> The numbers come as tech companies, publishers and advertisers grow anxious that their efforts to reach users through increasingly sophisticated online advertisements are having little effect.
Herein lies their problem. Had they stick to simple ads, people wouldn't rush to block them.
Per a HN comment I saved in my quotes file, "Any sufficiently advanced business model is indistinguishable from a scam."
-- dsirijus, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8227941
> “What’s causing grave concern for broadcasters and advertisers is video advertising, which is some of their most valuable content, is starting to be blocked,”
Video advertising is a whole new class of shitting on your users, and they're surprised people are blocking it?
It's as if those people lived on another planet. I wonder how many executives and ad-network people use ad blockers personally. I find it hard to believe they can't see the manure they're dumping on the Internet.
Sometimes it's like we live in a parody of the real world.
I feel that the online video ad situation is akin to advertisers blasting loud commercial jingles in the middle of the night, while complaining that people are getting sound isolated walls and how that's hurting their business, some even going so far as to talk about how thick walls should be illegal.
When I navigate to an url I don't get a fully rendered webpage ready from the server, but instead I get served a bunch of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It's then up to my computer to compose those things into the interactive website, using the rendering engine of my choice. How the website turns out being rendered can depend on a number of factors, like what screen resolution I use, what fonts I have on my system, etc. Maybe I'm using a text browser that can't render pictures or video.
So, it's so darn crazy to me that some people would say that I'm stealing or being dishonest by not rendering the ads in the website. Is it really my duty to render those ads, even if I don't intend to click on them? Would I still be stealing if I rendered them, but never moved my eyesight over to where the ad is placed? How far do I have to pretend?
Personal, but fun anecdote: my girlfriend works in marketing and kept away from ad blockers for a long time, partly due to professional sympathy, partly simply because she wanted to see the ads, since she has a professional interest in that sort of stuff.
She eventually caved about a year ago and installed ABP. No matter how interesting it was, nor how much she sympathized with the folks working in media agencies, browsing the web simply became completely impossible, especially over an occasionally flimsy 3G connection.
Simple ads are "collateral damage" in this case, but even those can be worth blocking, e.g. to protect against tracking.
It really just comes down to greed. The publishers had a good thing. They were making some profit, and they were finding ways to innovate (better tech, better subscription penetration, etc.), and then they had to go and get greedy with all our personal data. That's what sparked the war. We simply aren't willing to pay that much for the content we consume.
Rather, the problem lies in the need to generate increasing returns without charging anyone for a service. Facebook's recovery model has been to acquire and monetize anything with a growing userbase, Google's has been to sprawl across as many verticals as possible in a wild goose chase for long term sustenance.
It's going to be a sad day for Silicon Valley when advertisers stop getting their money's worth – which seems inevitable at this point. Products reach their saturation point and you can either kill the user experience (and subsequently kill the userbase) or you can start charging (and subsequently kill the userbase).
We do still have a few more years left of pseudo-charitable "Internet-giving initiatives" to get the rest of the world's loyal consumer-to-be population online. That way we can shove ads for the local ebola clinic in front of people in need of real help. That should sustain SF housing prices for another decade or so.
I suspect if companies tracked the actual return for various adds, it would put an end to the obnoxiousness fairly quick. It's easy to why so many companies are willing to engage in click-fraud.
Exactly. There seems to be a huge disconnect between what ad executives assume people will engage with and what people will actually tolerate. I think people will tolerate small banners and images and interstitial video ads that are 3-4 seconds at the very most (on video sites). If you can't get your message across in that time then prepare to have your ads blocked by a generation that expects the internet to be instant.
> Ad-blocking will lead to almost $22 billion of lost advertising revenue this year, according to the report, put together by Adobe and PageFair, a Dublin-based start-up that helps companies and advertisers recoup some of this lost revenue.
I guess assuming that the users of ad blocker users would visit the sites with the same frequency as without ad blockers, and they click on ads with the same probability if they see them as people who don't use ad blockers.
This is the same fallacy as counting the lost money on pirated content. Most people who pirate wouldn't buy a product even if they couldn't pirate it. The solution is much simpler for ad ridden websites: what about not serving the main content for ad block users? If you don't like them then don't serve them, it shouldn't be that hard. Maybe they don't do this because:
- Ad blockers are still a minority on most websites
- They don't eat up much bandwidth
- It would be really bad advertising (ha!) for them doing more harm than good
> what about not serving the main content for ad block users?
