[stephenr]

So use an ad network that doesn't unnecessarily track me across the entire web, destroy my battery life, and make reading content (particularly on mobile) a game of 'find the article' amongst the shit storm of ads.

The number of things that everyday sites embed in their pages is phenomenal. The Ghostery extension gives a good idea about how much crap gets loaded.

In an article about content blockers, http://www.imore.com/and-hour-safari-content-blockers-and-im... has 13 separate, third-party scripts/etc trying to load.

6 tagged as 'analytics', 4 tagged as 'advertising', 3 tagged as 'social widgets'

That is a ridiculous amount of extra requests, extra data, and of course, tracking.

The advertising (and since the obsession with 'cloud' or 'SAAS', analytics too) industry has been fucking end-users for YEARS. Now users have a credible way to fight back, and suddenly it's "not fair?".

If you want advertising to fund your site/blog/whatever, use an ad network that doesn't try to digitally fuck me every time I visit your site.

edit: grammar

[roosterjm2k2]

Do you not see the sense of entitlement in that?

If the site has too many ads for your taste, simply don't visit that site. You have some sense that you are entitled to whatever efforts the site owner has committed to bring you content (obviously enough effort to be interesting to you) without supporting them through the ad service they chose. If you don't like their ads, you could simply move on, but now you're taking the fruits of their labor without giving them the passive support they ask in return.

I'm not saying its right or wrong, but the attitude of "they did what I don't like, so im going to do x" is very much entitled...

[stephenr]

So your suggestion is that instead of trying to convince these "publishers" (as people like to call them apparently) that they should use a less user-hostile ad/analytics solution, we should all just boycott their publications completely?

I bet they'd all love that - no visitors because of their shitty ad network choices, thus no costs right. They can eat their own failed dreams for dinner.

Is this the ad-blocking equivalent of "if you don't like the laws here, go to a different country" ??

[roosterjm2k2]

How would that be any different than any business model? Don't do what customers like, or do specifically what they hate, you have less success...

[stephenr]

The current situation is the equivalent of a physical store attaching a tracking device to everyone who looks at their window displays at force, and tracking every other store the person looks at.

In that analogy ad blocking is giving the guy trying to attach the tracking device a punch in the nose and stopping him.

As I've said, ads don't have to be so invasive and intrusive. If they acted responsibly we wouldn't be so adamant about blocking them.

[karlshea]

So you must have the built-in pop-up blockers built into almost all browsers turned off too, right? Since that's the only non-hypocritical way to make the argument you're making.

[roosterjm2k2]

No, because as a developer of a site, you know the defaults... if browsers defaulted to predictably blocking ads, content providers would adjust accordingly. There is a difference between a standard on pretty much every browser and an addon.

[karlshea]

But those pop-up blockers weren't always the default, and when people started installing addons to Firefox back in the day to block them I kept hearing all these same arguments about how it was immoral and going to kill the publishing industry.

It's not an issue of morality. It's an issue of overstepping what's acceptable to someone clicking on a link, exactly the same as what happened to pop-ups and pop-unders.

Look at the two dev tools charts here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9605/the-ios-9-review/10#Safar...

That is crazy. I'm sorry, but if your business model depends on megabytes of JS and 20 seconds per-page of network activity on my mobile device, I'm going to block it if I can. And if your business model fails, that's not my problem.

It's not even the advertisements that are the issue. If everyone started just serving images and removed all of the JS coming down from these ad exchanges I would turn my ad blocker off.

(As an aside, it's a hilarious juxtaposition listening to the arguments about the taxi industry and why Uber killing them is for the best, at the same time as I'm hearing the arguments about how a random publisher should be able to decide how much code I'm going to allow to execute on my own personal device and me blocking it is immoral or entitled.)

[stephenr]

Pop up blocking wasn't always a standard feature. Then it was.

[ubercow13]

Once you get a chance to decide if the page's ads are to your liking, though, you have already been tracked and had the ad network's code executed on your machine.

[bbayer]

You are absolutely right. Abusing clients is not acceptable. I just wanted to start discussion from publisher's point of view. I am just trying to ask if it is fair to punish people for bad attitude of ad networks. If it is than another solution shall be proposed and forcing people to create native apps is not one of them. edit: additional comment

[idonthaveaname]

> I am just trying to ask if it is fair to punish people for bad attitude of ad networks.

Publishers should ask themselves whether they are in the business of providing quality content to consumers, or in the business of sharing revenue with advertisers. Deciding which side of this line they fall on will help them make the right choices.

[stephenr]

> if it is fair to punish people for bad attitude of ad networks

Site operators choose the ad networks they use, so yes, it is fair to 'punish' people for choosing to affiliate themselves with bad-actors.

> than another solution shall be proposed

Non-invasive analytics (i.e. a single company logging who visits its own site(s) using Piwik or OWA) are generally not blocked, and non-tracking ad networks needn't necessarily be blocked on privacy grounds.

[Frqy3]

Also, lagging page loading to allow the auctioning of ad space a bit longer to run to hopefully extract a slightly higher price.

[Flow]

There's an auction happening for each client request?

[hmage]

Yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_bidding

Common.

[porsupah]

Case in point, regarding /good/ advertising: Project Wonderful. I'm happy to whitelist their ads, as I've discovered quite a number of good webcomics through them.

Yet, such genuine targeting (not blindly matching keywords) seems to've attracted little attention from the ad industry - instead, all we get is more AdWords (unintrusive, just fairly useless, and occasionally amusingly inappropriate) and the likes of Outbrain (responsible for the "From Around the Web" ads).

