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Ask HN: Will ad blockers kill your startup?

2 points by markyc ↗ HN
Does your product use js tracking?

Many products using js includes are currently being blocked by ghostery, privacy badger, etc (such as mixpanel, optimizely, qualaroo, store mapper, etc)

With trackers just growing in popularity, what is your long term plan to stay relevant in this space?

6 comments

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dieulot
I just posted an article detailing how to circumvent iOS 9 content blockers here: http://dieulot.net/bypass-ios-content-blockers

(It’s on “new”, if anyone is feeling like upvoting it.)

rnovak
So, serious question, but your solution to people paying to avoid advertising is to circumvent it anyway? Are you surprised when your click-thru rates are abysmal?
crazypyro
Are all of those people paying though? I block a lot of trackers and I don't pay a cent.
Nadya
>Of course, the subdomain can’t be the same for every domain, otherwise content blockers will be able to block them as easily as today, with just one rule. It needs to be a random string of character for each site. Something like http://qngosjscn.mysite.com/analytics.js.

Once a pattern is used a Regex would defeat the subdomain idea easily. That or they could whitelist known subdomains that are "useful" and blacklist anything else. Random 8 characters won't help you against a better-written version of ^(http://)\w{8}\.

Making it look "legitimate" doesn't help. The moment people see the contents of your analytics.js (regardless if you called it "easter_egg_kittens.js" or not) they'd simply block that javascript. People aren't reading the name of the .js, they're reading all the js you serve and adding any analytics to a blocklist. It's human-curated, not machine-made. If your code can be read by humans it can be blocked by humans.

You need to include the javascript with other important functionality - and at that point, if people really wanted to circumvent it, they would use Greasemonkey to load javascript they do need and block your version of the file to avoid the analytics/ads.

E:

I could blacklist *.js from the example.com and whitelist only the necessary .js for the site to function. None of your randomizing URL's or bullshit would work.

It's a losing battle. If someone wants to block your ads - they will. The power dynamic is in their favor.

cm2012
You just have to make it hard enough for the majority of people to not bother with adblockers. If you can force even a single step beyond getting an extension, most people won't do it.
Nadya
The casual user wouldn't have to configure anything, the add-on would take care of it all by syncing to a curated blocklist which is doing all the heavy lifting. This is how it already works.