Skip to content

Adblockers stop publishers serving ads to (or even seeing) 1bn web users - Press Gazette

Technology
338 203 104
  • They call it "dark traffic" - ads that are not seen by tech-savvy users who have excellent ad blockers.

    Not surprised that its growing. The web is unusable without an ad blocker and its only getting worse, and will continue to get worse every month.

    Raw-dogging the internet without an adblocker is about as irresponsible as not using contraception

  • They call it "dark traffic" - ads that are not seen by tech-savvy users who have excellent ad blockers.

    Not surprised that its growing. The web is unusable without an ad blocker and its only getting worse, and will continue to get worse every month.

    Obligatory xkcd 624:

    Browsing without adblock

  • They call it "dark traffic" - ads that are not seen by tech-savvy users who have excellent ad blockers.

    Not surprised that its growing. The web is unusable without an ad blocker and its only getting worse, and will continue to get worse every month.

    Damn people, enshitifying the internet for the advertisers.

    I switched to GrapheneOS which uses Vanadium browser by default, which doesn't support any content blocking yet. I use ProtonVPN which seems to block everything.

  • The trade body called it “illegal circumvention technology”

    Lol. Fuck off.

    Once the data enters my network it's my fucking data and I can do with it what I please.

  • They call it "dark traffic" - ads that are not seen by tech-savvy users who have excellent ad blockers.

    Not surprised that its growing. The web is unusable without an ad blocker and its only getting worse, and will continue to get worse every month.

    Adblockers the heroes we need.

  • It's an interesting stance, but ask yourself, where is the line between advertising and promotion or sponsorship.

    I think that requiring that advertising is factual might be a better way to address the issue.

    Ultimately as a society we haven't come up with a better way to communicate the existence of products and services to each other, and we've been using advertising for 5,000 years or so.

    Marketing is society's cancer.

    When a company has a good product/idea, they grow organically. If I'm looking for something, it should be enough to have information available through manufacturers websites and customer opinions, there is ZERO need to shove ads down people's throats, which usually translates onto overconsumption and buying the best marketed (not the optimal) product.

    So yeah, fuck marketing in general, big corporations greed and their entitlement to control the web.

  • They call it "dark traffic" - ads that are not seen by tech-savvy users who have excellent ad blockers.

    Not surprised that its growing. The web is unusable without an ad blocker and its only getting worse, and will continue to get worse every month.

    It's not about blocking ads for me, that's a happy side-effect, it's about owning your computing and taking the necessary protection against tracking. Before "ad blockers" existed I spent a lot of time manually configuring my browser to block websites from connecting me to unnecessary, potentially intrusive third party servers, after all it's my browser and my internet connection. Now uBlock Origin does that for me, it's not an ad blocker, it's a wide spectrum content blocker and the user should have the final say on what they connect to. I think we should stop calling them ad blockers.

  • Once the data enters my network it's my fucking data and I can do with it what I please.

    Likewise, I can prevent anything from even entering my network that I don't want on it.

  • I used the internet for a long time before ad blockers even existed. Everybody simply ignored ads, instead. But that wasn't good enough for the advertisers. They weren't happy unless we were forced to look at the ads. Extraordinarily obtrusive ads. Popup ads. Popunder ads. That's when people started blocking ads. When you realized that your browser always ended up with 20 extra advertising windows.

    Nobody really cared about blocking ads until advertisers forced us to. They made the internet annoying to use, and sometimes impossible to use.

    Advertisers couldn't just be happy with people ignoring their ads, so they forced our hands and fucked themselves in the process. Now, we block them by default. I don't even know any websites that have unobtrusive ads because I never see their ads in the first place.

