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Ask HN: Why do adblockers still work?

27 points by johnsanders ↗ HN
I have wondered for a long time, but the article at the top of HN as i write, "Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web" reminded me. Am I wrong that all a publisher needs to do to defeat ad blockers is to serve ads from their own domain? Or at least make it appear as such? Surely the money at stake would make that an easy problem to solve. But obviously I must be wrong. Why?

21 comments

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PaulHoule
Third parties are necessary in advertising for this reason.

If ads were served by the publisher than the advertiser would always think that the publisher was cheating and claiming they showed more impressions and generated more clicks.

If ads were server by the advertiser then the publisher would always think that the advertiser was cheating and claiming that they showed fewer impressions and got fewer clicks.

Both could believe that a third party is honest. Both will feel even more assured if the site has 50 different trackers from 50 different third parties tracking the process.

johnsanders
That does make sense and I hadn't thought of that. But considering the huge portion of internet users with adblock enabled, wouldn't it make sense for the advertiser, publisher and third party to collaborate on a system installed on the publisher's servers that the third party verifies is an accurate metric? Or maybe the naysayers are correct that the whole ad tech universe could never and will never work and is doomed?
Linkd
This exists, but is rare and only for larger players. At the end of the day, if the end user can identify the DOM slot the ad goes into, it gets blocked either way. It'll forever be a cat and mouse game.
munchbunny
Yup this is sometimes done, where the third party stuff is served out of a first party subdomain instead of a third party domain. It's still uncommon except in the big publishers because it requires more effort to do the integration.

The topic of "accurate metric" is also challenging. When I worked on this, I would often find discrepancies of up to 5% depending on the technical implementation of the metric. There was never a clear explanation, just that the sequence of events from mouseover to click to redirect to more redirects to the final landing looked more like a very wide funnel with leaky correlation than the straight pipeline you might naively assume.

aqaq2
That doesn't make sense for Youtube videos? Unless Alphabet doesn't trust itself?
PaulHoule
Google has to be careful for how it treads for anti-trust reasons.

For instance Google has a blocker for "annoying ads" in Chrome. Needless to say it is never going to block an annoying ad that is served by Google. The whole thing is asking for a lawsuit.

If Google is aggressive against adblockers it similarly becomes a target in a way it would be if there were 4 major players that each got 20% of the market and then a bunch of small players.

The most interesting thing happening in online advertising today is the pitch made by the video or podcast creator that is embedded in the content. I've got an emotional connection with Nate Silver or Ana Psychology that makes me more responsive to their pitch than the average pre-roll.

aqaq2
> The most interesting thing happening in online advertising today is the pitch made by the video or podcast creator that is embedded in the content.

Harder to block, so I manually skip it...

elkos
There are browser ad-on that block sponsored content. Having said so, there are a few channels that provide pretty great content without sponsored pitches or with relevant pitches that might be ok-ish.
Doxin
You might want to look at sponsorblock. It allows you to annotate sponsored segments, and will automatically skip them. Of course you'll also get the benefit of other users annotating so in my experience it skips just about all sponsored segments without having to do anything.
tragictrash
Interesting question.

I think it boils down to the fact that the ads are delivered with the content. You can just choose to not look at the ads, right? This is the same principle that the ad blockers work on.

To get around that, Another way to do it is to deliver the ads first, have the browser attest the ads were played and then serve the content. The problem is the end user can always modify what you serve them. Getting the browser to attest to something like that is very hard if not impossible.

There's no good way to do it. The advertisers will always be playing a game of cat and mouse. They take what they can get, because that's all they can do.

PaulHoule
You can't always choose not to look at them.

This blog drives me up the wall with ads that cover the content, particularly on mobile devices

https://tonyortega.org/

The buttons for closing the content are hard enough to hit on a touch screen that at least 50% of the time I am going to wind up clicking on the ad by accident. I don't want to reward that behavior so I don't attempt to close the ads.

It's a certain sign that Scientology is a shadow of what it used to be that David Miscavige hasn't unleashed his flying monkeys to make accusations of click fraud against that site. Maybe they just aren't as internet saavy as Heaven's Gate.

tragictrash
By choosing to not look at them, I'm referring to how ad blockers choose to not retrieve the ads, not a human.
wizzerking
Plus here in the U.S.A we have data caps if we have to use AT&T so any bandwidth taken up by ads is bandwidth we can not use for stuff we really want to see. On top of that we are constantly inundated with malware, from drive by's and other malicious websites, that we have to pay for malware protection, on top of having to pay for 70 per month to 100 Megabits per second in the LA ara
cookiengineer
This is exactly why almost all advertising companies now offer CNAME cloaking support or a similar technique where their ad server is aware of the DNS domain that it was "called by" and serves ads accordingly.

This way stupid clients just follow the domain and think it's subdomain.publisher.tld and dont care about the CNAME pointer to the advertising tracker.

And you've assumed correctly: This is a cat and mouse game, and if you take a closer look at all those adblocker lists you'll identify lots and lots of randomized subdomains that are there just for the purpose of temporary obfuscation.

armchairhacker
I just posted in another section: most ads simply don't target the kinds of people who use adblockers. Why spend so much effort and resources to force your ads in people's faces when they're just going to ignore them?

Of course, why do advertising companies spend so much effort and resources to force ads in people's faces in TV/billboards/mobile games/unblocked web? I suppose those advertisements actually net the company back revenue. But trying to send advertisements to someone who has uBlock and PiHole, VPN, etc. is not only extremely difficult, but basically useless.

dangle1
Sounds like a modern corollary of wondering which half of one's ad dollars are being wasted.
t8y
In the future webpages will be streamed from a server and we will only see a video stream. No ad block will be possible as the whole page will just be a single html canvas (or some new stream element). It will suck.
Gravyness
Don't worry someone will make a machine learning model that discriminates ads from content and prevent specific areas from rendering.
paulcole
> Am I wrong that all a publisher needs to do to defeat ad blockers is to serve ads from their own domain?

Yes, you are wrong. If it can be served (regardless of from where), it can be blocked.