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Comment by bitmapbrother | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised by the complete disregard for people and companies that are reliant on ad revenue for a living. It's only a matter of time before we reach the tipping point and sites start blocking browsers from viewing their content if they detect an ad blocker is installed. I'm surprised more sites don't do this.

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Some sites try. It's an unsolvable problem, like DRM. My machine, my rendering rules. Only way around it is restricted clients, like consoles and iPhones and so on. Or maybe Intel SGX, which allows remote attestation of running specific code.

And ad companies brought this on themselves by being idiotic and annoying. Even Google is as bad as the others in the 90s. On mobile apps, I get scammy "virus scan now" or "clean phone fast" with blinking yellow and red. They link to the Google Play store, to install some app that requires all permissions.

It's usually solved by paywalls. For better or worse.

> My machine, my rendering rules

Indeed, but also: my server, my choice not to serve pages to you.

uBlock, ABP etc. are fairly easy to get around if you're serving your own ads/analytics.

You'll find it's because for the most part, the amount of people browsing websites with an ad blocker is still significantly lower than those who don't, so companies just let it slide. Though of course it's growing every year so maybe in the near future your scenario might happen.

Praytell, what's the solution to make sure a remote client device is rendering your page and executing your scripts exactly as you intend? Because you could take the same thing and sell it as rights management software and make a killing.

If it ever gets to a point where the revenue lost via adblockers gets significant then you'll probably start seeing sites only serving content via distribution channels they can control completely (eg paywalls, apps, desktop clients). In fact, you can see people starting to experiment with this type of distribution model.

I think it's a save bet to assume that more providers will compensate the reduction in ad revenue by offering yearly subscriptions like Amazon Prime.

I don't like that, but all in all the online advertising industry isn't that much money divided by the amount of people participating in it. Maybe 20$ to 50$ a month for the whole thing.

This doesn't include the hidden costs imposed by the new gate keeper dynamics established with such a subscription model, the reduced participation abilities for poorer people, the (vague, I know) anonymity enabled by ad metrics compared to credit card credentials.

I still block ads though. Being able to block ads and free ride on ad financed content is simply not an equilibrium. Idealistic sacrifices won't change that.

When a popular site tries to detect adblockers the filters/rules are updated with exceptions for files that are tested. Simple way to reduce ad-block effectives is not to use ad-networks but advertiser don't like that idea.

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