Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics
plausible.io
plausible.io
I feel like this is similar. All tech savvy people block ads and analytics and at least the known tricks they use against us. So the internet only tracks the defenseless people and is then built to serve them (and or exploit them).
Maybe we should engage in large scale AdWords fraud. Send come fake traffic away from Facebook and over to Wikipedia.
> Our average viewer is 65 years old and watches TV while doing the dishes, we must not show things that cannot be understood by them
and then they will serenade about how they would "love to have a bit more sophisticated things", but as they are the only ones who really understand their audience, they cannot allow this, although they support the values of the 68 generation etc. pp.
From my standpoint the German television landscape is completely doomed, because the people at the levers are in the illusion they do the good thing for "the small man" while in fact they just think the small man is incomprehensible stupid and must not ever be confronted with content that shows them that there is still stuff to learn and understand in the world.
Of course TV in the US has figured out that the 65+ crowd is very valuable to customers (the advertisers, not viewers!), so even though they could get more viewers by not showing the nightly news, the nightly news is what they show.
All the documentaries were getting really high ratings, so would display highly in searches, but not many people actually watched them.
It's the same for most content, I read a huge amount. I do read some intellectual books, but only occasionally. The rest of the time I read utter, thoroughly entertaining, trash.
I don't want to read about an existential crisis after programming all day, I want someone to hit something with a big sword and get the girl.
So like, sticking only to the first and second derivative in soap opera plots about retired civil engineers?
No late-period Beethoven sonatas as background music?
That must be difficult for you as a German.
Meanwhile, here in America we're perhaps a few years away from something like the movie "Ass" from Idiocracy winning an Oscar.
There are some high quality shows and TV stations though. Namely Phoenix (similar to PBS in the U.S.) and some of the news magazines that run in the late evenings. Of course there are also all the other public stations with higher quality programs but I find the program most of the time quite random and sometimes even a bit elitarian.
> because the people at the levers are in the illusion they do the good thing for "the small man" while in fact they just think the small man is incomprehensible stupid
So basically they have a Hacker News mindset!
In every thread about a dumbed down GUI/website it is argued that granny wouldn't understand it otherwise. No power user allowed, because data shows user is monkey.
I haven't watched german TV in ages, but I distinctly remember science shows degrading from science to thinly veiled ads - things like literally running a companies marketing video or making a "scientific comparison" where they hand out random style points at the end to make a specific product win. I think they even got into trouble over it since ads and science/education shows are taxed differently. Anyone pretending that they are doing that for their viewers is living in denial at best, but probably just outright lying.
> From my standpoint the German television landscape is completely doomed, because the people at the levers are in the illusion they do the good thing for "the small man" while in fact they just think the small man is incomprehensible stupid and must not ever be confronted with content that shows them that there is still stuff to learn and understand in the world.
Well, that would be more bearable, if half the TV market wouldn't be allowed to essentially tax everyone to finance their drivel.
Edit: it's an adblocker that is supposed to click on EVERY ad that it blocks.
Be carefull - fraud is a crime. But I am under no obligation to provide AdWords any data, let alone true and reliable data.
Considering the tracking and spying, and my legitimate interest in privacy, there is no room for fraud argument here.
PS: this would be probably a Hoax
If the sites set it up themselves, it's fraud. If you conspire with the sites to set it up, it's fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud. But if I'm prosecuted for the crime of not actually looking at ads I request, that's just a judge with an agenda. Whether it went one way or another at every layer of appeal would probably be a coin flip, though.
What’s needed is a better term.
I propose either AdTurfing (hat tip AstroTurfing) or AdLighting (hat tip GasLighting). My personal preference is the second.
Just thinking that the elderly population is probably the least likely to use those boxes (though I am not even sure of that), whereas they constitute the (dying) core of traditional TV viewership.
We're in something of a worst of both worlds situation where Nielsen has an increasingly small number of viewers where traditional TV boxes work to get decent samples, has to rely more than ever on surveys, and distrusts all streaming viewership numbers because they are cloak and dagger white lies between competitors, despite in theory being way more accurate than all the previous tools (the surveys and the TV boxes).
