What We Talk About When We Talk About Ad Blocking

&quot;Wen you use an ad blocker, that’s stealing. It’s no different than ripping music. It’s no different than pirating movies.” Adverisers and publishers still don&#x27;t get it. They see adblockers as some Napster-like problem: people use it to get free content. Block the adblockers and the problem will go away.<p>Never mind the issues visitors have with intrusive adds, bandwidth hogging ads and excessive tracking and invasion of privacy. Their solution is some magical self-regulation. Yeah, like that gonna work.<p>They turn a blind eye to eye the real problem: people don&#x27;t trust online advertising anymore. And why should they? Everywhere they go, they get bombarded with useless, &quot;targeted&quot; ads that stalks them from site to site, questionable calls to action to trick them into clicking and a user experience only sadomasochistic vusitors would enjoy.<p>There&#x27;s no shame in using adblockers. It&#x27;s a matter of staying sane.

<i>That’s stealing. It’s no different than ripping music. It’s no different than pirating movies</i><p>What a ridiculous and disturbing analogy. I&#x27;d say it&#x27;s no different than looking away from things I don&#x27;t want to see or closing my eyes, or covering my ears, and an adblocker is simply technology to assist me in doing so. Do advertisers really think they have the rights to force people to consume content? One question I&#x27;d really like to ask him is if he carefully views and absorbs the content of <i>every single ad he encounters</i>, because it would be terribly hypocritical of him not to!

I don&#x27;t use Ad-Blockers and find the naming itself is wrong. I use an URL-Blocker with a list of patterns i define to block data from URLs that i found in the past to degrade my online experience inacceptably. Those may include ads, but those may also be completely unrelated things.<p>The point here is, i&#x27;m not blocking ads, i&#x27;m customizing my web experience completely.

<i>he’s already looking at potential workarounds, whether that involves hiding content until people turn off their ad blockers (“But we’ll say it nicer than that”)</i><p>This does not sound like the type of thing a partner in a voluntary business arrangement does. It sounds like somebody participating in a mutually-antagonistic relationship.<p>We live in a world where tens of thousands of app developers work hundreds or thousands of hours to create apps for various app stores. Most of these will never make enough to break even. It&#x27;s a world where the average teenager can click a button and get a game to play for dozens of hours -- for free. If they don&#x27;t like the ads, they can pay a couple of bucks and continue playing for dozens of hours.<p>So, in this system where people trade this involvement of time for this small amount of money, what would the 5-minute experience of reading a news article be worth? A penny? Less? I&#x27;m thinking we&#x27;re talking a tenth or a hundredth of a penny. Of course, for the <i>publisher</i>, it&#x27;s a different equation, but we don&#x27;t price things based on how much it costs to make them, we price them based on what the market will bear.<p>The ad model was a great stop-gap for a couple of decades. It&#x27;s time has come to a close, as it should. As hardware prices continue to drop, perhaps the next step will be advertiser-funded hardware -- with full ad-blocking enabled. Instead of &quot;owning&quot; the web property, advertisers will own the hardware that gets you to the web property.

Don&#x27;t let anyone tell you that if online advertising disappeared, there would be nothing interesting to read online.<p>There was an abundance of interesting things to read on the web (produced by amateur writers and by students and professionals who make their living as professors, scientists, engineers, technologists, etc) before advertising appeared on the internet (around 1994). Even if we ignore the web, there was an abundance of interesting things to read on the internet and its predecessor (the ARPAnet): specifically, there was plenty to read in newsgroups (starting in 1979) on mailing lists (starting in 1975) and on &quot;anonymous&quot; FTP servers.<p>Before 1991, commercial activity was not even allowed on the US internet backbone. (Since the backbone was used by most internet users -- even users in other countries -- that amounted to a <i>de facto</i> internet-wide ban on commercial activity.) For example, although employers and employees (that is, W2 workers) were allowed to use the backbone to make help-wanted and work-wanted posts, contractors (1099 workers) and organizations seeking contractors were not because that was considered too much like commerce. Even with that ban on almost all commercial activity, the internet was a very lively and engaging place.

