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Will Ad Blockers Kill the Digital Media Industry?
HughPickens.com writes: Michael Rosenwald writes at the Columbia Journalism Review that global online ad revenue continues to rise, reaching nearly $180 billion last year. But analysts say the rise of ad blocking threatens the entire industry—the free sites that rely exclusively on ads, as well as the paywalled outlets that rely on ads to compensate for the vast majority of internet users who refuse to pay for news. A new report from Adobe and one of several startups helping publishers fight ad blocking shows that 198 million people globally are now blocking ads, up 41 percent from 2014. In the US, ad blocking grew 48 percent from last year, to 45 million users. "Taken together, ad blockers are hitting publishers in their digital guts," writes Rosenwald. "Adobe says that $21.8 billion in global ad revenue will be blocked this year."
Publishers have been banking on the growth of mobile, where the ad blocking plugins either don't work or are cumbersome to install. A Wells Fargo analyst wrote in a report on ad blocking that "the mobile migration should thwart some of the growth" of ad blockers. But Apple recently revealed that its new operating system scheduled for release this fall will allow ad blocking on Safari. Apple is trying to pull iPhone and iPad users off the web. It wants you to read, watch, search, and listen in its Apple-certified walled gardens known as apps. It makes apps, it approves apps, and it profits from apps. But, for its plan to work, the company will need those entertainers and publishers to funnel their content to where Apple wants it to be. As the company makes strategic moves to devalue the web in favor of apps, those content creators dependent on ads to stay afloat may be forced to play along with Apple. Adblock Plus has released a browser for mobile Android devices that blocks ads, and it's planning to release a similar product for Apple devices. "The desire to figure out how to bring ad blocking to mobile consumers is a worldwide phenomenon," says Roi Carthy Ad blocking, he says, "is an inalienable right."
Publishers have been banking on the growth of mobile, where the ad blocking plugins either don't work or are cumbersome to install. A Wells Fargo analyst wrote in a report on ad blocking that "the mobile migration should thwart some of the growth" of ad blockers. But Apple recently revealed that its new operating system scheduled for release this fall will allow ad blocking on Safari. Apple is trying to pull iPhone and iPad users off the web. It wants you to read, watch, search, and listen in its Apple-certified walled gardens known as apps. It makes apps, it approves apps, and it profits from apps. But, for its plan to work, the company will need those entertainers and publishers to funnel their content to where Apple wants it to be. As the company makes strategic moves to devalue the web in favor of apps, those content creators dependent on ads to stay afloat may be forced to play along with Apple. Adblock Plus has released a browser for mobile Android devices that blocks ads, and it's planning to release a similar product for Apple devices. "The desire to figure out how to bring ad blocking to mobile consumers is a worldwide phenomenon," says Roi Carthy Ad blocking, he says, "is an inalienable right."
Current blockers are only partially domain based, though that's the larger part. AdBlock & friends can also block based on HTML DOM ID's, classes, paths, etc.
Even if the ads are served by proxy through the origin site's domain, they're going to be in a defined place in the layout. AdBlock can block things like:
div[id='ad']
div/span[class='whatever']/p/img
I haven't found an ad yet that isn't susceptible to being blocked via DOM attributes.
Next step would probably be to dynamically perturb the classes & ID's returned in the page, but then the blockers parse the returned HTML, deobfuscating it in such a way as to give you consistent tokenized identifiers which are then blocked.
Arms race yes, but already predictable domains aren't a requirement for effective blocking.
Indeed, my response to their begging me to disable my ad-blocker for their site is that I DO have ad-blocks 'non-intrusive ad whitelist' enabled, they can serve me ads so long as they meet those standards.
Oh, they're not as 'effective'? They're more effective than ads that drive me to block them!
I don't read AC A human right
displaying static, unobtrusive, low bandwidth unanimated ads that do not track us, are served from the same domain as the web page it's displayed on, are presented below the fold, are not misleading, link to unobfuscated urls vetted by trusted third-parties to be safe, and are constantly monitored malicious code, content or redirection.. maybe, just maybe, people will start putting up with online ads again... until then... enjoy my adblock and noscript with a half-dozen years of tuning to their blocklists and whitelists.
It is an arms race between ad networks and ad blockers. I don't think anyone would fault a site for trying to monetize its content (stuff consts money). Unfortunately, too many sites got lazy and handed over the handling of advertisements to these larger conglomerated ad networks. The ad networks got lazy about who they let advertise/what tech they allowed to be used in advertisements, and now internet ads are yet another vector for the spread of malware.
This is not ok.
I'm willing to chalk up my annoyance with loud flashing pseudo-videos to personal preference, but it seems like everyone else who consumes internet content is also irritated by these things.
Until the ad networks can guarantee (which they can't, now) that they won't deposit malware on my parents' computers, I will evangelize the use of adblockers until I die. Another option, as others have already mentioned, is to bring control of ad content back to the sites' actual owners.
