Is it possible, like ubo, to block specific elements on the page that are not considered 'ads' by default? (like those annoying modals asking you to subscribe)
Looks like a good feature. Anyone here using Opera regularly? How is it on OS X? I use Chrome mainly, but I'm currently in the process of moving to Safari on El Capitan.
I switched from Firefox to Opera on Linux. Opera is faster (especially cold start), has great support for high resolution screens, support for touch input, access to Chrome extensions and built in flash. The best browser for Linux IMHO.
I know. I just don't like Chrome's UI and it's heavy integration with Google. I am trying to rely less on Google. I have switched to a different email provider, DDG is my default search engine and I use Owncloud for contacts, calendar and files.
You think many publishers would have paid to be whitelisted in Opera even at the height of its popularity? Not so sure about that. I think it's kind of a sleazy business model anyway.
Microsoft is also adding adblocking to Edge, which makes you wonder if the sites that rely on ads for finance their operation is designing a "Plan B". Granted it's not the two biggest browsers, and Google isn't likely to add ad blocking to Chrome, but still the it must make some sites rethink their business plan.
Actually, I read Google won't be too late to the party adding ad blocking to Chrome. Of course, with their ad networks whitelisted by default. To be honest, I think if they haven't done this already is because it would be such a monopolistic move. Most AdBlockers come with Google adsense whitelisted, but imagine if Google did that themselves. But considering not only how widespread the use of ad blockers is, but also how other browsers are soon going to ship with an ad blocker built in, now they'll be able to do it without anyone complaining about it.
What Google would have to do is participate in some sort of standards body for ads, like the IAB except with the sole purpose of determining "compliant" ad companies vs ad companies who will be blocked by default.
If they can get enough buy in, then they'll implement adblocking in Chrome while saying "we're not using monopoly power, we are simply implementing the standard X that Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera and Firefox have all implemented before us".
The exception list now contains only four websites that offer a very good experience to their users with ads on.
They say that now, but what about a year from now? Look at the scandal around the original Adblock extension. Everyone wants to maintain their own whitelist. I suppose this is the new monetization strategy? Pay us to whitelist you?
I remember when they wrote a great URL blocker which was blazingly fast and very easy for the user to edit and came with zero opinions.
It was built in the browser's engine core, had some UI elements to help add or remove things quickly, but at the end of the day was just a text file in your profile.
I remember it because it's what Opera 12 has, which is still my main browser to this day.
Edit:
!!!
As https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11397230 points out, this new ad blocker is even worse than anyone could think: It has literally no user interaction, except from adding websites to a whitelist. Other than the whitelist it has exactly two settings: On / Off
If it's blocking something on a website where you don't want it to block, but also want to block ads? Tough luck. If you're on a website where it's failing to block something you want blocked? Tough luck. If you want to block something that's not an ad? Tough luck.
They need to clean up their menu a little. Why is there the News, History and Speed Dial option in there if I already have them on each new tab?
Otherwise I love this new feature and that they adopted CT, but I think I speak for many people when I say that I'm a little worried about the trustworthiness of their new Chinese owners.
A quick Google search about them doesn't inspire confidence:
EDIT: Did a few tests on several websites. It seems for those that those that are lighter on ads like WashingtonPost, it can make the loading time 15-30% faster, while for the heavier ones like iMore, TheVerge, BusinessInsider, it's 50-75% (depending on the ads they show at the time, I assume). The heavier ones would even take over 30 seconds to load without ad-blocking. I'd say for most sites you should see a ~50% faster loading with this enabled.
I hope they include tracking-protection option as well in the future, as Firefox did. Then those features need to come to mobile, too. I don't think Firefox has implemented TP on mobile either yet.
I'm really beginning to wonder where the ad-blocking wars are going to leave us.
If I ran some kind of online content, and it was clear the majority of my money was made in advertising, and that the majority of my money was being eroded by ad blockers, I feel like the natural next step is to fill your content with ads that are simply not blockable.
I've started seeing this with YouTube videos, where people quickly (or not so quickly) plug audible at the start of their videos. I have no doubt that "native" advertising is becoming both more frequent and more insidious (because obvious native advertising doesn't work as well as non-obvious).
