Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I'm a bigger fan of plugging Audible in a youtube video than the current advertising situation. It's a lot more like newspaper or TV advertising, in that the person making the video has set a price for it, vetted/approved each ad, and made sure it's targeted at their general audience.

It doesn't let 3rd parties serve me arbitrary javascript for tracking, it doesn't give me drive-by malware, and it generally isn't selling me penis enlargement or one weird trick to lose weight.

Except that after the 2nd podcast you ever listen to you're either already a customer or you hate the ads for repeating.

Still waiting for good, useful ads, that are code-free. But if your product was the best it would be reviewed as such anyway, so ads are pointless.

I still don't have an email newsletter, but I don't hate MailChimp's ads. And if somebody came to me and said "Hey, you know about computers, how do I set up an email newsletter?" I'd probably point them to MailChimp (it's the only service I know by name). They're getting plenty of brand recognition even if I don't use it myself.

I'd even say I miss the Tiny Letter ads in 99% invisible.

I agree. In addition to that, I find Audible ads quite bearable. Since I liked the video content, the book recommendation that's going to come up would be relevant to me, without tracking me.

"Native" ads, in contrast, want me to buy a scooter (the Indian kind), eat Maggi, and gamble online. Sometimes, they repeatedly push some crappy Bollywood movie that I will never watch.

The ad industry gets so much money, surely they could come up with a way of not annoying me.

Neither do youtube ads.

They don't give me malware, but they're still poorly targeted and not vetted by the content creator.

> plug audible at the start of their videos

As processing capacity becomes ever more available, even that can be combatted. I recently converted a bunch of pod casts into an audiobook for personal use by stripping the variably-sized intro section with some perl that uses sox and pdl to search for a known sample, and then cuts off everything before and including that sample with ffmpeg.

It took maybe 3 minutes per intro section.

It might conceivably be possible to do this kind of thing in realtime in the future.

That reminds me of MythTv's automatical removal of advertisements in recorded TV.

One of the more advanced techniques they use, iirc, is checking for the disappearance of the channel logo, which tends to not be part of ads.

The problem I see with this whole conversation about ad blocking is that focuses so much on the blocking part and less so on how it could affect content per se. I’m of the opinion that ad blocking in the long term could work in benefit of quality content. I mean look at how the landscape is right now. Everyone and their dog can build a crappy site, steal content from major venues, change a title here and a sentence there, apply for AdSense and start monetizing. Why should I give a flying fuck for the sustainability of this model? Content should be original. If that means that 95% of sites out there would disappear I’m fine by that. If it also means that I’d end up paying for content I’m fine by that too. I still pay for paper magazines, I have half a dozen subscriptions to some of them.

What will the advertising industry do? For starters they have to be held accountable if they serve malware. There need to be some strict ruling that will have significant implications. Once we get past that we need to talk about profiling. It’s immoral, period. We don’t like it and I seriously doubt if it’s even working. Once the industry addresses those two issues then we can talk. In the meantime sites could start serving ads from their domains. That could render current ad blocking technology obsolete. It could also make them relevant again, like they used to be before Google took over the industry. In either way they need to start innovating fast, or sit back and whine like spoiled brats while adoption of ad blocking keeps climbing.

>We don’t like it and I seriously doubt if it’s even working

I think you right, the only place where profiling, if you can call it that, is working, is on Amazon, and it basically only works for books.

Most of what we think of as "the advertising industry" isn't exactly advertising anymore. It's a company that will take what you feed them, do some generic processing on it an plaster as many site as possible, big sites if you pay them enough. The amount of incompetent people in the online "advertising" business is staggering. Most of them don't understand how the Internet works. You just get emails with "Hey, put this on your page, it will help us track conversion". Then you review it and realize that their stupid Javascript snippet either break other Javascript, or that their server is to slow to actually handle the requests.

Online advertising has become a huge source of revenue to a whole industry that struggles to justify their value. These people will pressure the publishers and tell them that evil ad blockers are the reason their losing money, but that entire business models is broken. It's just a scam, moving money from companies with actual products and services to publishers of questionable content, via equally shady middlemen.

It wouldn't be so bad if actual work went into producing high quality ads, published on the right media/site and targeted at the right people.

So why don't we disrupt the damn thing? I mean by building something better, not breaking it altogether as we do with ad blocking.

I agree to a certain degree. I'm fine with tasteful, well-placed ads. The problem is that once it became lucrative, content providers binged on ad space such that the remaining real estate for content was overshadowed by that used for advertisements. I _think_ I recall an HN link somewhere that showed some study of how the content:ad ratio has consistently declined, but I can't find the link right now. Long story short, I agree that it could negatively affect content, but it seems like binging on ad revenue has already negatively affected content.

When people worry about the effects of ad blocking, they aren't generally concerned about the future of content farms.

> Why should I give a flying fuck for the sustainability of this model?