It's almost wild. The most forthcoming to shareholders/the general public over the years has been Hulu and Hulu's numbers at times have suggested Nielsen's data is very, very wrong right now, but Nielsen doesn't trust Hulu's data at all because it smells like lies because Netflix does nothing but lie or ghost them.
1. There is a disparity between age groups and other demographic dividers who have newer TVs. This could significantly skew the results for some advertisers.
2. The data is going to the TV manufacturer, and they will not share that freely between themselves or with anyone else. This will complicate collating the data as there are several entities to negotiate with in order to get an overall picture.
Yes, which is why I will never own one.
Depends, are the TV networks buying that information? Or just advertisers?
For example, When I watch youtube on my Roku, if im not signed in, does roku still aggregate what I watched on youtube, could that be sold to Hulu, for ads when I watch that on the same tv?
That is incorrect, they do have to pay (once per household). But if you get BAFÖG (student loan/social benefit mix that require you and your parents to be below a certain income bracket), you don’t.
You may like the "Google will eat itself" idea.
> I feel like this is similar. All tech savvy people block ads and analytics and at least the known tricks they use against us. So the internet only tracks the defenseless people and is then built to serve them (and or exploit them).
I think this is right - ad-traffic is manipulative and actually I don't think it is a societal 'good' at all.
A few personal examples:
* On Youtube almost all my adverts are encouraging me to start Forex / Stock / Property investment and trading, and sign up for courses on these. These courses are scams (or at best, 'half-scams' and poor/generic advice repackaged and sold for thousands), and in general provide poor financial advice (either through extortionate courses, recommending you become too heavily leveraged or advising you to day-trade high-volatility stocks by just looking at charts). Presumably it does this because I am 32 and male, so I am considered 'prime' for this marketing.
* One of the friends I know is a girl, and she has never seen the above adverts. We were talking and she says every single advert is just about pregnancy and fertility. I wonder how many of these adverts are just reinforcing gender-stereotypes in a wider sense, i.e. while google claims to be progressive and care about 'equality' really is their business model at it's core really just targeting women and telling them that they should be getting pregnant, while telling guys that they should be the bread-winners and earn money via stocks/shares?
* While my adverts are for forex, and my apparently fertile friend is getting adverts for pregnancy tests, my older parents just get targeted adverts for pre-paid funerals. One or two are probably be fine, but they are just on constant repeat - and I can't help but think that I wouldn't the constant reminder of death before every youtube video.
* My laptop is convinced that I want to go camping. It's only my laptop, every advert is camping related. Sleeping bags, tents... and the strange thing is that when it started I didn't want to go camping, but it's been so consistent across the last few months now that I kinda wanna go camping. Like it's sold me this romantic vision which I know wasn't there before, so even though I would usually like to say I can't be manipulated through marketing, it's really made me realise I can be.
Is the above really making society better? And if it's not, why should we put up with it? IMO the biggest lie we have been told by Google is that 'personalised ads' are a good thing.
Though, I would say this can actually hurt publishers in the long run
Believe it’s Scott Galloway who said advertising is a tax on the poor and technologically illiterate.
Data poisoning for something the scale of Google I fear would be ineffective to the point of laughability, sadly.
Let's say everyone get their wish and ads go away. Everything will require a purchase. Those purchases are logged to a real name/address. You end up with bigger privacy leaks.
People will still be tracking you the way they are now. And at the credit card level.
As an adult in the first world I can afford to pay for adfree solutions. Most people can't. Ads level the playing field.
https://www.german-way.com/germanys-tv-tax-the-debate-over-t...
The real harm seems to be from the tech giants censoring speech and policing payments, but what's the harm that someone targets a pair of shorts that I might like or show an ad for a conference I might be interested in?
Firefox may not have a great market share, but based on these numbers it's market share may very well be eight times higher than your analytics report. This can change the argument of "it's only 3% of our users so we don't need to test on FF" to "it's a quarter of our user base, we should at least test it", depending on your target audience. I've seen tons of people claim general Firefox usage is negligible based on public data from websites such as statcounter, but these metrics prove that those statistics are unreliable and should not be used.
The best you can do is use server side UA inspection, though you can't really distinguish bots from real users that way.
IMHO, this points at Firefox being used mostly by ad-averse, tech-savvy users, while the less-adverse, less-savvy users prefer Safari and/or Chrome.