I have to be honest: I'm not really a fan of this future. I think the right future is either a) paid content (which very few people will go for) or b) ad-supported content, but those ads aren't evil animated audible malware vector infected boxes of non-relevance. This leaves a chance that the content will actually be content, and not some headphone review that you're entirely unsure who has paid for the existence of.
Perhaps instead of having massive blocklists with the occasional white-listed website, there should be some kind of automated sin-binning, where websites (and ad agencies) that have proven to behave themselves (non-animated, relevant, safe advertisements) are allowed through while dodgy scum gets blocked for N months or until they have a proven amount of time where they have shown themselves to be safe.
This doesn't solve the whole "I don't want people tracking me" thing. I'm not really sure how to solve that. I don't see how you can. I see the future for that being more and more walled gardens so you can be tracked server side, which is also entirely undesirable.
As processing capacity becomes ever more available, even that can be combatted. I recently converted a bunch of pod casts into an audiobook for personal use by stripping the variably-sized intro section with some perl that uses sox and pdl to search for a known sample, and then cuts off everything before and including that sample with ffmpeg.
It took maybe 3 minutes per intro section.
It might conceivably be possible to do this kind of thing in realtime in the future.
> I've started seeing this with YouTube videos, where people quickly (or not so quickly) plug audible at the start of their videos. I have no doubt that "native" advertising is becoming both more frequent and more insidious (because obvious native advertising doesn't work as well as non-obvious).
In the UK they must make it very clear, before the user starts playing the video, that it contains sponsored content.
Honestly, I'm a bigger fan of plugging Audible in a youtube video than the current advertising situation. It's a lot more like newspaper or TV advertising, in that the person making the video has set a price for it, vetted/approved each ad, and made sure it's targeted at their general audience.
It doesn't let 3rd parties serve me arbitrary javascript for tracking, it doesn't give me drive-by malware, and it generally isn't selling me penis enlargement or one weird trick to lose weight.
I still don't have an email newsletter, but I don't hate MailChimp's ads. And if somebody came to me and said "Hey, you know about computers, how do I set up an email newsletter?" I'd probably point them to MailChimp (it's the only service I know by name). They're getting plenty of brand recognition even if I don't use it myself.
I'd even say I miss the Tiny Letter ads in 99% invisible.
I agree. In addition to that, I find Audible ads quite bearable. Since I liked the video content, the book recommendation that's going to come up would be relevant to me, without tracking me.
"Native" ads, in contrast, want me to buy a scooter (the Indian kind), eat Maggi, and gamble online. Sometimes, they repeatedly push some crappy Bollywood movie that I will never watch.
The ad industry gets so much money, surely they could come up with a way of not annoying me.
I agree. It sounds selfish, but I wish adblocking didn't go to mainstream.
I'm "guilty" of it too, I installed adblockers to all of my friends and family.
The current situation is just extortion in the end - pay to whitelist. And native advertising. Someone who is (unfortunately) in the in the business a little bit, it's horrible. You'd be surprised how many tweets, facebook or blog posts by your favourite people ("influencers") are just paid advertisement. Yes, you fell for it too -- people who say advertising doesn't work for them.
The future, in my eyes, is very very dark. Think of HN where people submit stories to only paid content. Sure, you Silicon Valley guys can pay for it, but not young and poor lurkers (I was one of them when I started reading HN) from not the richest countries in the world.
I hate ads and now I hate adblocking... and I don't know a good solution.
I agree with a lot of what you say, however the idea of sin-binning badly-behaving advertisers is very tricky. The problem is that both the website owners and the viewers seem to have little say in what gets stuck on their pages.
Take the recent cases of malware-spreading adverts on legitimate sites. These sites get their ad spaces filled through agencies that then broker further deals, often selling ad space on-demand through live auctions to others, and so on. So, the issue of who is at fault becomes very murky. Who is to blame? Naturally, the malware originators are guilty, but at each level removed, someone has failed to do proper due diligence. And at each level out, that due diligence becomes even more difficult. When you get to the site owner, it's difficult to see what they could do to stop the attacks (other than not having ads at all).
Even Google, who should be well equipped to filter out the bad guys, can't seem to prevent scum from getting on to their ad networks. Or is it that they don't really care? It's hard to tell.
But going back to the sin-binning, there's just no way to tell who to sin-bin. The 'block everything' approach is effective and just about everything else fails.