[qubex]

Personally I expect that the main thrust of the (inevitable) push-back will be a mechanism whereby cookies and ads are pushed from within the content site's actual domain. How that will occur and what exact from the back-end will need to take is something I am not sure about but I am sure far more intelligent and able people than I are hot on the topic.

[tomp]

Ultimately, that's exactly what we (the users) want - in particular, becayse cookies are per-domain only, this prevents any and all cross-domain tracking.

[0942v8653]

Not really… Browser fingerprinting is getting more and more accurate—you'll be amazed at how unique your browser is: https://panopticlick.eff.org

[draugadrotten]

Is there any extension to make my browser apepar less unique?

[tomtang0514]

You have no idea about ad network at all. "unnecessarily track"? Tracking is the only way to make the ad relevant to you and increase the ad's value so you actually see fewer ads and those ads fund better content. Without any tracking, you gonna see at least tripled amount of ads on the most popular websites today in order to generate same amount of revenue. And BTW, everything between "you land on a webpage" and "ad network decided which ad to serve" happens in about 100ms or less, like you can really notice it?! Complain about ads when you actually pay for subscription rather than asking for "workaround links" when you try to read a WSJ article posted on HN next time.

[stephenr]

If your site has recipes, cooking tips etc, you don't need to track my activity across the web, to know that I'm interested in cooking, and may want to buy cooking related items. Magazine based advertising has worked on this concept for literally decades.

As for your little quip about WSJ links. Do you mean this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10015496 ?

> I can't read the article because its paywalled

I never asked for a "workaround". Honestly the only reason I wanted to see the article is to identify if the article is as ridiculous as the title implied, so why would I buy a subscription for a publisher that puts out shit like that?

[tomtang0514]

That's exactly why I said you don't understand what targeted advertisement can do. Let's talk about 3 concepts:

1) Relevance. Take your cooking website example, say if that recipes has chicken in it. Then the magazine method can show you an ad about local supermarket for you to buy chicken. Then how do they know if you "probably" prefer walmart or wholefoods or local farmer's market? What if you are an organic guy? (which means you probably prefer wholefoods) Traditional magazine method doesn't make the result relevant enough for today's online advertising standard.

2) Feedback. As a brand who wanna do an online campaign, how do I know if my advertisement works? Today's advertiser no longer count on clicks, they count on impression. They don't need you to click to ad. They just want to make sure you see it. How do they if you didn't block to ad? How do they know if you didn't go to other tabs when their 15 second youtube ad is playing? That means at least 1 additional request send out from your browser. Usually it's more because they wanna know if you watched half of the video or the whole video. Things above don't have to be done with tracking you profile, but the other things does. For example, how to the advertisers know if they reach their target audience? If I'm selling the new mustang how do I know if I show the ad to ford people instead of chevy people? It's called on target percentage and it's one of the top metrics advertisers care about.

3) Availability. In many situations, there's just no ad available that actually relevant to the content. Then it's better for advertisers to show you something that may relevant to you instead of something completely random or no ad at all.

Your magazine method has works for decades doesn't mean it will continue to work in the future. Does magazine itself still work?

BTW, when I raise the WSJ thing I didn't target you specifically and I have no idea you had that comment you posted before. But as you said, you (and probably most people) won't pay for subscription for such ridiculous publication. Then advertisement is the way for you to read it freely so you can identify if the article is ridiculous or not. Or maybe just don't read it and comment by title?

[stephenr]

I don't care what they "can do". It's fucking creepy and I'll never accept it.

A site can just as easily say "show me ads for <page specific tags> as hard-coded "recipes", and knowing where I shop just goes into the creepy factor even more.

[tomtang0514]

Okay if I understand correctly, you just hate targeting ads with tracking not any ads right? Then instead of using ad blocker, you can opt out from cookie tracking on NAI so all participating companies of NAI (which covers almost all major players in the ad network industry) will not use your cookie.

[stephenr]

No, it isn't just privacy invasion that bothers me. Ridiculous screen-covering ads, bandwidth hogging, battery draining etc.

But forget all that - your suggestion, to avoid a tracking cookie from the various companies in what is frankly an industry with a terrible track record for doing the right thing, is to use the NAI "don't track me" "feature"... Which requires that I accept cookies from any domain and let them put a cookie on my device?

Are you aware of how stupid I would have to be, to believe that works?

[alkonaut]

Magazines and bus stop ads have worked for decades without knowing more about me than that I read a particular magazine for example. Small time outlets didn't advertise in magazines and bus stops in the past, so it's quite likely that small blogs and similar outlets with less than (say) a few hundred thousand unique visitors per day will no longer be able to support themselves via advertising, even to just cover hosting. The solution will be to aggregate into larger networks (medium etc) or rely on donations/subscriptions/affiliate links etc.

I don't want "targeted" "relevant" ads related to what I wrote on Facebook yesterday or what I googled last Tuesday. Ever. I'll just have to live with whatever content people can afford to show me without such ads. I really don't feel sorry for any ad network or any site that used them.

[Ntrails]

How about you consider the possibility that there are zero ads relevant to me. For as long as I can remember the only times I have clicked on an ad (on mobile) have been mistakes.

If ads make money based on click-throughs and purchases, then my blocking them has zero change in revenue generated. If they are simply displaying for brand awareness (less common on the web) then sure I'm having a minor impact but given that ads often ruin content enough to close the window (recent example being a floating banner covering half my screen and thus making article unreadable) I doubt there is positive brand impact anyway.

[monochromatic]

I didn't ask for relevant ads or privacy intrusions. And if your business model can be demolished by a bit of code that lets me selectively decide what I'm willing to view, it was never a good model anyway.