Swedish publishers plan summer ‘Block Party’ to thwart ad blockers Swedish publishers will mount an aggressive counter-offensive against ad blocking software later this year. “80 to 90 per cent” of publishers will simultaneously block the ad blockers for the month of August. It’s the first nationwide action of its kind. “Yes, we know this could be naïve, and we know this will be complicated …
Defeating the Adblock detection is pretty easy:
Just press F12 in IE to enable developer mode, select the Network tab and press the green Enable button to start capturing traffic. Then look for blocked call back scripts, etc and just unblock those very specific URLs....
"Then look for blocked call back scripts, etc and just unblock those very specific URLs...."
Do advertisers think there's any scenario in which I agree to run their malware-laden software on my computer? If JavaScript were not ubiquitous, the Web would actually be a safe place. Even in some dream world where I was willing to give up uBlock Origin, NoScript would remain firmly in place.
In any case, I've been saying for literally decades (since the beginning of the Web, in fact) that advertisers need an ironclad Code of Conduct, for their own protection. The backlash has been a long time coming, but it's not going to be postponed much longer.
Advertisers have been spoiled by decades of TV and radio, where they play to a captive audience, and enjoy the luxury of forcibly shoving their stinking pile of dog feces in users' faces. Now the shoe is on the other foot: users have the control. Advertisers need to grow up, realize their old business model is obsolete - and decide whether they want to become obsolete with it.
I accidently installed AdBlock instead of ABP once, that was a weird couple of hours. May jump to this ublock origin people are talking about.
But does anyone use AdBlock on purpose anymore as opposed to by accident when they think they installed ABP? They're a pretty minor player in the ad blocking market.
But adverts for yourself on your own site don't pay well. Most websites want to use advert networks - which require externally hosted content...
They still can: the ads get served async from the server from the content server. Gives the content-owner more power and takes the tracking problems out of the equation. This is the real value of the ad networks: they know that I also visit the website of the over-80's nude leapfrog team… Though because they only run collaborative filtering this actually adds little value: you book a holiday and subsequently see lots of ads for holidays.
No, the real threat is the move towards the private internet of Facebook's "instant articles" et al. :-(
Good article about this on The Awl.
"the ads get served async from the server from the content server"
Which will show on the advert network as zero page views then. Or maybe one view when you make the copy....Or do you actually think they would trust website owners to tell them how many times the advert was viewed?!
"Why should the publishers care about losing page visits from users who aren't "paying" by viewing ads?"
The same reason that Microsoft didn't really go after piracy: once you become some tiny back-water news website, you don't have any influence. And many newspapers, being loss-making enterprises, value influence above profitability.
“80 to 90 per cent” of publishers will simultaneously block the ad blockers for the month of August.
Your self censoring is commendable. Anybody who doesn't have their blocker yet, uBlock Origin is a good one.
I wish them good luck, and will be hoping that they realise how much of disaster blocking the blockers turns out to be.
Ads are an enormous parasitic drain on the internet. Blocking them is fast becoming mandatory for anyone who gives a shit about security and any semblance of privacy, and the ad companies only have themselves to blame.
Whilst online "content" needs to be paid for somehow, it doesn't mean we should allow consumers up to be mugged. Publishers need to find some middle ground, demanding that people stop using security software is never going to work. They seem to like adding "share to facebook" buttons everywhere, but never seem to have made the step to micropayments services like flattr, produced by those very same bad people who ran the pirate bay. I'll happily give you a few pence per article, but I'll boycott you if you penalise me for using an adblocker.
>The number of Britons who use ad blocking software has risen from 15 per cent last July to 22 per cent
Assume that this statistic is generalisable to the west, or even just Europe, which is where those publishers do business. The implication is that there are fully four months in which to get that number up--way up.