> Take the recent cases of malware-spreading adverts on legitimate sites. These sites get their ad spaces filled through agencies that then broker further deals, often selling ad space on-demand through live auctions to others, and so on
Yeah, and I think this is the crux of the problem. Like The Cube, we (as a collective, not you and I) have built his massive incomprehensible machine with an infinite number of moving parts that no one person actually groks the function of. The pictures about a third of the way down this talk[1] are instructive. So not unlike the banks with the GFC, there isn't really some moustache-twirling evil-doer pushing one weird trick ads and malware your way who you can regex out of your life, so you just have to nuke the whole thing from orbit. Which is essentially what we're doing with ad blockers.
Well, there's 2 kinds of filtering, malware from viewing an ad, and malware from clicking an ad. At least we should be permanently blocking ad networks that fall for the first kind of hack.
A whitelist of the top 100 ad networks that haven't let through malware in the past year, if you want to be on the list, submit your code for auditing.
Easy way to get on the list: Only let people create pure text or graphic ads, no code.
I'm optimistic that ad wars will lead to cleaner Internet. Until recently, Internet was like wild west for ads, it's time for more mature, orderly and safer (for end-users) solutions. The problem is not ads themselves, but the unregulated and un-trustworthy ads distribution networks. I wouldn't mind old-fashioned paper like ads (pics + text) that do not try to follow me and include arbitrary, possible malicious code. Currently I see two realistic scenarios: 1) companies that provide checked ads and ensure that they meet certain quality standards (I'm ready to bet that Google will take this path in near future) 2) native ads, where big players host ads on their own domain and sell ad space directly (to costumers or agencies).
Browser vendors could and should block cross-site tracking if they wanted to. The only problem is Google will do that over its dead body, and without Google's Chrome, the other browsers would just look like they are "breaking sites" for using cross-site tracking.
So if you want to stop cross-site mass surveillance-like tracking, keep telling Google to do it.
If we look at email and its spam situation, its rather clear that the future of content publishing that is funded by advertising will have to do so in a much more designed and careful way. The days when you just throw as much ads at the user as possible is over. The light in the tunnel however is that users do accept some advertisement, when its done in a tasteful and useful way. For example, a game review site or lets-play should link to a official source where viewers can buy the game, and both publisher and viewer benefit for such link.
People who do paid/sponsored content is not native advertising when viewers are being tricked to think its something else. Instead its a crime, often by breaking marketing laws and tax laws, and police in many nations have started to investigate and prosecute those who do not follow the law. Since the tax office is involved, I doubt this problem will continue for much longer, but maybe ad block technology could step in and prevent some of the more hidden advertisement by pattern matching logos or something similar to youtube's content ID.
Non-"blatant spam" email advertising really isn't better. Purchasing a product from almost any non-Amazon company will instantly sign you up for an almost daily torrent of email.
Even worse is when you're automatically signed for dead trees being sent to your house, because those don't have unsubscribe links.
It's crazy. I already bought the thing! I don't need more things, or else I would have bought them when I bought the original thing. Yet, companies are treating their customers - people who have actually already bought things - in this terrible manner. Maybe we need legislation mandating opt-in?
I might be the only one with this opinion, but this is just how the world works, and it's a good thing.
If something is annoying, slow and a hassle to use, eventually something better will come along and people will jump on it.
It's always been this way, why are we not watching TV ads anymore? Because there's a better option out there.
The concept seems to be that it's a worrying trend and I should be somehow ashamed for not wanting to view ads? Isn't that ridiculous? Advertisers seem to forget that it's their job to figure out how to advertise effectively. The world has moved on and no one will watch their stupid annoying ad. So they have to come up with something we will tolerate.
People are still complaining that no one is watching ads on TV and people don't buy newspapers. We moved on and they have to as well. I understand that there's small publications / blogs / businesses who are definitely not the "enemy" and I'm not saying they deserve to go out of business. But if the landscape changes, they must adapt too.
I'm sure we can all agree we are better off with Netflix than watching regular TV.
I would like paid content but with affordable prices (like 0.1¢ for small article, not $10 subscription to read a single article). But it needs some big player or few players who'll provide those micropayments without headache and huge fees.
> Perhaps instead of having massive blocklists with the occasional white-listed website, there should be some kind of automated sin-binning, where websites (and ad agencies) that have proven to behave themselves (non-animated, relevant, safe advertisements) are allowed through while dodgy scum gets blocked for N months or until they have a proven amount of time where they have shown themselves to be safe.
