Killing the messenger: ad-blockers

https://espresso.economist.com/8c53d30ad023ce50140181f713059ddf

by fridek • 10 years ago

65 105 10 years ago

espresso.economist.com

akerro2• 10 years ago

Just open any Polish major website without adblock to understand why. +10 trackers, +20 ads per page, +6 social buttons per post.

mamon• 10 years ago

I agree, Polish websites are so cluttered with advertisments, some of them being pop-ups hiding the whole main page of initial load. Completly unusable without ad-blocker. BTW. The best ad-blocker I found so far is just uninstalling Flash plugin from your browser. HTML 5 is not so popular yet, so that helps a lot.

klibertp3• 10 years ago

In Chrome you can make it so that Flash is not loaded by default, but you can right-click on the unloaded Flash applet and make it load and run. I think it's somewhere in the settings.

pipio21• 10 years ago

You can disable it(flash, java). When you are interested you activate it, just for one time.

That is what I do.

imtringued3• 10 years ago

Firefox's flash version is no longer up to date and vSphere needs a newer one so I didn't even bother with it. I'm using chromium exclusively as a fallback for vSphere.

rdslw2• 10 years ago

It's everywhere (Poles are just smart).

THere is much more time & bandwidth on major content sites spend purely for ads than on content

On slate: 60% ads

on business insider: 75%

on BBC: 65%

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/01/business/cost-...

On mobile, i simply use firefox. It's the only browser on android which easily allows me to install adblock (ublock origin exactly). highly recommended.

akerro2• 10 years ago

On mobile I installed AdAway.

ajuc3• 10 years ago

Regional newspaper sites are the worst. Every time I go there I feel dirty.

kalleboo2• 10 years ago

But the survey also found that very few people pay anything for online news—just 9% of people in English-speaking countries

That's WAY higher than I expected

erelde• 10 years ago

9% of 500M would be 45.000.000 paying customers... I think that might be wrong...

imtringued3• 10 years ago

It should instead be read as 1 in 10 readers is willing to pay for free content.

falcolas• 10 years ago

Agreed. I would think a 9% conversion rate would make any business man salivate. There's your whales, start targeting them.

spraak• 10 years ago

Is the title trying to say that ads are somehow messengers..?

creshal• 10 years ago

Probably trying to aim for a "shooting the messenger" pun, as in: Adblockers are killing content, not the shitty ad networks responsible for their rise.

fwn2• 10 years ago

... or the people using it. The message would be "your ads are bad", the ad blocking stats are the messenger and the shooting consists of media trying to tackle adblockers instead of bad ads.

dave2000• 10 years ago

I'm guessing they mean the sites.

People blocking ads are just the same as people skipping through ads on a vhs recording of TV, or going to the toilet/making a drink when the ads are on. Nobody likes ads.

Sylos• 10 years ago

Well, yeah, ad-blockers are among the best antivirus-software, speed up page-load times, reduce data usage, improve privacy and require roundabout 0 effort on the user's part. And except for ignorance of their existence or extreme benevolence, there's not a whole lot of reasons for users to not install ad-blockers.

That the ad-industry has been flourishing for so long is actually more surprising to me...

logicallee7• 10 years ago

Under your scheme web sites can themselves still have slow load times, high data usage, malicious payloads, and privacy implications such as profiling you based on your browser fingerprint - but you can actually get all of the benefits you mention (and more) by redirecting http traffic to 127.0.0.1 instead.

The only thing you lose is content, but the same thing is true for web sites that disappear because they have no business model other than making content and displaying it along-side clearly marked advertising - it's not like you or anyone else wants to pay for content.

Well, there is a middle ground - you can enjoy the slow page-loads, bad privacy, and all the other effects of visiting web sites, while also cutting out genuine content, through a second business model: make web sites replace their genuine content with indistinguishable shilling, and suddenly you have the best of both worlds: no clearly-marked advertising; slow page times; and no content!

That's an interesting middle ground.

Edit: got a downvote. In what way does 127.0.0.1 not strictly dominate a web site shilling with no genuine content? It is better in every conceivable way. It's also the future that you asked for, suggesting that web sites come up with a viable business model without any advertising. Or do you just want them to disappear?

throwaway2048• 10 years ago

please don't post like this

klibertp3• 10 years ago

What about all the content available right now for free, without ads? Will it magically disappear just because some ad-supported businesses (that provide content as a side-effect) are unable to find another way of sustaining themselves?

Your argument is based on the premise that intrusive ads and contentcalypse are the only alternatives. This is simply false.

TeMPOraL6• 10 years ago

That's a weird way to twist GP's post.

