Adblockers stop publishers serving ads to (or even seeing) 1bn web users - Press Gazette
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Raw-dogging the internet without an adblocker is about as irresponsible as not using contraception
For a few years, even the FBI officially recommended that everyone should use an adblocker. They recently removed that PSA from their website, I believe with the new administration:
https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/22/fbi-ad-blocker/
https://www.pcmag.com/news/fbi-recommends-installing-an-ad-blocker-to-dodge-scammers
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Advertising should be illegal. Huge waste of money and everyone's time.
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.
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Can only imagine how f'd up kids' minds must be now
My kid hasn't ever seen an ad on any streaming service or any web page, ever. And I block ads via DNS. We don't have any kind of live TV service or cable so they literally have just never seen any ads, ever.
Sometimes if we're out at a restaurant, some TV is playing live content and an ad runs. My kid is shocked like it's the first time he ever ate sugar.
Glad I can keep that toxic trash out of my house and out of his life.
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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.
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
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The ad industry is an abusive ex that complains when you defend yourself.
They're not ex. They're serial rapist.
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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 run uBlock Origin for the browsers, and Pi-Hole for the network. Plus a wireguard VPN server that my phone connects to when I’m not on the home wifi for ad-blocking on the go.
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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.
Whatever number it is, it ain't big enough yet.
More power!
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Can only imagine how f'd up kids' minds must be now
Was so proud when my kid stated that ”If the thing is good enough, it does not need advertising. Only poor stuff needs that.”
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Any good guides you know of to set that up?
Pi-hole. You’ll want to run two, because machines will use both a primary and a secondary server for their DNS requests. If you don’t want to buy a pair of raspberry pi’s, you can run it in Docker, which basically keeps it isolated to its own tiny virtual machine. So you’d just need to spin up a pair of docker containers to run the pair of pi-holes. If you’re using Docker, they’ll need a pair of volumes too, or else they’ll lose all of their data every time they reboot.
You’ll want this to be on a machine that is running 24/7, because any time it shuts down, your internet will essentially stop working. That’s why lots of people end up just throwing a few raspberry pis in a closet and forgetting about them.
Once it’s installed, you’ll need to load it with block lists. The default ones are pretty basic. I’d just google something like “pihole blocklists” 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).
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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.
Psychology has revealed that the ability to direct attention to and process stimulus is limited, and that it's more limited in the most vulnerable members of society, including those with autism and those with too much stress.
Stimulus engineered to capture attention must therefore be treated by the law as a form of violence.
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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 actually don't mind ad but only if it is general ad, not targeted ones. Hence, why I hate web ads. I appreciate advertisements in more public spaces like radio and posters.
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My DNS is from controld.com.
What you do is you log into your router and on the local area network page there's generally a section to change the DNS settings of your router and you just put in the IP addresses that control D gives you.
You can also set it up on iOS and Android so that you are also protected when you leave your home network and are on the go on your cellular network.
As I said, along with Control-D, I also use U-Block Origin to catch anything that it might miss.
The other thing to do is use as many open source applications as you can possibly get away with.
Fair warning, using third-party DNS is a massive security issue; It basically allows that DNS provider to see all of the sites you’re visiting. Whenever possible, you should use a self-hosted DNS server like pi-hole.
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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.
People don’t mind ads for the most part it’s 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.
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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.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
– Banksy
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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.
Without user consent? That’s exactly the opposite
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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.