The 'adverts-pay-for-content' argument needs to be run into the ground, where it belongs, as it's bullshit. If every business has fully to pay the freight of their on-line publishing/web presence, it becomes a universal fixed-overhead item. At the margin, there will be an effort, in every case, to minimise costs while maximising effect/reach/reaction/buzz. Sucking up that reality could well make for lean, clean, gracefully-degrading sites served from servers in direct control of the publishers. Competition is supposed to be an incentive to excel--so the articles of the faith suggest. So: stop feeding the parasite of the on-line advertising industry, and compete with your content!
"Reasonable ads please, then more of us wont be forced to block them!"
Indeed. That sentiment is why I'm glad I wasn't partaking of any coffee when I read this bit in the article:
'“Yes, we know this could be naïve, and we know this will be complicated,” Daniel Weilar of Nyheter24, an entertainment and news site. But Weilar thinks its preferable to the “protection racket” model of paying off the ad block software companies, he told Digiday.'
They haven't even considered the possibility of just making their advertising more reasonable - which to me means just static banners (no video, no audio) that don't require Javascript.
"However sites, including El Reg, cause the page to slow down so much with video/animated ads"
Try just using a hosts file that redirects most of the algorithmic ad servers to nowhere. There are various ones around, google something like "hosts file to block ad servers" and you will find the first few (non-advert!) suggestions of interest.
I find this makes firefox on a core-duo laptop under linux usable with full content rendition - no lags on scrolling except for embedded (content) videos &c while still allowing 'organic' ads from the actual servers that are serving the pages.
Just my compromise in a difficult area. I agree fully with the sentiment conveyed by the second sentence of your post!
All that this action will do will be to reduce (probably permanently) their number of viewers and drive traffic to those companies that do not participate in this stupid action.
With the current state of the internet, ad blocking and javascript blocking and removal of Adobe Flash has become as essential as a good antivirus package. Without the blockers, a new virus can get on your PC during the period between the new version emerging and the antivirus package having updated detection rules.
(If the threats get much worse then I may resort to only web browsing from a VM with Linux running from a virtual DVD.)
"With the current state of the internet, ad blocking and javascript blocking and removal of Adobe Flash has become as essential as a good antivirus package."
Actually I'd say ad, and Javascript blocking is 1000X more important then any crap antivirus(which are usually worst then the actual viruses) mainly because if you block those 2, don't download any software from dodgy sites, and use thumb drives in public PC's there is almost no chance to actually get a virus.
I dunno man, I host a bunch of websites for people out of my own pocket. I dont need to advertise on them. Its a service I am providing.....
Piss off with the free or nothing campaign, It's not that expensive to host a website. A few games sites that I go to rack in over 3k per month in donations, also not 1 ad in sight !!
The main issue these people have is that people are not prepared to pay for 90% of the content out there. They will look at it if it is free, but actually pay for it ..... Not a chance.
Ad blocks will only weed out the crap sites that rely on forcing ads in your face. And good bloody riddance !
It's so disheartening to see all this kind of merri-go-round trying to fix the symptom of the problem (that ad-blockers exist and are used by so many people) rather than the actual root problem itself (that these days too many of the ads are unacceptable to end users in what they demand of system bandwidth and how they look, operate and what they open the end user up to in terms of malware etc in some cases).
All that'll happen is end users will get pissed off with said Swedish publishers, and many will just go elsewhere for what they were after and probably a fair proportion won't come back again afterwards.
Whereas if the ads were plain, simple and without all the scripting junk behind it, I'm sure many users would be happy to accept them as a trade-off for being able to access the sites for free, and everyone (except maybe the ad-block suppliers) win.
Or am I looking at this too logically from being an engineer and troubleshooter?
Its a good experiment in a small country - with that large of an uptake you'd expect enough people to be inconvenienced that they can get some good metrics for how many people disable their ad block to view content versus just going elsewhere. If you want news about Sweden, where else you gonna go?
The issue is people who are looking for more general Euro or world news have many many other options, especially in a country where everyone learns English. I think blocking the blockers might work better in countries that don't speak a major language spoken in many countries like English or Spanish. That would provide more of a captive audience who would have no choice to go elsewhere for their content.
