Ads chew through half of mobile data
nextpit.com
nextpit.com
The user, who pays for the service, is getting no value out of the ads and the advertiser is freeloading the ISP's technical infrastructure and userbase.
You may hate ads, we all do, but at least recognize the hand that feeds you. The alternative is subscriptions for everything, and as far as I can tell that is far less popular than the ad model we have.
I disagree. The value I get from the Internet is almost entirely from non-ad-driven sources. The ad-driven stuff is very low value to me.
Maybe better to look at data instead, e.g. Netflix ad-supported plans vs ad-free plans, or YouTube Premium vs YT ad-supported, etc.
I have whatever search engine without ads for free. uBlock + NextDNS do the job.
If I visit a webpage about CPUs I am probably interested in CPUs, maybe I am building a PC, send me ads about that which I may actually find useful. Why would you send me irrelevant ads about gardening just because I am into that also? If I am looking to buy a CPU I am not gonna click on something irrelevant like that.
It really did exist, and was pretty great.
The ad-funded content and services are almost universally low quality and designed exclusively to hack brains to keep them scrolling, not provide real value. What few exceptions there are to this rule are not worth the enormous drain on society that the ad-funded model has been.
> and as far as I can tell that is far less popular than the ad model we have.
This is a classic market failure. Corporations have figured out how to manipulate people into pursuing the corporation's interest (scroll indefinitely through pages and pages of ads and spend money on the things so advertised) at the expense of the consumer's interest (do anything else with their time and money). Popularity is irrelevant when it's clearly achieved by exploitative design, not value delivered.
Those are all valuable things. The ad free ones are the exceptions. More over they only exist ad free because the money comes from elsewhere.
Virtually all news sites, regardless of what side you agree with, are composed mostly of garbage designed to draw your attention, not inform you about things that really matter. They may provide some value in addition to that, but the advertising model ensures that they must hack your attention as their primary goal.
> Basically all entertainment has ads (or subscriptions).
Similarly, our entertainment options were better before they had to be designed to keep you on a specific streaming platform for a certain length of time.
> Productivity stuff is either full of sales or upsells, aka ads, or alternatively sell your data (for future ads).
Depends on who you're buying productivity stuff from. My Fastmail account does just fine with no ads and no data sales, and covers basically everything I need. Most other "productivity" tools I've tried have felt palpably exploitative.
> More over they only exist ad free because the money comes from elsewhere.
Ad-funded products are a civilization-wide trap like credit card rewards. They create an illusion that things are coming for free, but companies don't do this out of charity—they pay for ads because they have good data that strongly suggests that the people who see them will, on average, pay them back and more.
I'd rather make the cost of a service explicit than hide it behind hard-to-quantify behavioral hacks.
I listened to "The Shadow" radio episodes from the 1940s, sponsored by "Blue Coal". At 0:45 of https://www.beyondthebreaker.com/the-shadow-of-blue-coal/ "All signs point to a severe winter. Be prepared! If you want to be sure of even, dependable, helpful heat in any kind of weather, insist on Blue Coal. America’s finest anthracite mined from the fields of northern Pennsylvania. The coal that is colored a harmless blue at the mine for your protection."
That's about 20 seconds, and the blue color was 'a marketing ploy to distinguish its coal from that of its competitors. But the company took it one step further by actually promoting its product as being superior, longer burning, and even more “healthful” than other coal. No wonder the PR “spin” profession was so poorly regarded in that era!'
Also, 1971's "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke", was 1 minute long, and did not inform.
Existing ad-free because the money comes from somewhere is the point. That somewhere is more ethical and prevents the conflicts of interest that make ad-based services inevitably worth their nominal price.
Some obvious very high value parts of the Internet with no monetization: government services and information, free educational materials from pre-school through graduate university and research level, basically all software I use, creative commons music, art, and CAD designs, forums and blogs where world experts like Terence Tao post, forums and blogs where hobbyists post.