    Now, they want to go back to the time when we would see their ads but ignore them. Fuck off. We know we can't even give them that much. If you give them an inch, they'll take a mile.

    the big turning point I remember was a combo of popups and interstitial ads

    Popups we all know and hate as they still exist and are disgusting. They were obviously gross and ate up ram and stole focus and shit

    But the interstitial ads were also gross. You’d click a link and then get redirected to an ad for 10 seconds and then redirected to content. Or a forum where the first reply was replaced with an ad that was formatted to look like a post

    Like adblocking was a niche thing prior to the advertising industry being absolute scumbags. The original idea that allowing advertising to support free services like forums and such wasn’t horrible, put a banner ad up, maybe a referral link, etc. but that was never enough for the insidious ad industry. Like every other domain they’ve touched (television, news, nature, stores, cities, clothing, games, sports, literally everything a human being interacts with).

    The hardline people that blocked banner ads way back when and loudly complained allowing advertising in any capacity on the internet would ruin everything were correct. We all groaned because no one wanted to donate to cover the hosting bills (which often turned out to be grossly inflated on larger sites by greedy site operators looking to make bank off their community) but we should have listened

  • I used the internet for a long time before ad blockers even existed. Everybody simply ignored ads, instead. But that wasn't good enough for the advertisers. They weren't happy unless we were forced to look at the ads. Extraordinarily obtrusive ads. Popup ads. Popunder ads. That's when people started blocking ads. When you realized that your browser always ended up with 20 extra advertising windows.

    Nobody really cared about blocking ads until advertisers forced us to. They made the internet annoying to use, and sometimes impossible to use.

    Advertisers couldn't just be happy with people ignoring their ads, so they forced our hands and fucked themselves in the process. Now, we block them by default. I don't even know any websites that have unobtrusive ads because I never see their ads in the first place.

    Now, they want to go back to the time when we would see their ads but ignore them. Fuck off. We know we can't even give them that much. If you give them an inch, they'll take a mile.

    The main clencher that got me running a blocker were the few sites whose payload was 90% ad related and as long as the page was open it kept feeding me more ads until a gigabyte of RAM and 5% of my CPU were dedicated to something I wasn't even looking at.

  • The trade body called it “illegal circumvention technology”

    Lol. Fuck off.

    What should be considered illegal circumvention is allowing articles behind a paywall to be included in search results.

  • I used the internet for a long time before ad blockers even existed. Everybody simply ignored ads, instead. But that wasn't good enough for the advertisers. They weren't happy unless we were forced to look at the ads. Extraordinarily obtrusive ads. Popup ads. Popunder ads. That's when people started blocking ads. When you realized that your browser always ended up with 20 extra advertising windows.

    Nobody really cared about blocking ads until advertisers forced us to. They made the internet annoying to use, and sometimes impossible to use.

    Advertisers couldn't just be happy with people ignoring their ads, so they forced our hands and fucked themselves in the process. Now, we block them by default. I don't even know any websites that have unobtrusive ads because I never see their ads in the first place.

    Now, they want to go back to the time when we would see their ads but ignore them. Fuck off. We know we can't even give them that much. If you give them an inch, they'll take a mile.

    Preach!!!

  • I used the internet for a long time before ad blockers even existed. Everybody simply ignored ads, instead. But that wasn't good enough for the advertisers. They weren't happy unless we were forced to look at the ads. Extraordinarily obtrusive ads. Popup ads. Popunder ads. That's when people started blocking ads. When you realized that your browser always ended up with 20 extra advertising windows.

    Nobody really cared about blocking ads until advertisers forced us to. They made the internet annoying to use, and sometimes impossible to use.

    Advertisers couldn't just be happy with people ignoring their ads, so they forced our hands and fucked themselves in the process. Now, we block them by default. I don't even know any websites that have unobtrusive ads because I never see their ads in the first place.

    Now, they want to go back to the time when we would see their ads but ignore them. Fuck off. We know we can't even give them that much. If you give them an inch, they'll take a mile.

    Ads used to be static text in the sidebar that the site owner manually put there. They didn't have any tracking and didn't slow down the loading time. Once they started adding images, I started using an ad blocker. I was stuck on dial-up until 2008 and a single, small image could add 10 or more seconds to the page loading time.