It's not GP's "scheme", it's an observable fact - ad blockers are among the most effective anti-malware and computer optimizing solutions out there. More and more it seems to be something as obvious as having a firewall on your machine.

(No! Don't install a firewall! The poor script kiddies have to make money somehow!)

The only thing you lose is content, but the same thing is true for web sites that disappear because they have no business model other than making content and displaying it along-side clearly marked advertising - it's not like you or anyone else wants to pay for content.

I say, good riddance. The only thing you lose is shitty content. If someone has something valuable to say, people will pay, or that someone will be willing to pay themselves to keep it up (as it is with most really valuable content on-line). If the only way to support your "content" is to shove toxic waste in the faces of your visitors, then frankly, you have no business hosting that content in the first place.

Now, for your middle ground - I guess that if we get there, we'll see a rise of anonymization proxies, Tor 2.0 or something like that. RE native advertising, in your example you're literally defending evil behaviour by saying those people could be even more evil. Like a robber that attacks me regularly and says, "as long as you have cash on you, I'll keep coming for that; if you move your money to your debit card, I'm afraid I'll have to beat you up for your PIN code". Am I supposed to be thankful to the robber that they don't beat me up and settle just for taking my cash?

Fuck it, I say jail the robber, and burn down the advertising industry.

crummy2• 10 years ago

There's actually an adblocker which effectively does this:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-ethical-ad-blo...

"This extension provides a 100% guaranteed ethical ad blocking experience. The conundrum at hand: users don't want to see ads, but content providers can't give away content for free. The solution is simple: if a website has ads, the user simply should not be able to see it. This way, the user doesn't experience ads, but they also don't leech free content."

effingwewt2• 10 years ago

Wow. The mental gymnastics here are astounding. Every time the ad blocker argument comes up, in pop you affiliate defenders, crying "If you block our ads, we will all disappear!". No, buddy- crummy sites that make bad decisions with regards to advertising and/or content (or lack thereof), would disappear, as very much needs to happen. People don't just not want to pay for content, we are just tired of we, ourselves, being the commodity with which it's paid for. Charge a subscription, start a patreon or what have you. If your business (make no mistake, if you make money off your website, that's very much what it is), survives or thrives, kudos. If not, it wasn't feasible and you need to rework your business plan or start a new one altogether. Ads are the laziest, most anti-consumer way you can possibly make money. Many of us have been around since the internet began, and we remember the years of wonderful, continuing content that existed before advertising (and even after the pop ups and banners, it was a long while before the site operators made any real money), and will continue to do so after ads as we know them have shifted yet again.

Shivetya• 10 years ago

so why aren't they built in to all browsers by now? many have pop up blockers and that was for the same reason, the ruin of the browsing experience

amelius2• 10 years ago

More and more publishing websites now block you when you run an ad blocker :/

Ad blockers have to become smarter first. For example, by making the displayed DOM different from the DOM seen by the browser (and JS).

TeMPOraL6• 10 years ago

Because the first browser to introduce ad block would get banned by major publishers and people would stop using it. This would have to be a simultaneous deployment by all major browser vendors. The best they can do on their own is things like Reader Mode in Firefox - obviously there to cut down on the amount of shit on-line, but not strong enough to make the "important people" angry.

Also keep in mind that the Internet That Matters now is the commercial, ad-backed one. Even standardization bodies have serious conflicts of interest now, and the changes are about enabling businesses to make money, not about making the Internet a better / more useful thing for humanity in general.

CookieMon• 10 years ago

Brave Browser has all that build in, and Firefox is heading there with tracking ads now automatically blocked in private browsing windows, but those browsers have the user's back - I imagine Chrome has Google's back and Google is about advertising.

Brave is promising a way for users to microtip sites they visit automatically, to make up for the lost ad revenue, so that will be an interesting experiment.

Browsers need this stuff built in pronto, because non-tech people have no chance of knowing the 4 or so plugins you currently need to install to browse safely.

gcb02• 10 years ago

They are.

Disguised as "reader mode".