If your objective is to maximize ad revenue, the most obvious approach would now be to ignore Firefox completely and focus on non-FF browsers.
Of course, following web standards would be the Golden Way, and more selfless actors follow that rule, but that song has been sung ever since the old Netscape/MSIE wars.
Home vs office.
On my company laptop I am often not allowed to install software (but I'm allowed to develop the software that companies trust to handle billions of dollars in transactions) so my usage would look 60% chrome with no add blocking and 40% completely locked down firefox.
These numbers are iffy or at least, very poorly described. They're not a percentage of HN or Reddit users - in the HN case, the sample is HN users who clicked on a front page link to a post about switching to Linux from MacOS. It's a fairly small sample biased in ways that are unknowable when all you have is that one sample. As a methodology, this is flaky enough to not warrant the headline and the significant digits in these numbers.
The actual numbers might be higher, the article notes that these numbers still don't include anyone who blocks first-party JS completely.
I don't know if any of the sampled websites actually work without first-party JS.
To nitpick. Starting with 3/100 FF, times 8 unaccounted for, you get 24/121, 20%.
No, the best you can do is to stop caring. A distant second is this "server side UA inspection." Whatever that means exactly.
About 5% of computer users have "advanced" literacy, defined as "Some navigation across pages and applications is required to solve the problem. The use of tools (e.g. a sort function) is required to make progress towards the solution. The task may involve multiple steps and operators. The goal of the problem may have to be defined by the respondent, and the criteria to be met may or may not be explicit"
https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/106841164116074208
Even just general literacy and numeracy are ... far lower than you'd expect: https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp
An OECD 20-country survey gives the 5% "advanced" technological literacy statistic: http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264258051-en
Jacob Nielsen discussed that at the time: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
This is a substantial aspect of my "Tyranny of the Minimum Viable User": https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...
Perhaps if the advertising industry didn't already prove for 20+ years that they are entirely made up of scum, I would agree. People use ads to make money. I feel bad that they aren't making money passively that way.
But I grew up with ad networks, including Google themselves, turning a blind eye to deceptive ads, bait and switch, fake window popups, and outright scams. The online advertising industry has done everything they could to fuck us over and big tech companies were complicit in the crime.
So that's why I don't care about running an ad blocker. Maybe the advertising industry will have a code of ethics after I'm dead, but until then I'll keep using uBlock Origin and NoScript (and other extensions) to screw with the ad business as much as possible.
Putting aside the ethics, advertising turns the internet into a race to the bottom. Ad blocking is good for the internet because it means that your ads had better be good, minimally intrusive, and also be integrated with the content you are providing. In other words, do things like preroll and midroll sponsorships and referrals rather than slap a bunch of banners on your site that peddle crap du juor.
Not dismissing that Google Docs overlay may be explained by any of the following: (a) learned behavior from mobile computing that very few things are configurable (mobile apps tend to have far fewer preferences on how things are displayed; (b) pop ups on mobile often don't close when clicked; and (c) they are used to operating with very tight screen real-estate. I think (c) is most likely.
As someone brought up on desktop computing, I fight to eliminate anything that needlessly wastes screen real-estate such as bloated window chrome. But I think someone brought up on small screens might actually feel agitated by "too much" space.
I know information workers who have workplaces that would gladly pay for nicer monitors or keyboards but don’t bother to even request them.
I know a couple with a brand new house that has a miserably squeaky front door that could be silenced a half dozen ways in under a minute.
People of all kinds contortion themselves into knots, giving little notice to the daily, near constant twinge of their circumstances but don’t improve them.
Tolerating ads is just one example of this.
I used to use adblocking but the tiny site Distrowatch made an impression on me. The owner rigged something so that those using adblock also would not see non-ad images. He said it’s really not fair to visit a free site and then block the thing that allows it to be free.
Also, I then read that one of the adblockers would take payments from advertisers to unblock their ads. What a racket.
So I block no ads. This does mean that I don’t look at the vast bulk of news sites because they have obnoxious ads. However, most decent news sites are now pay walled, and those that aren’t are junk anyway. I get my news from some sites I pay for, and from non-profit email newsletters, and from sites my employer pays for. These have few ads.
