Adblockers stop publishers serving ads to (or even seeing) 1bn web users - Press Gazette
-
Alternate reality foss religions were not on my imagination list this morning but there ya go
Ah somehow I knew religion must be involved to be so violent. Luckily I am not religious and my son could not be happier.
-
I used to maintain a website for a bicycling club in my county that was great for getting people into biking, getting people out the house, making friends, and staying fit.
We had a banner ad along the top of the site for a local bicycle/bicycle repair shop that aided the club a lot and was very reasonable.
He got something out of it (publicity and a seal of approval towards the value/quality of his work), and we got something out of it (money to run the site, and a bit left over for things like puncture repair kits and the occasional celebratory drink after an arduous ride).
Nobody bats an eyelid to those ads. They are reasonable.
What we have now isn't that. What we have now is an insecure, malware-infested privacy nightmare that ruins webpages and stresses everybody out.
Use Firefox + uBlock origin for your own sanity. Don't let big tech make you feel guilty for not going along with their game.
Guilty? Hahahahahaha
They will never make me feel guilty because they are the guilty ones. Guilty of greed and of destroying our society. Fuck big advetisers. They would put billboards in outre space if they thought it would make them a tenth of a penny more in profit.
I dont even consider them human to be honest.
-
"Without user consent" is a load of crap.
Honestly the scale makes me wonder how much is because it's fucking AI bots.
listen, if browsers just block ads as a matter of their existence and the average joe is unaware they are blocking ads, then all the better. this article references a poll that specifically asks if the users know they are hard blocking ads, and just under half say they were not. which is good news, as that is farther reach then what user competency rates would have got. i am just taking that poll at face value.
-
“And Scott Messer, founder of publishing adtech consultancy Messer Media, added: “Dark traffic is unlike anything we have seen before. It’s demonetising publisher content at scale without user consent.
“Publishers already face an existential-level threat in the face of AI reducing referral traffic. This is another slice that publishers cannot afford to lose.””
Good, I hope they go the way of the telegraph and whale oil salesman.
-
Ah somehow I knew religion must be involved to be so violent. Luckily I am not religious and my son could not be happier.
I am overwhelmingly happy for both of you.
I was raised Baptist. Don't recommend it.
-
I actually like how people are again on the wave of understanding that anarchism is right even if you've voluntarily consented to hierarchy. And other similar things.
Sometimes you need to break rules. Entropy and life are more important.
One could only dream my friend. One day we will all help and care for each other.
-
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.
wrote last edited by [email protected]If we could figure out how to block ads on TV we might actually still bother posting for cable again. I'm the mean time, fuck 'em, they're too rich as it is.
-
wrote last edited by [email protected]
Or just a protocol like Web Monetization where you put an amount of money you choose into a pot on your browser and it's handed out to sites you visit based on how much time you spend on a given site, with options to denylist sites from payment as needed
-
What device? FireTV/Firestick/etc all support it (surprisingly).
Amazon is crap, so my only two real options where an NVIDIA shield or an Apple TV and since we are an Apple household I went with the Apple TV, which doesn't support it.
-
Millenials are killing the ad industry!
Good.
It would have to be millenials since Gen z exist almost entirely in the walled garden of a phone app.
Most people now a days don't even use a desktop with a browser. I honestly expect that most of what they are "seeing" is just web scrapers for the LLM. Those are likely to "block" ads simply based on efficiency, since it shows down crawling.
-
Or just a protocol like Web Monetization where you put an amount of money you choose into a pot on your browser and it's handed out to sites you visit based on how much time you spend on a given site, with options to denylist sites from payment as needed
Reminded me of Flattr
is it FOSS ? -
If we could figure out how to block ads on TV we might actually still bother posting for cable again. I'm the mean time, fuck 'em, they're too rich as it is.
I just got cable again after not having it for... 13 years?
I don't even get the point of it. It's the exact same thing it was 13 years ago. Same shows and everything. Ads. I tried to watch it a few times and I think I've watched a total of 2 hours since I got it a month ago. It's awful.
-
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 use of the term "Dark traffic" here is to paint the use of ad-blockers as something nefarious. Don't use it, fuck these people right in their stupid mouths.
I propose using the terms "clean traffic", for ad-blocked website traffic, and "dogshit traffic" for everything else.
-
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.
i know this may go against the general attitude here but i gotta say this does make me a little sad when i think about it. and i use adblockers as well, but i never knew what the numbers were. when it's put into context like this it's hard not to be discouraged by the fact that this is still probably a minority of users. i mean what the hell, how are people still using the internet with ads turned on.
-
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 web has almost always been unusable without an adblocker. Ads today are less malicious, but more insidious. Clicking the wrong ad in 2003 would brick your computer. Clicking the wrong ad today means you'll have to cancel a credit card after your personal data is compiled and sold on the black market.
Nothing new. Ads don't fuel a free internet. They fuel a business model. The free internet is fueled by the time and donations of kind, dedicated people.
-
I don't mind the old system of one or two ads on a page or a 10-second ad at the start of a YouTube video if they don't track their users. But these days it is growing out of proportions, we are almost at American television with the amount of ad breaks in a YouTube video, and it's absurd.
Before I used Firefox on Android, any search about a game I'm playing would result in a half page video ad in the top half of the screen, accompanied by the bottom half being a request to share your data with 1496 trusted data partners.
Now I use Firefox with add ons, and I get the results I requested. The modern web is basically unusable in it's raw form.
-
sorry, fixed.
Do you have some evidence of this?
-
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.
Well no one ever had to sell me on how nice a fire smells.
-
To think that Google once had ads that I considered OK, just a bunch of text and links. How times have changed...
Advertisers will always keep pushing things trying to find the limit where people will just barely tolerate it. Then when they push it too far they cry "no fair!" When people stop putting up with it.
-
The web has almost always been unusable without an adblocker. Ads today are less malicious, but more insidious. Clicking the wrong ad in 2003 would brick your computer. Clicking the wrong ad today means you'll have to cancel a credit card after your personal data is compiled and sold on the black market.
Nothing new. Ads don't fuel a free internet. They fuel a business model. The free internet is fueled by the time and donations of kind, dedicated people.
Ads don't fuel a free internet. They fuel a business model. The free internet is fueled by the time and donations of kind, dedicated people.
I believe this to be true.