If you look to the Internet for ways to improve your life, you'll find the associated resources (which I'd characterize as the high value parts of the Internet) generally have no ads. It should be obvious why.
In general, its easiest to charge the wealthiest group with the greatest motivation to spend and that combination means in almost all cases corporations are better customers than individuals. Hence, advertising replacing subscription.
Additionally this why consumer internet is so hard to standup and SaaS feels so much easier to take from 0 to 1.
Someone is paying for it, there is no “failure” here. This is just classic leftist talk - you are welcome to create a new model and show everyone how it’s done. But then you will need money to host, code, etc. I’m happy to take something free if you want to pay for it.
B) If there's an argument against my stance in your comment here I'm missing it. I'd love to have a dialog if you have a counterargument!
I've tried putting my money where my mouth is by switching to subscription services for everything and I still have to go out of my way to avoid advertising with adblockers.
Obviously, different industries are likely to show different distributions of results, but CPG companies are the biggest ad spenders, I believe.
Companies pay for ads because they have good reason to believe that some significant percentage of people who see them will buy something that they otherwise would not have bought. They spend enormous sums setting up the infrastructure to attribute sales to specific ads. Meanwhile we, the consumers, have no really good way to quantify how much drains from our bank accounts each year due to the ads we see.
Might I be the exception to the rule and be un-manipulatable? Possibly. But I don't have a strong reason to bet on it, and I'd rather see the price of the service listed outright as a subscription than simply hope that the ad-funded version will net to a lower cost for me.
Works well, last year I sold 5000 books this way.
I've never had a moment where I've said "Oh, I'm glad that ad was there!"
If a service can't be run unless it's through ads?
Then perish.
So if anyone wants to seriously call the modern ad system a benefit to the user, then those externalities should be controlled. Either the actual bandwidth costs should be accounted as losses to the user, or the advertiser should be forced to pay those costs. And I bet that ads would start using far less bandwidth with no change in appearance if the advertisers started caring.
I have no bad conscience whatsoever to use an adblocker. Heck, I get eye cancer every time I have sit in front of somebody's webbrowser who does not have an adblocker installed.
Even though I use the internet quite a bit as we all do, if the free internet were to go away tomorrow, I'd probably find something else to do with my time.
Besides, this argument that without ads content can't exist is bogus. Firstly people have been creating art and knowledge without thought for pay since time immemorial, it's a basic human instinct. Were there ads paying for the paintings in Lascaux? In the early days of the internet there was little money to be made online, and yet the quality of the content was excellent - and yes there were banners and tracking cookies but it's interesting how the best sites had little or none of that, and when they did have ads the quality of the ads was very high too - relevant to the audience and not some worthless crap that is much worse than competitors.
To this day people freely publish quality content with 0 monetization, just because they want to. That type of content gets shared on this site daily. Technology has advanced greatly and simply putting a website up is very cheap now, and people have a decent number of hours to put into their hobby.
Before ads and ad "partners" became as pervasively parasitic as they are today, there was still plenty of fine content available online, much of it free of charge, and even now, many platforms exist that offer the same, or at least keep their ad systems unobtrusive to users.
Also, as another comment below mentions, even when you do pay, many platforms still bombard you with ad garbage, or create frankly abusive bullshit like paid tiers in which you still can't opt out of ads. Looking at you and many others Netflix.
Perhaps this statement is meant as a figure of speech. If so, please disregard the remainder of this comment.
If not, the statement makes no sense. The truth is Workaccount2 does not even know imoreno's name, let alone how imoreno uses the internet, i.e., "the internet as imoreno knows it".
The alternative is not "subscriptions for everything" because that is what so-called "tech" companies are already trying. Obviously it does not work very well if the subscription seller is only an intermediary with nothing that people want to pay for. As such, these websites must rely on surveillance and/or ads.
There are a number of internet users who generally do not "sign up" or "subscribe" to anything, other than internet service. Apparently this number is large enough to leave so-called "tech" companies no other option than to sell internet users out as surveillance subjects and/or ad targets.
