Adblockers stop publishers serving ads to (or even seeing) 1bn web users - Press Gazette
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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.
“The growth of dark traffic undermines the ability of publishers to fund the production of quality content, or even operate as a business. We must recognise users are not the main driver causing this.”
"It’s demonetising publisher content at scale without user consent."
They act like we don't know what we are doing and want the ads. People who block ads in browsers like ddg and brave choose those browsers for that reason.
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When I was about five years old, my parents were shopping for a car. When the radio said Brand X Dealer was the best place to buy a car, I was so excited to tell them what I'd just learned.
I haven't forgiven advertising since.
Can only imagine how f'd up kids' minds must be now
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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?
The thing is business is more booming than it's ever been, but making the line go up forever is a fool's errand, at some point you'll hit a peak. Hitting that peak is immensely punished in our economic system.
If you make a hammer that'll last 100 years, you'll sell as many as you can reach customers who need one, before hammer sales plummet. Instead of being rewarded for making a great product, you'll be punished when sales fall because you've solved a problem for most people.
Advertising is kind of neutral in abstract in my head. Make a great product for a fair price, and let people know about it, and that's actually probably a benefit to both parties. Make a terrible product, and tell a bunch of people it's great, and you've spent resources doing them a disservice. But if you can convince them it's good enough to spend money on it, and keep your revenue per customer above the cost to acquire them, it's profitable. And that's all they care about. It's basically the same pattern as a scam, but profit is the only thing they're told they're allowed to care about.
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And this is exactly why Google did away with Manifest v2 (what uBlock runs on) and why they wanted to introduce their “web integrity” standard. At that point the pages would be signed with ads and in the signature didn’t match the page wouldn’t even be shown.
They tried to play it off as “ensuring that you truly get the correct copy of the page and no bad hackers have intercepted it” but really it would have 100% forced ads.
Then I guess I'm not looking at those pages. No skin off my nose. That said, Firefox with Ublock Origin plus a couple of other ad-blockers seems to be working pretty well for me. Anything with a paywall, I just move on.
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Advertising should be illegal. Huge waste of money and everyone's time.
Unfortunately I don't think you can just make it illegal. People/companies would still do it, just covertly. Then you end up in a situation where adverts are not marked as such and that's probably even worse than the current situation, where ads at least identify themselves as ads.
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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!"
Don’t date stupid people. Incentivize intelligence.
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I actually agree with that but the only other solution is subject yourself to deeply concerning levels of surveillance, not to mention surveillance pricing.
I use AdNauseum and they have a toggle for privacy-conscious ads and I leave that on. That's my best compromise.
Toggles like that are available in other adblockers too and they pose a problem. They ad a ransom to showing you ads. You don’t want the ads but if the advertisers pay the adblocker company they get whitelisted and you see the ads anyway.
Never use those toggles.
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Besides the miserable experience unchecked advertisements cause, it is simply not safe to allow those advertisements to load.
A few years ago (before SSDs were common) I noticed unusual hard disk activity when loading a popular link aggregation site. A bit of investigation turned up a Trojan on my system. After removing it and reloading that site, my PC was immediately reinfected. The site owner denied any responsibility and said it was the advertising company's fault.
The way the Internet operates now means no one is responsible for the content their site provides or the damage they cause. Imagine if restaurant owners were able to deny responsibility for the atmosphere in their restaurants or food poisonings they caused? IMO it's the same thing.
Advertisers and websites have created the "dark traffic" mentioned here by repeatedly poisoning the public and they deserve the massive loss of revenue their behavior has caused.
Name and shame. Who's the link aggregator?
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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?
A lot of this comes from pressures exerted by shareholders. Get rid of the shareholders and you get rid of the pressures. Then you have people who chose to do the opposite noxious thing and people who chose not to. The market would then reward the less obnoxious people and the negative aspects would die out.
But we have shareholders so capitalism cannot possibly work the way we are promised it will.
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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 issue with extensions (including adblockers) is you are trusting someone with access to your shit and money buys bad behavior. So I dislike the lack of blocking there but I can understand why that decision was made.
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Obligatory xkcd 624:
GitHer
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Almost 70. Spent way too many years watching cable shit tv. I hate ads. I fucking hate ads with a nuclear passion. I have ad blockers, pirated shit and some services that do not show ads so far.
If there are ads I find an alternative or read a book. Our teen son screams ad every time he sees one that sneaks through ad just to get me going.Wow that sounds really tough. You know, when I was dealing with similar stress, a friend told me to ask my doctor about Lexapro. Lexapro is a once daily anti-depressant which can help treat anxiety! I got my life back thanks to Lexapro. Ask your doctor about Lexapro
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The trade body called it “illegal circumvention technology”
Lol. Fuck off.
The O.G. add blocker.
The concept is close to the same, how could something like this be seen as “illegal circumvention technology”?
It just shows us how disconnected the people in these positions can be that are regulating these things.
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The trade body called it “illegal circumvention technology”
Lol. Fuck off.
Fuckers want to colonize my property (my computer). that's what's illegal!
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Then I guess I'm not looking at those pages. No skin off my nose. That said, Firefox with Ublock Origin plus a couple of other ad-blockers seems to be working pretty well for me. Anything with a paywall, I just move on.
Then I guess I'm not looking at those pages. No skin of my nose.
That works until every website starts doing it.
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Advertising needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking.
It arbitrary pollutes any environment it’s conducted in, and causes secondary harms to non-participants by incentivising insecure hoarding of private information with the intent to better target individuals.
Agreed left unchecked it is horrible, one of the darkest pervasive elements of capitalism, used in a manipulative manner. We've reached astounding understanding of human psyche and are using that knowledge with advertising to control people's subconscious. It's disgusting.
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Then I guess I'm not looking at those pages. No skin of my nose.
That works until every website starts doing it.
So be it. -
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.
Call them what they are. Internet condoms.
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“The growth of dark traffic undermines the ability of publishers to fund the production of quality content, or even operate as a business. We must recognise users are not the main driver causing this.”
"It’s demonetising publisher content at scale without user consent."
They act like we don't know what we are doing and want the ads. People who block ads in browsers like ddg and brave choose those browsers for that reason.
Yeah, but bad ad choices cause people who would otherwise be fine with ads that fund content to block. Some will never go away, in the same way some will always pirate, but the ad landscape has become like the streaming landscape and pushed people towards these choices
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Likewise, I can prevent anything from even entering my network that I don't want on it.
Unless it’s intellectual property that belongs to the movie industry. Then you better not touch it. Or that’s illegal.
But if it’s advertisements, then you have to watch it, or that’s illegal.
