Ad Nauseam

Stop calling them ad blockers. They block surveillance features that advertisers put in their ads. I do not believe that ads would be blocked by surveillance blockers if they were just ads. Absent the surveillance, how would they recognize them? If ads were identical to the ads in analogue newspapers then surveillance blockers would let them through. When I read an analogue newspaper or magazine nobody is knowing if I read the ads or not. They only know whether they get results from advertising in that outlet. And they know that by tracking. They could run ads that don't spy on people. I always use surveillance blockers. I never shut them down for anybody. It is especially offensive when sites that are hardcopy outfits which have gone digital to keep up with the times complain about surveillance blockers. They certainly know how to run ads that are just ads. There is no technical difference between the ads and the rest of the page. The layout is the thing. They have experience with this and professional advertising people know about tracking results.

and again Flash is the scapegoat<p>&quot;By converting unsafe flash-based ads to safe HTML5 ads, they lower the risk of infection from a hostile ad.&quot; is laughable at best<p>An Ad Network is one of the fastest way to deliver a payload to a lot of users<p>Don&#x27;t fool yourself, Operating Systems, Browsers and HTML5&#x2F;JS also have a hell lot of CVE that can be exploited<p>It&#x27;s funny how a company like Google making Billions from ads, having ton of smart engineers, have never figured out during the last decade how to &quot;scan ads for malware&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s not like anyone can upload an ad to those big network, or that they don&#x27;t QA the ads before delivering them ...<p>Imagine this unlikely scenario: malware delivered by HTML5&#x2F;JS<p>I guess we&#x27;ll all have to run for the hills if that happen

Or a third way, everybody hides content behind paywall, hail the new web 3.0. Maybe not a bad thing, subscription could bring the old qualified journalism back the in the print era.<p>If you don&#x27;t think anti ad blocker is a problem, where is this article coming from? Hmmm, afraid that more websites would follow the trend so less content to read? The attitude that this is only websites and advertisers&#x27; problem is not as constructive as the author might presume.

&quot;I think that we need to hold the web sites accountable for the content that they display. If browsers get infected by ads at Forbes or people buy knock-off watches from ads at Yahoo, then we need people to sue Forbes and Yahoo. Remember: these web sites authorized the placement of the ad on their web page.&quot;<p>So effectively what you&#x27;re saying is that we should eliminate ad networks. There is no reasonable way to screen every ad before it is shown when using an ad network. So in order to be safe from lawsuits, publishers would have to go back to directly contracting with advertisers for every ad. Certainly there would be some benefits to that in terms of reduced low quality ads. The problem is, the added overhead of doing so would put many small publishers out of business. Dealing with individual advertisers is a huge job, with massive economies of scale; it just doesn&#x27;t make sense for websites that are orders of magnitude smaller than Forbes and Yahoo.

The publishers aren&#x27;t very innocent themselves. Clickbait articles are nowadays not a dirty strategy to get ad views, but to be expected. Then you have the endemic tracking going on, the tracking that has become intertwined with viewing an ad. Being tracked and seeing an ad... it&#x27;s the same thing! Nowhere else in the real world but on Internet is this to be expected. And it&#x27;s a debate that is frustratingly only discussed in organizations like the EFF, never lifted to the general public.<p>The mafia comparison feels much more like a stretch when talking of ad blockers than when talking of the bulk of the world&#x27;s news sites secretly (unless inspecting network traffic or HTML code) using a common few advertisement agencies.<p>I think the recent cookie laws feel pretty useless, especially since cookies aren&#x27;t nasty by themselves. &quot;Hi! This site uses cookies! Click here to learn more.&quot; It doesn&#x27;t tell me anything. It doesn&#x27;t imply that the site is evil nor good. However, give me a law requiring web sites to say &quot;Hi! We are part of a tracking network where your behavior on this site will be registered.&quot; Then we&#x27;re talking. Where the link doesn&#x27;t lead to an explanation by the publisher, but be required to lead to a link on an external part with an easily digestible, up front explanation of what an ad tracker does and can do. I&#x27;m honestly quite fed up that this offensive behavior can keep going on behind the scenes. All people see are photos of a new car model. A normal ad that is anything but normal.<p>For as long as there is this World Wild West on the publishers&#x27; sides, I&#x27;m not going to change my behavior on defending myself. Because I look at this as a form of defense. It&#x27;s simply like running antivirus tools on Windows. I wouldn&#x27;t want a trojan horse to be downloaded that uploads my browsing behavior to some server either. The difference from what these guys are doing seems razor-thin.

&quot;But keep in mind: not everyone is Google, not ever web site has a huge amount of traffic. With online ads, payment is usually tied to the click-through rate (CTR). The CTR is typically around 1% (actual percentage varies by web site). So if 100 people visit your web page, then 1 person will probably click on the ad, generating a fraction of a cent. If each click pays $0.001, then you need 1000 clicks to earn $1. And if 1% of uses click, then that&#x27;s about 100,000 visitors.&quot;<p>I&#x27;m not sure where these numbers come from, but unless you are in fact running a spam site, and likely even then, revenue per click is going to be higher than a fraction of a cent. As a random data point, it looks like the combined revenue per click from Adsense on our sites is around 30 cents per click at the moment.

I admit it, I look at linkbait articles and sites... The problem is that it&#x27;s crossed a line that there are so many intruisive ads, that the web doesn&#x27;t work without blockers.<p>If I happen to click on an article from facebook on my phone, the resulting page shouldn&#x27;t be something I can&#x27;t even scroll&#x2F;read because it&#x27;s so riddled with ads.<p>Another part is an extension of what TFA says... they should be held responsible... current techniques are iframes, and when a timeout occurs or it bounces to another ad network, another layer of iframe and tracking scripts runs... if an average ad is 3 layers of iframes, and an average page has 5-8 ads, that&#x27;d 15-24 complete extra browser contexts just for ads...

Just to throw out this idea I&#x27;ve been thinking about for a bit as a ad-golden-rule: The other end of an ad has to have an identifiable person attached (ideally a citizen or from a non-poor country): An ad-auditor.<p>So now the other end of the ad is not faceless&#x2F;identiti-less. If the ad is found to serve malware, there&#x27;s someone to ban&#x2F;take action against (like banning from a good-paying ad-audit job for life). Ad-networks that require the golden rule can be white-listed by blockers, and become trusted. Networks that don&#x27;t are considered malware haven.<p>Could this work? In the current ad-blocking war, the use of ad-blockers will only rise-and-rise, and something has got to give.

One point: by far most websites are on a pay by impression rather than pay by click. More predictable revenue.

The article misses a major point, ads are a form a surveillance and as such more and more people prefer to block them out of privacy concerns.

One solution. We will watch ads. The revenue will be taken by micropayment site like Flattr and distribute to sites we visit.