So I have found no loss from not using adblock. Adblock is like putting on a bulletproof vest to walk through a warzone. Better to just keep out of warzones.
And also "You are using the worst browser available to you (Samsung), shall I install Firefox?" and then "Nah, don't care".
How naive I was. No one actually cares. It was like assuming everyone born after 1908 would fully understand how cars work.
I hadn't even noticed it (at least not consciously). I've apparently been trained somewhere to ignore dialogues, and I would hazard a guess that it has something to do with the prevalence of hostile UX patterns.
[1]: https://archive.is/TZ7oe was the best, but is kinda dead now. https://blog.malwarebytes.com/threat-analysis/2016/01/clickj...
I don't use an ad-blocker, and nor do I accept sites with unreasonable ads. I block the whole site by closing the tab or hitting the back button.
I have yet to meet a single person, and yes they are all in the Bay Area tech industry, who knew about pi-hole before I told them.
- Despite having equivalent desktop (macOS) and mobile (iOS) apps, most of our users (> 75%) use the app primarily on desktop
- Most users say the key reason for use is for privacy protection; even with Safari providing some inbuilt privacy tracking protection
- Our app is focused on providing a simple 'set and forget' ad blocking approach; so you would think the key audience would be less tech savvy users. However a large proportion of users are tech-inclined and knowledgeable users.
- A lot of tech heavy websites are some of the worst offenders in terms of tracker usage and advertising. For example, The Verge can load 3.5x faster simply by using an ad blocker that blocks the on-page trackers and ads[2]
[1] https://www.magiclasso.co/
[2] https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/difference-adblocking/
Similarly, wrapping websites like Discord or Slack in Electron also gives the website owners full telemetry and tracking that they can't get in a tech savvy browser.
Would an always on VPN, a remote pihole be the only way for privacy?
It must be very disheartening to work on reddit's mobile site. Not only is it deliberately made a miserable experience by forcing you through AMP via Google and insisting you "continue in browser" every time, but then you're greeted with a banner that outright says "this page is better in the app".
What I do not know is if it will work also when apps begin using DNS over HTTPS… I suppose not?
E.g. if I wanted to know where you're hailing from, I'd browbeat you into granting me Location access privileges. If that's too difficult, I'd get you to grant me Files/Photos privileges (this one won't raise too many alarm bells with apps like Discord or Reddit), and then try to read EXIF geotags off your recent photos.
I'm using NextDNS as the system-wide private DNS on my Android phone, it works great and eats less battery than Blokada.
It works very well, I highly recommend it.
That and revenue is much higher on apps than on the web. I made an android apps for a website. And just alone the android apps made more money than the web version. With less ads.
Discord, Slack and other similar webapps can (and maybe do) send telemetry in the same connections used for the app's features. You can't reliably block that.
Maybe for now, but it's just a matter of time until use of DoH to circumvent your attempts at redirecting DNS becomes more widespread as well.
This is an ad disguised as an article targeting the "tech savvy" by bundling HN and Reddit (a truth + a lie makes the statement more true), a common clickbait tactic
> This makes sense especially considering how difficult it is to install an adblocker on Chrome, the most popular browser on mobile devices.
Nope, it is really easy: is just an extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/adblock-%E2%80%94-...
It makes me think Reddit users are inflating/manipulating this article w/ votes and comments
Correction: "difficult to install adblocker on mobile devices"
> Nope, it is really easy: is just an extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/adblock-%E2%80%94-...
The key word here is mobile devices.
AFAIK, ad blocking in Chrome on my phone is difficult. But with Firefox, I can easily install uBlock Origin.
I use a PiHole on my phone occasionally to block ads in anything that isn't Firefox, but I found that the OpenVPN client is a significant battery drain (~7% per hour).
I find it this comparison a little misleading because Plausible admits that their own script/endpoint are blocked by adblockers, just to a lesser extent than Google Analytics [3].
[1] https://github.com/NYPL/google-analytics-proxy
[2] https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...
Anyway, I indeed use Firefox with ublock origin, multi account containers, etc. I also use Firefox on Android. A lot of stuff people assume they need apps for works just fine in that.
You still need informed consent in the EU, GDPR is not specific to websites.
