounds in the news every year or so for at least
a few years now, but the online advertising market has only gotten more
obnoxious in response.

I'm intensely curious what will happen once things do come to a head.
Publishers and ad networks keep promising that the web can't survive without
advertising; users keep promising they aren't going to tolerate the tactics
that advertising networks and publishers have been using for years.