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a lot of page loads are slowed by ads because the ads are bid and filled in real time. You click on a link, your deets are passed thru to the ad server (IP, operating system, mobile or desktop, etc, whatever the browser sends), ad server auctions off your eyeballs. The auction window is left open as long as people can stand it in order to maximize bids.
I look over coworkers shoulders sometimes when we're working on something, and I'm always surprised to see so many ads. Ie, someone has the same email provider I do from our ISP and it's chock full of ads I never see. From an ISP service we *PAY* for. That's ridiculous; I'm paying $50/month so why should they be subsidizing themselves with ridiculous randomized ads?
This is pure unadulterated TRUTH! When many of us got online in the late 80s/early 90s nobody was bothered by ads...why? Because they were a simple hyperlink or at most a tiny .jpg or .gif showing a product for sale...so what. in fact i bet many of us even bought products from those ads because they were 1.- Almost all first party and thus relevant to the site you were viewing and 2.- The one who wrote the site would often have a nice polite "Here is the stuff I like, they have good deals on it, if you like the site maybe you could have a look?" and many of us did that.
Then here came the third party ad companies to take a big fat Cleveland Steamer on everything! First came the obnoxious pop ups, I bet many here first started hating ads in the mid 90s when that shit started really blowing up. First came pop up, then pop under, then pop all over the fucking screen. Then came the Java ads, followed by flash. Remember when Java was the hot thing, they were even showing desktops running entirely in java and it was Java this and Java that? I personally believe all the fucking Java ads slamming the hell out of those P3s is what turned the masses off of Java...but then came Flash, and boy was that name ever apropos when it comes to ads as the first ones were an epileptic nightmare as they flashed images worse than a Japanese cartoon trying to get your attention. Was that enough for the ad corp assholes? Nope because "hey we can blow their ears off and make 'em listen to our pitches, brilliant!" until it got to the point you couldn't have speakers in an office PC because you never knew when it would blow your ears out!
But of course the rotting elephant in the room is none of these ad corps or websites take responsibility for the malware they spread thus driving the final nail in the ad driven web coffin, because now its a severe security risk to allow ads to be loaded. I can tell everybody that once I switched all my users to browsers running ABP in low rights mode? Malware just dried up, in fact I can't remember the last nasty I saw on a PC that was running adblocking. And all those that scream about ABP and "acceptable ads" really need to look at the policy to become an acceptable ad, its the best practices I've been pushing for years, NO flash or java, NO sound, NO pop up/under/over, NO hidden redirects or misleading images like faking a security dialog box, in other words it is the kind of ads we used to not have to worry about, simple hyperlinks or non moving images.
So I'm sorry websites but you brought it upon yourselves, you had a good thing going and in the name of greed you shat all over it and made ads the plague blankets of the net. Switch to the ABP acceptable ad model and most of us will happily let your ads run, but of course that means not letting third parties throw any shit on your page they want and risking your viewers PCs but instead they will just whine and moan. I'm proud to say I got banned from The Escapist for calling them out on their BS, they had Jim Sterling whine about how evil ABP was and I posted a link showing how many times The Escapist had shown malware infected ads and simply asked "So are you gonna take responsibility and pay for the damages to those you infect with your ads?". Wow you should have seen how quickly they started burying the thread and throwing the banhammer, didn't work as the whole narrative got switched to ads and malware. So if any claim its about "saving websites" simply ask that little question, are they gonna take responsibility and pay for the damages if they infect their viewers? If not they can fuck right off!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
a lot of page loads are slowed by ads because the ads are bid and filled in real time. You click on a link, your deets are passed thru to the ad server (IP, operating system, mobile or desktop, etc, whatever the browser sends), ad server auctions off your eyeballs. The auction window is left open as long as people can stand it in order to maximize bids.
I never understood that "fact".
I work on the real-time bidding part (the DSP part - the ones buying), and we have a fixed window to bid. There's no variability anywhere, if we bid too late (and that's measured in milliseconds), we automatically lose.
So none of the exchanges I work with act like that, and I work with many of the big names. I'm surprised it made the news.
Furthermore, there's no technical reason (and the means are way too cumbersome) to force said sequential loading. If anything, I'd blame the browsers for:
1. Piss-poor and snail-slow JS compilers
2. Lacking compile caches (or if they have them, slow as fuck)
3. Bad parallelization
You've got your decades confused. There were no ads online in the late 80s or early 90s, unless you're talking about Prodigy, because no one outside of academia used the internet then, and the WWW and the Mosaic browser didn't even exist until 1994. Looking at a .gif (JPEG didn't even come out until 1992, and didn't see real usage on regular people's computers until later) meant manually downloading it first (perhaps from alt.binaries.pictures.*), then opening up an image viewer to look at it. The internet didn't really get commercialized with ads until the late 90s.