I don't actually want to block ads. If you want to put a small text or image blurb anywhere on the page... Good for you. I'll gladly accept those on a webpage so that the content creator can make a bit of cash.
But these companies are intentionally blurring the lines between advertisement and digital surveillance. You don't need to collect everything about my operating system, browser, monitors, GPU, every click I make on every website I visit, etc.
That's crossing a line of what "advertisement" means. So the more these "advertisers" work to blur those lines the more their "ads" will be blocked under the umbrella of those who don't want this level of pervasive tracking and surveillance.
Agree. I’d go as far as forbidding embedded JS altogether which removes the attack vector for malware within advertising networks. The networks have proved time and time again they are not able to prevent distribution of malware, and this is the primary reason I use an adblocker.
Maybe a new <ad /> tag which points to a resource which can only serve an image, video or text. Absolutely no scripting. Pass along only the advertiser ID and the bare minimum.
The problem is it’s not in Google or Microsoft’s interest to implement this. This has to come from legislation at US gov level. So it’ll never happen.
I do this on my iOS device. It's a bit of a pain to not have JS enabled in safari, but I can always share a page from Safari --> Duckduckgo's browser which i have installed for just such occasions.
Good idea, but I wish there was a less harsh method. I have been using my iPad a lot recently and the thing that bugs me is that it’s almost impossible to listen to Spotify uninterrupted as you use Safari because of auto-playing videos (not just advertisements).
It’s completely obnoxious and there is no way to stop it. Safari takes control of sound even if the video does not have audio toggled on and pauses your Spotify. Then if you use control center to start it again, it plays iTunes. I can’t believe this hasn’t been fixed.
EDIT: Just tried Brave Browser and this is pretty great so far. Seems to be the best compromise. Thanks!
Possibly the best feature of the Brave browser is having that be one tap away, remembered per-site. I really wish Firefox would copy it since I’m not optimistic about Brave’s longevity.
Ublock origin (in advanced mode), umatrix, and noscript each enable this functionality. Umatrix has the best UI of the three once you get used to it in my opinion. Go on YouTube and look for "the hated one" for great tutorials on JS blocking with umatrix and ublock origin.
uMatrix is wonderful. I can’t imagine browsing without it. The parent comments are talking about iOS, though, where there is unfortunately much less choice. Even “Firefox” on iOS isn’t really Firefox and can’t run normal extensions.
Yes, but then it's all or nothing. In advanced mode you can have a global configuration to block all third party scripts and frames, and then allow scripts from specific domains (or neutralize the global deny for that domain, so that block lists still work). Particularly useful when you just want to move forward and Google's captcha is blocked, but don't want to allow all the other 50 scripts on the site.
I also do this. Safari is my stateless browser, no cookies, no scripts, no location access, etc.
And then Firefox or Brave are what I use for anything requiring Javascript. Though brave’s UI is much cleaner than FF.
Another possibility would be to create ad blockers that do that, i.e. block third party javascript but not pure text or images. Then you get the same result, simple ads get through but ad scripts don't, so the people who use ads without scripts are the only ones who make money from them.
I think it's too late for that. I, for one, wouldn't enable even static ads anymore even if my blocker offered the option. The trust is completely lost and would take a long time to rebuild.
Blocking third party JavaScript will have the unwanted consequence of blocking CDNs as well, so at least you need some whitelist that allows those scripts.
> Maybe a new <ad /> tag which points to a resource which can only serve an image, video or text. Absolutely no scripting. Pass along only the advertiser ID and the bare minimum.
How would fraud detection work in this model? How do advertisers know the requests are coming from real users and not bots? Without assurance there, advertisers would pay much less, and publishers would earn much less.
(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself.)
Honestly, I don’t care. It worked in print, it can work in digital. Adverts would bother me less if advertisers hadn’t proven again and again that they can’t be trusted and that they don’t care about my privacy. I also believe that advertisement is a cop out for a real business model and the lowest form of business. Besides, as Banksy said: “You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.”
And before you say that the content creators need to get paid, just looks at the situation on Youtube, where Google makes a fortune and the content creators make fuck all, and big companies can take what little ad revenue the creators would have got for copyright claiming over 5 seconds of audio that falls under fair use. Many content creators now rely either on sponsorship or direct support through things like Patreon. Sorry, but Google can go suck it.
(I’ve also started just not consuming content from hostile sites. It’s mostly trash anyway.)
Content creators make plenty of Youtube, but it's spread out among millions of them which is why very few actually make any serious money. Also most content you wouldn't pay for, but will likely watch because it's free.
On the flip side, many creators have tried to go towards the subscription/patronage angle and far fewer are ever successful at that, with many making what amounts to a tiny trickle of supporting income while being burdened with much more responsibility to deliver. It's a hard bargain.
You say, "google makes a fortune and content creators make fuck all", then why do people still upload their content? That makes no sense to me at all.
But besides that, i am all for more competition. Better user interfaces, better conditions, less censorship, i am for all of it.
And to me it earns a lot of respect, that i can upload my 8k video to youtube, they distribute it potentially to millions of people, and i dont have to pay a dime. And that they are still able to make it a platform, where i get a lot of interesting things to see. And it is somehow sustainable.
> then why do people still upload their content? That makes no sense to me at all.
Why do websites exist that don’t have ads? Why do people have personal websites and blogs? Perhaps it is, in fact, physically possible for a website to exist without serving third-party JavaScript ads.
Definitly. And hosting is very cheap. But i would argue, that if you were a band or a big company like disney, and suddenly you have millions of people interested in your stuff, because you have a new release or constant demand, that you then must have some kind of model, that pays for it all. Who can do this with their own pockets?
Ah. I see for example netflix. And now it splits up into many sites again, who offer their own things. The technology is now there, maybe it becomes more and more a commodity, organizing payment is easy, maybe it all gets more diversified again. Does no one remember, how popular internet shops once were? But then amazon became way more convenient.
There's a method of distribution called bittorrent that scales with popularity. If people love it, you don't have to pay to distribute it. If people want you to make more, they've shown themselves willing to send money even after they've consumed your product.
That’s a good question. People do it for free, because they want to contribute to society. That’s why people contribute to open source, or Wikipedia, or write blog articles, participate on StackOverflow or post to HN.
Not everything is about the almighty dollar. Did you get paid for participating in this discussion?
Of course they also want to contribute to society. It is a great thing. And behind all this, someone has to pay for the other stuff. Its not only the content creator. On what hardware is this all running on? Who provides for electricity? Who is writing the software? Who makes sure, that we have internet cables deep below in the ocean. Someone has to pay for it. There are people having jobs. So of course i want that people can contribute. But it is only a part of the calculation, its a give and take. Everyone is in for something.
Let's not pretend that the distribution of things that people enjoy isn't free. People pay for an internet connection, they happily share media with each other. If you have a fanbase, you could make a film and put it on a high speed connection for five minutes once, tell people when it will happen on a message board, and rest assured that everyone who wants to see it will see it and it will exist in perpetuity with no further intervention from you.
Right, but the discussion is about whether that money has to come from (exploitative and invasive) advertising or not. In support of the current advertising model, someone had claimed that YouTube must be compensating content creators well, it is a good thing and so forth, because people still upload videos -- meanwhile, most people upload videos for free. The people doing it for money are uploading things like "CGI Joker Mates With Choo-choo Train Sing-a-long ABC's" and "$30,000 Rolex Watch -- Can We Blend It?"
Exaggerating only slightly for argument, YouTube is presently a great force for evil, actively chipping away at collective privacy and promoting the creation and dissemination of Worthless Garbage so that they can sneak in ten second promotions for Even-More-Worthless Garbage like Grammarly, whatever horror movie's coming out soon, etc.
Because for historic reasons, Youtube has a monopoly position on viewers and the content creators need those viewers, despite that they have to resort to other means, like Patreon, merchandise or product placements/sponsorship to make any money themselves.
This won't be the case forever, I hear more and more people (creators and viewers alike) complaining about Youtube, its monetisation and it recommendation algorithms.
You can make the same argument about podcasts, television, radio, magazines, billboards, etc. At some point you rely on statistics that someone is giving you in all of those mediums but they still made money.
I've personally made much more money producing content (YouTube and podcasts) by directly working with brands than I ever have from Adsense anyway so I'm not convinced that the advertisers "paying more" is helping content creators much to begin with. Patreon seems to be a symptom of that.
Edit: Also, on the subject of advertisers paying less. Isn't part of the problem the fact that adtech giants like Google are saying "look, we have this awesome tracking and targeting tech so you can pay less for ads to reach your target audience". Thus reducing the potential ad money that those people would pay into potential revenue for content creators to reach their audience?
I don't really care if ads stop being profitable. If ads stopped being a good source of revenue, the tech industry would adapt, and my guess is that the end result would be much more favorable to society. I'm working on an early-stage startup right now, and I'm certainly not going to use ads as part of my revenue model.
Google might not be too happy about an outcome like that, but I'm not overly concerned about Google's wellbeing. :)
I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this since you work on ads: are ads actually essential in the software industry, or could we do just fine without them?
> I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this since you work on ads: are ads actually essential in the software industry, or could we do just fine without them?
The industry would definitely adapt, but I don't think it would be more favorable to society. Here's what I would expect to happen if we stopped letting third party ad networks detect ad fraud:
* Facebook, Youtube, Reddit, etc and other huge sites are already big enough to run their own ad serving, and keep doing that. They are still in a position to detect fraud as a first party, and they're big enough that advertisers trust them.
* Current ad networks build first-party integrations, where to the browser everything comes from the publisher's site. This could be designed as a newspaper licensing an ad serving system. This would provide high levels of trust, but not as high as the current system because you lose the protection of cross-origin iframes.
* Ad networks don't find it worth it to integrate with long-tail sites, the sites make less money, we have fewer of them.
If we went far enough to functionally remove ads from the internet, either by banning them or by ads losing the adblocker-blocker-blocker-blocker arms race, then I'd expect a different pattern:
* Everyone moves to subscriptions of various kinds, probably with slightly porous paywalls.
* Right now ads are effectively a progressive tax: the publisher makes more money from you in proportion to how valuable it is to advertise to you, which is roughly in proportion to how much money you have. To raise the same amount of money from subscriptions you need to charge more than what people can afford to pay at the low end, so some people get cut off.
* There's a massive drive to consolidation: people don't want to have a lot of subscriptions to manage, so we get things where one subscription covers many people. The economics of how small sites get included in this are complicated, and I suspect this also hoses the long tail.
* Free sites are popular, making money through some combination of product placement, charitable funding, and funding to push worldviews. The latter worries me a lot.
> funding to push worldviews. The latter worries me a lot.
This is already happening in the advertisement world of today, where certain topics—some political but some not—are not "friendly to advertising", and so get demonetized on various platforms. How is that different from the scenario you worry so much about?
> certain topics—some political but some not—are not "friendly to advertising", and so get demonetized on various platforms
I think they're pretty different. If you look at the AdSense prohibited content policy [1] or the ones for other general-interest networks they don't allow their ads on sites about porn, drugs, gambling, etc. If you run a standard newspaper, for example, covering the full breadth of what a newspaper typically covers, you should be able to put ads on ~every story.
In a world without ads, the newspaper would probably be a subscription site, and would be competing with non-subscription sites that are funded by people who want to push a perspective. The current dynamic effectively prioritizes perspectives in terms of how much people want to read them (because that's where the advertising money is) while in this new dynamic there would be more prioritization based on how much money the people with that perspective have (because that's where the funding is). I think that's probably worse for the world?
> There's a massive drive to consolidation: people don't want to have a lot of subscriptions to manage.
Imo subscriptions aren't viable at all. For me to subscribe to something I need strong evidence that I will use it enough.
Automatic micropayments with a daily allowance seem like a much superior solution. They remove the friction of making the subscribe decision and keep the content creators in check by only paying for interesting content. Subscriptions can be easily forgotten or aren't annoying enough to bother to cancel them even if the provided content isn't worth it anymore.
There is a company called Blendle that offers a curated source of news/op-ed/etc to read, where you pay some fraction of a dollar per read, usually in the 10-25¢ range. If you feel the article wasn't worth it, you can click a link to get an immediate refund, no questions asked.
I like the idea, and I do use their service. They have plenty of room to improve- the articles they pick tend to almost always have a certain political slant, and I find more puff than meat more often than I think a curated service should offer.
But. It's a real attempt at a new model, and they're trying. I do get enough value out of it to keep using them to the few-dollars-a-month level, and I hope they improve their system over time.
Are you sure about that? I literally received their daily digest which has the price-per-article, as expected, just a few hours ago. Maybe they are now offering both?
The biggest problem I’ve had with Blendle is that I want to read an NYT article due to a recommendation, not because I go to their app. I just would forget to go there. There was no “open with blendle” option to move into my flow.
> Automatic micropayments with a daily allowance seem like a much superior solution.
How do you ensure some content quality that goes beyond a headline and a catchy teaser paragraph?
Kindle Unlimited had this problem when they started distributing payouts based on pages read, which led to a proliferation of books with catchy first page, instructions to skip to the last page and a bunch of junk in between.
Kindle Unlimited has other problems that make issues for content quality, king among them being the KDP Select requirement.
I’ve managed to find value from Kindle Unlimited, but pretty much nobody but self published authors (which I have no problem with, but there’s effectively zero bar to entry meaning quality is over the place) is available on the service because of the KDP Select issue. It doesn’t seem to be evenly enforced either, since the Harry Potter books are available via Kindle Unlimited yet are available for sale on other eBook stores, for example.
In recent years we, conscious consumers, shot down several viable business models that could have replaced ads such as data collection for trend analysis and crypto mining in the browser. They were met with outright hostility.
Perhaps justifiably so, but we have to keep in mind that any producable "value" will have to "hurt" in some way. We have to give something in exchange for "free" services. Yet the focus is only on the price paid instead of the fairness of the transaction (or lack thereof).
Either we give up the "free" model alltogether and shift back to paid services only, or we choose the lesser evil and live with it.
> Either we give up the "free" model alltogether and shift back to paid services only, or we choose the lesser evil and live with it.
This is true in a specific way, and it is sometimes useful to use this frame. But in this case, I think the frame obscures more than it focuses.
"We" aren't getting together and voting or bidding or whatever. I think the closest thing to a choke point for decision making about some of this is in Google's hands, with Chrome. At least until the browser monopoly wheel spins again.
> We have to give something in exchange for "free" services
Eh? No. The requirement is that services need resources to exist. If you immediately extrapolate to pseudo-moralistic finger-wagging at "consumers", you're ignoring a lot of ways various organizations have found to exist. It is either self-blinding or a heavy thumb on the scale.
How about I keep leveraging the fact that I'm smarter than the average user so I can give nothing and and the losers who get their data mined or their power used to mine coins can pay you.
This mutual hostility has worked for the entire life of the internet and probably has another decade of life if not more.
Game theory. In a world with network effect and a choice to make money from ads or subscription, the companies that choose defect (bad ads) win. We have to change the environment to get a different outcome.
I still remember the web when I got my first modem. What the ads changed is the amount of various clickbaits, useless sites, sites "for fun", garbage of the internet. All this would be gone without ad revenue, there wouldnt be any sustainable bussiness model for them.
