[onion2k]

The obvious solution as far as the ad networks are concerned is to proxy their adverts through the website that's displaying them. A website owner signs up to adnetwork.com, installs a node/PHP/whatever app on their server, and adverts are sent to that app and relayed on to the user's browser. As the ads come from the same domain as all the other content for the website they'll be virtually impossible to block. The reason this hasn't happened in the past is because shared web hosting would have made it difficult; as more and more sites move to virtual servers it'll get easier. Eventually it'll be a one-click install from a browser when you set up Wordpress or Ghost.

This means they'll load more slowly, they'll be harder to get around, and we will have absolutely no way to see who is actually tracking us any more.

Much as I dislike adverts on websites, the alternative to the way they're sent now is far worse.

[scarmig]

I'm pretty sure I've already seen this in the wild, but there are plenty of workarounds.

1) Easiest is DOM-structure. Ads will often have a signature tell-tale placement and structure on a page, and this is enough to identify them. A naive ad implementation is trivial to detect, and even smarter ones can be worked around using crowdsourcing.

2) As a general matter, the facet of advertising we call ads are obvious to humans, and should in principle be detectable to machines. Rely on layout cues, other pages on the website, differences in content. This will ultimately push more and more advertising into the "sponsored content" category, which seems a genuinely harder problem.

[sangnoir]

The sponsored content/"native advertising" is the next logical step. It can range from "product placement" in otherwise regular articles, to full-blown advertorials disguised as regular articles. No DOM-structure to block, no layout clues and very non-obvious to humans. I consider these to be more insidious than current ads that most are eager to block

[dorgo]

What we see here is evolution of advertisement. From low quality spam-like ads to higher quality advertorials, which must provide some usefullness to the reader in order to carmouflage as normal content and to attract attention. I work in a marketing agency and there is a big shift from Adwords + SEO to "content marketing". Big money is put into creating interesting or funny stuff to attract attention (and backlinks).

[teddyh]

If the content is sponsored, this fact must still be disclosed according to FCC regulations. These disclosures could be detected. In fact, there is already a Firefox extension to do this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/addetector/