The alternative is that the number of so-called "tech" companies (unnecessary intermediaries) able to continue as a going concern would drop. Naturally anyone invested in such ventures will be very defensive about their entitlement to conduct commercial surveillance and profit from ads. We see this in HN comments along the lines of "internet ads are mandatory" all the time. The "arguments" made in these HN comments are often quite funny, like "We cannot go back to the time before the internet had ads" or "If we do not have unfettered proliferation of internet ads, then the internet will suck."
That's a false dichotomy, the website earns $0.01 from my ad view(s) on a given page, why should that be replaced with a subscription? Just let me pay $0.01 to view the content.
No. I'm old enough to clearly remember the Internet without ads (commercial use was banned) and it was a far superior place.
Ads only add surveillance and noise and waste, zero value.
Ads can also be easily hosted on CDNs, so their cost for ISPs can be decreased significantly compared to other more dynamic content.
[1] https://www.nexttv.com/news/netflix-ceo-some-big-isps-extrac...
[2] https://epicenter.works/en/content/data-toll-deutsche-teleko...
Which is why I agree. The user is paying for those ads, and the infrastructure is being upgraded to serve those ads. Why do ads get subsidies?
It's not even about advertising for me -- static ads don't bother me that much. But whenever there's autoplaying video in the corner of a page, I hate it so much. Whether it's an ad, or a news site that inexplicably thinks I want to multitask and watch their news channel at the same time I read their article. It's genuinely hard to read the article when there's constant motion an inch or two away at all times!
Tbh it's probably been a net positive, I just instantly bail after the first refresh
I only start Chrome if some very stubborn (usually financial) site fails to work with Firefox + ad blocking; this happens maybe 3-4 times a year.
They should absolutely put it front and center. A tickbox on first run.
Unless you’re a EU citizen
There's a long tail of random websites linked to by sites like this one -- like the one in the OP!
And yeah, I do come for the comments.
They're faster and they're trustless. The only attack surface of a block list is that someone removes their site from the list.
The static blocklists can be defeated easily by having ads served by the same domain.
In that case you are stuck due to apple's decisions.
This is the main reason it has become my default browser there.
Pages are often unresponsive or don't fully load. Zooming breaks so many sites. I'm always closing Safari and re-loading pages.
Are the web developers ignoring Safari? They can't be.
"oeconomical" is just an extremely archaic spelling of "economical", since the root word from Greek is "oikos", which Latinizes as "oecus".
Why did you mention it? Do you see it as a separate word?
If you’re a consumer you might be right, but your opinions and feelings aren’t of importance to those in power.
>Unsustainable for who?
Bandwidth is never free from environmental impact, and given the same server/CDN/whatever the environmental impact will increase monotonously with increasing bandwidth use.
Besides the FBI recommending it for security, running a good adblocker is one of the most "green" ways to reduce your footprint from internet usage.
Regardless of how efficient the CDN, it still has a lower footprint to not connect to it at all.
>hell, it’s not like all bandwidth cost the same
This is after focusing a lot on the other personal emission sources, but OTOH "install uBO and set it to Easy Mode" is one of the cheap and easy (low-hanging) interventions. Incidentally I generally watch videos at 360p, unless it's a lecture with small text on slides. Most 'taking head' content is just wasted pixels at higher resolutions.
A better approach than your current lifestyle would be to focus your efforts into something scalable that would actually have an impact rather than wasting your time.
You're missing the point by complaining that it's a smaller impact than all the industry in China (what isn't?), because there's nothing I (or anyone else) can do to eliminate the impact of all the industry in China. That is not one of the available 'moves' in this 'game.' It's a red herring.
That's what I meant by "magic bullet" thinking: you imagine you can only do one thing, and that one thing must fix 100% of the problem. In real life this problem (like most problems) isn't like that.
