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Comment by bostonpete | Hacker News Reader

You seem to be assuming that the existing business model is one which people don't want. It allows websites to monetize using information that the vast majority of people don't care about, which allows most content on the internet to remain free. I'd say people are, by and large, pretty happy with this business model.

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If people want this business model, why is adblock so popular and getting moreso?

15 million daily users for just Firefox ABP alone! For comparison, this is roughly 5M more people than play World of Warcraft. And I'd wager most people know someone who plays that game..

Why are advertisers so scared of DNT on by default? If people want it so much, surely they'd go out of their way to enable it?

According to Firefox, they have 450 million users... I wouldn't call 5% "so popular". Having DNT on by default (and advertisers actually paying attention to it) would result in an immediate 100% of firefox users.

From my perspective, I'll use adblock, but I want everybody else to NOT use adblock. That way more websites can exist on advertising revenue.

edit: not quite apples-to-apples, as DNT reduces the value of an ad, while adblock eliminates it. but the general idea still stands

It's because the website owners choose a machine gun over a rifle when it comes to ads - instead of carefully selecting and testing ads for each page, they just slap half a dozen of them on every page and hope some get clicked on. It's very annoying for the readers/users, hence the popularity of ABP and NS.

Of course, the former approach takes more work, but the results are worth it in the long run...

A minor point here - from practical experience, if a website owner does indeed carefully select and test ads, there's no guarantee at all that the annoying ads won't be found to perform better.

Often, a LOT better.

The same applies to ad placement. Just because you - or most users - find an ad layout obtrusive, doesn't mean it wasn't carefully split-tested and kicked the ass of every less-obtrusive layout. Certainly, the floating banner at the bottom of my 400k unique/mo website outperformed anything thrown against it 2:1, despite being annoying.

Is this just tracking ad clicks or is it tracking actual conversions on something?

When I get a really annoying ad I often try and click on anything that I think might make it go away and the ads often seem to interpret that as a click and redirect me to the target page.

Yeah, those are super-obnoxious, and frankly user-hostile. I'm not sure why advertisers don't consider that click-fraud.

I was on some page the other day that had a popover ad that looked kind of like this:

  B B B B B B B B B B
  B B C C C C C C B B
  B B C C C C C C B B
  B B A A A A A A B B
  B B A A A A A A B B
  B B C C C C C C B B
  B B C C C C C C B B
  B B C C C C C C B B
  B B B B B B B B B B

Here the elements are Ad, Background, and Content. Everything except the content was treated as click target for the content.

The example I mention was clicks on a CPC platform, but the EPC from the ad remained higher than any other option for 9 months - long enough for high accidental clickthrough rates to be noted and corrected for.

Another blogger I know has tested layouts and settled on the same floating banner for his Clickbank ads - thus, conversion-tracked.

I use adblock but I only actually care about blocking < 1% of ads. I hate autoplaying videos with sound and popups, banner ads and google ads rarely bother me at all.

I imagine a lot of adblock users are the same.

I could whitelist sites with acceptable advertising but in reality I don't because I'm lazy (like most people).

I'd bet that most people who install AdBlock software aren't doing it because they care about getting tracked, but because they get sick of obnoxious ads, which exist independent of tracking.

AdBlocking software does not stop tracking. That's not feasible, unless turning on AdBlock also severs your internet connection. It might diminish tracking, but only incidentally.

Obnoxious ads that also happen to slow down your computer.

Because adblock gives the a free ride -- if adblock meant that you would have to pay before viewing sites that normally have ads, I am pretty sure most of those people would uninstall it.

using information that the vast majority of people don't care about

That feels false to me. I think the vast majority of people are too busy with their actual lives to understand how much tracking pixels and spy javascript can figure out about them over the course of a multi-year cookie lifetime.

(also see: patriot act. People with enough free time to care do care, but most people are busy raising kids, dealing with relationships, and recovering from emotional exhaustion due to broken workplace politics to think about things that they can't touch, taste, or have sex with.)

People would care if they knew and understood, but learning about how anything inside "the computer" works besides throw-the-cow or pin-the-clothes or filter-the-food is too nerd/geek and comes with negative social repercussions in their circles because they "know stuff."

This sort of reasoning is pervasive in many debates -- where people believe that "if only people understood the issues, they'd agree with me". This is moot, because (a) there's no way to prove it -- in fact, there are plenty of people who understand the business model and are fine with it, and (b) my point still stands that the vast majority of people don't care about it whether they understand or not.

>using information that the vast majority of people don't care about

You quoted the wrong person here; I never used those words.

I agree, the more targeted the ads, the higher value of the page view, the more free services. Plus people tend to buy things they think they want, so they are happy if they get ads that are actually relevant.

The problem is that there is a lot of value in that data beyond just targeted advertising. That's where things get cloudy.

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