It is inevitable that these agencies abuse their position.
> This doesn't solve the whole "I don't want people tracking me" thing. I'm not really sure how to solve that. I don't see how you can. I see the future for that being more and more walled gardens so you can be tracked server side, which is also entirely undesirable.
Native advertising gets around this and it puts power back in the content producers and users, as it should be. It becomes a partnership rather than a parasitic relationship.
Look at films and TV series nowadays -- Netflix provides content users have paid for, Marvel gets to advertise their high-quality library, and product placements are scattered around in a tasteful manner. This is as it should be.
The problem I see with this whole conversation about ad blocking is that focuses so much on the blocking part and less so on how it could affect content per se. I’m of the opinion that ad blocking in the long term could work in benefit of quality content. I mean look at how the landscape is right now. Everyone and their dog can build a crappy site, steal content from major venues, change a title here and a sentence there, apply for AdSense and start monetizing. Why should I give a flying fuck for the sustainability of this model? Content should be original. If that means that 95% of sites out there would disappear I’m fine by that. If it also means that I’d end up paying for content I’m fine by that too. I still pay for paper magazines, I have half a dozen subscriptions to some of them.
What will the advertising industry do? For starters they have to be held accountable if they serve malware. There need to be some strict ruling that will have significant implications. Once we get past that we need to talk about profiling. It’s immoral, period. We don’t like it and I seriously doubt if it’s even working. Once the industry addresses those two issues then we can talk. In the meantime sites could start serving ads from their domains. That could render current ad blocking technology obsolete. It could also make them relevant again, like they used to be before Google took over the industry. In either way they need to start innovating fast, or sit back and whine like spoiled brats while adoption of ad blocking keeps climbing.
>We don’t like it and I seriously doubt if it’s even working
I think you right, the only place where profiling, if you can call it that, is working, is on Amazon, and it basically only works for books.
Most of what we think of as "the advertising industry" isn't exactly advertising anymore. It's a company that will take what you feed them, do some generic processing on it an plaster as many site as possible, big sites if you pay them enough. The amount of incompetent people in the online "advertising" business is staggering. Most of them don't understand how the Internet works. You just get emails with "Hey, put this on your page, it will help us track conversion". Then you review it and realize that their stupid Javascript snippet either break other Javascript, or that their server is to slow to actually handle the requests.
Online advertising has become a huge source of revenue to a whole industry that struggles to justify their value. These people will pressure the publishers and tell them that evil ad blockers are the reason their losing money, but that entire business models is broken. It's just a scam, moving money from companies with actual products and services to publishers of questionable content, via equally shady middlemen.
It wouldn't be so bad if actual work went into producing high quality ads, published on the right media/site and targeted at the right people.
I agree to a certain degree. I'm fine with tasteful, well-placed ads. The problem is that once it became lucrative, content providers binged on ad space such that the remaining real estate for content was overshadowed by that used for advertisements. I _think_ I recall an HN link somewhere that showed some study of how the content:ad ratio has consistently declined, but I can't find the link right now.
Long story short, I agree that it could negatively affect content, but it seems like binging on ad revenue has already negatively affected content.
> Why should I give a flying fuck for the sustainability of this model?
That model? Yeah, screw that. But major news organizations like the New York Times still depend in a huge part on advertising revenue to stay afloat - subscribers alone do not make up the shortfall. So if we want to destroy the content farms we also run the risk of destroying the news organizations that produce the original stories.
The issue is with the user tracking and mutual trust.
If you write an article about cars, it should be possible to find companies your readers might be interested in, and embed it on the page, served from your same domain or CDN. You can track the views easily just by looking at the CDN request log and the click-trough with some javascript. Your ad customer can track the number of click-trough by looking at the referrer field.
If that was the case then your ads probably wouldn't get blocked. Privacy advocates wouldn't have too much issue because the data collection is limited to your website. There is no (a) or (b) choice here, you can still have ads. Just without all the user tracking.
The issue is that the advertisers don't trust your reporting. They want a more fluid relationship where they don't have to build a rapport with your website. Everything needs to be automated away. And for that to work the only way is to also track the users on the website. Then add a bit of greediness and gain Internet-wide user tracking.