Microsoft tried to enable "do not track" by default and the whole advertising industry went nuts. That's why everyone is afraid now. Apple started to move slowly on it by enabling ad blockers on IOS to even exist. Google have too much skin in the game, but they are not afraid of hurting their competition, they implemented flash and video ad blocker in recent chrome (and chromium, where they also rein) everywhere but not on youtube! (the blocker is not as obvious as to trigger when url != youtube, but they crafted the rules that it just so fit youtube one.

anyway, everyone is moving slowly, because microsoft was clever and fast to make a calculated mistake that show what will happen to anyone that tries.

adav• 10 years ago

Because the advertising industry pays browser makers:

http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/041315/how-mo...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-22/google-pai...

breakingcups• 10 years ago

Well, I doubt it'll ever be all browsers because the biggest browser in the world is owned by an advertising company.

zerr• 10 years ago

But it is good for actual companies/people who pay for ads, right? I mean, in the first place I wouldn't want to pay for showing my ad to someone who is not genuinely interested, thus is not a potential client. And it is in my interest that such people use ad-blockers.

lgieron• 10 years ago

Everyone is a potential client for Coca-Cola or other generic brands. And (the theory is that) even if you hate the ad, it will make you more likely to buy their brand vs competition.

fwn2• 10 years ago

Advertisers interest is rather diverse. While I see the brand value coca cola might aim at, I can also understand that advertising to the wrong user at the wrong time can hurt your wallet or your brand.

An example would be check24. It's just a random German comparison webservice. However, as they produce unbelievable disturbing video ads I can't block, I passionately hate them.

welterde2• 10 years ago

If I come across an particularly annoying ad I will try my best to remember that brand and buy the competitor out of spite (if there is no cheap generic store brand available anyway). Surely I am not the only one that does this.

ionised4• 10 years ago

And (the theory is that) even if you hate the ad

I must be the exception then, because seeing these ads makes me actively avoid these brands in the future simply out of spite.

konschubert• 10 years ago

You are making the incorrect assumption that people who have ad blockers would be unaffected if they saw the ad instead.

The truth is that advertising works on almost everybody.

voidz• 10 years ago

Please back up your claim. I ad block ads like on the street and on the radio by deliberately looking away or turning off the sound. The only effect those that do seem to slip through have on me is that I get annoyed, despise the ad, and the product.

ajuc3• 10 years ago

I always thought I'm (and most people) are unaffected. I had eye-opening experience recently. I was going back home after work and went to buy sth to eat in small shop. I bouth spaghetti and vegetables and the shop clerk asked me "what's with everybody buying it recently?". I had no idea, then I went out and noticed the billboard near the shop changed to some readymade spaghetti sauce that day.

ionised4• 10 years ago

You're right, they work on me by convincing me never to buy products from that company.

panic• 10 years ago

Yeah, it's the people selling ad space that lose revenue, not the people buying it to show their ads. The system seems a bit self-destructive at the moment. Ad-space buyers keep making more obnoxious ads, raising click rates at the expense of the people trying to use the site. The users get fed up and install ad blockers, which harms the sites but not the ad networks. The sites themselves are squeezed in the middle, without much leverage to stop either obnoxious ads or people from blocking them.

camikazeg• 10 years ago

It seems that a simple solution would be to cut out the ad networks. If the New York Times or The Economist just serve the ads themselves, rather than using a third party network wouldn't the ad blockers be unable to distinguish them from other content?

Sure they lose targeting, but physical media has existed for years based on ad revenue from companies that paid them directly for advertising. Even the tiniest local and university newspapers have gotten by with free distribution and paid ads for as long as I can remember.

rdslw2• 10 years ago

Greetings from Poland :)

Even while inconvenient for me, I've switched on my android from chrome (which I also use on desktopt) to firefox because of one reason: you can install plugins (read ublock, adblock etc) on firefox for android. Since that day, mobile browsing is a BLISS !!!

You can see here (and elsewhere) why: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/01/business/cost-...

TeMPOraL6• 10 years ago

The mobile ad scene is ridiculous. I'm about to switch from Chrome to Firefox just because of that stupid "ad network" that has some scripts which "escape their iframe" and keep redirecting half of the sites I view to what is presumably a malware download service.

Fiahil• 10 years ago

I'm also considering doing the same. Every single time I open a webpage on my phone it takes forever to load (even on a fast and reliable wi-fi) and I often cannot read anything until I have closed the cookie consent panel, the "install our app" modal, the full page autoplaying video ad, and the "subscribe to our newsletter" pop-up. It's like yelling insults to someone else while in an elevator.

distances3• 10 years ago

Also, I travel somewhat, and I have 400 MB roaming included per month. No way would I risk having some animated ad using this all up.

phatfish• 10 years ago

A good choice, it has become more stable over the last few months. A while ago i had so many crashes it was unusable.

I get less crashes now and the speed up from running uBlock Origin on my old S3 is very noticeable.

ionised4• 10 years ago

I recommend 1) Self-Destructing Cookies and 2) HTTPS Everywhere on Firefox mobile too.

LeonM• 10 years ago

I am amazed the numbers are that low actually. Most sites become unusable without an adblocker as many mobile browsers simply crash when trying to load that many content.