Regarding usability of ads, in 20 years I never bought anything shown. When I need something I search for relevant product solving my need and I buy it. And trying very hard to avoid fake reviews. If your product type showed on ads is what I need, I will still do my best to check the market and find best product type for me with lowest price I can get. Which is typically not what is shown on ad. At the end they dont change anything for me.
Now the question is - would internet without ads really be that bad?
My personal expierience with one of the news sites (cant remember which it was) after GDPR was somehow refreshing. If you didnt agree, they disabled all javascript and throw you into same website but with only text and images relevant to the article. I loved it.
> My personal expierience with one of the news sites (cant remember which it was) after GDPR was somehow refreshing. If you didnt agree, they disabled all javascript and throw you into same website but with only text and images relevant to the article. I loved it.
Thank you very much for this. :) Yes, it was npr, and it is perfect example of quality content not needing megabytes of js content while still beeing usable. As a content. Not eye candy.
(Disclosure: I read book each week and I am thrilled by anything new I learn. I dislike pictures of cute animals and I do all communication with friends over the phone or going out.)
> I'm working on an early-stage startup right now, and I'm certainly not going to use ads as part of my revenue model.
That is great, but who are the people paying you? Are they end users, or are you selling a service to other web companies that DO rely on ad dollars to make money?
I think that the democratizing effect of services that make money through advertising is vastly underestimated. There are a lot of people on the internet who can't afford to pay for Microsoft Office, or a set of encyclopedias, or courses like those which can be found on YouTube or blogs.
It's all well and good to say that you hate ads because you can afford to pay to remove them. Many can't, and we should think very carefully before we remove services they need.
The best content I’ve found in recent years has been either on sites that don’t contain advertisement (because they’re someone’s personal hobby blog, for example, or HN) or from videos where the person was supported directly by fans through Patreon.
Anecdotally, the advertisement-supported content is mostly garbage.
HN does have ads. They're job ads for YC companies, and they're the entries you see without an option to vote on. Ones like "Come eat – I mean build with the ZeroCater (YC W11) engineering team".
I believe your comment and Godel_unicode's are both correct, and I am pro-choice. Some people may prefer adverts over payment. I don't agree, but that is their choice. I can't stand to hear from NPR's underwriters any more, and will start singing songs loudly (I'm a bad singer to boot) when they come on. In other words, I am personally ad-adverse. My 80-something parents, however, don't even mute the channel, let alone change it, when watching TV and the advertising starts (it drives me nuts). Some people don't mind, and I think they have a right not to be denied content via advertising if that is an "offer on the table."
If one looks at the history of the HBO cable channel vs. broadcast channels (i.e. ABC, NBC, and CBS), and also Netflix, I think one can see there are similar dynamics at play.
The chaos of freedom is a beautiful thing, but using the government to enforce your version of utopia is scary.
Being pro-choice about advertising is like being pro-choice about influenza. Advertising is an infectious disease, it does not respect the choices of those who'd prefer to pay up front, and people underestimate its danger to young, old and weakened individuals.
It's unclear to me what that has to do with my point; the existence of high quality patreon-backed podcasts doesn't mean anything about the supply of quality advertising-supported podcasts. You should look into it, there are a lot of them.
I listen to ad-supported material, I just have muscle memory, and a visceral reaction to advertising where I will just advance VLC's playback by 1min via shortcut-key (assuming one uses a standard RSS reader and DLs the mp3 file locally).
I'm not sure I understand the point of saying you listen to non-ad-supported podcast, and not mentioning how they are supported or if it's pure hobbyist stuff you listen to.
Advertising comes in many forms (i.e. native content), and unless you link your .opml file, I can't ascertain the value of your statement. I do not recommend doing so, but young tech people think it's OK to put your real name on the internet (which is contrary to the ideas I was taught in the 90s; the use of pseudonyms has proven sound given our current circumstances).
You need a computer to run LibreOffice. So no, in many cases, they can't afford it.
Vimeo requires the person creating the content to pay, yes? So if I want to do a series of videos on Kibana, or Active Directory, or astrophysics, I need to pay Vimeo in addition to the effort of creating my content.
Basically no one outside a philosophy lecture has ever suggested that the current state of anything is the only possible one, that's a meaningless strawman. Please avoid the condescending suggestion that others can't imagine things being different, it's as patronizing as it is pointless.
True, but in many cases you can still offer a service for free without ads. E.g. offer a free version with limited functionality, and then offer a paid version with features that are needed mainly by people who use your product for work. Even if ads weren't an option, it's still advantageous to get lots of people using your product, and I think companies will continue to find ways to do so.
It seems to me that the problem is entirely of the web advertiser’s making, though. When the web was new and novel, tracking was used to prove or validate specific ad spend. You can still do that sort of comparative analysis but now detection might have to live on and be limited to what can be detected from the advertiser’s own site. And if by the nature of the product or sale, it proves impossible to tell if I’m a human, well, that will be a shared cost or concern that all advertisers would have. If sites were forced to or mandated this new form of anti-tracking ad, advertisers would eventually go along with it because the alternative is not advertising on the large percentage of sites which have adopted it. This would probably make non-web ads and validated human email addresses more valuable unless they too are subject to the same anti-tracking provisions. An email service (or search service) by it’s nature offers more opportunities to tell if you’re human though, and such services would be inherently more profitable to advertise on... (see Facebook profits)
I don’t really see problems here outside of encouraging an entire industry to move on from tracking and/or DRM the way an entire nascent industry moved on from the popup and pop-under ad, or invasive screen takeover and annoying animated ads.
Your industry doesn't itself create value it maximizes the value of other industries by connecting customers and creators. The ultimate equilibrium might see your industry having to do more with less.
Ultimately the world did everything it does now without internet marketing and ultimately could do so again.
A sizable share of a smaller pie is better than all of nothing. Essentially your concern is both correct and irrelevant.
Nobody cares if Google has to make less money to have a less crappy internet the same way nobody cares if the newspaper industry makes less money.
Honest but blunt answer: We (my businesses acting as advertisers) don't rely on your (Google's, or any other ad network's) claims anyway. The only thing that matters is the metrics we measure on our own sites, and we're going to be able to separate those by ad campaign anyway. We don't care about getting more Facebook likes or how many Instagram views some image gets or how many impressions Google claims to have shown on third party sites. We only care whether a given campaign gave a good return on investment in terms of direct benefits and/or actionable leads.
I used to work at an advertising company that worked this way, doing lead gen. In some verticals there's nothing better, and as long as your own metrics are good you can figure out how much a traffic source is worth. If a traffic source goes bad and starts being 50% spam, no problem, your automatic system lowers its bids by 50% and you're fine.
The thing is, only a very small fraction of the ads ecosystem works this way. Coke wants to show ads to people to position their brand, not to get people to buy soda over the internet, which means they're not able to measure the efficacy of channels on a per-publisher basis and figure out if they're being cheated. Brand advertisers typically use third-party fraud detection services like Moat to inspect the environment their ads are running in and see if they look legitimate.
Then there's a large range of people doing things where you could measure the effect of channels, but the site just isn't that sophisticated. Some pizza place somewhere buys some ads, they don't have the tech staff to measure conversions and optimize their channels, instead they trust the ad network to make sure they're not being cheated.
Even sophisticated performance advertisers rely on ad network fraud detection, just indirectly. Yes, you run your ad campaign, and you bid what the traffic is worth to you based on your measurements. But the existence of that traffic stream comes from fraud detection. Imagine some publishers on an ad network start spamming it, and the ad network isn't able to detect the fraud. The money from advertisers now isn't going to publishers in proportion to the value of their traffic, but instead in proportion to how much they're cheating. The publishers that were the source of your good traffic go out of business, and the ad network collapses because it doesn't have valuable traffic to send to anyone.
I recognize that other advertisers may have different goals, such as for large, brand-centric advertising campaigns. I'm not an expert on those so can't offer an informed opinion on any specifics. From a casual observer's point of view, I don't see how they're any worse off than the classic "everyone is wasting half of their ad budget, they just don't know which half" of the print/broadcast era. As you say, at least with online ad networks there can be some indication of where the ads are being shown, allowing a level of independent scrutiny by the advertiser if they wish.
Try looking at it from the publisher's perspective. If their ad network can't detect fraud then of all the money the network brings in an increasing proportion will go to fraudulent publishers. Honest publishers will make less and less money and eventually give up on the ad network.
This does seem to assume that ad networks are the main or only way to support sites that rely on ads for their funding. I'm not sure why we should make that assumption, though.
We're talking about a built-in feature to safely and transparently include ad content from a third party in your own site. It seems possible that advertisers could set up standardised content to work with that feature. Then the kinds of hosts who make enough from advertising to be worth keeping it anyway could either delegate to an advertiser's own server or self-host. Payment could be either a direct transfer or use some new, simpler and more transparent service just to handle that aspect.
Do you feel like advertisers know that now? I feel like I hear about clickspam/ad fraud operations getting closed down (and nigh-instantly popping up elsewhere) on a constant basis.
Is this like intrusive DRM in PC games, where all the studies show that it increases producer costs and complexity, annoys consumers, and doesn’t actually improve sales revenue, but some companies do it anyway because “what about piracy?”
I think one big difference with DRM for PC games, is that piracy of PC games is normally not a money making activity for the pirates. It might prevent companies from selling a game to certain people, but there is no clear cut evidence that person would have otherwise bought it.
For advertising however, you can first of all incur a cost to an advertiser (since costs are calculated per click, view, etc), but furthermore, pirates can even profit from it by having a website and generating fake clicks for that website. If you would not try to prevent this ad fraud you would have bad actors siphoning off complete company advertising budgets to their accounts.
You don’t have to use a model which allows this. Pay-per-placement, for example. You pay a fixed amount to put your ad in a specific article (or on the entire site or in whatever rotation people like) and then there’s no way to rip off advertisers with click farms.
You still need to measure your audience to get advertisers to pay the price, but this is decoupled from the individual ad buys so it can be done differently.
Ha, please have a little trip to any of the open air electronic markets of Eastern Europe(even of those countries that are within the EU) and every other stall has DVDs of almost any PC game/software you can think of. Signs like "newest game releases here!", "Windows 10 all versions no key one dvd!", "Blu-ray movies - 10 per disc!" Are still common. They are not even trying to hide this even though the police are meant to be on a look out for that stuff, but I can guarantee that I could come back with a backpack absolutely full of pirated PC games from one of these markets - that is making people money, no one is doing this out of charity even if prices are low.
the people buying the pirated software would not have otherwise spent the money on the official/real version. This is the stickler - counting "loss" from this kind of sale is at best immaterial and at worst fraudulent.
> advertisers would pay much less, and publishers would earn much less
I think people like me who argue that web advertising should return to dumb/static/contextual ads also accept that it might kill a huge fraction of web revenue/jobs/content.
The downside is that advertisers move to the walled gardens of a few big players, and to native advertising. I’m still more ok with that than with the way the ad industry works now.
I'm seeing more and more articles about online ads popping up. I also use an ad blocker (unlock origin on mobile, umatrix on desktop) for all my browsing just to make it bearable.
But I also see a lot of people saying they'd like to contribute to the sites they visit frequently. I built a proof of concept website to let everyone do just that:
There are several similar concepts (Mozilla with Scroll, quid, even patreon et al), but I think mine reduces friction because signing up is as easy as on HN. Oh, and there's absolutely no tracking or selling of information to third parties.
There are rating agencies that verify both print and TV numbers with as much accuracy as possible, and Connected TV (streaming, smart tvs, netflix, etc) now have comparable metrics to website ads.
Those older mediums were also just inefficient and create a lot of wasted spend, whereas the internet has allowed far more businesses to start and thrive by lowering their customer acquisition costs. These companies would never survive if they had to still rely on older ad models.
There's not really any meaningful empirical proof of ad impressions now, just a very shady chain of trust between a handfull of companies who all have a vested interest in not scrutinizing these things too closely.
Once you're at the point where you are buying traffic to meet goals, you're not going to scrutinize the origin of that traffic beyone anything that would appear to be flagrant fraud to your customers.
These are all interesting questions for advertisers but it's not obvious the burden of addressing advertisers' problems should be dumped on users with next to no informed consent, as is the case now.
Except many ads are not directly linkable to purchases. Coca Cola won't track you to a local grocery store and an ad for a musical won't track you when you buy the ticket a week later.
It depends. Your credit card company knows what you bought and when, while the ad network knows the phone number linked to the PC where the ad was shown. Join the two tables and we can track you to the grocery store.
Even if this were done (I don’t think that either of the involved companies would or could share this detail of data) you still have a problem. What about ads that don’t work?
I have put an ad on your site, it took up space for some time. The ad was bad and nobody bought anything even though a hundred thousand people saw it. The publisher is still owed money because they did their part.
>You would only do business with companies you trust to not cheat.
That massively increases the barrier to entry. Right now you can make a new site, sign up with an ad network, and start showing ads. No one involved needs to trust you (much) since the ad network is in a good position to detect cheating. Remove that, and big trusted publishers (NYT, FB, Google) are still fine, but smaller ones wouldn't be able to demonstrate to the ad network or advertiser that they should be trusted.
> Right now you can make a new site, sign up with an ad network, and start showing ads.
With the tiny payout you get from Adsense, unless your site is really popular to begin with, you're not going to make much of anything. Pennies maybe (which you won't receive until hitting a threshold anyway). So I don't see how it helps with entry.
By the time your service is popular enough to make real money you could approach smaller brands and advertisers to get better deals than Adsense.
Adsense exists to make ads cheaper for the advertisers and there's no way around the fact that that means content producers will be making less money as a whole. You can't have it both ways. It's lowering the amount that advertisers are willing to pay content creators by giving them the perception that their money stretches further, aided by online tracking and targeting. Meanwhile Google caches in on their cut of the deal and all of the piles of data they collect with their monopoly while content producers get shafted.
AdSense and other networks primarily exist to automate matchmaking. Publishers and advertisers can already find each other, but this requires a lot of work. By automating this work, it can make more money for publishers (in aggregate) and make things cheaper for advertisers at the same time.
My understanding of your argument is that no publisher should be using Adsense etc today, and they should all be negotiating direct deals instead, is that right? What would you say to publishers (and I've talked to many) who are happy to have the "collect bids from people who want to advertise on my site" portion automated for them so they can focus on running their sites?
I'm not saying that there aren't content producers who want that or would benefit from it. I'm saying that they probably won't make as much money that way. And if the only way to do it is to use pervasive tracking and digital surveillance (which users are increasingly blocking and lawmakers are becoming skeptical about) then it's a business model on unstable ground to begin with.
My experience, especially with media content producers, is that those ad platforms are never sufficient and it's always advisable to rely on partnerships or Patreon. Because, yeah, it's more work to create those relationships, but the alternative is relying on a low-revenue platform where a small update from the whims of Google might destroy you without warning.
Yes. Arguing that online advertising should be like traditional advertising (killing the adtech industry of today) means accepting that a ton of money will flow from small players to the bigger players, and into more insidious forms of ads (video overlays, native ads posing as news). But it’s a tradeoff I’m more than happy to accept.
> Right now you can make a new site, sign up with an ad network
and spend the next two weeks delivering explanation after explanation to the ad networks and Google that you are indeed a real person/company and indeed created a site with unique content and indeed plan to generate leads, etc, etc.