Some porn sites have started to do that. Well it's not like there is only 1 porn site on the planet... There lies the
issue with that method.
Unless every content provider does that it is not going to work. And it's also a cat and mouse game just like piracy. The technology will always be ahead of whatever scheme they use to block content.
As a musician, I get somehow a taste of revenge from all that crowd that is freaking out, the same crowd told us to "adapt or die" 10 years ago. Well they now need to adapt or die, because ad revenue will not be a viable business model 3 years from now...
I can say I watched a lot of grey market content when I could a) not afford otherwise seeing it, and b) when there were nor reasonable offers like Netflix. Since there's Netflix in my country my grey market consumption has diminished to less than 10%. And 100% of that remaining content is content I can't get on Netflix.
The reality is advertising is a brainless way to refinance for content. That's one of the reasons people minimized buying DVD/Bluray, or watching tv (I am not even connected to public tv any more). Find a better way and people will pay.
Finding that way might be hard, harder than I think, but I don't think the whole text media industry will go down before they find a model that works.
> what about not serving the main content for ad block users? If you don't like them then don't serve them, it shouldn't be that hard.
Harder than you think. Ad blockers actively subvert attempts to detect them with code and filter updates. If ad blockers were easy to detect we would surely see more of that.
So I just started using ad blockers (uBlock Origin on Chrome, adblock + ghostery on Safari) because I was finally sick of the amount of extra bandwidth, CPU and just noise they are creating with this crap.
I've intentionally not used ad blockers for years, because I get that's how companies make money, but heaven's to betsy if they don't dig their own graves with the intrusive over-intensive crap these days.
My old tactic was to just not visit sites with offensive, intrusive or band-width heavy ads. These sites, bar some outliers, no longer exist. Every tech, current events and editorial site pulls down half the fucking internet to show me some words on a screen these days.
I started using adblocking software -years- ago, when an ad on a reputable, syndicated comics page (gocomics.com I think) minimized my browser, and popped up an ad to look like a system dialog telling me my computer was at risk. That was it for me.
Since then, uBlock occasionally gets disabled on Chrome because I don't even know, and it usually is just a few pageviews before an ad is so obnoxious that I notice and re-enable it. I don't understand how people without adblockers even use the web at this point.
I just started using ad-blockers for similar reasons. I found an increasing number of sites (especially news sites) were becoming so obnoxious with the advertising that it was causing my browser to frequently freeze and/or crash.
I really don't mind a simple, static banner ad, but this crap has gotten out of control.
I recently just hit my limit, too. The final straw was advertising videos that grabbed focus and refused to let it go. Worse, the videos were at the bottom of the page and would force my browser to scroll to those videos, refuse to yield focus until X seconds were played. Then, after I was able to scroll back to the top of the page to view the content I was after, the whole thing would start again as the next video played. AdBlock was installed after that.
This article makes an important point: ad-blocking is not just a means to remove annoying (and often disgusting) advertisements; it's also to prevent data being collected about you without any consent or oversight.
Don't forget the security perspective -- as ad networks are being abused for malware delivery more and more, ad-blocking is also a way to stay safe.
Not to mention all the fake "DOWNLOAD!!1" buttons that an ad-blocker removes, eliminating a large percentago of malware installations for less tech-savvy users.
I'm not sure how successful it is in that regard. Just browser fingerprinting is enough to track most people; cookies and third party connections are not essential.
I've had more friends/family request ad-blockers. This has become an even bigger issue with auto-playing video ads on mobile which both suck up bandwidth and randomly begin playing loud audio on your phone when it's otherwise silent. We're talking mainstream sites like Slate, Salon.com, Daily Beast, Bust.com, etc, all of which automatically played loud video ads on my girlfriend's phone. On Android, this necessitates switching to Firefox and using something like AdBlock Plus or uBlock since Google Chrome on Android doesn't even support plugins. I'm unsure if these ads are intentional auto-playing video ads or AdSense's broken "hover to expand" ads which are always triggered accidentally and are, for all intents and purposes, auto-playing video ads.
I was recently giving a screen-shared demo to a media company that makes the vast majority of their revenue from online ads. One of the execs saw the adblock extension button in the browser chrome, interrupted the demo, and proceeded to tell me how terrible I was. Needless to say we did not make the sale.
Lesson learned: When giving demos, open an incognito window since most plugins are disabled by default.