Also, the amount of data used by ads is overwhelming, and (at least in my country) mobile data limits are still from 1999. Since setting up a squid proxy with adblocker for my mobile devices, my mobile data usage dropped significantly, allowing me to switch to a cheaper data plan.

_Codemonkeyism• 10 years ago

For some months I try to not use ad blockers on one laptop (Dell XPS13 2016) after years of ad blocker usage.

1. I still hate how sometimes ads pop up where I click, often above videos. Might be intentional or might be download times of the ads (or might intentionally use the slower download of ads by placing them there).

2. While traveling with a limited mobile data plan, data was sucked up by video ads, reloading ads, ... the largest strain on my data plan was ads.

3. Many ads get larger and have sounds, which is painfully annoying.

4. Not yet been infected by an ad, but the anxiety is there.

5. Not scientific, but my feeling is power is significantly drained faster (checking some days with ad blocker on)

davidgerard2• 10 years ago

Every time I set up on a new box I try browsing without an ad blocker. I lasted 23 hours last time.

aphextron• 10 years ago

Ad blocking will be a standard feature in every major browser within 5 years, and we will laugh at these days they way we did with pop-ups.

nannal• 10 years ago

Brave browser paving the path of the future.

kalleboo2• 10 years ago

In Chrome, which run by Google, who make most of their money from ads?

I can see Firefox doing it as standard.

I think Apple are happy just allowing the ad-blocker extensions (and they got some publicity when they did that).

q52• 10 years ago

I have been seeing more and more discussion of fundamental issues occurring in the online advertising industry which are acknowledged to cause backlash which harms the bottom line (ad-blockers, decreased viewership, etc).

The fact that these patterns are being spoken about to such a large audience - I have no link to the advertising industry and have seen loud messages from large publications outlining some issues:

- Relevance: showing an ad of something you just searched on eBay on your news site was novel at first but over time people have learned to tune out because seeing your search for soccer ball while reading about terrorism just taught people to blank out the irrelevant ads.

- Performance: tracking scripts, social sharing, multimedia ads. Refer to the series of VPAID Google+ posts outlining the detrimental effects of a single ad loaded into the user's view.

Companies targeting contextualisation and performance, and accepting that users are no longer willing to accept the poor quality of current popular methods may be in the minority at the moment but the niche will most likely expand. They will be economically rewarded for investing their time into newer, more effective methods, and current popular methods will slowly be overtaken by those methods that obtain a better ROI.

A good question is how long will the industry ignore the rising walls of ad-blocking? Walls seem a lot hard to take down than build in these types of situations. It would be wrong to expect people to turn off their ad-blockers because the industry pinky-swears not to overstep the boundaries again.

JulianMorrison• 10 years ago

They will be economically rewarded for investing their time into newer, more effective methods

The risk is, they won't. The overwhelming majority of awful, amoral advertisers may be closing the window of opportunity for the rare-as-unicorns respectful ones, because adblocking software doesn't distinguish.

q52• 10 years ago

adblocking software doesn't distinguish

I think the "walls" of ad-blocking will be dismantled slowly and those who can prove their respectfulness will be whitelisted through the blockade.

nodepackagemgr• 10 years ago

It's a dead end. People in Poland won't really pay subscription fees, so the only way to monetize is through ads. Ads don't pay that much though, so they are packed in amounts that are beyond annoying for users. So they block.

On the other hand, most people gather their daily news digest from one of the top news outlets, which in turn serve heaviest ads. So the most valuable customer is the average Joe who doesn't know ads can be blocked and doesn't really care.

TeMPOraL6• 10 years ago

So the most valuable customer is the average Joe who doesn't know ads can be blocked and doesn't really care.

Which outlines a great mission for us - to reach every average Joe and Jane and educate them that yes, ads can be blocked, and yes, their computer will be running much better and faster when they do it.

ajuc3• 10 years ago

People in Poland won't really pay subscription fees, so the only way to monetize is through ads.

I thought that too, but I watch some starcraft matches on twitch, and many Polish-language casters have lots of subsriptions and some donations.

sleepychu• 10 years ago

Keep pushing. I've said this many times before, there will inevitably be some casualties in the war on intrusive ads but these might be necessary to convince advertisers to come back to us with a fair deal. Don't accept guilt-tripping, don't be pressured into allowing unlimited surveillance by private entities, traditional circulation based advertising which isn't a bare in terms of bandwidth or surveillance can and will work when users demand it.

jkot2• 10 years ago

This industry is ripe for disruption by micro-payment system. I want to be able to surf, and make a small payment on every website I visit ($0.001). If system detects I actually used something (copy&paste, longer visit, scroll down, print bookmark), payment should be increased significantly.