Dear all publishers,<p>Stop using shitty third-party injection scripts to deliver advertising. Find another way.<p>Dear advertisers,<p>Please start trusting publishers to accurately report page views to you, like you used to for print media. There are laws to prevent them from lying to you.<p>If those two happen, and ads are unobtrusive (ideally, static content), I&#x27;ll disable my adblocker for your site. Until then, sorry, you don&#x27;t get to force me to put up with your crap. By all means detect my ad-blocker and hold back all your content, that&#x27;s totally acceptable by me.

Ad blockers are great! There are no acceptable ads, or good ad networks.<p>I will never, ever disable them, ever, for any reason. There&#x27;s no upside to it. If your site dies for lack of ad revenue, well, the market has spoken.

&gt; &quot;The ethics of ad blocking&quot;<p>I will never willingly click an ad, period. If I even as much as look at an ad, and if I decide the product merits a bit of my time, I will google for information on the product. Over the years I have learned to ignore ads. My brain must have, by now, a carefully arranged neural (eh) network that blocks out ads already. An ad blocker would only spare my devices the same problem. I can&#x27;t remember the last time I saw an ad outside.<p>That said, ads are worthless of my time, bandwidth and screen space. I don&#x27;t want to download your tracking gizmos, stock images, crafted keywords, animations, whatever.<p>Replace all ads with donate buttons, and I will accept them. And donate, if I enjoy your content.

Ad Blocking is technologically straightforward because of the ease with which 3rd-party ads are incorporated into webpages: typically it involves a relatively simple change to the page template to include some scripts and a new page element or two. It&#x27;s this very simplicity that make it so tempting for content providers to so easily add more, but again, makes it equally easy to remove. Since it&#x27;s just templates and scripts all the actual fetching of ads is done by the client, so very few resources are expended by the content provider.<p>Ad providers need to move to integrate on the server-side where the content is more intricately woven into the actual content of the page. All images and perhaps URLs that provide interaction would be from the origination domain. There wouldn&#x27;t be 3rd party URLs exposed and it could be more difficult to distinguish ad content from story content, at least algorithmicly.<p>The costs of this sort of integration would be significantly higher and content providers would need to be more judicious with who they work with to provide the ads.<p>I imagine in this sort of environment most ads would revert to the sort of passive, informational form of print advertising.<p>They would also be directly responsible for what data they share with third parties as all interaction would be going directly through their servers.

That most people claim that the invasion of privacy as the worst part of online advertising rings true to me too.<p>I don&#x27;t mind ads. I detest the idea that people are profiling me.<p>Retargeted ads, where I&#x27;ve just been searching for a flight on one site and then I visit a completely different site that has an ad for flights to and from my chosen destination, drive me to deliberately avoid that company in the future if I can help it. I find it completely disturbing.<p>Profiling is what makes me primarily use an ad blocker.

This guy (and his employer) is upset because, like in the music industry, consumer-driven countermeasures to questionable business practices are prompting new business models. And like the failed attempts at DRMing all the things, these &quot;workarounds&quot; are going to end up hurting publishers more if they pursue it. Give me an alternative to this &quot;piracy&quot; (HA!) and if it&#x27;s good enough, I&#x27;ll pay.<p>Or say I turn off my ad blocker. Will TechCrunch et al. stop creating pointless articles with titles optimized to get clicks, i.e. page views for their now-unblocked ads? [1] Bloggers are in the same business as advertisers of swindling users into viewing their content, and under the more dangerous guise of &quot;useful information&quot; and sometimes &quot;reliable fact-based reporting.&quot;<p>Ads aren&#x27;t the entire problem. It&#x27;s the systematic use of psychological tricks and behavioral analytics to direct and hold our attention in an increasingly noisy internet. So I&#x27;m not going to listen to producers with vested interests when they question my &quot;ethics&quot; for exerting control over my information consumption. Good try, though. [2]<p>[1] Obviously TC isn&#x27;t the worst perpetrator, but I did scroll to the bottom of this article and instantly get a title to pique my reactionary interest: &quot;Are We At The End Of The Android Heyday?&quot; (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;gallery&#x2F;are-we-at-the-end-of-the-android-heyday&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;gallery&#x2F;are-we-at-the-end-of-the-andro...</a>).<p>[2] Anyone else notice the previous title from the permalink? &quot;Raymond Carver Loved Ads.&quot; This one was much better.