Secondly, PiHole, uBlock origin and most other adblockers also block Plausible analytics (there are discussions on their own Github Issues regarding it). If you are proxying Plausible to get accurate readings, same should be done with GA.
They are also JavaScript based, so how long before ad-blockers start blocking them too?
Isn't it time to come back to server side analytics?
I welcome that; if I want to give feedback I'll do so myself. Analytics should not be opt-out.
If content producers are willing to put in the hard work of developing a reputation for quality output slowly, disseminated through trusted sources, surely augmented by some form of paid marketing but not by just spamming the web with links in the hopes that they can get clicks and then use dark patterns to keep people on the site long enough to monetize 20 seconds of their eyeball time, then maybe they can get people to willingly pay them. This is sort of what Substack is proving. The tiny number of writers worth reading are actually being paid by willing readers. But it's a tiny number. Micropayments can never solve that most web content is worth 0 dollars and 0 cents.
Although, I am not convinced micropayments would save the Internet from this ad-winter: It is hard to beat free at scale.
That's not true. Web Monetization is built on top of the Interledger and does precisely that - micropayments for web content. When i wrote about it[0] and posted on HN[1] the overwhelming response here was negative, presupposing greed and lack of privacy of everyone ( as in the website would still track and run ads to earn more money, etc.). The solutions exist, people just don't want them, even supposedly privacy-focused people.
[0] https://atodorov.me/2021/03/07/please-support-web-monetizati...
But to my first point, they are a non-starter because too much of the world has trouble managing their money, and mentally don't want to pay for something until they've seen it. Why should I pay a dollar to read an article that might be poorly written, full of inaccuracies, etc.?
The closest model I've seen to working is twitch. You have a central content platform, with silly cosmetic awards for subscription, and a sense of "credibility" among others there in interactions because you've been subscribing for x amount of time. This would require a more interactive news service, and hell, that I would pay for. If I read an article by an expert who answered (reasonable) follow up questions and owned their journalism, that would be incredible.
More directly to your point, I think lots of people have made attempts at micropayment protocols. The difficulty is psychological rather than technical - the cumulative mental burden of repeatedly deciding whether to part with a tenth of a cent "costs" much more than value being exchanged.
You live with the assumption that everyone would just accept micropayments, and that's far from the truth.
The result would be content for a small portion of those with available income, and content for those without it (with parallel markets for content distribution under paywalls - like piracy).
That's even more messed up than the current advertising model.
Don't get me wrong, some brands would love that, to pile up those with available income and serve them marketing communication through press releases, reviews and stuff like that. I can see Apple applauding this.
"Data driven design" is kinda overrated anyway. It's better to actually listen to your users. Stats don't show what people think, and they're often tweaked to show what people want to see.
This is not to say the data is useless - it's just worth remembering that, unless you have strong statistical background, you're probably reading your data wrong, so your metrics should be treated as weak evidence at best.
--
[0] - It's not snark, it's a corollary of the replication crisis. This is a hard job.
Some of the problems in talking to users:
- people will often tell you what they think you want to hear rather than what they really think. (Very few users would ever tell an interviewing dev that they think the product is unsalvageable, the dev team wasted several months and that the user would never ever use it)
- Users often don't know what they want because they don't understand the full range of possibilities. Sometimes they dream of tech that would violate several laws of physics, at other times they fail to realize that for-loops exist and just ask for a faster way to manually click a button a thousand times.
- Fads affect users just as much as anyone else. If there has been a surge of news articles about how Google is doing fancy AI stuff, you can bet the bakery on the corner of the street will mention machine learning when asked what they want to improve their business.
It's basically a real time website log analyser which gives you enough information to know whats happening on your website but doesn't require any pesky Javascript etc to do it.
Also since it is works by analysing your log files it can never be blocked.
One of my clients' website traffic is composed of over 75% bot traffic. Server-side logs are unusable for anything other than site performance.
My home network runs Pi-Hole, and every browser has uBlock Origin. The Internet has been a bearable place. And then I happened to show my 2 year old a cartoon from Youtube on a non-adblocked device.
My. Freaking. God.
It's full of ads.
The cartoon is 10 minutes. Every minute, an 15-second, at the very least, ad rolls in. Like fucking gnats by the river in the summer: you get one, two, and then you are swarmed in them. There weren't the yellow markers anywhere on the progress slider, too.
