Majority of Americans now use ad blockers More than half of Americans are using ad blocking software, and among advertising, programming, and security professionals that fraction is more like two-thirds to three-quarters. According to a survey of 2,000 Americans conducted by research firm Censuswide, on behalf of Ghostery, a maker of software to block ads and online …
Anyone who does not use an ad-blocker, is, at least naive, at worst irresponsible. NONE of the big tech firms can be trusted with your persona data. They all gather it and sell your information.
I am constantly surprised by friends who don't even know that ad-blockers exist. They moan about ads, but just put up with them. Just crazy.
PS: I'm not American - I'd be interested with the figures for other nations.
>worst irresponsible
They are noble benefactors of us 'professionals'
They are the ones that pay for all the stuff we get for free and they distract the ad-slingers from getting more aggressive targeting us.
If everyone runs an ad blocker they are either going to get more intrusive about putting ads into the content or just put more stuff behind paywalls
"I am constantly surprised by friends who don't even know that ad-blockers exist."
I was recently visiting a friend of mine that works in IT. He has his own company, staff and all. We went into his office for him to show me a web page with some neat new piece of gear. He opened his browser, did a quick search, and then went to a site with the piece of equipment. He starts grumbling at how long the page is taking to load. Once it loads, it's so full of adds and other crap that the item we are looking at is barley visible.
I asked him: "Is this what the internet looks like now?" He looks at me puzzled. I then asked: "Don't you run an add blocker?" He answers: "What's an add blocker?"
I sat down at his desk and installed uBlock for him. Once he started browsing again, it was like a revelation. I told him "Don't you know that many of these adds contain malware and trackers?"
I guess the difference is that I work in IT security, and he works more on the engineering side. Still, I was really surprised.
It was a bit of a revelation for me to see what the modern internet looks like without an add blocker. I've bee using one for over ten years now. It's the first thing I do when installing a new browser.
I don't use an ad blocker. Most of my browsing is done with a whitelisting script browser, and the rest is to specific sites which either don't have ads, or where I want to allow them to support the site. (That secondary browser does block most trackers, and in any case with most of those sites I'm authenticating so they have most of the information anyway).
I had an ad blocker installed for a while; it wasn't adding any value, so I no longer bother with them.
Not everyone is you.
My main browser is Vivaldi running uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger and Noscript. Secondary browser is Chromium (I'm on Linux) with the same set, only a little tighter on the Noscript and I run social media on there. Firefox is the last browser and runs only Faceache, and that's also got the facebook container on it.
I find this useful for bypassing pages that have pop ups to stop me from using blockers... I firstly block the message element, and then when the page is usually covered by a transparent black, so I simply block that element as well, and then I can usually get at the page underneath. So I'm using the blockers to block the anti-blocker blockers, and I get access to the un-blocked page as a result.
The really annoying ones are those that disable scrolling too, especially the ones that check periodically and switch it back off again if their demands haven't been met. A tedious pain to undo, but I do it anyway because bad behaviour shouldn't be rewarded. I mean, by that point, I've used your system resources and bandwidth already - just let me read the damn content you already sent me and then leave in peace. I'll get at it anyway unless it's been paywalled or gated behind an actual TOS/cookie acceptance redirect, so why the song and dance?
"I do it anyway because bad behaviour shouldn't be rewarded."
It certainly shouldn't. Don't use those sites. What's really alarming these days are the likes of FOSS projects who won't or, I suspect, can't put up a site to display anything useful without Javascript turned on. If a project can't do that I assume it has nothing useful to offer.
Advertisers are using adblockers.
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ROFLMAO!!
I rather think "advertisers" referred to people working in the advertising industry. The ones who sell advertising to the actual advertisers. Of course the actual advertisers may well not like other people's ads but they themselves are so special nobody would want to block their ads. Or maybe think they're clever to know about ad blockers but think their target audience won't.
"Or maybe think they're clever to know about ad blockers but think their target audience won't."
You would not believe how much of the business world operates off this premise. Same for outsourcing. They all think nobody else ever heard of it, and it's getting to the point that they are losing customers because their products are no longer affordable as more and more well-paying jobs disappear. The people they outsource to for pennies on the dollar certainly can't afford them.
"And nothing was learned by the big money in 20 years."
Because they are still a growing market making more and more money year on year. There's still growth in the numbers of people on the internet so even if 50% are using ad blockers, it's almost certainly still a growing number of victims. Maybe when the market reaches saturation and ad slingers start to see a levelling off, things may start to change.
There are two sides to it - do you see the ads, and are you being tracked even if you're not?