Also adblockers don't waste my time, they actually save me time. As far as mitigations go it has a good cost-to-benefit ratio, hence "low-hanging."
> focus your efforts into something scalable
But again, this premise that we're only allowed to do one thing is silly. I contain multitudes, and so do you.
If all the negative externalities were properly priced in, a lot of bottom-feeding crap at all layers of the stack will die off, but advertising itself will remain and would actually become better as a result for all parties involved.
Interesting note, the privacy sandbox apis that google (was) is pushing were extremely bad for bandwidth to the point that in early tests our servers often did not respond in time to successfully bid in an auction. This occurred in many steps different steps of the auction (ssps as well). Google of course kind of moved away from this set up before fixes were implemented. (If the time between a user loading a page and the result of a programmatic auction is too long, ads may not be served)
This could have been a few kilobytes of static html...
60.9MB transferred https://imgur.com/a/ftGkR3m. They are in fact worse than the rest of them. It is still going up as the ads rotate. I count 11 ad placements.
My 1GB mobile data plan should be enough to read at least 10s of thousands of pages in a month. Instead at 60MB, I could read... 16. Naturally I never use mobile data, and my only real use for a phone plan at all at this point is being forced to have SMS for banking.
*Mostly asking because I have come across this sentiment before, not because I think op(s) are engaged in this
Is the question “how many of you Adblock users also work in advertising tech?”
Opening this page 6 and a half times would exceed the monthly download limit on the first broadband internet plan my family had about twenty years ago in Australia.
Even though I use an adblocker, I got a huge table showing three Amazon products that took more space screen than any of the text block of the actual article.
I can't even imagine how the site looks like without an adblocker...
If Stopthemadness actually works reliably, it is also an existence proof that blocking video autoplay is possible, and that Apple is simply not fixing the "never auto-play" setting in Safari.
Perhaps Apple and Mozilla should just remove the "never auto-play" settings in Safari and Firefox and say that they are doing so in order to empower web sites and adtech companies (including Google/youtube, who pays them a lot of money) to force you to view unwanted video advertisements.
Although it is an arms race and obnoxious web pages can have javascript/webassembly video players that render into a canvas, etc., I still blame Apple for not sorting this out, and even backtracking on click/tap-to-play.
IIRC, at some point Apple did roll out default click/tap-to-play on iPhones, and there was a huge outcry from web developers (probably including Google/youtube) that it broke their sites. I expect the real complaint was that it interfered with pushing unwanted video advertisements.
It can't be set as default because most people are used to spam ads. Heck, most people seek them on tictok
But ublock, VPN and DNS blockers are available on mobile
Also add security and privacy costs to this.
There may be more, but the only one I know works totally local is Firefox Focus.
You can install it, set it as the ad blocker for iOS Safari and never actually use it as a browser.
It’s not 100.0% effective. But, it makes a big difference with minimal hassle.
I don't know what your basis is for this claim. Mobile Safari had an API for content filter lists, and every ad blocker I’ve tried required me to enable several of these filters through the system settings. I don't think there's any way an iOS extension even could configure a proxy without user confirmation.
I've been using Wipr for a few years now. It's basically set and forget.
For instance ive never paid for YouTube premium to get rid of ads on mobile and allow background audio (yes they charge for background audio). On Brave mobile you can turn on background audio for all media and ive never seen/heard a YouTube ad.
Edit: ironically my post in this thread about how ads are partially enshittifying the internet, reads a bit like a sponsored endorsement for FF :-) ah well. It's still good.
When i’m on mobile data advertisements are always super clear and in super high resolution, but i often get pushed low-res versions of the media.
I really hope some better company comes and dismantles YouTube as a business.
Edit: i’m using plain YouTube on plain iOS, so it’s all on google/YouTube.