After two weeks of back and forth you are approved by Google only to be indefinitely temporarily blocked for "additional traffic verification" in a couple of days despite purchasing only the best traffic for start of the site.
> smaller ones wouldn't be able to demonstrate to the ad network or advertiser that they should be trusted
It is already very, very complicated and is rapidly getting close to impossible.
Good point. I guess it’d kill PPC. I’m not sure how advertisers detect fraud but maybe you can check the limited info sent along with the request and do whatever heuristics you do as usual.
That would imply ethical (actual) use of this tag. I cannot thing that any advertiser would ad this, just as they ignore the "Do not track". I fear that we will never we able to rely on the ad-makers honesty, as the hunt for the bottom-line never ends. It looks like this will be a war we will continue fighting with AdB+, NoScript, uBlock(s), hosts, and other tools.
It has been a cat and mouse game. The tech changes, but the game goes on.
>forbidding embedded JS altogether which removes the attack vector for malware
The more worrying ones I've seen don't rely on JS but are just links to bad sites. Downloading software can be a bit ridiculous these days with alongside the main download button about five ads saying "Download Now" linking to god knows what iffy software.
good idea! your ad tag is exactly the type of compromise we’ve been asking for since the web (and online ads) became a thing: first-party-served ads with only basic first-party analytics and clear delineation of the ads. unfortunately competition happens around targeting, segmentation, and conversion, which pushes us way past that.
One issue I’ve run into with blocking JS at the browser level is that it also ends up blocking extensions that use JS from working. I would block JS on websites much more if my extensions that use JS could still run.
I don’t suppose there’s a config setting in Chrome that discriminates between the website’s JS and the JS from my extensions?
It's often necessary to allow same-host scripts for extensions or bookmarklets to work. Those some-host scrips are often a considerable part of the problem.
Agreed. I would go so far as to vote for a representative who wanted to pass a law restricting what is legal advertisement.
I believe undisclosed ads should be illegal, I would ban music in ads, I would ban color in ads, I would ban sexuality in advertisement, I would ban appeals to emotions in ads.
If a product truly makes the life of the purchaser better, then no gimmicks are needed to sell it.
And yet we try to appeal to others ratio or emotion with arguments in discussions like these. So that that they buy in to our ideas. We persuade, it is good to be charismastic and seducing too. And if someone famous writes or speaks, someone we adore, we listen more careful. In the end it matters, that we can find enough people to vote for that one guy, to give him or her the power, that bans or controls behaviour, that we just used ourselves. Meh. Its all blurry lines.
I found it astonishing that the song "Look What They've Done to My Song, Ma" (which is seemingly about corruption of art) was later licensed for commercials for oatmeal and a hotel chain... complete with modified lyrics!
I have no issue with static, contextual ads (I had this conversation on here the other day in fact).
Imagine reading something about, say, a particular lawnmower and the article has a link to that lawnmower at the top as an ad from Flymo with a discount. No tracking just a link to buy it with a tracking Id in the URL or something.
Can someone answer me this: Are there studies, not funded by those who benefit from mass-tracking, that show the benefit of all this data-gathering to show ads? Or that show it doesn't work perhaps?
My gut tells me the difference in success rate is minimal and couldn't possibly justify the data collection but I'd love to be proven wrong.
At this time, I believe the whole scheme to be a con. (there, I said it!)
The online ad industry is super shady and is getting much worse since google and facebook have started eating their lunch. But it would be very hard to pull data collection out of this business model. If company a puts the lawnmower ad up and only reports clicks and company b reports the percentage of men aged 35-40 company b will eventually put company a out of business. Content providers have to run what ads will actually make them money so they’re going to go with networks where companies actually buy ads. The only way this cycle is going to get stopped is with serious pushback either from consumers, technology or laws.
I agree with your sentiment, but there is far too much money in ad tracking for it to be ineffective. Internet advertising is a very metrics-driven enterprise
> I'll gladly accept those on a webpage so that the content creator can make a bit of cash.
Why do you feel like your attention should be for sale? There should be no advertising on the web. Content should be free or cost money, and the cost should be transparent. Advertisements are just socially accepted psychological manipulation. We can do better.
That's a completely different discussion though. Personally I'm not offended by seeing a brand placement if it helps the content creator and is transparent (meaning I know it's an ad, and it's not collecting data about me).
Bringing it to a physical example, if I walk into a store and see a product placement or physical sign advertisement, I'm not that offended by it. But if they started fingerprinting me and taking my picture under the premise of selling me more stuff... I'm offended by that.
Contextual ads is fine. An ad for a gadget when I searched for the gadget is fine. An ad for the same gadget next to an article about similar gadgets is fine. An ad for the gadget on Facebook because I searched for that earlier is not acceptable.
Anything that remembers anything about me or my behavior is distinctly off limits. I don’t care if your site or business depends on it. If you use a an ad network that uses tracking cookies to show ads, you’d business model is flawed and your business should die.
By "we" do you mean only people who agree with you? Or do you accept that in a democratic society there can be ads? Personally, I don't block ads on principle. I simply don't visit websites that feature blaring over the top ads or otherwise feature annoyances. When you block ads you are explicitly signalling that you are receiving something of value by visiting the website. I prefer to not send that signal.
>When you block ads you are explicitly signalling that you are receiving something of value by visiting the website.
This is not the case. I have visited thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of websites in which the content was not valuable to me, and I blocked those ads, too.
When I block ads, I send the signal that my attention is not for sale, and moreover, the content creators' business model is not my concern. Eventually, if they get the enough of these signals, they'll find a new way to make money.
You don't need scripts to know who visited your website. Scripts can potentially tell you how many are blocking your ads though. But its always a cat and mouse game. I prefer to simply avoid sites that show shitty ads.
This describes AdSense in general - the original point was some text ads.
But as the article points out, we acclimate to stimulus, so any ad that's welcomed and successful will lose engagement over time. Which is why we get either very creative compelling advertising or advertising that attempts to trick us.
The entire thing is fundamentally broken, of course, and nobody seems to have a monetization strategy beyond subscriptions or the perpetual cat and mouse game of blockers, blocker-blockers, blocker-blocker-blockers and so on.
In an industry full of innovation the monetization aspect is stuck in the newspaper model created 150 years ago.
You put your finger on the pulse of it. Ads give little net positive to society in general, because their sole value add is to inform. But with information acquisition cost drastically reduced due to good search engines, the value add becomes nil. So advertisers create company value by other modes. This is not a net good.
But as the article points out, we acclimate to stimulus, so any ad that's welcomed and successful will lose engagement over time. Which is why we get either very creative compelling advertising or advertising that attempts to trick us.
Relevant (and somewhat humorously self-aware) take on the matter from youtube channel Wisecrack-which is a channel that likes to look at the deeply classically philosophical aspects of how we react and inform ourselves through the lens of modern media.
The one place I thought ads were relevant was on google search. After all, I was searching for the product they are advertising.
But the line started to blur when they decided to remove that yellow background that tells me the result is an ad. Now, it's a 11px font that spells ad. That's the only indicator.
For myself, I created a single use extension that turns google ads background to yellow[1]. I'm fine with ads on Google search, as long as I know they are ads.
I actually want to block ads. If you want to put a small text or image blurb anywhere on the page... I don't want to see it. I'd rather people stop whoring me out and start standing up for what they believe in.
Not to mention the extra resources being eaten by all this JS. When I leave a typical website with lots of ads and tracking open, I can see the energy usage averaging much higher in Activity Monitor on my Mac, even in Safari and with some basic ad blocking on.
I imagine folks serving up the JS have figured out ways around whatever simple blocking tech I have. If their JS wouldn’t eat up so much battery, I’d mind a lot less, since I leave tons of tabs open.
Domain-specific auctions was nice when it was done by Project Wonderful, but there is too much convenience in being able to push advertisements for the entire internet.
Designing secure APIs that can’t be misused by a Cambridge Analytica or similar is a hard problem. Google Plus was “breached”.
To be fair I'm not even sure which companies I trust to do ads with. I guess I'll avoid ads on any of my websites. I do agree though, security of that scale is not an easy problem to solve.
Project Wonderful is the only ad network I have ever fully whitelisted. I've whitelisted specific networks on specific sites before, but Project Wonderful was not only acceptable to me, I actually occasionally found it useful on the webcomics I saw ads on, as it generally showed off the art style. I (almost) never saw ads for unrelated products, there were no videos, few ads were even animated. To me, Project Wonderful fulfilled the promise of 'relevant advertising' far more than the tracking ads currently do. General location- and demographic-targeted advertising can certainly be annoying, but is not offensive in the manner of tracking my browser history.
I just hope ALPR/facial recognition/etc doesn't get combined with digital billboards to bring internet ads into physical locations.
I decided a few years ago to disable ad blocking for awhile. The result was frankly, a parade of shit. Google was probably best at showing the occasional relevant ad, mostly in GMail.
Beyond that, the automated crap that does the targeting tends to hit the lowest common denominator topic. What I actually do online barely registered, but if my kid used my laptop, it would immediately take over the ad experience.
Absolutely. If the content creator and the advertiser dont trust each other enough to have the ad be delivered from the same server as the content, then why would I trust them to run whatever code they want.
Small ads on the web are still more targeted than newspaper ads, since web ads appear on specific websites which are of interest to the user. If I visit a motorcycling forum, I should get motorcycling ads, and they can be effective even if they're small.
What pisses me off is the intrusiveness of the ads. Auto playing video or audio. The amount of malware attacking browser zero days. Until that goes away, I'm going to run a layer of adblockers. That's a problem the ad networks introduced and allowed. It's not on me, as an end user, to fix. You serve me auto playing audio, video, and malware? I'm going continue to block you until you fix that.
Yes, agreed. Ads are a great way to finance things where there is value in being accessible by everybody - I'm not happy about seeing podcast episodes locked behind Patreon walls, for example. While it's great these creators are gaining an additional revenue stream, it still means I or others are priced out of accessing their content. I don't have any natural right to access it, of course, but I prefer the open access ad-driven model over a marketplace where I have to pay every single podcast I listen to $5 a month. And hell, podcast ads weren't tracking and profiling me.
I'd be happy to not use an adblocker, but the abuse of ads for tracking users and as a potential attack vector for malicious content means I'm leaving my adblocker up, no matter how much sites might beg.
Podcasts are a great example. They've had to do advertising the old fashion way, by market research and trying to figure out which ad campaigns are more effective without mass surveillance.
Often they use the strategy of widespread name recognition, which is why you can probably think of a mattress brand, and a recruiting platform off the top of your head. That's effective advertisement without tracking.
Some podcasts do algorithmic auction style ad sales with targeting based off geolocation on the downloading ip address. This works by generating a new audio file for each download. I think the industry calls it "dyanmic ad insertion".
Patreon gives you a private RSS feed so paid podcasts are indeed a possibility. It is similar to getting your private activity ATOM feed from Github for example.
A podcast is a podcast. Some of the podcasts I listen to have put a bunch of content behind a Patreon paywall. The distinction whether it's an RSS feed isn't meaningful. I still don't have access.
If it makes you feel any better, we're only collecting GPU info so we can identify you when you've "forgotten" to accept cookies. It's only like we're lifting your finger prints from discarded coffee cups, no biggie.
(adtech developer)
>I don't actually want to block ads. If you want to put a small text or image blurb anywhere on the page... Good for you. I'll gladly accept those on a webpage so that the content creator can make a bit of cash.
I would be more than happy to accept that and I do see it from time to time. But I still won't be disabling my adblocker - allowing ads served from DoubleClick et el is just far too dangerous from both a security and privacy perspective. Even if they're not responsible for the actual ad content they're at the very least complicit in all of it.
This sounds like such a rational comment, but it is based on the naive idea that ads can be effectively targeted simply based on content. You're never going to have ads that people are willing to pay for (i.e. a certain threshold click-through rate) without some sort of direct targeting. For example, you can't tell if your article on basic car maintenance is being read by a 30 year old male who might be interested in a beer ad or a 30 year old female with two kids who might be more interested in a new iphone cover.
When I turned 25 I started getting nothing but hard soda ads from YouTube. I don't drink.
I went and disabled personalized advertising, and for the first time in years I started seeing ads that tempted me to click through, ads from tech companies about tech. Why the difference? Because YouTube started showing me ads related to the content I'm actually watching rather than based on their faulty neural network profile of me.
Obviously this is just one anecdote, but it's illustrative of the point: don't try to advertise either beer or iPhone covers on a car maintenance site. If I'm on a car maintenance site, you know all you need to know about where my interests are at that exact moment. Why try to hijack my attention (difficult when I'm trying to solve a car problem) when you could instead subtly redirect my attention to an ad for a local mechanic?
You have a good point here. What website I'm currently on is a pretty strong indicator for the types of content and services I'm interested in. Content aggregator sites like Facebook where people spend a ton of time thinking about all sort of topics are really the Holy Grail target, though, and that probably explains why the ad delivery model is less about where you are on the internet and more about who they think you are.
> Why try to hijack my attention (difficult when I'm trying to solve a car problem) when you could instead subtly redirect my attention to an ad for a local mechanic?
If there's only space for one ad, do they show you an ad for tools, exterior mechanic, engine mechanic, or a new car ad? All are valid options for both you and the advertiser.
This is where invasively tracking your online behavior can help you.
Direct targeting basic car maintenance alone covers a lot of ground doesn’t it? cars, spares and consumables, accessories, tools, car shows, workshop equipment, vacuum cleaners, mechanical things in general and diy... it’s endless.
Edit: ok endless is hyperbole, but content targeting is hardly useless.
Seems to be working for the New York Times – “The publisher blocked all open-exchange ad buying on its European pages, followed swiftly by behavioral targeting. Instead, NYT International focused on contextual and geographical targeting for programmatic guaranteed and private marketplace deals and has not seen ad revenues drop as a result“ (source: https://digiday.com/media/gumgumtest-new-york-times-gdpr-cut...)
I didn't want to block ads either; originally I just used policeman / uMatrix. Unfortunately Google analytics broke pages (because some pages required all scripts to load before rendering anything), so I had to switch to uBlock Origin with its extra Google analytics shim.
>I don't actually want to block ads. If you want to put a small text or image blurb anywhere on the page... Good for you. I'll gladly accept those on a webpage so that the content creator can make a bit of cash.
For years I allowed google text ads because of non invasion and distracting they were. However the of amount tracking taking place forced me to also disable them.
If you are fine with ads so that content creators make money, where do you draw the line? How much money should they make?
Having more data about you allows them to pick out 'better' ads and make more money. Wether this money goes to ad networks or content creators depends on how much leverage one has over the other.
It's not a question of how much money they make, but how they make it. An advertisement should be a one-way channel from the publisher to the audience. If information is flowing in the other direction (particularly if without the audience member's express permission) then it's become something more than an advertisement and that's a good place to draw the line.
We need to abolish user agents. At the most, a universal web versioning or a "release timestamp" would be sufficient.
This is the first step to reducing fingerprinting, remove distinctions between different browsers and only have the level of web version or timestamp they can support.