That model? Yeah, screw that. But major news organizations like the New York Times still depend in a huge part on advertising revenue to stay afloat - subscribers alone do not make up the shortfall. So if we want to destroy the content farms we also run the risk of destroying the news organizations that produce the original stories.

> I've started seeing this with YouTube videos, where people quickly (or not so quickly) plug audible at the start of their videos. I have no doubt that "native" advertising is becoming both more frequent and more insidious (because obvious native advertising doesn't work as well as non-obvious).

In the UK they must make it very clear, before the user starts playing the video, that it contains sponsored content.

https://www.asa.org.uk/News-resources/Media-Centre/2015/New-...

https://www.cap.org.uk/Advice-Training-on-the-rules/Advice-O...

I agree. It sounds selfish, but I wish adblocking didn't go to mainstream.

I'm "guilty" of it too, I installed adblockers to all of my friends and family.

The current situation is just extortion in the end - pay to whitelist. And native advertising. Someone who is (unfortunately) in the in the business a little bit, it's horrible. You'd be surprised how many tweets, facebook or blog posts by your favourite people ("influencers") are just paid advertisement. Yes, you fell for it too -- people who say advertising doesn't work for them.

The future, in my eyes, is very very dark. Think of HN where people submit stories to only paid content. Sure, you Silicon Valley guys can pay for it, but not young and poor lurkers (I was one of them when I started reading HN) from not the richest countries in the world.

I hate ads and now I hate adblocking... and I don't know a good solution.

I might be the only one with this opinion, but this is just how the world works, and it's a good thing. If something is annoying, slow and a hassle to use, eventually something better will come along and people will jump on it. It's always been this way, why are we not watching TV ads anymore? Because there's a better option out there.

The concept seems to be that it's a worrying trend and I should be somehow ashamed for not wanting to view ads? Isn't that ridiculous? Advertisers seem to forget that it's their job to figure out how to advertise effectively. The world has moved on and no one will watch their stupid annoying ad. So they have to come up with something we will tolerate.

People are still complaining that no one is watching ads on TV and people don't buy newspapers. We moved on and they have to as well. I understand that there's small publications / blogs / businesses who are definitely not the "enemy" and I'm not saying they deserve to go out of business. But if the landscape changes, they must adapt too.

I'm sure we can all agree we are better off with Netflix than watching regular TV.

I agree with a lot of what you say, however the idea of sin-binning badly-behaving advertisers is very tricky. The problem is that both the website owners and the viewers seem to have little say in what gets stuck on their pages.

Take the recent cases of malware-spreading adverts on legitimate sites. These sites get their ad spaces filled through agencies that then broker further deals, often selling ad space on-demand through live auctions to others, and so on. So, the issue of who is at fault becomes very murky. Who is to blame? Naturally, the malware originators are guilty, but at each level removed, someone has failed to do proper due diligence. And at each level out, that due diligence becomes even more difficult. When you get to the site owner, it's difficult to see what they could do to stop the attacks (other than not having ads at all).

Even Google, who should be well equipped to filter out the bad guys, can't seem to prevent scum from getting on to their ad networks. Or is it that they don't really care? It's hard to tell.

But going back to the sin-binning, there's just no way to tell who to sin-bin. The 'block everything' approach is effective and just about everything else fails.

> Take the recent cases of malware-spreading adverts on legitimate sites. These sites get their ad spaces filled through agencies that then broker further deals, often selling ad space on-demand through live auctions to others, and so on

Yeah, and I think this is the crux of the problem. Like The Cube, we (as a collective, not you and I) have built his massive incomprehensible machine with an infinite number of moving parts that no one person actually groks the function of. The pictures about a third of the way down this talk[1] are instructive. So not unlike the banks with the GFC, there isn't really some moustache-twirling evil-doer pushing one weird trick ads and malware your way who you can regex out of your life, so you just have to nuke the whole thing from orbit. Which is essentially what we're doing with ad blockers.

[1] http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

Well, there's 2 kinds of filtering, malware from viewing an ad, and malware from clicking an ad. At least we should be permanently blocking ad networks that fall for the first kind of hack.

A whitelist of the top 100 ad networks that haven't let through malware in the past year, if you want to be on the list, submit your code for auditing.

Easy way to get on the list: Only let people create pure text or graphic ads, no code.

First kind of hack: You've effectively blacklisted every ad network.

I'm optimistic that ad wars will lead to cleaner Internet. Until recently, Internet was like wild west for ads, it's time for more mature, orderly and safer (for end-users) solutions. The problem is not ads themselves, but the unregulated and un-trustworthy ads distribution networks. I wouldn't mind old-fashioned paper like ads (pics + text) that do not try to follow me and include arbitrary, possible malicious code. Currently I see two realistic scenarios: 1) companies that provide checked ads and ensure that they meet certain quality standards (I'm ready to bet that Google will take this path in near future) 2) native ads, where big players host ads on their own domain and sell ad space directly (to costumers or agencies).