That said, there's a lot of time and energy keeping up with what works, and what does not in the ecosystem. From the pfsense (ie, IP blocking) side of things I'm wholly dependent on filter list authors -- and of course IP blocking ads is marginally effective at best. From the pihole side of things, you have similar problems: dependency on domain lists, and the ever-looming threat of server-side ads. The only reason pihole (or any DNS-based blocking in general) is not wholly useless is because it represents a minority of users. If the technique were even marginally popular, the industry would move on and render it almost totally useless. uBlock origin suffers similar problems, and of course Google has moved to neuter it via Manifest v3. They are also in something of a tug of way with Youtube, and I get the sense that if they really wanted to, they could easily circumvent the plugin. As could any other website. I'm not really worried about losing Youtube, mind you, but it feels pretty clearly that the door is closing on the ad-free internet. And worse, the time when the users on the internet had more power than corporations is dying with it.
So I can't relate to this battle you paint that's so dire that we should stop using our phones.
I've never felt that way with uBlock in Firefox for Android. Installed it years ago and don't even need to give it a second thought.
The only ads I have to deal with are the ones on my TV YouTube and ones in apps, which I try to use the websites for instead anyway because I consider installing some app usually a sign of defeat. If someone isn't trying to scam you out of at least some attention and some personal data, they'd have a functional website.
what's wrong with uBlock Origin on mobile? (available in Firefox)
Since there were no cyber-laws to charge trespassers on digital estate the intruders were charged with "stealing electricity".
Perhaps we forget that ads are also a crime of resource misappropriation. Advertisers are not like vampires that are off the hook if you invite them in.
AdGuardHome and WireGuard running at home. WireGuard connects on-demand when I leave home.
I choose to run it at home because there are cases where services and/or sites block datacenter IPs, and I have complete control over what and how I block, no proxying through any blocking service.
Fixing the problem itself would likely require legislation and regulation to get ad tech companies (or the companies that use the ad tech) to pay attention to the data use.
Im curious how much time or money you’d be willing to invest and spend monthly to have this solved simply?
AdGuardHome is fairly straightforward: https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome?tab=readme-ov-fil...
And here is a nice script to install wireguard: https://github.com/angristan/wireguard-install
And you'll likely need to forward the WireGuard port.
It's always shock to se how many ads grandparents has in TV, especially for kids that are rised in adfree environment.
I would even argue this is a larger issue than the JS bloat websites are having...
Overtly consuming rich media from Youtube, Music, and Twitter dwarfs the data consumption of Safari.
Even your example of a tracking pixel is only going to be a handful of bytes.
That and ads that resize and push down the content you’re about to click on to make you misclick were the final straws.
Wouldn’t a better solution be DNS sinkholing, like PiHole or AdGuard Home?
What about an embedded video window that covers the bottom 2/3rds of the content and follows with scroll?
Oh and I hope you've not left out the absolutely mandatory "Read More" button that spawns a user interaction and auto-plays everything on the page.
Those are all of my favourite things on the web and I really enjoy seeing them all over the place!!
Newsletter signup, location permission
Video covering every thing
These are my favorite adtech offsprings
People correctly value this at $0. This post is noise, and things like it just make web crawling/search harder to scale.
Recourse to "people have revealed their preferences" is the last refuge of the defenders of the status quo of deeply corrupted "markets".
Users should of course block all malware.
The other obvious thing to consider is that if you're going to write an article to convince people of your opinion, I'm not going to pay you for that. You're the one trying to influence me!
Ridiculous thoughts from my grandmother. I disagree. People still watch TV even though there are ad breaks, ads on top of the show you are watching, and product placement within the TV shows. People clearly want ads otherwise they would use alternate means to get the information, such as DVDs, books, libraries, non-online classes, or seminars. If mobile data pricing goes up and the cost of ads to the end user is too high, the free market can sort it out. Honestly it's hard for me not to believe that blocking ads is anti-capitalist and against the free speech rights of advertising companies.
Even if they didn't, the amount of data ads use massively slows down the experience of using the internet, especially when outside of a tower-dense area.
'iPhone 6', an phone that's 10 years old. A sample size of 8 and undisclosed.