They're getting the wrong message here - Eyeo's 'protection racket' will be their own undoing since many users are advocating uBlock Origin as a superior alternative to AdBlock Plus' 'acceptable' ads.
Fighting back against AdBlock's questionable policies is fiddling whilst Rome burns...
While I disagree with the adblock plus "protection racket", these publishers are going about it the wrong way. They still don't understand why people use adblockers. For most, it is not because they don't want to see ads. They are annoyed with pop-up/pop-unders, tracking with ads, obtrusive ads, auto-playing videos, ads that attempt to learn your physical location, and ads that deliver malware or redirect your browser to scam websites.
If publishers want people to turn off adblockers, return the advertising model to the days when the internet first became a necessity of life, the days when the above rules were the de-facto standard. Until then, no matter what step you take, adblockers will just keep growing.
Pretty much spot on, but with one small adjustment for me. This part:
For most, it is not because they don't want to see ads.
Is not true, at least in my case. In an ideal world I don't want to see any ads, ever. However - I am happy to put up with unobtrusive, sensible ads in exchange for a free service, for those sites I am a regular visitor to and user of. Unless and until this type of ad replaces the aggressive, obtrusive and downright annoying stuff that is currently the norm I reserve the right to block ads, aggressively.
"If publishers want people to turn off adblockers, return the advertising model to the days when the internet first became a necessity of life, the days when the above rules were the de-facto standard."
Well back in the early 2000s I was running this
http://proxomitron.info/45/help/Contents.html
because ads have always been a problem on the web.
Of course they don't understand, and neither do most people..
The magazine publishing earning model, even in the dead-tree era, was never about articles, it was about selling ad-space. The articles were purely to create the vehicle to sell that ad-space. With the shift to internet, that earning model has not changed for the majority of publishers. They switched medium, but not their earning model.
So, no, they wouldn't understand... They're still stuck in an economic model that was already failing 3-4 decades ago, and have failed to evolve.
I had no problem with that model. It might have delayed my user experience by a few seconds by having to turn multiple glossy pages to reach the articles - I might even have paused to look at a cool car shot or a gadget - and when I reached an article I wasn't blinded or deafened by some shitty Flashy overlay.
It seems advertisers have forgotten the first rule of their "art" - to attract attention. By seduction, not assault.
Various UK content providers have done that for ages, e,g, ITVplayer (hub, whatever it is rebranded to today) does not play content if adblocker *detected* as active. So a bit of catchup by the Swedes.
Though anyone who is capable of installing software to block ads is likely to be equally capable of a bit of searching & finding the content they were looking for elsewhere (& maybe never returning to the site they were blocked from)
Ad slingers blew it (ignoring the major hassles of mega obtrusiveness of so many ads), killer blow was so much malware served via ads, ad / flash/ js blocking software has become as much a basic security measure as anti-virus software.
Better if they stopped whinging about ad blocking, and instead binned ads and got micro payments / donation systems rolled out.
heyrick: "The reason I still use ABP is because it has a really simple element hiding extension that can get rid of such overlays."
With uBlock Origin, the 'element hiding helper' is built in, and far more convenient. uBlock Origin also offers a detailed page log, allowing you to easily identify what the site is trying to load, what is being blocked, and, potentially, what might need to be whitelisted. uBO is a huge leap beyond ABP.
"Quite a few UK news websites with adblockers load the entire page content and then overlay it with a "you can't see this!" bubble. It's probably child's play for someone to knock up a browser extension to display the article content from page source."
1) Reader mode on Firefox seems to get rid of this, along with all other rubbish from the screen.
2) I have in the past used AdBlock, in particular its element hiding helper, to block the overlay.
Is that only some 10% of advertisers pay to be on Ad-block's whitelist, the rest get on by complying with the terms and by virtue of being a small player.
The big players have to both comply and pay and seeing as Ad-block needs funding to continue, then I think this is an excellent model.
All this whining from the big ad execs is to be expected, as they have never featured in the top 7.4 billion of the nicest, most considerate, selfless people on the planet.
Ah, yes, the planet, that being the thing which they are selling to us until it is nothing but ash and dust.