&quot;The report also estimates that ad blocking will cost publishers $22 billion in revenue this year.&quot;<p>Ad blocking will save advertisers $22 billion in wasted spending this year.

&gt; publishers saying that there’s an implicit agreement that they’ll give you lots of content for free<p>Except that it&#x27;s not free, the costs are obfuscated. There are people&#x2F;entities earning revenues as a result of the ads&#x2F;trackers&#x2F;miners running on pages, and the money for these revenues surely is not created out of thin air, it comes from <i>somewhere</i>.<p>If people were able to completely assess the (currently obfuscated) cost to them, they could make an informed decision about whether they rather skip the middle persons and pay themselves directly the content providers.<p>&gt; asking users to pay if they don’t want to see ads<p>I am very skeptical of any claim that paywall = no ads&#x2F;trackers&#x2F;miners. Ad brokers will <i>always</i> push for their ads to be shown -- that&#x27;s their job, and content providers will always be open to increase their sources of revenue regardless of whether they have a paywall or not.<p>Edit: of course there are also the less obfuscated costs, like extra bandwidth, shorter battery-life, and other such inconveniences.

I don&#x27;t know for sure but personally I have gotten so few relevant ads over the last few years that I start to question all those bright engineers at Google Adwords&#x2F;Adsense.<p>This time it is dating sites. I mean: a company that has access to most of my search history since, IDK, 2005 and still serves me ads for Russian, Ukrainian, Thai, Chinese and whatnot dating. This being despite the fact that I never clicked one single of them, the fact that I explicitely clicked on the feedback button and told them I was not interested and the fact that I volunteered to tell them what my interests really are.<p>Before that it was one weird trick. Before that it was &quot;Is your PC slow&quot;. Why o why are all ads either not targeted or targeted at everyone but me?

I can still use my computer, my bandwidth and my time as I see fit. I refuse to waste time waiting for ads to load, closing popups, stopping videos (with sound!), and sieveing through a visual mess to find the actual content on a webpage. I&#x27;m not particularly keen on the manipulative techniques used in ads either.<p>If you do the right thing and make your content accessible through a subscription, so that you can do your job without relying on ads, and I find that you produce quality content then I will gladly subscribe, as I do for a few sites which do actual journalism.<p>I suspect part of the problem lies here, with ads you can scrap revenue with click-baity, devoid of content articles, but people aren&#x27;t going to give you money directly for that.

In a world with zero advertising (but good alternative business models) no one will wish for ads return. They&#x27;re not good for the world and don&#x27;t need to be part of the future.

The way I view it, I have every right to determine what gets downloaded to my computer and what does not. Ads have proven themselves time and again to be at best worthless and at worst outright harmful, so I block them. I have no ethical dilemma about this.<p>There&#x27;s already more content available than it is possible for anyone to consume. For the most part, none if it is content that anyone really <i>needs</i> to consume. If one interesting-sounding article is hidden behind a paywall or obnoxious ad, oh well, there&#x27;s another one a click away that isn&#x27;t.

So what is everybody who uses an ad-blocker planning to do when browsers start to support WebAssembly? When it becomes easy to compile C libraries like freetype - or a proprietary replacement, designed for obfuscation - I expect any website paranoid about &quot;controlling the user experience&#x27; will simply use the browser for the &lt;canvas&gt; tag.<p>Blocking elements with CSS (or whatever) will no longer be possible, and the Halting Problem says you&#x27;re going to have a hard time trying to do similar blocking of the WebAssembly bytecode. You might be able to block a few image URLs for a while, but the ad industry will quickly migrate to any technique that has has a real effect of bypassing ad-blockers.<p>This is the problem with having a Turing complete language as a dependency for rendering documents; the only reason it hasn&#x27;t become a big problem <i>yet</i> is that the technologies involved are fairly new and can be awkward to use for some use cases. With a framebuffer and a way to generically use any language, those speed bumps no longer apply.