Perpetuating that idea that ads either should exist as they are, or that the evil "paid content" will grow is playing the game of the advertisers. It's a false dichotomy because other solutions exist.
Content creators will adapt, and we will all be better off as a result. No one is going to stop creating online content just because they can't figure out how to monetize it effectively yet. Where there is a fanbase, there is always a viable business. Podcasters have been the first to embrace this new paradigm of treating your audience with respect and doing tasteful product endorsements. Others will follow suit or end up abandoned.
The future of advertising is probably represented by the advertorial that then makes it harder than ever for journalists to actually criticize their patrons.
Thanks for such a rationale comment. People so often default to ad-blocking as the best option. I suspect they will be the first to complain when websites start dropping quality because they have no funds or insert 'cash for comment' everywhere and you cant trust news/reviews at all.
If you think about it, that a business can give you so many cool products (e.g. emails, movies, news, calls etc) at no cost with the small inconvenience of having some ads while I've largely learnt to ignore anyway if pretty darn cool.
Hmm, sounds interesting, but wouldn't it need a lot of more resources for computing all that stuff? You also need to actually download and do the work with all those ads.js (that loads another 10 trackers).
How stable is Opera nowadays? I'm lazily searching for a replacement for Firefox, which even fully updated, keeps crashing on all my platforms (Android, Linux, Windows) at annoying rates.
Really? absolutely reckless user here on all platforms, the only crashes I have on desktop are unexpected cumputer shutdowns, on mobile it sometimes crashes right after launch, looks like the UI
Latest Opera is excellent. I keep trying all other browsers periodically, since Opera Software - the company is in a bad shape. But I always keep coming back to Opera.
Despite their company doing badly technically they are still doing a great job. The UI is as fluid as ever, and the rendering is rock-solid. I wish they survive and continue building this browser.
What is their policy with analytics and tracking, beacons, etc? These are some of the most problematic and worrying add-ons to web pages for me, and yet very little gets talked about them. In theory, a well-designed browser (and well-written web pages) can still make all the 3rd party analytics requests without slowing down web site load time (e.g. they can be deferred until the page is loaded), and yet they are the things that I want to block most of all.
Hmm, I haven't used Opera since about 2004. How is it on Linux platforms? I am getting tired of Firefox eating all my ram, and I've never been crazy about Chrome.
One thing I do when I benchmark is to provide all details so that other people can try to reproduce -- anybody can investigate the figures I report.
There is not enough details for me to reproduce here: no sample of which web pages were used in the benchmark, no work on settings used on various blockers. Why is it so difficult to obtain such key information?
I really doubt uBlock Origin's ("uBO") default settings were used given the reported timings (because 6s to load a web page).
Also that uBO is reportedly only 0.2 sec faster than ABP hardly make sense to me, especially on any Chromium-based browsers.
In any case, for those who want to make comparisons for themselves between blockers, here are online tools:
As a former long time Opera user, I'm a little sad to say I don't trust Opera to block ads for me. uBlock Origin does the job just fine, and my gut feeling is Opera will have a whitelist or not block everything. Ever since they switched to being a Chromium skin, I just don't trust them.
I'm also curious how this compares against uBlock Origin. I know uBlock uses a lot less memory and seems a lot faster than ABP for me, and it's curiously missing from their comparison.
82 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadIs it possible, like ubo, to block specific elements on the page that are not considered 'ads' by default? (like those annoying modals asking you to subscribe)
If they can get enough buy in, then they'll implement adblocking in Chrome while saying "we're not using monopoly power, we are simply implementing the standard X that Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera and Firefox have all implemented before us".
They say that now, but what about a year from now? Look at the scandal around the original Adblock extension. Everyone wants to maintain their own whitelist. I suppose this is the new monetization strategy? Pay us to whitelist you?
It was built in the browser's engine core, had some UI elements to help add or remove things quickly, but at the end of the day was just a text file in your profile.
I remember it because it's what Opera 12 has, which is still my main browser to this day.
Edit:
!!!
As https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11397230 points out, this new ad blocker is even worse than anyone could think: It has literally no user interaction, except from adding websites to a whitelist. Other than the whitelist it has exactly two settings: On / Off
If it's blocking something on a website where you don't want it to block, but also want to block ads? Tough luck. If you're on a website where it's failing to block something you want blocked? Tough luck. If you want to block something that's not an ad? Tough luck.