Except those little unobtrusive ads are easy to ignore and hardly anyone clicks on them so no one will pay anything for them. Also there’s no way to verify the clicks that do happen are genuine.
Exactly this is why I block, and I also would not object to your "less intrusive" ad. I would still block, but I wouldn't mind at all seeing such a static, self-served ad.
For many many years I resisted installing an ad-blocker. As someone who worked at a website that made the bulk of it's revenue from ads, it felt hypocritical, and also, I wanted to make sure that the experience of our website was bearable without ad blocking, by forcing myself to experience it every day.
I gave up about two years ago. The web just go so bad I had to install ad-block. My computer would spin like a jet plane at least once an hour due to insane advertising on a website consuming all the CPU.
I literally installed ad-block to save my computer hardware.
The ads don't even bother me that much. I used to always say, "my brain is my ad-block". It was the slow loading, CPU heavy ads that got me to turn.
If advertisers want to advertise to me, that's fine. I understand they need to make money. But how about not melting my computer in the process?
> If advertisers want to advertise to me, that's fine. I understand they need to make money.
I feel sad just reading that. Advertisers are paid to deliver targeted psychological manipulation to you, and yet you feel ashamed for making their work less profitable. It's like observing some kind of digital stockholm syndrome.
This seems exceedingly hyperbolic. With advertising, we can enjoy many services free of charge.
Using google as an example, google maps, search, android, etc all provide tremendous value to their users while being ostensibly free. Without revenue, they simply wouldn't be able to exist.
Having witnessed what advertising and marketing strategies do to psychologically vulnerable people, I now feel I am financing these services on their back.
I know someone who is in debt (and in denial) because she can't resist buying something that is "on sale". Her house filled with things she does not need but that were a bargain.
No, "targeted psychological manipulation" is not an hyperbole, you just are not the target. You, when you see "YOU HAVE WON A PRIZE!" blinking you think "Yeah, right, who falls for these anyway?" The answer is, a few people whose life is pretty miserable.
I'd rather have the internet financed in a sane way through microtransactions than the thing we have now.
It's not free of charge, you're just paying in a different way. These services are able to operate because they deliver content that changes your mind in a way that benefits the corporations who pay for ads. They alter your purchasing habits, sway you politically, and change your emotions. If they were not able to manipulate you then they would be worthless.
I would change “ostensibly free” to “nominally free”. While you pay no up front cost, you are worth a dollar value to these companies.
That money isn’t being spun out of thin air, it’s being extracted from you somehow.
Whether that method of abstraction is getting you to buy something you otherwise wouldn’t have, or by using your data to manipulate others to do the same; they exact their toll on you.
> Without revenue, they simply wouldn't be able to exist.
Nonsense. OSM exists, HN exists, Linux exists. And just because some services need revenue to pay bills, it doesn't mean advertising or users paying is the only way to get it. Google Maps gets revenue from businesses using it on their websites, for example.
> With advertising, we can enjoy many services free of charge.
Using google as an example, google maps, search, android, etc
Google gets much much more than just showing you ads. You surrender all your digital life using Google free services, and that info is priceless, because 95% of people did the same. What would you say if in 10 years, government, police and businesses will routinely use google data for background checks? It is just one use case.
Yeah, for many years I figured "Let the website owners make money, I get to use their service for free anyway, and I can always mentally tune the ads out."
And then sometime around 2015 or 2016, I started noticing ads that would lock up my CPU, or get my laptop's fan running, or prevent the page from loading entirely, or increase page loading time by 10x. And then I decided enough was enough, and installed an adblocker.
It's not the general concept of advertising that I object to. It's when the advertising makes the content that I initially came to see unusable. Fix your goddamn Javascript and maybe I won't block you, although at this point I'm kinda enjoying the ad-free experience.
Hey I like this idea. This is something that needs to happen. Every website starts with aggressive CPU throttling, and then they can ask for permission to be unthrottled. "Our web page requires lots of CPU to deliver text, for some reason we would prefer you not think about, can you please unthrottle us?". This seems like an action browsers could take to significantly improve the web.
Same boat. I actually don't mind most ads. Then the slow page loading, CPU melting became annoying. And on mobile, even reputable sites were having ads hijack the browser. I'm done, I only use Opera or Brave now. I feel like I was a target demographic to advertise to, and they abused me instead.
I used to not use ad blockers as I'm not bothered by ads. But it's getting increasingly difficult not to because the ads are making thousands of requests downloading hundreds of mbs of who knows what quite often simply crashing the tabs. It has got to the point that ads and analytics are being added so mindlessly (I saw it first hand as random CPU hogging battery killing trackers were pushed onto my single-page web app by product managers) that browsing without an ad blocker isn't viable anymore performance-wise.
> the ads are making thousands of requests downloading hundreds of mbs of who knows what quite often simply crashing the tabs
Where are you going for that to happen? Not only does a tab crashing is extremely rare for me, even on my low 8 GB of RAM which I got 8 years ago. It seems a bit crazy that it happens quite often for you.
Did anyone ever investigate what benefits ads have to a population? It seems like a net loss to me, because ads are used to make people consume more than they need; ads make people buy the product with the biggest advertising budget instead of the best product; and while ads may make the internet "free", we are still paying for those ads indirectly.
Why then, doesn't the government bring advertising to a halt? At least they could start with targeted advertising as seen on the internet.
(Of course, if you measure the success of an economy by the GDP, then it might seem that ads have a positive influence, but that seems a bit like a broken-window fallacy to me).
IMO the first place to start implementing ad bans is in public spaces, which I hear is common in Europe. I don't have to watch TV so I don't see TV ads. I don't listen to the radio much so I don't listen to radio ads. I can use an ad blocker on the web, yet for some reason the public spaces I inhabit (and help pay for) are full of ads.
It is not. I have seen a ramp-up in the amount of advertisement everywhere. Maybe poorer countries like Romania - I have been just to Bucharest - are not so affected. But, Sweden, or Spain, - the countries that I spend more time - are just installing more and more advertisements everywhere.
Gambling advertisements are quite common in Stockholm. I remember specially one telling people to buy lottery tickets because they live sucks and the only lottery can save them from their horrible lives. It was disgusting.
Not saying you are wrong, but which European states is this common in? I’ve never noticed this, and many public spaces in Europe have a great deal of poster/bill board style advertisements.
I remember reading Paris tried this, but that’s a long way from “common in Europe”.
Airports are never going to be high on the list of places sans billboards and are usually privatized space. I'm not too bummed out about airports and shopping centers, but I draw the line at public transit and actual fully public spaces like the streets of downtowns (which are choked in ads in Sydney now).
Sigh. Aside from the fact this comment adds no value to the discussion, anyone can walk into Zurich airport and buy a ticket.
By this logic, many public transport centres such as train stations wouldn't be public spaces either (not unheard of for a train station to have a ticket barrier too). There are adverts in places other than the airport too!
This is not true, you can't buy a ticket without identification and you can't get past security unless you go through several other checks. Going into a public area like out on the street is not even similar at all. Airports are not public locations, they are much more similar to the interior walls of a private business than a public location, which doesn't require you to pay to enter and produce varying amounts of identification.
Maybe you heard about prohibition of billboards in highways, but it was only of alcoholic beverages. I remember hearing about it years ago when Osborne's bulls where saved because they were (justly IMHO) a national monument or something like that. The name was removed though.
Correct. It's awful here in Sydney. The local government a long time ago decided that it couldn't be bothered to put up and maintain infrastructure like bus shelters and the like, so they got JC Decaux to do it (a French company, whose maintenance trucks amusingly use an Australian flag as their major design motif) in exchange for plastering the whole city with ads.
Advertising has also been proven to be bad for your sense of life satisfaction, which is an externality not paid for by advertisers.
"The effect implies that a hypothetical doubling of advertising expenditure would result in a 3% drop in life satisfaction. That is approximately one half the absolute size of the marriage effect on life satisfaction, or approximately one quarter of the absolute size of the effect of being unemployed."
I don't see how the study is establishing causation. It does not prove that advertising is creating an externality, as you claim.
In fact, it explicitly says that it does not show causation and recommends further research.
It's easy to come up with theories to explain it that don't have anything to do with the one you proposed. For instance, higher advertising could be caused by weakness in the economy that doesn't show up in other data (or at least not GDP) but which leads to less satisfaction later, which wouldn't show up in their controls.
I have managed to block advertising out of my life so effectively for so long I nearly recoil when a normal tv advertisement at someone’s home or a bar catches me somehow at full volume.
That or I marvel to those around me at the amazing production value of some stupid commercial that’s aired to them countless times is.
I have no doubt a barrage of ads day in and day out, regardless of economic condition is bad for a person’s well being.
Even disregarding the many questionable aspects of consumerism, think about how many developers you know that have dedicated their entire ability to creating better advertising. The amount of brain power that has been spent on marketing (largely) unnecessary products to consumers is staggering. I hesitate to suppose where we could be if those abilities had been directed elsewhere, but I expect the world might be a much better place.
>'Why then, doesn't the government bring advertising to a halt? At least they could start with targeted advertising as seen on the internet.'
Interesting idea. I just read that over £20bn is spent a year on advertising in the UK. The problem is that things which are socially valuable - especially journalism, but also a lot of entertainment - are chronically dependent on advertising revenues.
Netflix is an interesting example of a new model of entertainment that generates revenues through subscriptions instead of advertisements. Lots of newspapers have also shifted to a subscription-based model, though only The Guardian has done so without placing their website behind a paywall. Another alternative is public service broadcasting, like the BBC.
I guess they mean purely via subscriptions. But of course Netflix also uses product placement and probably sells all your viewing and behavioural habits as well.
I'd be surprised to hear they were selling viewing data though. A few years ago, they were making a lot of noise about how that data gave them a unique way to make decisions on what content to produce that other studios lacked. Seems like the kind of thing you'd hold close if that were the case.
When you search, it's also clear they have shadow profiles for content they don't have (e.g. before they had Monty Python and the Holy Grail, they'd autocomplete to "Things like Monty Python and the Holy Grail" pretty early in the autocomplete results). I wonder how heavily that search data is weighted in deciding how much to offer to license existing content.
>The problem is that things which are socially valuable - especially journalism, but also a lot of entertainment - are chronically dependent on advertising revenues.
I think calling journalism "socially valuable" is debatable.
There was a paper on the psychological effects, i.e. net negative effects on happiness not too long ago [1], I think it was posted on HN a while back. Haven't read it though so I can't comment on the specific findings and the quality.
If anyone has any literature on the other effects mentioned by the parent, I'd be highly interested as well.
There are countries that ban ads, but they also ban a lot of other things.
My presumption is that if advertising was banned, and you were still dealing with a relatively free society, that many more resources would go in to PR and marketing. At least an ad you know is an ad.
A good exercise is to go back and look through magazines from the 1950s and 1960s, especially Playboy. The advertising seems much more transparent in its shallow promises and we actually know what the long term outcomes were from following them -- e.g. alcohol, tobacco, and cars no one gives a shit about anymore. The editorial bridges between advertising and content glaringly stick out. These things aren't necessarily no longer true, but the obviousness of time shines a bright light on it.
To me the biggest story in ads isn't ad blockers or Google, it is Facebook getting consumers to spend gargantuan amounts of money creating content for free and then making tens of billions of dollars from it. Youtube/Google at least has revenue sharing.
Barely. It's not like a person can create an account, upload an original video which becomes extremely popular, and receive a single penny in compensation.
True. In some countries, mixing content and ads (see social media influencers) is already forbidden, especially when targeting children. I suppose the law could be extended here.
I worked briefly in a marketing department as programmer. Learned the following there.
The benefit of advertising is to inform the consumer of products they may not be aware of.
"Messa thinks Messa might have Mesothelioma!"
Most of the time advertising is a waste of time, and there certainly are better ways of learning about products. However, the function of informing consumers of products they may not be aware of is of mild benefit.
A better question than what benefit is advertising might be, "How can advertising be made more beneficial to the viewers"
To a minimalist advertising could almost be construed as a form of psychic attack on ones value system.
Imagine firing off hundreds of ads at a vegan about how eating meat is good. That's essentially what all the "buy this shit" ads are doing to someone who explicitly buys as little as they can to get by.
This doesn't only apply to minimalists. I don't consider myself a minimalist, but I do consider advertising as a psychic attack. This is how many justify disabling billboards and ad blocking : they are merely defending themselves.
Another way of looking at it: What are better alternatives for helping people learn about available products? Or better yet, good ways of solving different problems in life, which may not always involve buying a product.
There is an inherent problem with advertising in that the incentives are somewhat misaligned. Company X doesn't want me to learn about the best way to solve problem Y. They want me to learn about _their_ solution to problem Y.
Or even worse... Company X wants me to believe that Y is a problem for me — when in fact it may not be, or at least not how they claim — and that only they can solve it.
I'm currently reading the book the book, "Utopia for Realists" by Rutger Bregman. I consider myself fairly intelligent, but of course knowledgeable in just a few domains, but he brought up something that I'm ashamed to not have realized for myself.
Simon Kuznets, a Russian emigre to the US, developed the concept of the GDP in 1934, and according to Bregman, tracking the GDP was a significant factor in the US's ability to harness its manufacturing capability during the war effort; most countries had a significantly inferior understanding of their own production dynamics.
As useful was it was for the war effort, Kuznets warned that the GDP should be redefined after the war, as the country's needs had changed. Instead, military spending is part of the GDP. No party wants to significantly cut back on military spending because it would affect the GDP. So not only does the GDP encourage increased military spending, it doesn't reward so many things that would be beneficial to society, and thus little effort is spent optimizing for those things.
TL;DR: if the GDP doesn't measure it, there is no political will to address it, and if the GDP does measure it, it is a political necessity to boost spending in that area. Thus, needless military spending, rent seeking money shuffling on wall street, and advertising are richly rewarded as they are included in the GDP.
Thanks for sharing that. I've had this feeling in my gut for a while, and I think it touches on a similar notion.
The feeling has to do with the fact that where I live, nearly every software engineer you meet works for a defense contractor, an issuance company, or a finance company. These jobs, and the dollars that come from them, seem somehow hollow to me. I'd accept a significant pay cut if my code were somehow contributing to something like growing food.
> It seems like a net loss to me, because ads are used to make people consume more than they need;
My SO opened an escape room a year ago. I though similarly as you before that (not that it make people consume more, but that they'll buy the inferior product), but then after a few weekend without any reservation... it made me realize how things aren't just found.
You need to be reminded that something exist to even consider it. It's not even a question of whether that's the best thing for you.
She always ask people what they think once they done and recently she got as a comment "but you aren't visible enough". We pay for ads, a few thousands, we are probably not too far from having spend 5 digits in ads. I couldn't imagine how people could be aware of our existence without ads at all.
> and while ads may make the internet "free", we are still paying for those ads indirectly.
We are paying for it, sure, but at least we are paying, aren't we? I like that I can get any ads on a channel. I love DIY channels, I seriously hate how almost all of them hide that all their tools were given. They say it from time to time, but on most videos, they'll just keep using the one from the past videos without mentionning getting them for free. That's an ads by the way, they may even directly get paid for using theses tools. With adsense though, the ads I get aren't necessarily related to the video, I'm AWARE they are ads, they are made FOR ME (thus more profitable for the channel, because I may need tool, but I may be more likely to buy a new computer for example).
