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Comment by yulaow | Hacker News Reader

for b) I would say the contrary. Have you tried entering in a common website from a mobile browser without an adblocker? You get like so many ads, SO MANY, one over the other, some full-screen some that just let you see the 10% of the real site, some with a pseudo-pop-up, all with those little "x" almost unclickable to close them that force you to click on the ad in the end.

And in the "free apps with ads" of the mobile store the situation is even worse... they'll often try all possible tricks to force you to click on the ads.

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Can that really go on forever? I don't know anyone that deliberately clicks on ads. Ads usually act as a "don't buy" signal to me - I assume the product is of low quality or a scam because of the skeeziness of how they tried to reach me as a customer.

Like higher education, the online ads business seems poised to collapse.

Are you Russian, this is a common sentiment there :)

I think this is a common sentiment everywhere.

If that was true the US would have A LOT fewer ads.

A large part of our business is built on product listing ads and Google shopping. Regular people have no problem clicking on ads, the ads actually usually provide a much clearer path to buying they product than organic results.

In a lot of verticals without ads you would be concentrating most of the sales in the biggest players as it has become very hard to compete in organic search for anyone else.

> Have you tried entering in a common website from a mobile browser without an adblocker?

Not in a long time; Firefox Mobile with Adblock Plus makes the web far more usable on a phone.

The constraints of a mobile device make adblocking even more critical than on desktop systems. If a browser or mobile environment wanted to differentiate itself, it could pre-install and pre-configure an adblocker.

You could do it with a rooted phone and adfree android, which is like adblock plus but rewrites /etc/hosts to route all ad serving domains to localhost. This one simple trick convinces even ad supported apps that they are offline, and they cease to show ads.

I just avoid installing any apps that have ads in the first place. The only time I see ads is with the one app I use that embeds a WebView and loads webpages, many of which have ads.

I can't comment on Google's practices, but an honest ad network can generally detect accidental clicks and won't count them towards ad budget. This can be done by, eg, looking at how long a user remains on the click-through site before coming back.

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