It's depressing how far Opera ASA has fallen.
Edit: had to install Opera to find out, this is the list:
Otherwise I love this new feature and that they adopted CT, but I think I speak for many people when I say that I'm a little worried about the trustworthiness of their new Chinese owners.
A quick Google search about them doesn't inspire confidence:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2919554/tencent-qihoo-antimal...
EDIT: Did a few tests on several websites. It seems for those that those that are lighter on ads like WashingtonPost, it can make the loading time 15-30% faster, while for the heavier ones like iMore, TheVerge, BusinessInsider, it's 50-75% (depending on the ads they show at the time, I assume). The heavier ones would even take over 30 seconds to load without ad-blocking. I'd say for most sites you should see a ~50% faster loading with this enabled.
I hope they include tracking-protection option as well in the future, as Firefox did. Then those features need to come to mobile, too. I don't think Firefox has implemented TP on mobile either yet.
If I ran some kind of online content, and it was clear the majority of my money was made in advertising, and that the majority of my money was being eroded by ad blockers, I feel like the natural next step is to fill your content with ads that are simply not blockable.
I've started seeing this with YouTube videos, where people quickly (or not so quickly) plug audible at the start of their videos. I have no doubt that "native" advertising is becoming both more frequent and more insidious (because obvious native advertising doesn't work as well as non-obvious).
I have to be honest: I'm not really a fan of this future. I think the right future is either a) paid content (which very few people will go for) or b) ad-supported content, but those ads aren't evil animated audible malware vector infected boxes of non-relevance. This leaves a chance that the content will actually be content, and not some headphone review that you're entirely unsure who has paid for the existence of.
Perhaps instead of having massive blocklists with the occasional white-listed website, there should be some kind of automated sin-binning, where websites (and ad agencies) that have proven to behave themselves (non-animated, relevant, safe advertisements) are allowed through while dodgy scum gets blocked for N months or until they have a proven amount of time where they have shown themselves to be safe.
This doesn't solve the whole "I don't want people tracking me" thing. I'm not really sure how to solve that. I don't see how you can. I see the future for that being more and more walled gardens so you can be tracked server side, which is also entirely undesirable.
As processing capacity becomes ever more available, even that can be combatted. I recently converted a bunch of pod casts into an audiobook for personal use by stripping the variably-sized intro section with some perl that uses sox and pdl to search for a known sample, and then cuts off everything before and including that sample with ffmpeg.
It took maybe 3 minutes per intro section.
It might conceivably be possible to do this kind of thing in realtime in the future.
One of the more advanced techniques they use, iirc, is checking for the disappearance of the channel logo, which tends to not be part of ads.
In the UK they must make it very clear, before the user starts playing the video, that it contains sponsored content.
https://www.asa.org.uk/News-resources/Media-Centre/2015/New-...
https://www.cap.org.uk/Advice-Training-on-the-rules/Advice-O...
It doesn't let 3rd parties serve me arbitrary javascript for tracking, it doesn't give me drive-by malware, and it generally isn't selling me penis enlargement or one weird trick to lose weight.
Still waiting for good, useful ads, that are code-free. But if your product was the best it would be reviewed as such anyway, so ads are pointless.
I'd even say I miss the Tiny Letter ads in 99% invisible.
"Native" ads, in contrast, want me to buy a scooter (the Indian kind), eat Maggi, and gamble online. Sometimes, they repeatedly push some crappy Bollywood movie that I will never watch.
The ad industry gets so much money, surely they could come up with a way of not annoying me.
I'm "guilty" of it too, I installed adblockers to all of my friends and family.
The current situation is just extortion in the end - pay to whitelist. And native advertising. Someone who is (unfortunately) in the in the business a little bit, it's horrible. You'd be surprised how many tweets, facebook or blog posts by your favourite people ("influencers") are just paid advertisement. Yes, you fell for it too -- people who say advertising doesn't work for them.
The future, in my eyes, is very very dark. Think of HN where people submit stories to only paid content. Sure, you Silicon Valley guys can pay for it, but not young and poor lurkers (I was one of them when I started reading HN) from not the richest countries in the world.
I hate ads and now I hate adblocking... and I don't know a good solution.