Are ads really that effective? I'd love for my internet ads to show me stuff I could buy at nice prices. What I get is I bought a mechanical keyboard once and now for two months all ads will be bombarding me with mechanical keyboard offers. Why would I want one if I already got one?
Advertising exists to increase consumption, because capitalism requires constant growth. On order for it to sustain itself, we need to buy more and more, consume more and more.
When a company can produce a product that is somehow too high quality to be a viable business model, you know we're living in a weird society. Capitalism requires that stuff breaks and is replaced regularly.
And advertising helps manipulate us to desire new things constantly.
"Why then, doesn't the government bring advertising to a halt?"
I've been advocating for bans on unsolicited advertising for many years. Usually such comments get voted down in to oblivion, but as the years have gone by more and more people are beginning to feel the same way.
Advertising is severely detrimental, not only because of the reasons that you state, but they also distort the media because news outlets are loathe to do investigative journalism or negative reporting on the companies that provide their bread and butter and because they also want to run stories that don't offend or antagonize their advertisers -- stories from that point of view that capitalism is bad or advertising is bad, for instance, are off limits to many outlets partially because of this.
Advertisers also routinely lie about the products they're selling, so people are being deceived about the products they're buying, sometimes with very serious negative consequences (such as advertising of cigarettes or medical products that are actually harmful).
The problem is, like me, you can be relatively unintelligent, work forty hour weeks, and make around a quarter million dollars a year peddling ads. That's tough to give up when nobody's dropping dead because of it.
Advertising and advertised products have and do do tremendous harm. It's just generally indirect by one or more degrees. Tobacco, alcohol, petroleum, gambling, leaded paint. Just off the top of my head.
This line of thought is complete nonsense. When you get a product in a transaction, you get something from the other party and you give them something in exchange. When you buy an iPhone, what you're giving is $700. In the case of non-paywalled online content, what you're giving is an ad impression. It would be ludicrous to say after an iPhone purchase "I didn't get anything out of the part of the transaction where I paid $700? The government should ban it".
I'm not dismissing the possibility of conversations about whether advertising for services is a type of transaction that's difficult to reason about, and that users need to be protected from themselves by regulation. But looking at only the outflow half of a transaction and asking "I don't benefit from this part, we should ban it" is utter gibberish.
"Did anyone ever investigate what benefits payment systems have to a population? It seems like a net loss to me, since payment systems cost money to operate and in the end all they do is reduce the amount of money a user has. While payment systems may allow you to 'buy' services, we are still paying for these systems directly and indirectly
Why then, doesn't the government bring currency and bank accounts and credit cards to a halt?"
Remember that the formal name for a web browser is a User Agent.
This metaphor makes it clear that when there is a conflict of interest between you the user and whatever the server on the other side wants, your Agent should act in your interest.
This - so far I have a title, 'The death of User Agent' of an article about how browsers turned from user (my) agents, who represent my best interests on the internet, into corporate agents (which act in best interests of their makers - on my own computer!)
Regrettably, nobody bothers to mention that JavaScript is really what's to blame for all of this. If unnecessary use of JavaScript earned the same sort of derision that "best viewed in IE 6" banners did, we wouldn't be where we are today.
That genie is too far gone to put back in the bottle, but that's the real problem with the online advertising 'ecosystem'. JavaScript enabled pop-up ads, it enables tracking, it enables coinminers and other malware.
> JavaScript is really what's to blame for all of this
Along with CSS, cookies, external images and fonts, redirect links, referrer headers, browser caches, and IP addresses that don't change over time and that can be linked to physical locations.
Javascript certainly doesn't have its hands clean, and there have been some frankly stupid decisions in how it was designed -- but stopping dedicated trackers is more complicated than you're making it seem. I don't need Javascript to put a tracking pixel in your email.
Aside from CSS and redirect links, all of these features are fairly straightforward. The consequences of disabling the Referer header, for example, are pretty small and easy to understand: you'll stop sending sites information about what links you used to get to them, but some very picky websites that check the header (e.g. image hosts that try to prevent hotlinking) might not work. This means browsers can provide options to let the user choose their preferred balance of privacy, functionality, performance, and "helping us improve your experience".
With JavaScript, on the other hand, it is very difficult for end-users to tell what a given website is doing. Are those hundred kilobytes of minified code a tracking/fingerprinting script, a crypto-miner, or a Hello World app in the UI framework du jour? It's hard for even an experienced developer to know for sure, and it's basically impossible for browsers. Your options are (1) allow everything, (2) use really crummy heuristics like "what domain is this file being served from", or (3) disable JavaScript and give up on using half the websites on the Internet.
I do think most of these things (with the exception of IP addresses and caching) are easier to solve than Javascript. I disagree that they are trivial to solve or that combined, they are substantially less harmful than Javascript. Let me try to sidestep this debate though and focus on the broader problem.
JS has a few stupid design decisions, but the fundamental reason Javascript is hard to run safely is because it's a turing-complete language that exposes a lot of powerful features.
You can argue that the web doesn't need a turing-complete language that exposes a lot of powerful features. Can you argue that phones don't? Can you argue that personal computers don't need that?
All of the tracking that happens on the web right now also happens on mobile phones and desktops. Users have broadly shown that the "only download code you trust" security model doesn't work (see recent articles on both the Android and iOS app store for reference). Even something basic like adblocking on Android is kind of terrible -- the best app I know of is AFWall, and that's maybe half as powerful as something like UMatrix because it's relying on static firewall rules.
You get rid of powerful applications on the web, and users will go back to downloading apps like crazy just so they can order pizza from their phone. Since currently, all of those platforms are pretty terrible for privacy; it is very hard to argue that a world where people could only download native apps would be more private than the world we have now.
We could also keep the web and switch wholesale to a SaaS model for everything, which is broadly bad for consumers, and carries its own privacy risks (there are some computations like password generation that I don't want to be done on a 3rd-party computer). Switching over to using forms and remote computation for everything on the web would also greatly increase the prevalence of 3rd-party cookies, making them much harder to block.
The point I'm getting at is that I don't see a world where Javascript vanishes and privacy gets any better. In fact, it might even have the opposite effect if the deprecation of Javascript means people download more Android apps. Privacy is a really hard, complicated problem and there probably isn't any single solution.
> I don't see a world where Javascript vanishes and privacy gets any better.
If JavaScript vanished, it would accomplish one huge win for privacy: it would split the "reading content and submitting forms" part of the Web out from the "powerful applications" part.
It is cool that you can use JavaScript to build a collaborative 3D modeling program. It might even be better for privacy than a native app. But it is less cool that Facebook and every news site you read gets access to the exact same capabilities and attack surface as the 3D modeling program.
And personally, I think ordering pizza would land on the "content and forms" side of the divide.
Absolutely. What is Javascript? It's andom pages all over the world telling your computer to download code from other random pages all over the world and execute it. Executable data is one of the first no-no-s of security.
A native app collaborative 3D program could be worse for privacy if it were closed source. If it were open source, then no way. For one thing, unlike a Javascripted one, it wouldn't update behind your back. Its code wouldn't be obfuscated, and wouldn't be dynamically pieced together from the four corners of the world.
I think GP is making a reasonable argument about capabilities, and that's something that we should be pushing harder for both on the web and on native. I also think that's something we are actively looking at on the web, we're just looking at it from a feature/platform perspective instead of at a language level.
On the other hand, I don't think the Open Source argument holds at all. This is pushing for something that just isn't going to happen. Now we need to not only get rid of Javascript, we also need to convince Facebook to Open Source its native app?
I run mostly Open Source native apps, but the only way I can do that is because web-apps take the place of many native apps I would otherwise need to install on my phone or computer.
> For one thing, unlike a Javascripted one, it wouldn't update behind your back.
Most people's phone apps are set to auto-update, and most PC apps have the ability to download and execute additional code on the fly. I like to think I run a pretty tight Linux system, but all of my programs have write permissions to their own personal install directories.
It sounds to me like your problem isn't so much Javascript as it is 3rd-party requests/assets and mutable web-pages. These are also interesting problems to talk about, but they're largely unrelated to Javascript. It would maybe be helpful to see the web move more towards a DAT/IPFS model where webpages could be versioned.
On the Javascript side of things, all of this boils down to the security idea the users should only run code that they trust. Users have broadly rejected that idea -- both on the web and on native platforms like phones. They want the ability to safely run untrusted and semi-trusted code.
We can argue over whether that's a reasonable thing for them to ask, but that's the position we're in. The web is trying to figure out how to let you run untrusted code.
JavaScript enables functionality in the same way that cars enable transportation. They aren't the only solution. And there would be far less injury, death, and pollution if we all just didn't use automobiles. The world would be a safer, cleaner place. And a small fraction of people would be happy with it.
JavaScript is the same. We'd have a cleaner, safer web without it. And only a small fraction of people would be happy with that.
If JavaScript is an automobile, HTML/CSS is an electric bike. You can get pretty much wherever you want on an ebike, they're safer than cars, more intuitive, and lighter on natural resources. Nearly everyone knows how to ride one, and there's very few surprises, unlike automobiles which are repackaged in all sorts of odd ways (gas on the left or right, or maybe it's electric, car vs truck vs bus). And all that complexity comes at a cost to both the driver (who knows if the car is spying on you) and the manufacturer (need to keep up with the current trends because reasons).
Sometimes you need a car, but usually an ebike will be more than sufficient. Going on a road trip or doing a large Costco run? You probably want a car. Just picking up some eggs from the grocery store or making a visit to the library? An ebike is probably the best option, and is also likely faster (closer parking, can ride on roads, sidewalks, bike trails, etc).
I use a static site generator for my blog and personal web site, and there's absolutely no JavaScript involved. I use JavaScript with a web framework for webapps because otherwise we would need to build a desktop app, which would limit our reach to those platforms we have the resources to support.
I'm of the opinion that you should use the simplest technology that will get the job done. It's far easier to make a static site secure than a dynamic one. It's far easier for a customer to vet your server-rendered site than your pile of JavaScript (nothing runs locally, so they just vet form actions and HTTP headers).
If only using JavaScript required a license to operate and came with a set of rules enforced by fines and jail time :)
If every browser had done the sane thing from day 1 (no third-party scripts and no cross-domain communication) we wouldn't be in the mess we're in. Sites could still use all the power that comes with scripting, ad networks just wouldn't be feasible.
That's fine. Now the first-party and ad peddlers have to work with and trust each other instead of using my machine, my ignorance and my disinterest in their dealings as an intermediary.
> The world would be a safer, cleaner place. And a small fraction of people would be happy with it.
You might be missing how expectations change after the introduction of a technology. I wouldn’t guess that people would be unhappy about not having cars before the car was even invented.
JavaScript isn't from nature. It could have been designed so that it didn't enable those things, but it wasn't. It's probably more accurate to say the ability browsers grant JavaScript is to blame, but that's just splitting atoms.
It's not possible for a system that can communicate remotely to prevent tracking on some level by using unique IDs and fingerprinting even without JS. It's also not possible to have a programming language that can't also be used as a coin miner, it's just a CPU based operation and there's no way to discriminate between user desired computation and exploitative computation. Your point about pop up ads is valid in that JS does not need to be able to influence the state of the browser in that way, this is the only example that crosses outside of the sandbox.
Agree.
I no longer use an ad-blocker, and haven't for some time. Especially so since CSS took over.
Originally I used NoScript (and Firefox 'View>Page Style>No Style'), now I just tend to use uMatrix, with appropriate media types disabled.
It makes for a faster, and easier to read web, where I still see the occasional ad, but once configured, usually not.
I'd guess that use with Javascript disabled seems to be accepted in part due to Safari on iOS supporing it - possibly it was the default (I can't remember).
It's crazy Steve Gibson (of all people) calls this too impractical to use.
If you're a total tech-novice, sure, but as a power user it's fine. I'm blocking ycombinator.com right now. I can still submit this. If something doesn't work, just click the icon and trust its domain. If pictures don't show, trust a CDN. Amazon, Paypal, 99% of sites work with an initial adjustment of trust settings.
The percentage of sites that function without JavaScript enabled is decreasing over time.
Things like React are accelerating that curve. Even for sites that could function without it, they are throwing up hands with "welp, they can't disable it anyway because other sites...so let's not test that use case anymore."
I don't like it, but it is what it is. Technical people aren't going to drive the decision to work without JS. In the end, it's a cost decision, with the usual PHB[1] outcomes.
Steve Gibson is ... well, he used Windows XP until fairly recently. He's not some one you should take advice from.
I used noscript until Firefox changed to the new web API and noscript stopped working briefly. I switched to ublock origin in medium mode and haven't looked back. More compatible and practical nowadays.
You're being downvoted of course, BUT whilst JavaScript wasn't created for all this, and itself isn't to blame, the fact that big corporations have pushed the technology forward I think is telling. At the end of the day what do Google (and others) really want? What do they have to gain with all the technology they are using, enhancing, improving?
Something like the unholy child of RSS Feeds / Podcasts / NNTP / Email / Pub-Sub / Gopher / Google Reader
A new language (or two complementary languages) separating content and presentation, limited, possibly not Turing-complete but expressive. Specifically less powerful than modern web browsers.
But you can't build a pop-up if you don't have access to create new windows, yet you can still be turing complete. For example, WASM is Turing complete, but it can't create popup windows because it has no access to the DOM.
I think JavaScript should have to request access to use browser APIs, and you should be able to disable access to any of all of them. For example, I should be about to disable:
Yes! All the replies here are missing the point completely. It’s not that JavaScript is somehow uniquely bad among programming languages. It’s that the entire idea of putting a general purpose programming language into the system was a bad idea.
99% of my web browsing shouldn’t need it. Every site I visit uses it, but almost all of them could be built just fine without it.
It is a fully capable platform. How it's used isn't a fault of the platform though. It seems user-agents and adblockers are applying the proper protections, just like how antivirus works on your desktop.
Well the difference is ads and malware are not the same thing, but they use the same vectors. The comparison would be more like removing DRM protections vs using antivirus.
In practice it will be slower and bigger. Everybody will be just compiling entire C++ frameworks to wasm. A web app needs to do something with images? Here is the entire ffmpeg compiled to wasm. Need a single widget from Qt? Here is the entire Qt compiled to wasm. I'm pretty sure nobody is going to carefully refactor existing C++ libs to select only the subset of features needed for web.
I've been blocking ads ever since I learned that I could stop seeing DoubleClick ads by blocking their domain in /etc/hosts.
I won't ever apologize for doing so. As far as I'm concerned, any advertisement that depends on JavaScript is malware, and I think that my right to protect myself online outweighs the need of publishers to turn a profit.
IMO, profits are like respect. They must be earned, and if the only way you can turn a profit is by spying on people then maybe you shouldn't be in business in the first place. If the only way you can get me to use your product is by giving it away and selling my data, then maybe your product shouldn't exist?
As far as I'm concerned, the data I generate by using a search engine should be treated with the same care as my medical records. It should not be mined or traded. It should not be kept longer than 30 days.
And if that breaks the internet, so be it. You brought this on yourselves.
Adguard on desktop and Android. Globally blocks all ads across browsers and apps (except embedded ads like IG and Twitter). Truly magical and worth every penny.
