Comment by beloch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beloch | Hacker News Reader

Every once and a while I try using a browser without adblocking installed for a while, just to see how it goes. It's always gotten worse. Ads simply keep getting more obnoxious and, in some cases, downright scary. If I'm setting up a computer for either my less-than-tech-savvy parents or for a child, ad blocking software is installed for sure. I view ad blocking software as necessary for their protection.

Adblocking is here to stay. It's not going away. More and more users are going to use it. The scumbags who create obnoxious, invasive ads aren't going to suddenly start playing nice so everyone can take a deep breath and uninstall their blocking software.

If you run a website supported by ads, don't bother trying to convince users to stop using adblocking software. Given what's out there this is an unreasonable request. What you can do is make sure the ads on your site are tasteful, subtle, and respectful of the user's privacy. Then politely educate users on how to whitelist your site. e.g. In Adblock plus, it's as simple as selecting "Disable on www.yourpage.here". Be prepared to be blocked forever the first time a bad ad slips through your review process. The days of letting advertising companies inject whatever ads and malicious code they want into your website are pretty much over.

I would find it hard to believe that giants like Google aren't making significant investments into solving the ad blocking 'problem'.

It's an arms race that represents an existential threat to too many companies and too much money.

It's an arms race with a very easy to predict winner. Any scheme to force users to see ads is likely going to conform very closely to the precedent set by DRM. e.g. MPAA and RIAA vs fair-use and content sharing. A few 9-to-5 corps don't have a hope in hell of building something that will thwart everyone who hates advertising.

> It's an arms race with a very easy to predict winner. Any scheme to force users to see ads is likely going to conform very closely to the precedent set by DRM. e.g. MPAA and RIAA vs fair-use and content sharing. A few 9-to-5 corps don't have a hope in hell of building something that will thwart everyone who hates advertising.

That doesn't bode well for adblockers, then. DRM has been incredibly successful at

(a) acclimating consumers to the idea that they can't own digital goods[0], even the ones that they have purchased; and

(b) stifling innovation in the music industry for the last 15 years[1].

The status quo is that users have both the right and the ability to block ads. (The only missing piece is the knowledge or awareness of how to do so). In a DMCA-like situation, I can't see how things would realistically change for consumers for the better.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9414211

[1] Spotify doesn't count, since it's partially owned by the record labels. So the last major leap forward was.... iTunes? That was 2001.

    Spotify doesn't count, since it's partially owned 
    by the record labels. So the last major leap forward
    was.... iTunes? That was 2001.

Also in 2001, http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhapsody_(online_music_servic... :

"Rhapsody was the first streaming on-demand music subscription service to offer unlimited access to a large library of digital music for a flat monthly fee..."

the major difference is that with ads, there is a solution to hide the ads in the content (native advertising).

Native advertising is what's going to get us.

I usually see this in the context of movies and TV, not web stuff. How would you do native advertising in a web article? As for native advertising in tv/movies, we've had that already for years if not decades; if that were going to be 'the answer' it would already be the answer.

> How would you do native advertising in a web article?

With the whole article.

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/243797/forbes-...

http://www.experiencetheblog.com/2014/08/new-york-times-nati...

Didn't google invest in AdBlock? Or some how give them money?

AdBlock allows companies to pay to have their ads reviewed as "non-intrusive" and then those ads are allowed to be displayed by default. Users can still opt to block those as well.

From the article:

>Eyeo GmbH [...] collects millions or[sic] euros from large players such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Taboola, who all gave in to Eyeo blackmail to have their ads whitelisted.

Google/Facebook/Apple may not be as concerned by this as you may think; strategically, they would probably be happy if slow decline of advertising income on desktop would eventually make every publisher to move to walled gardens of mobile platforms, completely controlled by them.

You may end up with a world with nearly unblockable, more creepy ads, and no more open web as we know it today.

> [...] would eventually make every publisher to move to walled gardens of mobile platforms, completely controlled by them.

Ad-blocking is ad-blocking, you'll always be able to do it another way if one current way no longer works. It might be inconvenient (as it is on an iPhone, for example), but we'll get there.

Google is trying Contributor, which allows you (the user) to spend a few dollars per month to remove ads while still benefiting the sites you visit. They're trying to get buy in by showing the amount of money you're giving to each site. For example, my local newspaper got 4 cents from me today because I read an article about a bridge closing.

But besides getting people to pay, Contributor is facing a problem with sites using multiple ad networks. The Onion, for example, is both participating in Contributor and continuing to run ads from other sources. So if I turn uBlock off for their site, I see the "Thanks for being a contributor!" message (instead of one ad) right under two giant ads.

I'm not a 'contributor' yet (but I like the idea... and I DESPISE ads, so I will look this 'contributor' thing), but I have to say, the "Thank for being a contributor" message seems too redundant (and corny). I want as little distractions as possible, I wouldn't want to be seeing the gratuitous thank you messages filling up the space that ads used to -- please just use it for content, or just leave it blank.

You do get an option of what to display as the contributor. The message is the default, but there's a transparent option, as well as an option to show cat pictures instead of ads.

But it is very muted and I very rarely note it is there. Here's an example: http://imgur.com/28jjUjr

Thank you for bringing this up.

I haven't heard of Contributor until now, but I'm curious as to how the technology works. Would privacy extensions like Ghostery interfere with the collection of visit statistics that would determine the distribution of your contributions?

It is served just like any other ad from Google, it just shows a "Thank You" message in place of the ad. If Ghostery prevents Google ads from working, it would also disable tracking for Contributor.

When I first signed up, I had to reconfigure uBlock to allow ads from these Google networks so I could then see the contributor block instead of ads.

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