The publishers are assuming a business model which regards consumers as the enemy, and harasses them to toe the line. Not normally a good way to endear them to the customer.
I agree, however, with the description of AdBlock as a protection racket. I also agree with this being naïve & complicated. They just for got to add pointless, antagonistic and suicidal.
Sometimes a bit fiddly when I have to give temporary permissions to sites/domains in order to make something specific work.
Easy: I run a different browser with no controls at all. I will use it to see something if tweaking settings seems as if it will take more than a few seconds. After viewing I clear all private data (cookies, etc) and view something else. Not perfect, but easy.
What I've always thought adblockers should do is have an option for a site where all the ads are downloaded, and all the Javascript run, just in an off screen window. That way the content is in the visible window, and all the ads and checks that verify everything was downloaded and run is invisible. Not sure how they could detect / protect against that.
You wouldn't enable that except on sites that were trying to block the ad blockers, since it would obviously slow things down.
Alternatively, I've always thought that if sites want to defeat ad blockers, they should have a way where they locally cache all the ad stuff on their own site. How are you going to block it if you can't tell if something is an ad or part of the content? The reason we can block it now is that all the accesses are to third party sites that can be blacklisted as they are discovered.
The problem is not with the ad blockers, it is with the adverts that get pushed out by the people who they *allow* to put their adverts on their sites.
What they *should* be doing is telling the advertisers to stop producing all the bandwidth hogging, malware laden, irrititating, noisy and intrusive adverts which make people HAVE to use ad blockers in order to have a less frustrating browsing experience on their sites!
Until then they are just shooting themselves in the foot with this idiotic stunt.
is it not possible to build a plug-in that would BLOCK the websites from knowing that their ads are NOT displayed on the actual screen? I mean, in the age of super-fast internet, unless I'm on my mobile (and then browsing is pointless anyway), I don't care much about the shit they load into my internet cache, I'll clean it when I close the browser, what I really care about is what I actually see on the screen. And if I don't see it... they can send it my way, be my guest.
While I run an ad-blocker and agree that a lot of ads are intrusive and occasionally pose a security risk. The concept of "pay us to get your ads whitelisted" does smell of racketeering. I would feel more comfortable if the vetting was done by an independent third party, not the manufacturer of blocker. (The ads could be cryptographically signed and ethical blockers permit only those that were signed by parties the user trusted.)
Moral discussions aside, it is unfortunate that add blockers are doing paid white-listing because it is allowing the advertising companies to make a lot of noise about racketeering etc which is distracting from the issue of why people are using add blockers in the first place.
From this they can build a platform, stand some politicians/lobbyists on it, push the whole innocent victims of extortion routine and then get some stupid legislation rammed through.
They must have rejoiced when they heard what adBlock et al were doing.
-- there were some way to help content providers understand the impact of high-bandwidth ads on consumers. Perhaps by streaming large volumes of communication packets to their servers from a variety of scripted sources, unilaterally and without any load mitigation. Oh, wait, of course hitting a computer you don't own with loads of automatically generated bandwidth-hogging comms would be a DDoS attack, and it would be illegal.
Huh. I'll be gobsmacked.
It should provide us with a good test bed for counter-blocking scripts/add-ons which block the adblocker blocker. Got to thank the Swedes for that.
I saw the web through a browser without an ad-blocker the other day. It hurt. It seems that ads have been getting more aggressive since I started using AdBlock a few years back, probably creating a sort of positive feedback loop.
I'll turn off my ad-blocker when an ad doesn't add to the screen load time significantly, doesn't occupy a major fraction of the screen, isn't screaming at me audibly or visually and is actually pertinent to the content I'm viewing. As to blocking ad blockers, go ahead, Forbes already lost my page hits because of this, so fuck 'em!
Porn sites are ahead of the game, with many detecting adblockers but continuing to work with only a simple and unobtrusive request you subscribe for an ad free experience. They have the advantage of more desirable content than most news sites to enourage subscriptions but where porn leads others follow.