The great thing about getting older for me is realising that nothing is indispensable. Everything eventually ends, we move on with our lives and do something else.
So sure: maybe someday un-adblockable content will be a thing. Do I care about that content? Turns out maybe I'll just walk away entirely. The internet has a lot of utterly ad-ridden services with far too high an opinion of how important they really are.
There is so much content. Great content, too. The miracle of over 100 years of mass media recording tech. And, you know, 4000ish years of written word records and storytelling. Ad-supported web trash is mostly just a distraction from better things that can be had used for just a little money, or checked out from a library. My life'd probably improve if it all went away (Web would have a better wheat/chaff ratio, I'd be less distracted by junk).
So sure, make your sites, services, and content so annoying that I stop using them, and close copying loopholes, somehow. Or ban spyvertising and let it all go down in the flames of the prophesied ad-pocalypse. I really don't care a bit either way.
I absolutely agree. Every now and then I open up a link that and me too disable my adblocker and if I can't bypass it in <5s I just close the tab and move on.
There is very little on the internet that is completely unique and of interest to me. If you try to put up a barrier to your content I will go somewhere else almost every time.
It's simply better to go to the options of your browser and disable third-party cookies altogether. And at that point why not keep using Chrome, which is faster, heh
I often use firefox reader mode just because websites use custom fonts, and to remove all the clutter, even when there is no ads.
Also, it won't be long until reddit is sued and must remove comments where people copy-paste the entire article because of pay walls and ad blockers. Same for outline. I guess website will start findings ways to prevent copy pasting, and maybe someone will create some app that just let their users browse a PNG rendering of websites.
It's almost as if normal newspapers might be considered a good alternative.
I think Reddit is largely protected from being sued (in the US) for copyright infringement in comments/submissions as long as they comply with valid DMCA notices. But yeah, that involves removing the content.
> I guess website will start findings ways to prevent copy pasting
This is already a thing in some places. I wanted to use a table of data I found on a website but found I couldn't copy and paste it into excel. Instead I downloaded the webpage and parsed it to extract the table and rebuild it manually.
I'm amazed that all the interested parties haven't got together to flesh out a microtransaction standard. The whole ad-blocking debate would be moot if we could pay a few cents to read an article free of distracting ads. If you choose not to pay, you get the ads and don't get to complain about ad-blocker-blockers because you were offered an alternative.
I know it has been attempted in the past with little success, but all those attempts were just companies going it alone and hoping for the best. If the W3C, browser makers, banks and publishers all got together a standard could be developed. Something that would be core to web standards. It wouldn't be easy, but it would solve a lot of problems.
A vastly more sensible option: a means-based, universal fee (a/k/a tax) and payments to creators based on both UBI and quality + access distributions -- a universal content syndication mechanism:
$100 per person per year from the world's richest 1 billion inhabitants would match all present publishing income, and present ad spend. Truth is we're already paying for the content, we're just not getting it.
> The whole ad-blocking debate would be moot if we could pay a few cents to read an article free of distracting ads.
It would not. You're worth more to the advertisers than a few cents, so even if you and everyone else chipped in, many ad-supported sites would see their revenue plummet, and close their doors. Consumers spend a lot of money buying things, from groceries to appliances, and a percentage of each of those sales goes to the ad budget to steer that buying. Unless everything in every store got a few percent cheaper, consumers literally don't have the money to distribute to the websites at anywhere near the level advertisers pay. Every single American would have to pay Facebook $15-20 per month to match the advertising revenue Facebook generates per user, not a few cents. The cost of using Google's services would be similar to a cable or cell phone bill, assuming every single person that uses them continues to and signs up for that bill.
Who gets to judge the value of content? And how can it have "negative value"?
Regardless, the action of consuming the content itself means that it has inherent value. I believe whether it's worth it is a decision for the user instead of dictated by someone else.
I believe that's what I said, but to be clear: yes it should be up the individual, however if you look at most people's actions then their demand and willing consumption of content does not align with what they can or will pay for.
For example, blocking ads (even though most know that is the trade-off for the content) instead of refusing to visit the site. If the content has no value, why visit the site at all? Surely not ever pageview has zero value?
We tried compensating users for every ad they see, using a browser extension (ClearCoin), but Google took it off the Chrome Web Store because extensions have to have a single purpose; ad blocking & replacing is apparently two purposes. Maybe they just didn't like us.
I'm browser crypto mining.
There's a direct link between the time a user is engaged, and the amount of money a publisher earns.
The relationship is direct between reader and publisher; making quality content becomes important again, there's no adoption friction, and ad networks become a thing of the past.
It's no wonder Google blocked browser mining quick-smart.. it had the potential to bring down the entire house of cards.
I think there is middle ground:
* Browser imposed intelligent CPU limits
* User Preference: Don't want mining? You'll see ads instead.
The reality of humanity is that people operate via incentive. The internet is no different - publishers are incentivised by money. There must be a mechanism to provide that - today's interpretation is increasingly aggressive advertising, which makes noone but the advertisers happy.
Crypto-mining provides an incentive for publishers to invest in their content, knowing they will be duly rewarded, without a middle-man.
Users know that they are providing revenue to publishers simply by the act of viewing content.
It has the potential to be empowering for everyone involved.
However, to riposte as glibly as you did: If you don't feel like compensating a publisher for their content, they may not feel like serving it to you. It's lose-lose for everyone. What do you propose, then?
A huge part of advertising is getting users to feel that they can trust in a product or service enough to spend their money on it. Spend a bit of time watching TV commercials and see how many methods of establishing trust you can spot.
This is why the way web ads are served is utterly farcical. How can you build a person's trust by invading their privacy in a hundred different ways just so you can be sure the ads they're seeing are a little bit more targeted than what's on TV?
People often say that they would be happy to have reasonable ads that don't interfere with website function and which respect their privacy, but it's been so bad for so long that it would likely be very difficult for an ethical, privacy respecting ad service to get off the ground. Many people have been burned too many times to believe and unblock such an ad service. EME shows that there is no interest in even trying this approach. They're just going to continue escalating the arms war.
They're going to lose.
Companies advertising on the internet need to wake up to the fact you can't support a war against the privacy of your potential customer base and expect them to trust you. Yes, you've dug quite the hole for yourselves over the last couple of decades. Why keep digging?
Something is different in the arms race this time.
Browser development is almost exclusively funded by advertising. Chrome, in the obvious way. Mozilla is funded entirely by Google. Safari is the only surviving exception.
Safari's (Webkit's) declarative adblocker is really good while optimizing for performance and battery life.
Have you tried 1Blocker X?
Though, for fun, I've rolled my own Safari extension for content blocking. You get 90%+ of the way just concatenating lists of ad domains and feeding them into the blocker. But, for example, you can encode all of Easylist as content-blocker rules.
Chrome is now moving to a declarative model and it is widely considered to be a downgrade purposely meant to stifle ad-blocking technology.
I think the ideal system would support declarative and non-declarative modes (since a fully declarative system could never account for every possible use case).
I can see that given the choice between declarative rules vs. a "onRequest(req)" handler, almost every developer would just opt for the latter because it's more general and open-ended.
And there's no pressure from users to choose the more restrictive but performant option because people basically have zero insight into what's killing their battery, much less which competitor is better in that regard.
Given the gulf between Safari vs Chrome battery performance, I'm not all that convinced that the declarative api is pure downside like HN cynicism and Twitter outrage might suggest.
I can agree that it would be nice to have competing implementations, but that's just the result of browsers being so complex that once your hobby horse feature is removed from one, you basically have nowhere to turn.
> Given the gulf between Safari vs Chrome battery performance, I'm not all that convinced that the declarative api is pure downside like HN cynicism and Twitter outrage might suggest.
Safari was already beating Chrome on battery life before its extension API was neutered. This is post hoc revisionist rationalization.
What's your point? That Chrome now can't adopt Safari's extension API to save battery life because...? Improving Chrome's battery life by adopting a simpler extension API helps close the gap. That's a significant benefit whether or not Safari did it first or whether Chrome still has room for improvement.
The grandparent was implying that Safari's better battery life justifies their decision to use the declarative API. But that was already the case before they adopted the declarative API, so it's not obvious that the declarative API has anything to do with that success. Maybe it's just a minor improvement, or maybe it isn't an improvement at all.
I'm not sure how you could make that argument and ignore the fact that the declarative API is technically simpler and its battery benefits are apparent from that aspect alone.
It's not apparent that the benefits are significant in any way. They could be minuscule and therefore not worth sacrificing important user experience features like adblocking over.
It could also be that because of the reduced expressiveness of the adblocker, more ads are missed, and you might therefore end up with a net increase in the amount of code that has to be executed by the browser. So the declarative API could actually lead to a performance decrease in practice.
The Chrome team has already evaluated the change and explain why the benefits are not miniscule [1]:
> In addition to these safety concerns, there are also significant performance costs. In most cases, these costs are not from the evaluation of the extension script processing events, but rather from everything else coordinating the script. That overall performance impact can be very large, even for an extension written as performantly as possible where the JavaScript execution time is negligible.
> As it’s designed today, the blocking version of the Web Request API requires a persistent, long-running process, and is fundamentally incompatible with “lazy” processes - processes that can be set up or torn down as-needed, conserving valuable system resources. There are also significant costs associated with the serialization of the request data, the inter-process communication needed to send that data to the extensions, and the processing of extension responses.
You are free to dismiss the writeup as lies, of course. You're also free to handwave it away by saying "well I don't like the trade-off". But you can't discuss this as if the benefits are not apparent.
This blog post is highly misleading. For example, they start off with several paragraphs about security/privacy implications, but this change doesn't have any security/privacy implications. That's because they have explicitly stated that they will not deprecate the observational webRequest API, which has exactly the same privacy considerations as the content blocking API. However because the observational API provides "important functionality for which there is no alternative" (to their tracking business), it will not be deprecated. But the content blocking API which also provides important functionality for which there is no alternative (but hinders their advertising business) is being deprecated.
Furthermore here you can see a tweet from Justin Schuh, lead of security and privacy on Google Chrome, where he claims that the "sole motivation is correcting privacy and security deficiencies" (which I just debunked as being a possibility), not performance: https://twitter.com/justinschuh/status/1134092257190064128
So between Justin Schuh and Simeon Vincent (author of the post you linked), who is lying? It must be at least one of them.
But let's ignore the misleading claims about security/privacy and just focus on the performance issue.
In this post, they include absolutely no numbers or measurements of the performance effects of using the content blocking API. They give some explanation of what is technically required to implement each approach, and certainly the declarative API is a simpler approach, but you made that point already. And I responded to it. Just because the API is "obviously simpler" doesn't mean the performance advantage is in any way significant, and could even be outweighed by the increased ad load due to the less powerful API. It's just not at all obvious from what they are saying here that the change is worth compromising user functionality over.
> All content-blockers except DuckDuckGo have sub-millisecond median decision time per request.
> Time to Process a Request in Ghostery (median): 0.007 ms
> Loading Ghostery's Blocking Engine (from cache): 0.03 ms
> Memory Consumption of Ghostery's Blocking Engine (at startup, in Chrome): 1.8 MB
Note that last one: 1.8 MB memory consumption. And they're arguing that we need to be "setting up and tearing down this component as needed" to conserve that "valuable" 1.8 MB. Nonsense.
> That's because they have explicitly stated that they will not deprecate the observational webRequest API, which has exactly the same privacy considerations as the content blocking API.
It's still a substantial improvement if popular extensions that don't need to use observational webRequest (ie. content blockers) no longer use this more expensive method. It's a leap of logic to suggest that supporting observational webRequest means that the simpler content blocking API has no benefit.
> Furthermore here you can see a tweet from Justin Schuh, lead of security and privacy on Google Chrome, where he claims that the "sole motivation is correcting privacy and security deficiencies" (which I just debunked as being a possibility), not performance (...) So between Justin Schuh and Simeon Vincent (author of the post you linked), who is lying? It must be at least one of them.
Neither. The change may be motivated by privacy and security but as Simeon Vincent explains, it also has substantial performance benefits. I'm not sure how you logically leap to the conclusion of "this has no performance benefits" from "we did this for privacy/security reasons".
It's also extremely misleading to compare the performance of a content-blocked site to internal browser performance. You know what has the best overall performance? An extension that blocks the whole page; 0ms speed, the best performance, almost zero battery drain, except that this hypothetical extension consumes substantial resources on its own. But hey, the 0ms page speed makes up for it. It'd be pretty silly for the Chrome team to base their decisions on the performance of rendering an incomplete webpage depending on both random extension makers and random website creators.
> Note that last one: 1.8 MB memory consumption. And they're arguing that we need to be "setting up and tearing down this component as needed" to conserve that "valuable" 1.8 MB.
Ghostery is only one extension among them, and all the adblocking extensions in that performance study ran a pre-pruned set of EasyList rules when popular adblockers run more rules in practice.
Static blacklists versus live heuristics is a pretty obvious compromise, and prone to lose in the long term arms race. That's exactly why Chrome proposed manifest V3...which is basically implementing Safari rules.
It could be a good feature for Mozilla to be the best privacy protector.
Firefox used to be the fastest, if they can be fast and the most private, they might be able to regain some mindshare and maybe market share.
There’s just the problem of most of the funding coming from Google.
Right and also encrypted media extensions are a new development.
I think the solution is a new web protocol that does not require an OS in a box (browser). It will be supported by decentralized (mostly p2p) protocols. It probably will not have any JavaScript.
Just another few thoughts on this: this new browser could support a much more limited and high performance default protocol. For example, markdown. Media and applications could be attached to links, but carefully controlled -- for example only displaying or loading media and applications when the user switches to that tab and launches them.
Attached applications could be web assembly with I/O abilities such as a simple canvas-like UI.
If you can find or create a suitable and high performance p2p system (or group of systems) for enabling people to load and publish these lightweight links, you could provide a useful and viable alternative to the traditional web that would be approachable by small development teams.
Built in p2p search could be a killer feature for such a system.
(Too late to edit: The bit about Firefox revenue should read 'almost entirely' -- they have some negligible revenue streams, but the vast majority of income is dependent on Google)
Any "browser" without its own engine isn't really relevant here, as 95% of their product is being maintained by a third party. This includes Brave, Opera, Gnome Web, and now even Edge.
(I'm admittedly not sure how I'd classify stuff like Pale Moon, which is primarily based off someone else's engine but now backports its own patches.)
But isn't it? Google Chrome is trying to reduce ad blocking by changing webRequest API, but others that use the same engine can simply undo that change.
I think there's more involved than simply undoing a change. Apart from the obvious tedium of chasing upstream code changes, the extensions themselves have to be installed from a willing (and trusted) repository. The chrome web store can omit extensions that use an API in an unsupported way.
Brave already integrates ad-blocking at a lower level than the webRequest API, so this is less of an issue, but you sacrifice your choice in blocker.
The recent Chromium’s Manifest v3 controversy around the overheads of the various extensions using the WebRequest API to inspect and potentially block undesired requests did not affect Brave as requests are processed natively, deep within the browser’s network stack.
If we're thinking of traditional ad blockers, I can see where you're coming from. But really, I don't think that's in danger. There will always be forks, or binary patches, not to mention router/DNS level solutions.