Someone good at their job would have taken the opportunity to find out why you were using the ad blocker and considered the impact on their industry based off your response. It wasn't professional to have such a childish outburst during a meeting, and to interrupt at that. I would think it's possible you are better off in the long run not getting the business.
The next time tell him that you are finding flaws in adblock to help ad companies. If he asks you for more details tell that this is a support 1 yr service because you have a dedicated team constantly researching new adblock versions.
I have a similar anecdote. I work for a company selling a recommendation platform to travel agencies, and the content we display is often similar in layout to regulars ads. It happens, from time to time, to demo a version of their own website to them, with the proper recommendation block injected (mostly to seek the client's validation on the look and feel). And, I recall having one of them congratulate us for the fast loading and clean display of their pages (on my ublock-running-browser). I didn't pick this up. Obviously, the original page was literally cluttered with ads..
I wonder if the audience for ad-blocking software is also not that "valuable" to begin with (from an advertiser's perspective). These are more sophisticated people that don't fall for blinking warnings, fake browser UI and who don't tend to install stuff without meaning to.
Maybe they're losing the less tech-savvy folks too, as their "computer whiz" friends and family members grow tired of fixing yet another drive-by toolbar or ransomware install. Myself, when working on someone's computer, I now download Adblock as a first thing after a clean browser installation.
If 1/3 people in certain countries use ad-blockers, I'd venture to guess that they are no exclusively without value. In fact, since they are probably more savvy than the rest, they might be better targets.
Seeing how a lot of browser/flash/java drivebys seem to come from ads, I also consider them good security practice these days. See for example the recent firefox exploit.
I started blocking ads about a year ago when some mainstream tech sites began to show ads that I felt make me unhappy, such as "The 10 signs of getting a heart attack/Alzheimer's/cancer", etc. Usually with a picture of someone in their 60's looking quite sad or disoriented. I find this kind of advertising very offensive and I'm sorry that I'm now also blocking all other kind of ads, too.
Ahh, the free market is great, until it totally isn't. I look forward to seeing what new revenue strategies the truly innovative companies will come up with. We've all been lulled into the complacency of cheap and easy ad dollars -- let's innovate instead.
true innovation isn't cheap, and sometimes it's cheaper to try warping the market instead of innovating. After all, money is like water - it flows through the path of least resistance.
I use adblock, ghostery, several JS blacklists etc., uninstalled all Flash from all computers years ago, and still I regularly catch "funny calls" to strange IPs I don't even visit in Little Snitch.
Highly recommend this little utility. The logs make for unexpectedly interesting reading.
I actually wrote to the NYT about this some weeks back. In essence: feel free to block me, charge enough subscription to cover your needs, or go out of business. Or, display static ads that don't collect and forward information about me.
It just occurred to me that if adblocking is made illegal, then the next generation of adblocking software won't block ads, they'll block sites. "This site is known to use intrusive ads, which are illegal to block. Whitelist or Blacklist?"
If I remember correctly, ad blocking software overlays the ad with blank HTML right? So blocking ads doesn't actually reduce data usage, since the browser still downloads everything, Adblock just has to parse it and get rid of the junk.
I believe because of this download-then-parse model, webpages actually load slower. I remember an HN article on the front page about it.
Nonetheless, I still use Adblock. The sites worth supporting I normally pay money for in some way, such as premium on a forum.
> If I remember correctly, ad blocking software overlays the ad with blank HTML right?
Don't know why you're being downvoted, you're simply unsure about a (wrong) assumption and asking about it, which to me simply calls for a correction / explanation. Anyway, no, uBlock for example actually blocks http requests, based on huge community-maintained blacklists. Just try loading theverge.com :
The article alludes to this, but doesn't state it: let's be clear that by blocking ads, you're not just blocking annoying advertisements---you're blocking software, most of which spys on you. Some sites load megabytes of JavaScript.
Another perspective: for free software advocates, these simply must be blocked, because they're non-free.
I can’t actually remember when I began using ABP. I install it on all browser by default and I believe about a year ago have begun using Ghostery to block annoying beacons everywhere. Never had much success with it on my Google Nexus Tablet and because of it simply stopped surfing the web on tablets and smartphones altogether. However, since the release of Adblock Browser - big big kudos to the team for creating such a fantastic piece of software - I can resume browsing the web on my portable devices. I don’t mind relevant and unobtrusive ads. However, some sites simply have gone overboard with 30 plus beacons included and ads everywhere. I will never support such an aggressive approach to monetising a resource. Especially by those large publishers which believe they can do whatever they want on the web, simply because they're now not limited by physical space anymore, as they are with their print magazines.
