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.
Using an ad blocker makes me tech savvy? Oh, la, la. Hand me my monocle and glass of schardonayegh.
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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.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I feel like one thing doesn't get talked about enough is that websites feel the need to implement ad services that want to track the user in order to serve ads. Which I just find weird, the expectation to give up ones privacy, just to get served an ad.
Instead, the ads should just be relevant to the content of the page where an ad is embedded, which would automatically make it relevant to the reader, without tracking them.
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Using an ad blocker makes me tech savvy? Oh, la, la. Hand me my monocle and glass of schardonayegh.
I mean, basically yes? Do you think most people ever touched the addons button?
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I mean, basically yes? Do you think most people ever touched the addons button?
Well, no, but is that really the bar? It is a pretty low bar no matter how you dress it up. Now leave me alone with my schaedeghenayegh.
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I feel like one thing doesn't get talked about enough is that websites feel the need to implement ad services that want to track the user in order to serve ads. Which I just find weird, the expectation to give up ones privacy, just to get served an ad.
Instead, the ads should just be relevant to the content of the page where an ad is embedded, which would automatically make it relevant to the reader, without tracking them.
Ad companies are getting butt-hurt because the pages you are referencing are being seen even less, due to AI scraping by search engines. So now they are going after:
- The consumer using an ad blocker. Last amount of protections/rights, easiest target to vilify.
- The search engines, for stealing content views where ads would be placed
- The publishers for allowing users that use ad blockers.
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People donât mind ads for the most part itâs the fact that they take over 3/4 of the screen and generally try to be as obnoxious as possible.
If we stuck with banner ads no one would care, but they just had to make ads as shitty as possible.
I absolutely do mind.
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Using an ad blocker makes me tech savvy? Oh, la, la. Hand me my monocle and glass of schardonayegh.
Sorry that's spelled jardoughneigh you uncultured swine. Give back that monocle at once!
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Yeah no, I have seen multiple businesses closing down due to poor marketing promotion/budget.
And then we all complain that we didn't know about a certain product/service because they didn't market it good enough (we have seen it a lot of times with movies for example, then they turn into obscure classics with the pass of time, but not really profitable), also some games that didn't really made themselves known while in critical selling weeks?
Who is gonna be the brave soul to release a game when GTA VI appears? That would be marketing suicide, no matter how good your game is.
I have seen multiple businesses closing down due to poor marketing promotion/budget.
Only because they were competing against businesses with possibly shittier products but certainly better marketing. Remove all the marketing, good and bad, and suddenly it's a real merit-based competition.
It is very idealist, but IMO worth considering. There can (or at least should) be less intrusive means of letting people know of a product.
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I run uBlock Origin for the browsers, and Pi-Hole for the network. Plus a wireguard VPN server that my phone connects to when Iâm not on the home wifi for ad-blocking on the go.
I switched to adguard home recently, much nicer user interface and I dont miss any features from pihole.
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Pi-hole. Youâll want to run two, because machines will use both a primary and a secondary server for their DNS requests. If you donât want to buy a pair of raspberry piâs, you can run it in Docker, which basically keeps it isolated to its own tiny virtual machine. So youâd just need to spin up a pair of docker containers to run the pair of pi-holes. If youâre using Docker, theyâll need a pair of volumes too, or else theyâll lose all of their data every time they reboot.
Youâll want this to be on a machine that is running 24/7, because any time it shuts down, your internet will essentially stop working. Thatâs why lots of people end up just throwing a few raspberry pis in a closet and forgetting about them.
Once itâs installed, youâll need to load it with block lists. The default ones are pretty basic. Iâd just google something like âpihole blocklistsâ and figure it out from there. Each list will be a URL, which allows the pihole to pull updates, (which you can tell it to do via the built-in web UI).
Its actually not easy to run two of them since they are not designed for using a shared disk (you can get corrupted data). Its also not necessary, you can just leave the secondary dns server blank.
But if you want two because you want high availability in case one of your piholes goes down, you can rsync the settings between the two machines every 5 minutes or so. Its important to keep them in sync that way.
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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.
Maybe the problem is the advertisers and not the consumers. Jeeeesus.
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Pi-hole. Youâll want to run two, because machines will use both a primary and a secondary server for their DNS requests. If you donât want to buy a pair of raspberry piâs, you can run it in Docker, which basically keeps it isolated to its own tiny virtual machine. So youâd just need to spin up a pair of docker containers to run the pair of pi-holes. If youâre using Docker, theyâll need a pair of volumes too, or else theyâll lose all of their data every time they reboot.
Youâll want this to be on a machine that is running 24/7, because any time it shuts down, your internet will essentially stop working. Thatâs why lots of people end up just throwing a few raspberry pis in a closet and forgetting about them.
Once itâs installed, youâll need to load it with block lists. The default ones are pretty basic. Iâd just google something like âpihole blocklistsâ and figure it out from there. Each list will be a URL, which allows the pihole to pull updates, (which you can tell it to do via the built-in web UI).
Machines will be fine with just one primary DNS server. The main reason for running two is so that you still have one working DNS server if either machine goes down, for example during maintenance.
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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 âweb integrityâ standard. At that point the pages would be signed with ads and in the signature didnât match the page wouldnât even be shown.
They tried to play it off as âensuring that you truly get the correct copy of the page and no bad hackers have intercepted itâ but really it would have 100% forced ads.
To think that Google once had ads that I considered OK, just a bunch of text and links. How times have changed...
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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.
Ads on websites are deals the sitemaker made with themselves. The internet is free.
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The trade body called it âillegal circumvention technologyâ
Lol. Fuck off.
They wont be happy until eye tracking technology makes sure we sit and watch their fucking ads before the actual content appears.
I mean, none of this is getting better. Its only going to become worse. I have ads in the fucking pause screen on my streaming tv app. So if I want to take a toilet break, I get an ad in my face. Its just so ridiculous.
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Obligatory xkcd 624:
Step 4 - success - Attention aquired.
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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.
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.
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gasp you mean to tell me you DON'T like 20 million videos playing over the top of the recipe that you're trying to read while trying not to burn dinner? unbelievable.
smh these motherfuckers are so brazen
Speaking of cooking and not wanting to see 20 videos playing over the recipe:
No ad blockers needed
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They wont be happy until eye tracking technology makes sure we sit and watch their fucking ads before the actual content appears.
I mean, none of this is getting better. Its only going to become worse. I have ads in the fucking pause screen on my streaming tv app. So if I want to take a toilet break, I get an ad in my face. Its just so ridiculous.
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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.
It's far far worse than American TV. TV commercials are a scattershot hope that you show the ad to 2 million people and 10,000 see it and buy your product.
With Google fingerprint tracking, advertisers are selling hyper-targeted ads so a company buys only ads to show to the right 10,000 people over and over. It's a literal dream for advertisers. But it's a fucking dystopian nightmare for us.