  • Raw-dogging the internet without an adblocker is about as irresponsible as not using contraception

    Perfection!

  • Advertising should be illegal. Huge waste of money and everyone's time.

    Like "back in the day" on TV: turning the volume of the ads up to be louder than the program you are watching; bells, horns, alarms; extremely misleading ads (people doing things absolutely stupidly, but suddenly better with product)... Loud and abusive scams is too much of it!

  • The main clencher that got me running a blocker were the few sites whose payload was 90% ad related and as long as the page was open it kept feeding me more ads until a gigabyte of RAM and 5% of my CPU were dedicated to something I wasn't even looking at.

    Ex was mad that my PiHole was blocking some FB stuff so I turned it off.

    "The internet's slow."

    Looked over her shoulder and pointed to her (still loading) screen:

    "Ad, ad, ad, ad, ad, ad, ad, ad..."

    "FINE! Turn it back on!"

  • It's an interesting stance, but ask yourself, where is the line between advertising and promotion or sponsorship.

    I think that requiring that advertising is factual might be a better way to address the issue.

    Ultimately as a society we haven't come up with a better way to communicate the existence of products and services to each other, and we've been using advertising for 5,000 years or so.

    Here's how you make people aware of your products.

    You sell a quality product for a reasonable price.

    That's it.

    Instead, capitolism has become this game of cat and mouse where the consumers ALWAYS lose. Just a game of shrinking product sizes, reducing quality, and raising prices. Little by little.

    It's most obvious when you haven't had a product in a while, maybe years, and you grab it again. Only to realize they've gone through several iterations of enshitification.

    When I was a kid, Andy Capps Cheese Fries used to be about as long as my pinky, and they were thick. Now it's like the length of my pinky until my second knockle, and it's like the same thickness as a pretzle stick. Sure, it's technically the same product, but everytime I buy them I realize why I was disappointed the last time I bought them. And I won't buy them for another 5 years. Maybe by then they'll be the length of my pinky nail and as thick as a sewing pin, but cost 8 dollars instead of the 25 cents it was when I was a kid.

    They did a durability test on hammers. In one side was an old rusty hammer. It had a date of 1931 on it. In the other was a brand new hammer bought that same day from Home Depot.

    The new hammer crumbled long before the 1931 hammer did. This test was done in 2017.

    But I never buy products because they advertise. I buy them because I remember how good it was the last time.

    Except now, you're advertising BAD memories. Because when I go in expecting this much, with this quality, and instead I get a fraction of it, with only a fraction of the quality.....congradulations. You saved money on production costs. You also pushed your customer away from being a repeat customer.

    All this business schools, and all the data they have I'm sure shows that their way is better. So explain to me why it seems businesses these days struggle to make the line go up, but when I was a kid business was booming?

  • Likewise, I can prevent anything from even entering my network that I don't want on it.

    That's more to the point!

  • Also, aren’t most folks using apps these days? I have elders and younger relatives that literally don’t know how to use a web browser.

    I wouldn’t want to be a web publisher right now…

    Whats not to know?

    Step 1) Open the browser.

    There is no step 2. Just go wherever you want, and read. Or watch videos. If you don't know where something is, search for it. The browser does all the work. That's like saying you don't know how to use a microwave.

  • They call it "dark traffic" - ads that are not seen by tech-savvy users who have excellent ad blockers.

    Not surprised that its growing. The web is unusable without an ad blocker and its only getting worse, and will continue to get worse every month.

    Good 🖕🏻

  • 0 Stimmen
    1 Beiträge
    0 Aufrufe
    Niemand hat geantwortet
  • Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?