I can provide the view from an indie mobile programmer that lives from advertising revenue.<p>The problem is simple: a lot of people don&#x27;t want to pay for things (I include myself here).<p>I live from the money I earn from the adversting in some chat&#x2F;dating apps. The reality is that if I removed the ads and put a price on them I would be without job. To make it more relatable to you, I would be a failed entrepeneur without job.<p>I don&#x27;t even like to put some kind of pay-to-enable features in my apps because I don&#x27;t like them. I want my apps to be free 100%, for anyone can use all their features equally.<p>And also I really dislike how freemium is applied to these kind of apps, e.g: you receive some notification that someone has liked your profile but can only know if you use some credits you pay for. I know that I could be earning a lot more money using tactics like these, but I feel like they are shameful.<p>Ads are not perfect, maybe you dont like them, but remember that the alternative would be to pay for the app. Do you think people would pay for 100% the apps they use?

If content sites want me to disable ad blocking they&#x27;ll have to promise me a few things first. a) they&#x27;ll go out of their way to ensure that they will never, ever serve me malware. b) they&#x27;ll make sure that there is a balance between content and ads. I don&#x27;t want to see a dozen different ads on the same page. While content costs so does my bandwidth. c) they&#x27;ll stop tracking me all over the web. Sure, tracking works for them pretty well but it&#x27;s an intrusion of privacy for which they never bothered to ask permission.<p>So as long as they don&#x27;t play nice, I won&#x27;t either. And I sincerely hope that the adoption of ad blocking spreads even further especially in smartphones.<p>Oh and btw, while we&#x27;re on the topic how about we discuss how publishers rip off advertisers by buying traffic and&#x2F;or clicks from botnets and other shady tactics?

This is what happen when you have a industry that depend on deliberate deception to generate revenue. Once people start to find out they construct counter-measures to protect them self and the industry start to create counter-counter-measures in order to sustain itself.<p>As a Internet user I expect and consent that a website can provide useful content when I access it. I do not expect nor consent that the website give me malware that tracks me, nor do I give the publishing website permission to store and sell sensitive and private information about me, nor do I expect the site to fill my screen with excessive and intrusive sound and images that has the intention to deceive and distract me.<p>The historically solution to this problem has been for government to step in and create regulation that prevent the deception. Advertisement in TV, movies and radio is heavily regulated where the Internet space has so far not been touched. Alternative the industry could try fix this themselves by applying some self-restraints but so far the path of least resistance has been for users to take control of their own computers and deny the industry by technical means, ie ad blockers.

&quot;It’s no different than ripping music. It’s no different than pirating movies.&quot;<p>When you rip music or pirate movies, you are doing something they don&#x27;t want you to do.<p>When you block an ad, you are <i>not</i> doing something they want you to do (loading the ad code and executing it).<p>So yeah, ad blocking looks very different to copyright infringement to me.

How are ad blocking &quot;losses&quot; ever estimated? If X% of visitors start using ad blocking, how many fewer cluck throughs would be lost? How many sales? Isn&#x27;t it pretty likely that the same people who use ad-blockers actually do so because they don&#x27;t read or click on ads, which is the whole reason ads are noise to them?<p>Personally in the rare occasion that I see an ad I actually consider clicking I rather browse to the target site in a new window than click the link, to avoid revealing to N different companies in the ad chain that I like shoes or toyotas.

I don&#x27;t use an adblocker. IMO, the more people use adblockers, the more ads will appear to keep sites profitable.<p>Do I hate ads? yes. Do I click on ads? no. Do I look at ads? hardly.