I've been using adblockers for a few years. Something happened at work, I had to reinstall a browser, and I only install addons as the need arises, so it takes awhile to get a new browser installation up to speed with the ten or so addons I eventually end up with.
Ad blocker was first, and almost immediate. To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, "My God, it's full of ads!"
Not to mention the risk to my employer by allowing ads across the firewall.
EDIT: And there's an opportunity for people who want to sell into the enterprise. Businesses should be blocking ads at the firewall. My employer blocks egregiously non-work related sites, but they don't yet seem to care about ads riding in on allowed sites. I expect that to change.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|10 years ago|reply
Herein lies their problem. Had they stick to simple ads, people wouldn't rush to block them.
Per a HN comment I saved in my quotes file, "Any sufficiently advanced business model is indistinguishable from a scam." -- dsirijus, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8227941
> “What’s causing grave concern for broadcasters and advertisers is video advertising, which is some of their most valuable content, is starting to be blocked,”
Video advertising is a whole new class of shitting on your users, and they're surprised people are blocking it?
It's as if those people lived on another planet. I wonder how many executives and ad-network people use ad blockers personally. I find it hard to believe they can't see the manure they're dumping on the Internet.
[+] [-] Drakim|10 years ago|reply
I feel that the online video ad situation is akin to advertisers blasting loud commercial jingles in the middle of the night, while complaining that people are getting sound isolated walls and how that's hurting their business, some even going so far as to talk about how thick walls should be illegal.
When I navigate to an url I don't get a fully rendered webpage ready from the server, but instead I get served a bunch of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It's then up to my computer to compose those things into the interactive website, using the rendering engine of my choice. How the website turns out being rendered can depend on a number of factors, like what screen resolution I use, what fonts I have on my system, etc. Maybe I'm using a text browser that can't render pictures or video.
So, it's so darn crazy to me that some people would say that I'm stealing or being dishonest by not rendering the ads in the website. Is it really my duty to render those ads, even if I don't intend to click on them? Would I still be stealing if I rendered them, but never moved my eyesight over to where the ad is placed? How far do I have to pretend?
[+] [-] weland|10 years ago|reply
She eventually caved about a year ago and installed ABP. No matter how interesting it was, nor how much she sympathized with the folks working in media agencies, browsing the web simply became completely impossible, especially over an occasionally flimsy 3G connection.
Simple ads are "collateral damage" in this case, but even those can be worth blocking, e.g. to protect against tracking.
[+] [-] mangeletti|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ethanbond|10 years ago|reply
It's going to be a sad day for Silicon Valley when advertisers stop getting their money's worth – which seems inevitable at this point. Products reach their saturation point and you can either kill the user experience (and subsequently kill the userbase) or you can start charging (and subsequently kill the userbase).
We do still have a few more years left of pseudo-charitable "Internet-giving initiatives" to get the rest of the world's loyal consumer-to-be population online. That way we can shove ads for the local ebola clinic in front of people in need of real help. That should sustain SF housing prices for another decade or so.
[+] [-] madeofpalk|10 years ago|reply
I can tell you ;)
Executives don't use ad blockers - they've usually drunk enough of the cool-aid to not be bothered by the ads.
Others, like the devs, for sure would have ad blockers installed (but disable when they need to do dev relating to ads)
[+] [-] uxcn|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] increment_i|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leni536|10 years ago|reply
I guess assuming that the users of ad blocker users would visit the sites with the same frequency as without ad blockers, and they click on ads with the same probability if they see them as people who don't use ad blockers.
This is the same fallacy as counting the lost money on pirated content. Most people who pirate wouldn't buy a product even if they couldn't pirate it. The solution is much simpler for ad ridden websites: what about not serving the main content for ad block users? If you don't like them then don't serve them, it shouldn't be that hard. Maybe they don't do this because:
- Ad blockers are still a minority on most websites
- They don't eat up much bandwidth
- It would be really bad advertising (ha!) for them doing more harm than good
[+] [-] aikah|10 years ago|reply
Some porn sites have started to do that. Well it's not like there is only 1 porn site on the planet... There lies the issue with that method.
Unless every content provider does that it is not going to work. And it's also a cat and mouse game just like piracy. The technology will always be ahead of whatever scheme they use to block content.
As a musician, I get somehow a taste of revenge from all that crowd that is freaking out, the same crowd told us to "adapt or die" 10 years ago. Well they now need to adapt or die, because ad revenue will not be a viable business model 3 years from now...