Give me ad's that don't auto play music at full blast even after i've muted them, jam up my web browser by taking over 2/3 rd's of the page hiding what i want to read and look at and importantly without badly written code that hangs the whole page, that i'll stop using ad blocking software
It's not a protection racket though. I use ABP and as far as I'm concerned it's more like a security service that keeps out anything I don't want. The fact that they will (if I allow it) let through some non-intrusive advertising is fair enough. It stops people harping on about ad-supported sites needing to able to deliver free content as long as they play by the riles and I can cancel it any time if I disagree with their definition of "non-intrusive" or "acceptable".
Largely irrelevant to me anyway, as I've blocked all ads on all my devices because fuck ads.
Calling it a protection racket is bullshit though. And I couldn't care less if advertisers get charged for being able to put through "acceptable" ads, the charging structure is set up so it doesn't hurt smaller outfits and fuck advetisers anyway. They're all cunts who are actively making the world a worse place.
As Bill Hicks said: "If you work in advertising, just kill yourself now."
Just undertake to publish only ads that are not intrusive, do not involve tracking, do not try to sell peopole what they have already bought, are not animated, do not involve Flash, do not involve Java, do not pop up, pop over or pop under, are not misleading, do not cover huge swathes of the page, do not include any autoplay video and which have your abolute guarantee not to be tainted with malware. Cover my extra data cost that your noxious content requires to put itself on my machine. Then and only then will I quit using AdBlock.
Guys (OK, and girls): It is YOU, and only YOU, who got yourselves into this shithole. You are just reaping the fruits of that which YOU have sown.
Just quit whining and sort your act out.
The Really Simple Ad Company
An internet advertising network focusing on delivering effective but unobtrusive advertising.
All adverts delivered by the network must not be animated or play audio. The total area of the user's web browser window covered by ads must not exceed 1/5. Adverts from the network may only be displayed alongside adverts from other networks if they enforce a compatible rule set.
Pitch to ad blocker makers and end users: We're helping keep your favourite sites online whilst not annoying you with loud flashing adverts. This is what you've been asking for please don't block us.
Pitch to websites: Loud flashing adverts may be more effective but only if the user actually sees them. If current trends continue most of your users will be blocking adverts entirely. Our adverts are unfiltered by all of the leading ad blockers.
Having occasionally turned off portions of my blocking suite on certain sites to "take a peek" at what was not normally getting through to my screen I have noticed that the latest tactic seems to be to put pop-ups, pop-outs, etc. ~over~ other less obtrusive advertising.
When are the advertisers who are "playing fair" and not making themselves a PITA going to start clawing back their sponsorship for their ads that are getting stepped on?
Second thought: make all ad services/trackers/etc run through the content providers portal so they get billed for all the bandwidth they are hogging on their end. When they start having to pay larger bandwidth bills and build out more server capacity just for the advertiser then they can begin to grasp what the end-user is going through. In the dead tree era more advertising meant you had to print more pages with all of the costs attendant. In the internet era the advertiser just forces the equivalent of more pages on the computer of the user, using up often scarce resources and forcing the ISP to provide more bandwidth than otherwise would be necessary.
Everyone should have the 3 following items installed in some form depending on OS/Browser and so forth.
1: AD Blocker
2: Script Blocker
3 Cookie Blocker
Personally I use
1: ABP
2: NoScript
3: Privacy Badger
Occasionally I run across a site that asks for the ad blocker to be disabled... some of these still allow full access and it's just asking (not forcing) and those that try to force it... I leave and never return.
For those who weren't aware, and that I've introduced to them... have been shocked by the number of things running behind the scenes. Just visiting what is a normally innocuous website can be filled with dozens of tracking cookies and numerous scripts that have nothing to do with the running of the site at all.
This website alone has 3 scripts that are blocked as well as a few tracking cookies and of course ads... Because until websites.. including this one learn that serving up bandwidth draining and potentially malicious services... is not the way to do business. Allow 3rd parties to server up content to your site is a security flaw that needs to be stopped.
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