What I find much more scary is the prospect of the entire web stack becoming much more locked down as a consequence of both (1) ad blocker prevention and (2) the consolidated browser market. Think Encrypted Media Extensions, but for everything.
If there were ten browsers in active use today, getting them all to agree to something like this would be almost impossible. Unfortunately, there's only 2–3 browsers, and if Firefox loses any more marketshare...
There isn't a source, because Mozilla doesn't break it down. They just say that they get almost all their revenue from "search royalty payments", and their two biggest deals are with Google and Baidu. You just have to guess how much comes from Google (90% market share worldwide) vs Baidu (the biggest search engine in China, which is also the largest single internet market but not as well funded as the US market).
> Mozilla Foundation philanthropic programs and activities are funded by public support from individual donors and foundations ($13.8M), as well as from royalties earned that are paid by the Mozilla Corporation ($8.3M). Total revenue and income support to the Mozilla Foundation in CY 2016 was $23.4M.
> The majority of Mozilla Corporation’s revenue is from royalties earned through Firefox web browser search partnerships and distribution deals around the world. Mozilla Corporation’s revenue and income support for CY 2016 was $506M
I've been browsing with EME disabled for years, most stuff still works, I just leave sites that don't. If I accidentally hit a site with EME too much, I add the domain to my link block list so I never see links to them ever again. If most people would get on board with that for just a year, it could sway the industry to stop using it.
Same experience for me with sites that try to pull off GDPR shenanigans. If you don’t make it easy for me I just close the site and never return, and let’s be honest, my life is better for it. The more hostile the web becomes the more likely I am to go for a walk in the park instead. Fine by me, really.
At the end he mentions EME (encrypted media extensions) which may be the real front in the war. Actually the browser and video market consolidation with EME could really slant the odds in the advertisers favor because and Google and Netflix can make it really hard for people.
Eventually we may make a hard break from the old internet into a new one. I'm looking for practical and scalable cryptocurrency and smart contract solutions to become popular. After that you may see a new type of browser protocol that does not have a full operating system in it and can be implemented by mere mortals. It might depend on one or more decentralized protocols such as IPFS or dat or even one of the many less popular academic content-oriented-networking systems. There is a strong possibility it will not have any JavaScript.
In the end, it's an arms race, and I don't think either side is giving up on it anytime soon. The only thing that concerns me is that one side has way too much money, while the other side has way too much time.
the point of the article is that the wars is over.
money won by enlisting the corrupt law makers. from now on, content will have DRM (e.g. netflix) and if any adblocker even tries to touch it, the creators can be jailed.
now if you want to create/contribute an adblock, besides time, you must have impeccable opSec or also be willing to do time in jail.
IMO this war will lead to greater consolidation on publisher side. If only FB/Google are left with ability to make money of the web, we'll be left with hobbyist who do it for free or super platforms.
Right now Verge created a wordpress website put google ads on it and can afford a team to right some content. If all third party ads are blocked option left would be `paid content` or go to Google/FB platform to publish wherein you'll have lesser control but more revenue as all ads are first party.
I can't use most of the sites at work because of ads and I can't install an adblocker because it would have access to corp data. When I search for something related to work, I know that most of the sites would display inappropriate junk on half screen with my colleagues probably watching behind. The solution I use us to search on stackoverflow only, but it too displays some garbage, and I have to scroll the page so the ads won't be in view. It's a hilarious situation.
Google and other ad businesses need to create "AMP for ads". Ads should allow only basic HTML elements without javascript. Figure out a way to track only what's really necessary, maybe even get allowed tracking level set by user in browser settings (an improved version of Do Not Track). That might be even used to check if user agrees to have cookies set. It should solve the annoying cookie banners issue too.
Finally, let's add option for user to select "text only" mode for ads to keep additional downloaded data to minimum and maybe even make ads accessible.
Update: And, of course, after a quick search I find that AMP for Ads is an actual product from Google https://amp.dev/about/ads/
Sorry for not researching before commenting.
No, Google Adsense allows javascript so advertisers can fingerprint and track the user's browser. Occasionally, some advertiser will drop the charade and just set top.location="https://example.com/" and, after too many user/publisher complaints and a few days, Google will manually block them.
I never click on ads. Never ever. I get that every ad doesn't need to be clicked e.g. videos that mindlessly show you a product. But atleast there is no direct feedback going back on those in terms of ad placement effectiveness/click-rate etc. They can keep burning their money showing ads - I just won't provide them any feedback on whether/where their money was wasted vs well spent. Also the best way to kill them is for lesser and lesser people to click on them.
What I find interesting about this post is that it only talks about blocking ads but not about how to replace them as a source of revenue for websites.
I actually do pay for some websites, including for not seeing ads on Youtube (with mixed results now that ads are just baked in the video, when the entirety of the video itself is not an ad) and I want an easy way to do so : I want to be able to access the content I want while its creator gets paid.
So far, ads have been a successful way to do micro payments (the only ?).
Instead of waging this increasing war between ads and ad blockers, I would rather see organizations that try to find a better solution (with privacy somewhere at the top of the checklist).
Ads are forbidden on my network. I'm running a strong pihole that forbid advertising domains, obnoxious tracking and well known malware sites. Sponsored search results do not work and some websites are inaccessible, but it's fine, we don't need them. Ads are "The Great Evil" I will teach my children to fight, in all their forms, before drugs and alcohol.
If you are running an ad-dependant website and struggle to make money as a result of the campaign people like me are running, then you'll have to adapt. If you fail to adapt and your website closes, it's fine : as a society, we didn't need your services.
Podcast ads are usually read by podcasters themseleves they don't track nobody sometimes they are even funny and if they are not to long, I don't skip them. So they are great example how all ads should be made.
Advertisements are one thing but most of these "ads" are actually gathering more info than they advertise. JavaScript trackers are just awful if you care about privacy, which I do. It's pi-hole and no-script all the way for me until they stop with this rubbish.
Targeted ads are another kind of problem. I don't really want to be told or suggested what I should or could buy, I can make up my own mind. I know some people don't mind them and that's fine.
I block ads because I don't want my computers to be hijacked, and sites that sell ads do not do proper due diligence in protecting the public from hostile advertisers.
It's somewhat ironic that this page contains the most impressive procession of banner ads that I've seen in a long while. And almost all of them keep changing every thirty seconds or so. Apparently I've been successful in systematically avoiding sites that would torture me like that. They may succeed once but only at the price that they won't see me again.
The EFF site is full of ads on your machine?!? That doesn’t sound right (and disabling ad block doesn’t cause it to serve any to me, unless you count the mailing list signup form after the article).
I’d guess that you are looking at a different page or your machine is compromised.
I don't block ads or set up adblockers for customers and family members because I object to ads. I do it because it significantly cuts down on the number of potential attacks on systems.
Between malicious code ending up on ad networks and ads that take people to malicious sites, it only makes sense to block connections to things that are not actually needed for the display of pages. Most people who get a take-over-the-screen "We are Mikrosoft and have discovred that your computer infected call us helpful people at Mikrosoft and we will fix your comptuer" messages aren't getting it because they're visiting dodgy sites or even ones that have been hacked - they're getting them because either someone got that into an ad network or because they clicked on an ad that turned out to route them to one of those.
I can't babysit everyone and really don't want to, but I can at least cut down on some of the crap that hits their computers.
I think the ad blocking arms race is unfortunate because it's converging on recognizing/disguising ads so that they can be hidden/served despite what the other side wants. That's lame. I don't have any need for a hyper evolved system of coersion/rejection.
Wouldn't it be far better if instead we focused on identifying content and finding ways to serve it more efficiently? Why download the whole page and then hide 95% of the data?
I'd like to see a system where we crowd source the identification of content. If 100 people all view a page and see 100 different ads but the same article each time, a smart browser extension should be able to conclude that the uri actually refers to the static text. Store that on ipfs or somesuch and when I click the link, don't waste my bandwidth downloading the site, just serve up what I wanted in the first place.
I'm not sure how such an approach would play out--but all we're getting out of the current strategy is smarter and smarter ads. I can't imagine we're gonna look back in 100 years and be glad we aligned our incentives in such a direction, so I think trying something different would be worthwhile.
So there is a technical solution to ad delivery that is pretty hard to impossible to block that is serve everything from the same domain. It’s very possible today and even desirable with http/2. You can configure this with cloud front and multiple origins or using service workers with cloudflare... I’d guess it’s only a matter of time before this becomes the more common way to deliver content and ads as one origin...
Tracking impressions (something advertisers seem to want) is facilitated by third-party servers. Self-served ads defeat this and raise fraud concerns.
Standardised advertising units (display sizes) mean that blocking elements strictly on dimensions is possible. One of my early userContent.css stylesheets, borrowing from online souces, did just this, and was highly effective, for a time.
Obfuscated content and JS can get around some of this, thou stylesheets whitelisting elements would be yet another workaround.
That is why the edge computing - changes this trust issue... It's just a matter of time before you have a advertising module you can install in cloud flare as a service worker implementation that both parties can trust... this with obfuscation could make it really hard to block and pretty viable for advertisers... let alone the fact that you can shift the analytics into the cloud edge servers... this both eliminates the argument of speed to access the content and removes your ability to block it. I see this as the future of adtech...
What seems to happen in practice is that infrastrucure domains and hosts used for advertisig are blocked by default. Amazon's aws & s3 domains come to mind, and they're rather horribly abused (Bezos's own WashPo have covered this). Which may be why generic buckets are going away.
Here in India you might have heard of this little service called Hotstar. To start with, this is a paid subscription service, and I believe at the time I purchased it it cost me something like ₹1000 a year. This would lead you to expect that they aren't interested in Ads, wouldn't it?
No. This service is so adversarial to anyone who doesn't want to be tracked, it doesn't even work in Private windows. It stops working itself when you open the Browser's debug console. If this wasn't enough, this service stops working when you have uBlock origin (which finds that there's a /track request going out a hundred times every minute).
I responded by creating a new browser profile just for this website and routing all tracking domains (mostly segment.io) to 127.0.0.0 in my local hosts file.
I haven't used that service for a long time, but recently I heard they are now showing in-content ads between programming! So basically they've taken cable TV and put it on the internet with higher fees and shittier service.
I still firmly believe that in-browser crypto mining could solve internet advertising problems fairly for both parties.
1. As a user, you set your preference: no mining - ads will show instead. No ads, there will be some mining.
2. The longer a user stays on a page, ie the more engaging the content is, the more money the publisher earns.
In theory, this would trigger a natural correction for dark publishing patterns: click bait would diminish, articles split over X pages would reduce. True, engaging content would win.
Hitherto all alternatives for remunerating publishers have flopped (an engaged user has no easy way to remunerate aside from pulling out a credit card..) .. so we have been stuck with ads.
I was truly sad to see in-browser crypto mining get banned. For a brief moment, it seemed that pleasing everyone was going to be possible.
Gigantic waste of energy. Why drain my battery to not see ads when I can just use an adblocker? Ignoring these, why reward longer content, content I happen to keep in the background, or content I happen to leave in the foreground while away over more valuable content?
Donating directly is a much nicer solution for me, and there’s so much room for improvement there too in the areas of privacy, fees, and convenience. (In a world where in-browser mining were a good idea, an out-of-browser miner could provide the equivalent for this kind of manual donation.)
Because aside from insidious advertisements, it's the only compensation mechanism that provides revenue to publishers without demanding a behavioral change from users.
Obviously, there need to be intelligent structures in place - and these can be enforced by the browser (as they already are today) - CPU limits for inactive tabs, CPU limits based off the computer's power-mode. The ability to disable mining at the cost of seeing advertisements.
I'm not sure why you think people avoiding ads would accept mining. I find mining environmentally unethical even when you're using your own resources; it's mindboggling to me that distributing this to general population is even an idea worth discussing.
It's so negligible for creators as to be meaningless. If it's meaningless except (maybe) to those who are so ultrapopular as to derive value from it, what good is it to normal people?
Is it necessary that ad blockers be totally all-or-nothing in their approach? Pop-up blockers didn't kill all ads. They just killed pop-ups. If it's really the privacy violations that are the problem, and not the user experience of seeing a bunch of ads, why not find a middle ground?
Make an ad blocker that just dishonors cookies, clears localStorage, etc for the ad domains, rather than blocking the requests altogether. Publishers won't make as much money since advertisers won't be able to track you. But at least you could give the publishers the ability to make some money from ads served to you.
If this approach gained adoption, you might see a growth in the market for non-tracking ads (analogous to the growth in the market for non-popup ads described in the article).
Adblock Plus has their "acceptable ads" feature[1] so it's already a thing. But there was some controversy around it, which I don't recall well enough to give a fair hearing.
Also, Firefox has a good deal of tracker blocking[2] built in that tries to go after browser signature recognition. I think the problem with that is it can break some sites, though I have it on and don't see a lot of problems.
Beyond that, many ad blockers let you customize the lists, and there are tracker blocking lists. But I think they all default to standard ad blocking, so the hindrance is configuration.
> Adblock Plus has their "acceptable ads" feature[1] so it's already a thing. But there was some controversy around it, which I don't recall well enough to give a fair hearing.
You can pay the makers of Adblock Plus to have your ads declared "acceptable". However, I do not want somebody else deciding for me which ads are "acceptable".
> Is it necessary that ad blockers be totally all-or-nothing in their approach?
Yes, it is. Publishers and advertisers have overstepped time and time again. They must be reminded of their place, and nothing short of grabbing them by the scruff of the neck and rubbing their noses in the mess they made will suffice.
> But at least you could give the publishers the ability to make some money from ads served to you.
I could, but why should I? The publishers had a chance to be reasonable, and they just kept pushing. I'm done being reasonable. The publishers should be glad they aren't facing the Internet Death Penalty[1].
I counted eleven interstitial "advertising" breaks within an article on some site recently. I use adblock, so the label. was the only trace left, but that's still absolutely ridiculous, and is precisely why I'm doing same.
I love reading the views people have about digital advertising on HN, and as someone who works in the space I often agree that they are not providing a great experience and the tracking is too much, but what is the alternative for monetisation of content on the web?
I think we’re going to need adclickers: similar to adblockers except they put the ad in a sandbox and click it. As long as this registers as a click, someone somewhere will want to be paid and sooner or later the whole ad economy nightmare will implode.
The article kind of ended abruptly. The point about Encrypted Media Extensions and DMCA and rise of encrypted video playback within browser is an interesting point that needs more elaboration.
The story of how Internet grew and what made it valuable to users and what threatens it – it is worth articulating and illustrating and repeating each year as more and more people take Internet more seriously but don't know about these happenings under the covers.
Also, for the business model innovation to happen, existing business models need to be studied with care and deeper and broader understanding needs to prevail over more and more users.
Everyone should click as many ads as possible. Fuck over the datasets.
The ads I get are now stupid and hilarious. I broke their algorithms and I cost every crappy advertiser money.
The EFF very directly is trying to blame Do Not Track being useless on browser vendors and media companies when the reality is that it was a dumb idea whose existence likely does more harm than good (as it makes people think they can avoid tracking by using it, when they have done literally nothing to people who are tracking them by turning it on except provide one more bit of browser setting variation that can be used to differentiate--and thereby track--users). What the hell, EFF?