Take the recent cases of malware-spreading adverts on legitimate sites. These sites get their ad spaces filled through agencies that then broker further deals, often selling ad space on-demand through live auctions to others, and so on. So, the issue of who is at fault becomes very murky. Who is to blame? Naturally, the malware originators are guilty, but at each level removed, someone has failed to do proper due diligence. And at each level out, that due diligence becomes even more difficult. When you get to the site owner, it's difficult to see what they could do to stop the attacks (other than not having ads at all).
Even Google, who should be well equipped to filter out the bad guys, can't seem to prevent scum from getting on to their ad networks. Or is it that they don't really care? It's hard to tell.
But going back to the sin-binning, there's just no way to tell who to sin-bin. The 'block everything' approach is effective and just about everything else fails.
Yeah, and I think this is the crux of the problem. Like The Cube, we (as a collective, not you and I) have built his massive incomprehensible machine with an infinite number of moving parts that no one person actually groks the function of. The pictures about a third of the way down this talk[1] are instructive. So not unlike the banks with the GFC, there isn't really some moustache-twirling evil-doer pushing one weird trick ads and malware your way who you can regex out of your life, so you just have to nuke the whole thing from orbit. Which is essentially what we're doing with ad blockers.
[1] http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
A whitelist of the top 100 ad networks that haven't let through malware in the past year, if you want to be on the list, submit your code for auditing.
Easy way to get on the list: Only let people create pure text or graphic ads, no code.
So if you want to stop cross-site mass surveillance-like tracking, keep telling Google to do it.
Maybe loading those whitelisted ad domains through Tor?
People who do paid/sponsored content is not native advertising when viewers are being tricked to think its something else. Instead its a crime, often by breaking marketing laws and tax laws, and police in many nations have started to investigate and prosecute those who do not follow the law. Since the tax office is involved, I doubt this problem will continue for much longer, but maybe ad block technology could step in and prevent some of the more hidden advertisement by pattern matching logos or something similar to youtube's content ID.
Even worse is when you're automatically signed for dead trees being sent to your house, because those don't have unsubscribe links.
It's crazy. I already bought the thing! I don't need more things, or else I would have bought them when I bought the original thing. Yet, companies are treating their customers - people who have actually already bought things - in this terrible manner. Maybe we need legislation mandating opt-in?
The concept seems to be that it's a worrying trend and I should be somehow ashamed for not wanting to view ads? Isn't that ridiculous? Advertisers seem to forget that it's their job to figure out how to advertise effectively. The world has moved on and no one will watch their stupid annoying ad. So they have to come up with something we will tolerate.
People are still complaining that no one is watching ads on TV and people don't buy newspapers. We moved on and they have to as well. I understand that there's small publications / blogs / businesses who are definitely not the "enemy" and I'm not saying they deserve to go out of business. But if the landscape changes, they must adapt too.
I'm sure we can all agree we are better off with Netflix than watching regular TV.
Just wait until AI gets smart enough to make all ads blockable.
It is inevitable that these agencies abuse their position.
> This doesn't solve the whole "I don't want people tracking me" thing. I'm not really sure how to solve that. I don't see how you can. I see the future for that being more and more walled gardens so you can be tracked server side, which is also entirely undesirable.
Native advertising gets around this and it puts power back in the content producers and users, as it should be. It becomes a partnership rather than a parasitic relationship.
Look at films and TV series nowadays -- Netflix provides content users have paid for, Marvel gets to advertise their high-quality library, and product placements are scattered around in a tasteful manner. This is as it should be.
What will the advertising industry do? For starters they have to be held accountable if they serve malware. There need to be some strict ruling that will have significant implications. Once we get past that we need to talk about profiling. It’s immoral, period. We don’t like it and I seriously doubt if it’s even working. Once the industry addresses those two issues then we can talk. In the meantime sites could start serving ads from their domains. That could render current ad blocking technology obsolete. It could also make them relevant again, like they used to be before Google took over the industry. In either way they need to start innovating fast, or sit back and whine like spoiled brats while adoption of ad blocking keeps climbing.
I think you right, the only place where profiling, if you can call it that, is working, is on Amazon, and it basically only works for books.
Most of what we think of as "the advertising industry" isn't exactly advertising anymore. It's a company that will take what you feed them, do some generic processing on it an plaster as many site as possible, big sites if you pay them enough. The amount of incompetent people in the online "advertising" business is staggering. Most of them don't understand how the Internet works. You just get emails with "Hey, put this on your page, it will help us track conversion". Then you review it and realize that their stupid Javascript snippet either break other Javascript, or that their server is to slow to actually handle the requests.