But it has to preserve privacy, be scam proof...

iand• 10 years ago

That will simply move the incentives towards publishers spreading their content over as many pages as possible to get more micropayments from you.

jkot2• 10 years ago

That is one of the problems which needs to be solved. Scammers are everywhere where money are.

NTripleOne• 10 years ago

You mean like they already do?

Like those 'slideshow' style articles that load a new set of ads with every 'slide'?

tremon2• 10 years ago

Yes, Blendle is a step in the right direction. It includes the ability to demand a refund if you feel you've been baited. It also charges per article, not per page view -- although the prices are higher than what you quoted.

mrweasel• 10 years ago

Ideally the payment system would be in the browser. You deposit some amount the a payment provider, and newspapers sends a 402 Payment Required http code to the browser, when you land on an article.

nothingbutslide• 10 years ago

We at Scriber have created a micropayment platform for publishers: https://www.scriber.io/

You can test the user experience of it by browsing our demo publication: http://www.getexplorerr.com/

We've put a lot of effort into making the UX as seamless as possible, trying to mirror the in-app purchase experience of native apps. We're also signed up for Stripe's Apple Pay on the web which should make the process even smoother.

mtgx• 10 years ago

I think even browsers such as Firefox should begin to offer an easily accessible adblock button. But instead of being enabled by default, it should be off by default for all websites. If the users are annoyed with a site's ads, then they can click to block them, and the preference is saved permanently until the user unblocks that site again. I believe this is exactly what Opera does now.

Third-party tracking protection should be enabled by default.

Kliment• 10 years ago

This sounds like an excellent idea, except switch it on by default. You're describing ublock origin.

yoodenvranx• 10 years ago

More and more of the large German news pages are adding auto-playing videos to their websites and you find them even on their mobile websites. Think about that for a second... auto playing videos on mobile websites in a country with very expensive mobile contracts... Who thought that this might be a good idea?

netcan• 10 years ago

To me, ad blockers are a sign the web is working.

Ethics comes up a bit when it comes to ad blockers. Sites make money from ads. Dont' they have a right to?.. I think if we're going to think about it in that sort of way, we need to sort out rights. The web means that servers can serve whatever they want. They have a "right" to send you pictures of clowns when you request their page, even if that page was a news site yesterday. They can also send you ads. The client has the "right" to do whatever they want with that page. They can use whichever browser they want. Display the content however they want using whatever software they want. They can read the code, execute the JS, selectively display the content....

That's the deal. Servers can send what they want. Clients can do whatever they want with whatever servers send them. Users are exercising their rights with adblockers.

On the more practical side, it's interesting how the economics of this has evolved. In the beginning, online ads were pretty useless and worthless. The economic model around online ads collapsed with the 99 crash.

Then Google (or really omniture) figured out how online ads could work. They cleverly used it to serve ads with a tiny, unobtrusive footprint and still make way more money than the dancing monkey ads from the 90s. We've been in rapid growth mode since, and the value of advertising stock is now through the roof.

Now that online ads are valuable again, the incentives to go overboard are overwhelming. Even Google who made small and unobtrusive ads a core idea have crossed some big lines. They look at valuable search queries like "best divorce lawyer in Toronto" where every click is worth $50, all the clicks going to those worthless (free) organic results and aggressively trying to increase the share of clicks going to ads.

Now, even if you search for a divorce lawyer by name, you will first scroll throught a page and a half (on mobile) of his competitors ads. This is unequivocally "obtrusive" in the sense that it puts less relevant content in more prominence than the relevant stuff.

This time it's being driven by ads being valuable rather than worthless.

Back to the rights thing... Ad blockers and the active right of users to reject certain content is a balancing force here. When a respectable news site, forces you through an ad before they load a page, autoplay a video and then pop up (or under) an affiliate link to aliexpress and dating for gold digger pages...

zelos• 10 years ago

Is there any way sites could force you to view their adverts? Short of forcing you to use some kind of custom browser, I can't think of anything. I guess you could say something like "enter the code shown somewhere in the middle of this video advert to read this content" or something? Even then you'd probably get browser extensions to scan the video and read the code.

mbrock• 10 years ago

I'll just keep reading public service news sites.

The online presence of commercial news feels mostly stressful, incendiary, and yucky to me. That publishers don't understand or ignore the way their advertisements ruin the user experience and sell out our news reading habits is just another reason to consider commercial news as basically hostile.

douche• 10 years ago

It's not the easiest to setup, but the best way to block ads is with a block list in your hosts file. Even works across browsers.

Killing the messenger: ad-blockers

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