We need to move towards an economy where many essential internet services are publicly funded and there are rational subsidies for journalism meeting very minimal standards.
I really wish there was some sort of proper monetization model for rss. The web has no reason to be this obnoxious pile of bloated unreadable spyware. I want to support more of these companies because I think what they do is important but it gets hard to justify 10 bucks a month for each of them. When I try and whitelist ads I often find I can’t even find content on the site anymore and my browser slows to a crawl.
What is the difference (if any) between companies who nefariously, vehemently, and willfully track users and stalkers (who we classify as criminals) chasing after their obsessions? Why is it legal for the business? Aren't the end-goals pretty much the same in both contexts and the only differentiation in both cases is the fact the adversaries are either a business or an individual?
FYI, The title doesn't suggest one to stop blocking ads, but means the opposite.
> When you visit a site, the deal on offer is, "Let us and everyone we do business with track you in every way possible or get lost" and users who install adblockers push back. An adblocker is a way of replying to advertisers and publishers with a loud-and-clear "How about nah?"
How about we just don't let the advertising industry develop or fund our browsers and web standards? Users need to be able to control what kind of content their device will load and display, so it's probably time to develop technology that supports it (and scrap the current web, which is now basically billboard ads for the internet).
I use Safari, Firefox/Mozilla is wholly dependent on money from the ad industry (Google). But Safari also goes in the direction the ad industry desires through its adoption of new standardized features. There is really no way out using the current "web", we need a simple, open alternative that isn't controlled by the ad industry and adopts only features in the best interest of the users first and content creators second.
YouTube's gotten a lot more shitty about it, too. I wouldn't block ads on there but they treat their creators like crap and they treat me like crap. Nowadays if I don't block them I get two ads in a row and if I don't skip the first one, I have to wait on the second one, too. And often some ads go on for minutes. The longest I've seen was a 50 minute ad. Or ads that scream at you, as loudly as possible. Especially when you're trying to enjoy more laid-back content. Ugh.
And a lot of that revenue doesn't go towards paying the creators their proper share. I would gladly pay for an ad-free YouTube but they're dead-set on shafting creators, making their lives as miserable as possible. Random demonetisations, horrible handling of fair use, etc. All this without ANY kind of proper support. If I pay for a service or rely on something to make a living, I expect to be able to at least somehow talk to a human being, etc. They've gotten more and more and more hostile towards creators and users. So now they get the Brave-treatment (since they fiddle with adblock on Safari, I use Brave just to watch YouTube. If they detect adblock and can get through it, you get actively punished with longer and more frequent ads.)
Little wonder that most small people without VC investment backing them have looked for alternatives to this, they understand how sites that host content being hostile towards the userbase is a race to the bottom. With off-site patronage and superchat and burnt-in ads they're in control. Sadly you do have to be of a audience certain size to take advantage of these but they're far more pleasant for everyone involved (except the firms that host the content).
For sites in general that model seems to be viable, too. But you do depend on your audience for this which can be a good thing generally as often it seems to keep the content more honest. The content that panders is very often just going to slowly die off.
I would be okay with ads if they weren't disgustingly obnoxious and consistently trying to intrude in my life and take my data.
Lots of bigger websites have an insane quantity of ads, some even have their entire backgrounds replaced with clickable ads. One accidental misclick and you're pissed off. There are sites where the occasional ad is sometimes interrupted by content.
I simply can't take it. Performance-hogging, data-stealing, annoying, time-wasting ads. They're everywhere.
This embarrassing early era of an internet built on the ludicrous house of cards of advertising can't come to an end soon enough.
I look forward to reading in the history books about how some of the world's greatest minds spent their time and energy figuring out how to build businesses on manifestly bad UX.
What a weird phrase: “how about nah”. Is this a reference to something I’m totally missing out on? I can barely pay attention to that point the article make when it’s framed in such an odd and unclear context.
I get wanting to have style to your writing but not at the expense of clarity.
It means something to the affect of "Thanks, but no thanks, I'll do this my way", with a bit of extra snark.
I liked the term "adversarial interoperability" that they used in the article. I think it is an interesting concept. Although I might want to reframe it as protecting individual autonomy.
Breaking this cycle of blocker-blocker-blockers is what makes me actually like Adblock Plus's "Acceptable Ad" options. It provides a counter-offer, rather than just "No.", whereby advertisers can feed you unambiguous and untracked ads.
This misses the real intention of DNT, which was to give browser vendors plausible deniability when advertisers inevitably rejected it.
The one and only reason that browsers (with the exception of Google's) don't block ads out of the box (like they do for pop-ups) is out of concern that ad-supported websites will explicitly blacklist their user agents, driving away their users and causing the browsers to lose marketshare.[1] DNT was the shot across the bow that said "we can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way". The obvious outcome was that the ad networks would choose to ignore it, which formed the foundational justification for gradually introducing ever-stricter policies reining in ads by default.
[1] The inverse is true as well: the nuclear option of any browser whose marketshare sinks to the point of unsustainability will be to immediately introduce on-by-default adblockers, since at that point they have nothing left to lose.
I never had one in my life. I'm 27 and have had the same number since I was ~13 or so. I did get a few spam text messages, maybe one every three years.
The richest companies on the planet don't robocall me, but they do stalk me all over the internet and wherever I bring my phone, which I consider worse.
Meanwhile I haven't gotten any in many years, because my spam call filter works a treat, and always has.
Though I am thinking of turning it off and putting up a "Hello? Hello? Sorry I can't hear you could you repeat that. Uhha, go on..." recorded message about 5 minutes long, just to waste their resources. That would actually be a promising addition to a spam filter.
And that spam call filter probably requires proprietary software, which has access to your call logs and theres every chance that the spam filter app company can steal your data.
> Though I am thinking of turning it off and putting up a "Hello? Hello? Sorry I can't hear you could you repeat that. Uhha, go on..." recorded message about 5 minutes long, just to waste their resources. That would actually be a promising addition to a spam filter.
This a nice idea but on the rare occasion that your filter incorrectly blocks the wrong person, you might be annoying someone who really needs to talk to you.
They do. The common strategy is to pick numbers with the same area code to pretend to be legal, and some advanced callers try and pick numbers that match even more recognizable digits (like your office). All this traffic is a major source of revenue for VOIP operators.
Now that's getting into some serious philosophy there. In this respect, would we be moral people without it being codified in law? I'd like to lean towards yes, because before state's law it was religious law. Humans have always projected their morals via the powers at be.
Without legislation you'd have large tech corporations running robbery networks tracking everyone's behaviour and and recommending who it would be most profitable to rob today based on their behaviour, location, etc... oh wait.
Legislation doesn't stop criminals. The best way to stop browser tracking online is to make it technologically impossible for malicious actors to track the browser.
But these are incorporated entities. If proper privacy laws are/were put in place and enforced, they would have to honor DNT. This is as much a failing of these companies to respect privacy as it was the failing of governments to protect privacy of their citizens.
Besides violating privacy, ad networks have also been a proxy for malware. They should have been sued into oblivion for that as well.
I agree that since the proper means have failed, blocking is the best solution. Do people who are not computer savvy a favor and install a proper ad blocker for them. We can do much better than 26%.
It's a matter of what order you want to tackle things in. I'm not interested in only stopping the worst actors. I want to stop all tracking, and if I can't, I'll settle for stopping some of the worst actors through solutions like legislation.
I understand that some people come from the opposite direction -- they try to stop the obvious bad actors with laws, and if those laws fail, then they'll look for solutions that put control in the hands of individuals.
I don't dislike those people, but my perspective is that people who focus on tracking by corporations don't have a good perspective of the entire problem.
> Do people who are not computer savvy a favor and install a proper ad blocker for them. We can do much better than 26%.
Amen on that. I'd like to see the ad industry collapse, but that's a separate conversation.
I'm not convinced that pervasive advertising to the degree we currently see is good for society as a whole. I would encourage people to block ads even if they didn't include any trackers at all. I would even block ads off of one-way mediums like the radio if I could.
Incognito mode enforces what do-not-track was supposed to do, and there, the cat-and-mouse game continues. But the reason Chrome can continue to support this is that most people don't use it.
If a company is advertising on their own keywords
1) It's much cheaper because AdRank is better
2) They're probably doing something wrong - if people have typed your brand in already and you've got good SEO then there's no reason to advertise on it
If I buy the paper version of the New York Times the ads are on every page but I don’t mind them. They are not watching me. Nor would I mind ads on a page, if they are rendered as plain HTML. Just no Javascript
I subscribe to the print edition of the local paper.
I'm not interested in logging in to the paper's website so that it can 1. feed me yet more ads and 2. track in minute detail exactly what I'm reading and for how long.
The real problem is that the browser does not give enough ropes for the user to hang themself and also a few more just in case, and gives too much control over it by the data received from the server instead.
Most companies overdo the ads on their sites. If it was one or maybe two banners or the like, it would be okay, but no, let's cover 2/3 of the content with ads.
We’ve made full circle again. Were back in 1999. Tons of ads pace being bought with clickfraud (facebook). Zillions of scripts etc, when all you want is someone to put a text link + a pitch which is relevant to the page (current search, current article, type of content in the video), not the user.
Problem is they can’t. Publishers earn through the massive amount a low quality traffic, bots, and even misreporting impressions and clicks.
When I loaded the BoingBoing version of the article my browser contacted 53 third-party domains and a grand total of 373 cookies were set. The BoingBoing privacy policy does not mention "Do Not Track", usually a signal it is ignored, and it discloses nearly none of the third-parties. The cookie opt-out link goes to the NAI site which does not work on Safari because Safari won't allow the third-party cookies required to opt-out by the NAI. BoingBoing's privacy policy lists nine types of advertising, none of which are behavioral.
The author of this article, Cory Doctorow, is an editor of BoingBoing and has some level of control of this.
In contrast, I got zero tracking from the EFF site. Exact same content, completely different privacy experience.
I'm not an absolutist that you can't criticize a system you benefit from (it's ok to criticize Apple's labour practices if you own an iPhone), but there is a big difference between admitting participation in a flawed system and passing yourself off as an objective critic of a system you benefit from.
It is really hard to reconcile BoingBoing's behavior as a publisher with their content. This goes far beyond ad tracking. The BoingBoing store sells categories of products (insecure IOT disasters) that the site's editorial content rails against, and I've lost count of the number of cheap dollar store level knockoff products are pushed by the editorial staff in order to take advantage of amazon affiliate links.
I've seen people banned, and have been banned myself for drawing attention to these things on their bulletin boards.
>> I'm not an absolutist that you can't criticize a system you benefit from (it's ok to criticize Apple's labour practices if you own an iPhone), but there is a big difference between admitting participation in a flawed system and passing yourself off as an objective critic of a system you benefit from.
Exactly. Also, given the site's legacy, political slant, and access to technical talent, if they don't choose to explore ethical modes and models of behavior and publishing, what hope should we have for the rest of the industry?
(The only positive thing one can say about BoingBoing on these matters is that they do not block ad blockers.)
Does that changes anything to the truth and validity of the points he is making, though ? Because if yes I would like to know what and how, and if no then this is an ad-hominem.
This is not ad hominem. It’s directly relevant. No attempt was made to avoid discussion of the issue at hand by attacking Doctorow. Let’s please keep our fallacies straight.
I actually think if he was more transparent the piece would have been significantly better. For example, "At BoingBoing we rely on these systems as well. Why? The simple fact is we have virtually no alternatives to the adtech status-quo and our choice is either to participate in the system as it is or go out of business. This is why I'm calling on likeminded publishers to...". Instead he passes himself off in a disingenuous way, and people reading his words could reasonably assume that his own site was perhaps better, when in reality it far exceeds the mean for the amount of tracking on a website.
Yes it says boingboing are hypocrites and not the right people to spread this message. At the very least they could have used this as an opportunity to say “you may have noticed we have tons of tracking on this article, here’s why...”.
There’s something to be said about being a trustworthy source.
I emailed him about this, and his response was essentially, it's not within the ability of publishers and their writers to get rid of these kinds of ads. Pop up ads went away because the consumers worked around them - that's why advertisers stopped demanding publishers put them on their sites.
So, wanna get rid of tracking cookies, continue as a consumer to block them and make them pointless. Advertisers will then stop demanding BoingBoing uses them.
Just install noScript. All the really nasty stuff ads do gets blocked but people being sane (things like what project wonderful used to do) still works.
There are more countries besides United States. I don't know why people here always refer to it as if it were the only ruler of the internet. It's not. In fact it does a piss poor job at playing its part.
It also represents about 50% of the global advertising market (ad spending), so if the market changes there, it effects the rest of the world (for good and bad).
That's the web, not the internet. The internet existed continuously for over 2 decades before the web was created (although the general public didn't know about it).
"Existed": had actual users. (The US government started funding continuous research into packet switching in 1960.)
Also, if Tim Berners-Lee (TBL) hadn't created the web, someone else would probably have used the internet to create something like it in a few years whereas if the US hadn't invested heavily in packet-switching in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, a much longer interval of time probably would've gone by before someone created anything capable of enabling an ordinary programmer or sysadmin like TBL was to create something like the web.
"Ordinary": not able to command a lot of capital or labor.
TBL persuaded his boss to let him create the web during working hours. His boss agreed largely because he thought that the project would be a good way for them to evaluate a new computer the boss had bought (by NeXT). In other words, the existence of the internet (which in turn enabled the existence of a community of programmers interested in donating code to innovative projects, a community that got a very big boost when Stallman started publishing on the internet in 1983) enabled the creation of the web without any serious commitment from government, corporate executives and people with lots of money.
In contrast, the creation of a network that allowed an ordinary programmer to recruit open-source contributions to his project and to easily deploy server and client software of his own design required massive outlays of capital over 3 decades. It easy for such massive outlays to go awry in various ways. The US government avoided its going awry. In contrast, the French government retained so much centralized control over Minitel that at no point in Minitel's history could an ordinary programmer have used Minitel to create something as innovative as the web.
(It wasn't until the internet had been almost completely turned over to the private sector in the early 1990s, for example, that any software started to track users more than absolutely necessary for the operation of the network: in the early 1990s, anyone could send and email with president@whitehouse.gov in the "From" field. The reason it worked that way was to maximize anonymity of senders. There was no way for the sender of an email in the early 1990s to know whether the recipient read it, the reason again being a desire among the designers and maintainers of the infrastructure to maximize privacy.)
Of the major browsers which are non-US based? Hint: not the majority. The point the op was making had nothing to do with your response claiming the US is the "only ruler of the internet".
Does the US do a poor job of regulation of monopolies in tech? You don't have to look hard to find supporters of that statement. But we're at a point in time where things are finally starting to bubble up and garner traction. Will it be perfect in the short term? Definitely not. But I'm hopeful the US can and will bring their portion of the blame back into check which is advantageous to a sum
that's greater than simply the US.
But these companies are intentionally blurring the lines between advertisement and digital surveillance. You don't need to collect everything about my operating system, browser, monitors, GPU, every click I make on every website I visit, etc.
That's crossing a line of what "advertisement" means. So the more these "advertisers" work to blur those lines the more their "ads" will be blocked under the umbrella of those who don't want this level of pervasive tracking and surveillance.