Online advertising has become a huge source of revenue to a whole industry that struggles to justify their value. These people will pressure the publishers and tell them that evil ad blockers are the reason their losing money, but that entire business models is broken. It's just a scam, moving money from companies with actual products and services to publishers of questionable content, via equally shady middlemen.
It wouldn't be so bad if actual work went into producing high quality ads, published on the right media/site and targeted at the right people.
That model? Yeah, screw that. But major news organizations like the New York Times still depend in a huge part on advertising revenue to stay afloat - subscribers alone do not make up the shortfall. So if we want to destroy the content farms we also run the risk of destroying the news organizations that produce the original stories.
If you write an article about cars, it should be possible to find companies your readers might be interested in, and embed it on the page, served from your same domain or CDN. You can track the views easily just by looking at the CDN request log and the click-trough with some javascript. Your ad customer can track the number of click-trough by looking at the referrer field.
If that was the case then your ads probably wouldn't get blocked. Privacy advocates wouldn't have too much issue because the data collection is limited to your website. There is no (a) or (b) choice here, you can still have ads. Just without all the user tracking.
The issue is that the advertisers don't trust your reporting. They want a more fluid relationship where they don't have to build a rapport with your website. Everything needs to be automated away. And for that to work the only way is to also track the users on the website. Then add a bit of greediness and gain Internet-wide user tracking.
Perpetuating that idea that ads either should exist as they are, or that the evil "paid content" will grow is playing the game of the advertisers. It's a false dichotomy because other solutions exist.
If you think about it, that a business can give you so many cool products (e.g. emails, movies, news, calls etc) at no cost with the small inconvenience of having some ads while I've largely learnt to ignore anyway if pretty darn cool.
I don't know all of it, but a lot of it will result in a big increase in native advertising.
By its nature, it's harder to block due the lack of uniformity.
1. the ad-blocker does not interfere with the normal operation of the website (or webapp), and
2. the website can never detect that an ad-blocker is running.
I'm not sure whether Opera does this.
Just set a variable inside the ads.js and if it's not present, the ads are blocked. (or the file didn't load).
Despite their company doing badly technically they are still doing a great job. The UI is as fluid as ever, and the rendering is rock-solid. I wish they survive and continue building this browser.
Edit: Seems like it is just a different wrapper around the Chrome internals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_%28web_engine%29 Does it do anything differently (or better) than Chrome or FF?
And after a few hot clickfraud cases, we have massive scripts being downloaded for each ad to track validity of "impressions".
There is not enough details for me to reproduce here: no sample of which web pages were used in the benchmark, no work on settings used on various blockers. Why is it so difficult to obtain such key information?
I really doubt uBlock Origin's ("uBO") default settings were used given the reported timings (because 6s to load a web page).
Also that uBO is reportedly only 0.2 sec faster than ABP hardly make sense to me, especially on any Chromium-based browsers.
In any case, for those who want to make comparisons for themselves between blockers, here are online tools:
To measure average page load speed: http://www.raymondhill.net/ublock/pageloadspeed.html
For examples, the page-load-speed tool reports ("Average (valid)" values):
http://www.rollingstone.com/:
- Opera 37 + native blocker enabled: 1482.75 ms
- Chrome 51 + uBlock Origin + default settings: 1729.20 ms
- Chrome 51 + ABP + EasyList/EasyPrivacy minus "acceptable ads": 2467.17 ms
http://techcrunch.com/:
- Opera 37 + native blocker enabled: 1959.10 ms (noticed ad placeholder left behind)
- Chrome 51 + uBlock Origin + default settings: 1316.90 ms
- Chrome 51 + ABP + EasyList/EasyPrivacy minus "acceptable ads": 2063.76 ms
And another tool, to find out what is not blocked (also a rather important aspect of any blocker): http://raymondhill.net/httpsb/har-parser.html
For example, comparing what was not blocked on TechCrunch with Opera 37 native blocker and uBO + default settings:
https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/585534/14185866/b...
I'm also curious how this compares against uBlock Origin. I know uBlock uses a lot less memory and seems a lot faster than ABP for me, and it's curiously missing from their comparison.