The issue is with the user tracking and mutual trust.

If you write an article about cars, it should be possible to find companies your readers might be interested in, and embed it on the page, served from your same domain or CDN. You can track the views easily just by looking at the CDN request log and the click-trough with some javascript. Your ad customer can track the number of click-trough by looking at the referrer field.

If that was the case then your ads probably wouldn't get blocked. Privacy advocates wouldn't have too much issue because the data collection is limited to your website. There is no (a) or (b) choice here, you can still have ads. Just without all the user tracking.

The issue is that the advertisers don't trust your reporting. They want a more fluid relationship where they don't have to build a rapport with your website. Everything needs to be automated away. And for that to work the only way is to also track the users on the website. Then add a bit of greediness and gain Internet-wide user tracking.

Perpetuating that idea that ads either should exist as they are, or that the evil "paid content" will grow is playing the game of the advertisers. It's a false dichotomy because other solutions exist.

> Perhaps instead of having massive blocklists with the occasional white-listed website, there should be some kind of automated sin-binning, where websites (and ad agencies) that have proven to behave themselves (non-animated, relevant, safe advertisements) are allowed through while dodgy scum gets blocked for N months or until they have a proven amount of time where they have shown themselves to be safe.

It is inevitable that these agencies abuse their position.

> This doesn't solve the whole "I don't want people tracking me" thing. I'm not really sure how to solve that. I don't see how you can. I see the future for that being more and more walled gardens so you can be tracked server side, which is also entirely undesirable.

Native advertising gets around this and it puts power back in the content producers and users, as it should be. It becomes a partnership rather than a parasitic relationship.

Look at films and TV series nowadays -- Netflix provides content users have paid for, Marvel gets to advertise their high-quality library, and product placements are scattered around in a tasteful manner. This is as it should be.

If we look at email and its spam situation, its rather clear that the future of content publishing that is funded by advertising will have to do so in a much more designed and careful way. The days when you just throw as much ads at the user as possible is over. The light in the tunnel however is that users do accept some advertisement, when its done in a tasteful and useful way. For example, a game review site or lets-play should link to a official source where viewers can buy the game, and both publisher and viewer benefit for such link.

People who do paid/sponsored content is not native advertising when viewers are being tricked to think its something else. Instead its a crime, often by breaking marketing laws and tax laws, and police in many nations have started to investigate and prosecute those who do not follow the law. Since the tax office is involved, I doubt this problem will continue for much longer, but maybe ad block technology could step in and prevent some of the more hidden advertisement by pattern matching logos or something similar to youtube's content ID.

Non-"blatant spam" email advertising really isn't better. Purchasing a product from almost any non-Amazon company will instantly sign you up for an almost daily torrent of email.

Even worse is when you're automatically signed for dead trees being sent to your house, because those don't have unsubscribe links.

It's crazy. I already bought the thing! I don't need more things, or else I would have bought them when I bought the original thing. Yet, companies are treating their customers - people who have actually already bought things - in this terrible manner. Maybe we need legislation mandating opt-in?

I would like paid content but with affordable prices (like 0.1¢ for small article, not $10 subscription to read a single article). But it needs some big player or few players who'll provide those micropayments without headache and huge fees.

Thanks for such a rationale comment. People so often default to ad-blocking as the best option. I suspect they will be the first to complain when websites start dropping quality because they have no funds or insert 'cash for comment' everywhere and you cant trust news/reviews at all.

If you think about it, that a business can give you so many cool products (e.g. emails, movies, news, calls etc) at no cost with the small inconvenience of having some ads while I've largely learnt to ignore anyway if pretty darn cool.

Content creators will adapt, and we will all be better off as a result. No one is going to stop creating online content just because they can't figure out how to monetize it effectively yet. Where there is a fanbase, there is always a viable business. Podcasters have been the first to embrace this new paradigm of treating your audience with respect and doing tasteful product endorsements. Others will follow suit or end up abandoned.

Browser vendors could and should block cross-site tracking if they wanted to. The only problem is Google will do that over its dead body, and without Google's Chrome, the other browsers would just look like they are "breaking sites" for using cross-site tracking.

So if you want to stop cross-site mass surveillance-like tracking, keep telling Google to do it.

> I'm really beginning to wonder where the ad-blocking wars are going to leave us.

I don't know all of it, but a lot of it will result in a big increase in native advertising.

By its nature, it's harder to block due the lack of uniformity.

> This doesn't solve the whole "I don't want people tracking me" thing. I'm not really sure how to solve that.

Maybe loading those whitelisted ad domains through Tor?

The future of advertising is probably represented by the advertorial that then makes it harder than ever for journalists to actually criticize their patrons.

> I feel like the natural next step is to fill your content with ads that are simply not blockable.

Just wait until AI gets smart enough to make all ads blockable.