One way to get around ad blockers is to collect the image but then render a blank space or otherwise not bother to display it, which hides the ad but doesn't stop them collecting their tracking data.
Google doesn't provide an adblocker that they created. Neither does Firefox. What are you asking here?
Some adblockers do say they let "unobtrusive ads" through, but I don't use those.
Most adblockers do block all ads.
It's even possible in many browsers to block the search bar from going to google or whatever.
I'm asking about the fair number of articles I've read on this site in recent years about how various ad-blockers have changed policy to allow "good ads" and how Google's changes to how their plug-ins work have led some ad-blocker authors to claim that it stops them from effectively filtering content. I assumed that this was common knowledge among the readership here, but based on the downvote pile-on perhaps that isn't the case.
I block all Ads but that depends on the source ... I've been reading and posting comments on El Reg for years now and I have my blocker setup to permit all adverts on El Reg ... I see this as "For My Benefit" - the adverts here are never terrible, it's a reasonable environment. And seeing adverts is reasonable given the very helpful El Reg posts every day!
Yep this isn't like the days of newspapers when the editors could see every ad they were running. There are too many layers between the Register and the ads that run.
And hackers often attack one of those layers as that effectively lets them deliver malware payload to all the customers down the chain, including (depending on who they have attacked) very high profile websites. You might not be able to break into the NYT or WSJ website to run your malware, but if you p0wn something they use to deliver ads that's even better as it is less likely to be detected by their IT security people and take longer for them to remove than if it was something on their site itself. Plus you will get a whole bunch of other sites along with it.
but I hate ones that use a lot of screen space, auto play video, generate popups, ... this is why I use an ad blocker and also run no-script.
Blocking ads also makes pages load faster and use less of my monthly allowance. No-script helps with privacy.
If all the advertisment did was show me something relevant and not track me. I could possibly accept tracking which site a click came from if it could not be matched to a purchase in any way. Or possibly if you could guarantee that it couldn't be tracked to a specific user. I don't necessarily mind the company I buy from knowing I've bought from them before. I don't want them knowing I clicked through from an advert on the guardian and letting that leak to the world. I've a reputation to maintain.
When I want to buy a lawnmower I'm happy for adverts showing lawnmowers. I'm not happy to still receive them three weeks after I bought one and am trying to buy a computer.
Have an advert for a SAP on the reg when I'm viewing stories about a disastrous oracle deployment is amusing, appropriate and may very well target a group of people that are interested and can purchase these services.
Having the same advert on YouTube if my kid is looking at some pointless video isn't useful to anyone.
> If all the advertisment did was show me something relevant and not track me.
Which would be akin to magic, as the "relevance" is managed by tracking, otherwise they have no way to figure out what is "relevant" to you.
Not that I approve of or like the tracking, just pointing out the contradiction. How about they fling out the same ads to everyone visiting a site, without trying to make them any more relevant than "whatever the subject of the article is"?
> I don't necessarily mind the company I buy from knowing I've bought from them before.
As we are talking (for now!) online ads, pretty sure that every company knows when you buy from them two or more times. Hard for them to do otherwise (unless you space out the purchases with multi-year long gaps between each and hope they aren't keeping records longer than they strictly need to).
> When I want to buy a lawnmower I'm happy for adverts showing lawnmowers. I'm not happy to still receive them three weeks after I bought one and am trying to buy a computer.
Again, that sounds terrific - as with so many others (judging by the complaints that pop up in El Reg comments) I'd also like to only see ads for X before I buy X and not after.
BUT the only way that could happen is by the tracking being even more intrusive :-(
We would have to let all the advertisers know when we are about to seriously start looking for X and then they'd all have to know that we'd bought the X (and even then they'll just switch to advertising a better model or spares that you'll need to keep fixing the obviously inferior model you just bought).
As it stands, you are just complaining about the inevitable lag in the system, as the stats from your browsing shift focus from X to Y - the only way to reduce that lag is to give them even more information!
Have you spotted anyone telling you that if you let them suck more data about you (well, phrased less repulsively than that) then they can target your ads more precisely (aka "give you better experience" on their site)? There is a large, if unpleasant, lump of truth in those suggestions.
In other words: be very careful what you wish for - and don't do it out loud, as they will take that as your agreement to total data rape.
Inquiring minds would like to know...
Obviously it is not sensible to complain about being downvoted, so I take the lumps (oh my precious, precious vote ratio, sob, wail) but I just have to ask:
Are those who disagree with my comment those who know far more about how the tracking really works nowadays and object to my horribly horribly crude description of the stats and the lag in the system causing ads for mowers to continue on and on (in which case, explain the error, pretty please? We all want to learn)?
