[acdha]

I think you’re right from the short-term perspective but largely irrelevant long-term. If Safari allowed arbitrary code execution, it’d be a little better for as long as it took publishers to deploy first-party ad injection. We’d still get the security problems, though.

You can already see what that’s like with podcasts where local ads are spliced right into the audio file. You’re not stopping that short of doing something like buffering the content and running it through an AI, and if that became widespread we’d just see more embedded placement (“Hey, protagonist, why are you so irresistibly sexy?” “It’s these new briefs from My Undies”).

Adtech is a multi billion dollar industry and the people making the content you want are enthusiastically supporting them. This is not a problem which technical tricks can solve – as soon as you do something effective, Google can deploy hundreds of engineers with huge resource budgets to foil you. That won’t change without something like regulatory changes to lower the financial pressure.

[kibwen]

> if that became widespread we’d just see more embedded placement

Which is completely desirable. The problem isn't "ads", it's "targeted, personalized ads that rely on thoroughly destroying the the privacy of everyone on the internet in order to function". If a show/podcast wants to vet its own advertisers and endorse a specific product, that's great; it establishes a concrete relationship with the advertisers that has more value to both users and content creators than the anonymous, unvettable system of opaque middlemen currently peddled by targeted ad networks.

[acdha]

That’s one option but it’s not what’s happening. Historically ads were easily blocked because they came from different domains; as we’re seeing now increased deployment of blockers has lead to things like CNAME cloaking or even first-party hosting. The amount of money at play is enough that they’re going to keep trying more invasive approaches as the old ones become less profitable.

The podcasts I mentioned aren’t running their own ad network, they’re using a service which injects audio segments into your download. I’d expect things like that to become more common as ad revenues decline, with an endgame something like CDNs inserting tailored content directly to avoid any other hostnames or paths which easy to block.

[yc12340]

> Historically ads were easily blocked

Historically ads were served by the site owner at their own discretion. Prior to that ads were served by TV and radio channels. None of those approaches were easy to block.

Dedicated ad networks on separate domains are relatively recent fad (since ~15 years ago). A lot websites still ship first-party ads, many have never stopped to.

[ajsnigrutin]

First party ads are also a part of many content creators (eg. "this video is sponsored by NordShadowraid Wallet"), and currently, the only way to block them is via crowdsourcing (eg. sponsorblock addon).

[lern_too_spel]

If I can recognize an ad, I can construct JavaScript that can recognize that ad too. The current extension APIs let me inject that JavaScript, while the declarative ad blocking APIs do not.

[acdha]

This is a constant arms race, as anyone who’s looked at Facebook’s DOM knows, and if you’re successful it pushes to the end state I mentioned of ads becoming very similar to the content. The companies which depend on ad revenue aren’t going to go out of business voluntarily and many of them will find alternative paths to those ad dollars.

[benhurmarcel]

> where local ads are spliced right into the audio file. You’re not stopping that short of doing something like buffering the content and running it through an AI

This can be solved by crowdsourcing it: https://sponsor.ajay.app/

[acdha]

Currently, to some extent. Again, my point is that there’s a ton of money at stake and it’s not like companies are going to say “welp, someone blocked our ads, time to close up shop”. Each time blockers have gotten better, all that’s happened has been the ad delivery systems getting more sophisticated — and since the providers can run the same tools I don’t think that’s going to change. Containing some of the damage by, for example, continuing to restrict JavaScript at least has some benefits but things like YouTube ads are the same format and delivery path.

[fomine3]

It's cat and mouse game, but currently ad blockers win all battles.