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Comment by srdev | Hacker News Reader

My experience is that the blockers have done a very good job of keeping up with these tactics, so I'm not particularly worried on this front. There is still viral marketing and paid PR pieces disguised as legitimate content, however, but not much can be done about that and it doesn't impact me as much as traditional advertising.

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Wait: paid messaging, articles stealthily written by PR flacks, "native" ads, in-feed hortatory messages masquerading as intelligent editorial content ---- this stuff is better than traditional ads? Because they impact you less?

Sure, perhaps they impact your LTE connection less. (But, hey, no one needed faster than 56kbps in 1995. Mobile bandwidth will grow.)

In point of fact, I'll bet ads "disguised as legitimate content" impact you more.

Most of us are technologists of one stripe or another here. But putting on our humanities hats, isn't it actually quite a bit better/more moral/more tolerable/sustainable to have a little shiny 300px by 250px cube with a picture of the latest BMW than to have the credibility of our favorite car blog or car writer compromised?

I take it as a point that these probably impact behavior just as much as traditional ads. Let me raise a counter-point though.

These things have already been done for a while. Is there any evidence that banner ads were preventing this sort of advertising from being even more prevalent than it already is? I am skeptical that advertisers are holding back on these avenues -- in fact its pretty obvious that they're heavily into this space already.

Yes, that is fair. But I suppose I took it as an unstated assumption that there's really only one type of ad that we will never be able to programmatically block: ads that are woven seamlessly into editorial content. If the ad blockers of the world win, what will be left is ads that don't really announce themselves as ads.

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