[+] [-] erikb|10 years ago|reply
The reality is advertising is a brainless way to refinance for content. That's one of the reasons people minimized buying DVD/Bluray, or watching tv (I am not even connected to public tv any more). Find a better way and people will pay.
Finding that way might be hard, harder than I think, but I don't think the whole text media industry will go down before they find a model that works.
[+] [-] eli|10 years ago|reply
Harder than you think. Ad blockers actively subvert attempts to detect them with code and filter updates. If ad blockers were easy to detect we would surely see more of that.
[+] [-] SCdF|10 years ago|reply
I've intentionally not used ad blockers for years, because I get that's how companies make money, but heaven's to betsy if they don't dig their own graves with the intrusive over-intensive crap these days.
My old tactic was to just not visit sites with offensive, intrusive or band-width heavy ads. These sites, bar some outliers, no longer exist. Every tech, current events and editorial site pulls down half the fucking internet to show me some words on a screen these days.
[+] [-] lostcolony|10 years ago|reply
Since then, uBlock occasionally gets disabled on Chrome because I don't even know, and it usually is just a few pageviews before an ad is so obnoxious that I notice and re-enable it. I don't understand how people without adblockers even use the web at this point.
[+] [-] jcadam|10 years ago|reply
I really don't mind a simple, static banner ad, but this crap has gotten out of control.
[+] [-] seandhi|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] merrua|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] applecore|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lorenzhs|10 years ago|reply
Not to mention all the fake "DOWNLOAD!!1" buttons that an ad-blocker removes, eliminating a large percentago of malware installations for less tech-savvy users.
[+] [-] iwwr|10 years ago|reply
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Fingerprinting
[+] [-] JohnTHaller|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] billyhoffman|10 years ago|reply
Lesson learned: When giving demos, open an incognito window since most plugins are disabled by default.
[+] [-] talmand|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wslh|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fiahil|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benbristow|10 years ago|reply
Because that's probably cutting into his paycheck ;)
[+] [-] iwwr|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wololongong|10 years ago|reply
The majority of online ads are bland and don't use dishonest or obnoxious tactics. People just tend to notice the dishonest/obnoxious ads more.
[+] [-] troels|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flinty|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nly|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lawl|10 years ago|reply
https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2015/08/06/firefox-exploit...
We need a better system than ads.
[+] [-] quonn|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geromek|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quinndupont|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chii|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xcombelle|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lancey|10 years ago|reply
Just kidding. They'll just get mad at blockers and continue to make their users' lives a living hell.
[+] [-] HSO|10 years ago|reply
Highly recommend this little utility. The logs make for unexpectedly interesting reading.
[+] [-] dhimes|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a3n|10 years ago|reply
I just helped my all-but computer-phobic ex-wife with a computer task last night. She had ABP installed. I think my teenage son did it.
Reap it.
[+] [-] a3n|10 years ago|reply
It just occurred to me that if adblocking is made illegal, then the next generation of adblocking software won't block ads, they'll block sites. "This site is known to use intrusive ads, which are illegal to block. Whitelist or Blacklist?"
[+] [-] lowpro|10 years ago|reply
I believe because of this download-then-parse model, webpages actually load slower. I remember an HN article on the front page about it.
Nonetheless, I still use Adblock. The sites worth supporting I normally pay money for in some way, such as premium on a forum.
[+] [-] ronjouch|10 years ago|reply
Don't know why you're being downvoted, you're simply unsure about a (wrong) assumption and asking about it, which to me simply calls for a correction / explanation. Anyway, no, uBlock for example actually blocks http requests, based on huge community-maintained blacklists. Just try loading theverge.com :
- Without uBlock: 131 requests
- With uBlock: 37 requests
[+] [-] mikegerwitz|10 years ago|reply
Another perspective: for free software advocates, these simply must be blocked, because they're non-free.
[+] [-] sritrisna|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benbristow|10 years ago|reply
https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.adaway
Works a charm ;)
[+] [-] dublinben|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a3n|10 years ago|reply
Ad blocker was first, and almost immediate. To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, "My God, it's full of ads!"
Not to mention the risk to my employer by allowing ads across the firewall.
EDIT: And there's an opportunity for people who want to sell into the enterprise. Businesses should be blocking ads at the firewall. My employer blocks egregiously non-work related sites, but they don't yet seem to care about ads riding in on allowed sites. I expect that to change.