Not all of those ads were good for kids, too. One was, I kid you not, an ad for Jira. An ad for the fucking Jira, in the middle of a cartoon. Won't anybody think of the children!?
My daughter was very much not impressed. So was I.
I promptly got uBlock Origin running, and youtube-dl'd the whole channel those cartoons were in, for good measure.
I built a game - termsandconditions.game that got to #1 on HN a few months back and for a while I couldn't understand why I had such high CDN use and 4X less registered hits. This is why!
The biggest benefit is definitely the sheer speed at which news websites load on my phone now, even when I'm on a crap connection.
Another benefit: This isn't a VPN, so you can still use a VPN whilst using Private DNS.
Edit: Also... lol, I can't access TFA as plausible.io is also blocked on my network and phone. I'm going to assume that the article is actually an analytics competitor whose pitch is "GA is blocked, use us instead!".
Edit 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=plausible.io Yes, assumption was correct.
Edit 3: NextDNS stats from my home network: 11.45% of DNS requests blocked, but from my phone 23.7% of DNS requests blocked. You need this more on your mobile than in a web browser!
Works on ios and android.
I think their free tier is very generous at 300k lookups/month; otherwise it's something cheap like 2€/month if you want unlimited lookups (i use this to block tracking on all my devices + home network)
On iOS the options are a bit worse but Brave has some kind of adblocking that works. Safari also supports blocking lists via AdGuard but it's more limited.
I certainly dont really like GA, but i wouldn't take specific action to block it. Definitely not taking specific action to unblock.
One option would now be to host a plausible proxy on-premise. But I didn't have time to try that out yet.
PS: We're paying plausible customers and our stats are publicly accessible [2].
-1: https://rugpullindex.com/blog#HowPlausibleareOurWebsiteAnaly...
This is a clever ad for a google analytics competitor.
If there's no complex interactivity achieveable only through JS, I prefer to ship sites with plain HTML/CSS, so I don't really like to use any client-side analytics. And yes – I can live without all the fancy features to track and profile my visitors.
I don't want to host by myself either, since I enjoy using a simple git push to deploy my site.
Moving to a normal analytics, the number is closer to a dozen, maybe a few hundred.
I suspect Netlify doesnt remove bot traffic
* Use a CDN which provides access logs (AWS Cloudfront, logs are stored in S3, Azure supports this too i think) * Feed those logs into a self-hosted analytics solution, like goatcounter [1]
Getting 100% blockage [0] on this adblock test [1].
[0] https://i.imgur.com/7hdaHmh.png
[1] https://d3ward.github.io/toolz/adblock.html
Haven't seen an ad in months. (kidding)
Which means it still underestimates; those who selectively disable Javascript, through things like uBlock Origin's advanced mode or uMatrix, will not be counted. So the real percentage is probably higher than that 58%, and we don't know how much higher.
I remember spotting such study.
I still wonder if advertising is always worth spending on, beacuse google and facebook make a big amount of money with it, but I'm still skeptical when I see the actual amount of people "engaging" in ads, when you see how much it actually costs.
My startup has tried a variety of marketing strategies from in-person campaigns on the street, video ads on YouTube, "free" PR through newspapers etc. In order to measure the effect of each approach we only did one at a time.
For us paid marketing on Facebook/Instagram was, unexpectedly, the most efficient form of marketing by far. But I would not assume that applies to all, or even most, businesses. So you should experiment with different strategies for your business.
That’s why the hostility to ads feels misplaced: it works, it helps company to whom you want to give money to find you and people like you. It’s just that condescension from _some_ people in Ad platform and a press that insistently favours the worst people mean that people like me who argued for more user-friendly interfaces (ban certain content, prevent repeated ads) were routinely overruled.
It's a widely known trend that more tech-savvy consumer audiences tend to employ more tracking countermeasures.
The sales message in the post claims GA is cookie-based, which isn't entirely true. Cookies are one complementary component of tracking within the Google stack, but not the only one. Depending on your account type, GA deployment, and reporting method, you can achieve reporting results that are not solely cookie-based.
The over-simplification is for sales purposes.