    Technology technology
    5
    1
    36 Stimmen
    5 Beiträge
    38 Aufrufe
    ivanafterall@lemmy.worldI
    It's a nascent industry standard called The Artificial Intelligence Network Template, or TAINT.
  • 263 Stimmen
    24 Beiträge
    122 Aufrufe
    glitchvid@lemmy.worldG
    Republicans are the biggest suckers there are. There's a reason as soon as the jig is up grifters pivot to conservative talking points.
  • 691 Stimmen
    140 Beiträge
    596 Aufrufe
    H
    Maybe I don't want you to stop, big boy.
  • 1k Stimmen
    95 Beiträge
    287 Aufrufe
    G
    Obviously the law must be simple enough to follow so that for Jim’s furniture shop is not a problem nor a too high cost to respect it, but it must be clear that if you break it you can cease to exist as company. I think this may be the root of our disagreement, I do not believe that there is any law making body today that is capable of an elegantly simple law. I could be too naive, but I think it is possible. We also definitely have a difference on opinion when it comes to the severity of the infraction, in my mind, while privacy is important, it should not have the same level of punishments associated with it when compared to something on the level of poisoning water ways; I think that a privacy law should hurt but be able to be learned from while in the poison case it should result in the bankruptcy of a company. The severity is directly proportional to the number of people affected. If you violate the privacy of 200 million people is the same that you poison the water of 10 people. And while with the poisoning scenario it could be better to jail the responsible people (for a very, very long time) and let the company survive to clean the water, once your privacy is violated there is no way back, a company could not fix it. The issue we find ourselves with today is that the aggregate of all privacy breaches makes it harmful to the people, but with a sizeable enough fine, I find it hard to believe that there would be major or lasting damage. So how much money your privacy it's worth ? 6 For this reason I don’t think it is wise to write laws that will bankrupt a company off of one infraction which was not directly or indirectly harmful to the physical well being of the people: and I am using indirectly a little bit more strict than I would like to since as I said before, the aggregate of all the information is harmful. The point is that the goal is not to bankrupt companies but to have them behave right. The penalty associated to every law IS the tool that make you respect the law. And it must be so high that you don't want to break the law. I would have to look into the laws in question, but on a surface level I think that any company should be subjected to the same baseline privacy laws, so if there isn’t anything screwy within the law that apple, Google, and Facebook are ignoring, I think it should apply to them. Trust me on this one, direct experience payment processors have a lot more rules to follow to be able to work. I do not want jail time for the CEO by default but he need to know that he will pay personally if the company break the law, it is the only way to make him run the company being sure that it follow the laws. For some reason I don’t have my usual cynicism when it comes to this issue. I think that the magnitude of loses that vested interests have in these companies would make it so that companies would police themselves for fear of losing profits. That being said I wouldn’t be opposed to some form of personal accountability on corporate leadership, but I fear that they will just end up finding a way to create a scapegoat everytime. It is not cynicism. I simply think that a huge fine to a single person (the CEO for example) is useless since it too easy to avoid and if it really huge realistically it would be never paid anyway so nothing usefull since the net worth of this kind of people is only on the paper. So if you slap a 100 billion file to Musk he will never pay because he has not the money to pay even if technically he is worth way more than that. Jail time instead is something that even Musk can experience. In general I like laws that are as objective as possible, I think that a privacy law should be written so that it is very objectively overbearing, but that has a smaller fine associated with it. This way the law is very clear on right and wrong, while also giving the businesses time and incentive to change their practices without having to sink large amount of expenses into lawyers to review every minute detail, which is the logical conclusion of the one infraction bankrupt system that you seem to be supporting. Then you write a law that explicitally state what you can do and what is not allowed is forbidden by default.
  • Covert Web-to-App Tracking via Localhost on Android

    Technology technology
    3
    29 Stimmen
    3 Beiträge
    28 Aufrufe
    P
    That update though: "... completely removed..." I assume this is because someone at Meta realized this was a huge breach of trust, and likely quite illegal. Edit: I read somewhere that they're just being cautious about Google Play terms of service. That feels worse.
  • Cloudflare built an oauth provider with Claude

    Technology technology
    23
    1
    34 Stimmen
    23 Beiträge
    129 Aufrufe
    A
    I have to say that you just have to sayed something up
  • 11 Stimmen
    1 Beiträge
    14 Aufrufe
    Niemand hat geantwortet