It's also odd that the clicks from Google Search Console line up very closely with what we see from Google Analytics. I had always thought this data would be more accurate since Google SERPs uses (used to use?) forwarding URLs to track this stuff.
There is a specific demographic who use blockers, generally of the tech-savvy kind. It should even be possible to detect the blocker being used and some of its settings. It would be ironic to detect that a user is blocking almost everything and show them ads for privacy-oriented products and services.
The reason I keep using Google stats on my backend is convenience and “Google magic” for tracking session length, bounce, behavior, etc etc. I can get most of that out of awstats, but that requires more work.
Would be interested to also include that into the statistics. How many nerds block javascript? I wouldn't be counted by the plausible proxy since I disable javascript per default via ublock and if I allow javascript I still filter it using uMatrix.
Reddit is a very diverse site and not a tech savvy site overall. This just means the subset of users who liked this, likely very technical link, blocked GA. To use that to claim 58% of all reddit users block GA is very disingenuous imho.
I've since moved to NextDNS.io to have network agnostic ad/malware filtering. Still keep a "special" configuration for my wife :)
So what exactly does Plausible do to avoid being blocked in the same manner? What prevents GA from doing the same?
It seems they serve plausible from the same server as the origin website (first party), probably under an unique name, which means you need to block the script manually on every domain instead of simply blacklisting `plausible.io` (for example).
> What prevents GA from doing the same?
That's a good question. Probably ease-of-use (no need to explain how to host it, easier updates) and the lack of need to do so. YouTube, for example, could also make it _far_ harder to block ads by simply sending a single video stream, but they don't for some reason.
Google Analytics reports 10k uniques vs. 35k in Netlify's server-side analytics.
It does not give any value. And moreover it takes a lot of time to study. At the end rather on quality and sales you focus on visits, and a lot of other non important metrics.
https://gioorgi.com/2020/pihole-lockdown/
Give it a try!
It's not quite as bad as things were ten, fifteen years ago, where not using an ad blocker was just begging to get your machine pwned, but it's still bad.
Then sorry, as a NoScript user I probably manage to escape both GA and your experiments :)
I never asked for ads and telemetry, so there is no other option for me.
If it's a popup for something I don't have a choice about using (e.g. a government site), right clicking the offending element choosing inspect and then deleting it out of the dom usually solves the problem.
Could be that I am visiting less annoying websites these days though...
That's me.
"58% of Hacker News, Reddit and tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics"
100% of Google Analytics authors are tech savvy.
This is called irony.
I fundamentally disagree with this parable. I don't think common practices in advertising are a necessity, especially when it comes to analytics.
Adblocking is a reasonable defense against the constant and expanding abuse (of both people and the commons) that the ad industry brought on us.
For the record, I don't engage in ad blocking as such. I block scripts, which has the side effect of blocking much of the more abusive ads. However, reasonable ads aren't blocked at all -- it's just that there aren't many reasonable ads on the internet.
Most advertising is a con, on the ad buyer.
I block ads not because I'm anti-ad, but because
1) it's nearly impossible to browse the web at all without an ad blocker
and
2) Malware has been delivered via ad networks, sometimes on otherwise reliable websites that were duped into running the ad.
I'd have no problem with ads if they appeared as ads used to appear in a newspaper - static content between articles that doesn't distract or interfere with my reading experience.
Like... hey guys, you know, if you want to sell to these folks maybe you should consider an alternative to GA, right?
Why didn't you ignore this?
This is fine for you, yet an AD that's it's clearly identified as being an AD, with, literally, a defined area - it's not.
Only 10% of the users that don't block GA.
That's pretty in line with "X% of users that participated in our poll say they don't min participating in polls".
Telling Facebook "hello, I am visiting baddragon.com from Mozilla Firefox 63.1 on Obscure Linux in Podunk, Saskatchewan, population 32" is barely an improvement over telling them "hello I am John Q. Smith and I am visiting baddragon.com".
And of course, private browsing is generally per-instance. Log in to your Google account in a private tab? All your other "private tabs" are also logged in to Google until you close the private browser.
What we had in the nineties was that we could configure our browsers to ask for every single cookie that a site wanted to place on our computers. That got old really fast when internet advertising became a thing, and tracking cookies were all over the place.
/sarcasm