Or have I uncovered a seamy underbelly of people who actually would like to have more detailed tracking, because seeing ads for mowers after you bought the damn thing already is so very very painful?
You're getting downvotes for coming so close to making sense here and failed.
How about they fling out the same ads to everyone visiting a site, without trying to make them any more relevant than "whatever the subject of the article is"?
The easiest and most accurate way to understand what's relevant to the visitor is the subject of the page. Why try to make them more relevant by tracking what the user has looked at in the past?
If, to take the example, I was looking at lawnmowers last week but looking at chainsaws instead this week it may well be that either I've bought a lawnmower, in which case ads for lawnmowers are irrelevant, or I've decided not to buy one in which case ads for lawnmowers are irrelevant (you might notice a theme emerging here).
There is, of course, one body of people who will make a profit by showing me ads for lawnmowers even if the evidence shows I'm now in the market for a chainsaw instead. They're the people who are selling my attention to lawnmower makers. It's not to fanciful to consider whether they're actually defrauding the lawnmower makers as well as invading my privacy by tracking me.
From the advertisers' PoV the best value is likely to be to show me lawnmower ads when I'm looking at pages about lawnmowers and chainsaw ads when I'm looking at chainsaws but then there's no expensive alleged targeting money to be made from that; the advertiser could contract directly with the site publisher and cut out the advertising industry middleman.
For avoidance of doubt I own a couple of lawnmowers, chainsaws, strimmers and garden shredder. I'm not in the market for any more so any advertising that I might fail to block would be an irrelevant waste of money but I would appreciate some decent weather to get out into the garden to use some of them.
> The easiest and most accurate way to understand what's relevant to the visitor is the subject of the page
Which is fine when the page can be relied on to have a clear subject - like a lawn mower review site.
But how much of the bulk use of the web consists of those pages? Note - not just your use of the web (in case you do have a very restricted set of sites to visit) but the bulk use.
YouTube, Facebook, El Reg, The Washington Post, Amazon - there is no clear subject that is "relevant" to each and every page.
Unless you are suggesting that advertising companies should analyse each and every page for its content (so, what is on the front page of Facebook today? Oops, it changes on a per user basis) and serve ads based on that? Or that the page creators submit that detail (oh dear, The Semantic Web never took off)?
And the cost of doing that - hey, let's just run every page access through an LLM (ignoring those weren't available when we built up the hatred of "unreasonable" ads!), that will be cost effective!
Again, no love for ads on this side, but definitely not agreeing with these "but the answer is so obviously easy" suggestions.
Every web page has tags attached to it (or can have). Eg here at El Reg their website overall would be it-focussed, but if they have a review of a mobile phone they can add tags that advertisers will use to serve up more specific ads related to phones. Takes 2 seconds to do.
If the website doesn't add the tags they get less relevant ads, their ad revenue will suffer and the bosses will tell everyone to add the tags.
Easy peasy, no invasive tracking required.
AC said
"Again, that sounds terrific - as with so many others (judging by the complaints that pop up in El Reg comments) I'd also like to only see ads for X before I buy X and not after.
BUT the only way that could happen is by the tracking being even more intrusive :-("
No, there's an easy way for that to happen - no tracking involved - just serve ads relevant to page / search content, not guessing what I may be interested in
That way, if I am searching for a lawnmower, or visiting pages full of lawnmowers then I am likely to get lawnmower ads.
.. Once I have purchased a lawnmower (assuming I am not a lawnmower fetishist), I will no longer be searching lawnmowers / visiting lawnmower related web pages.
Ads used to be like that, & (unsurprisingly) I got far more relevant ads than I do these days (multiple people live at our address, so get a lot of ad pollution that way (though, can be good when I get ads of scantily clad women urging me to buy lingerie, typically triggered my my partner buying a bra or similar online))
> No, there's an easy way for that to happen - no tracking involved - just serve ads relevant to page / search content, not guessing what I may be interested in
> That way, if I am searching for a lawnmower, or visiting pages full of lawnmowers then I am likely to get lawnmower ads.
And why will that never happen?
Because - whilst you are in the market for a lawnmower, unless you are a lawn-mower fetishist, you will only be looking at mower-related material for a tiny part of the time. So what are the ads going to be on the other pages you visit?
None? Really? Are you only reading material you paid for?
On The Register, do you only expect to be shown 15% off your next purchase of a major social media site? Or be offered a ten-pack of used SpaceX boosters, one careful owner?
Current affairs? "Oligarchs in YOUR area are looking for love!". "Remove stubborn stains with Hamas-be-gone".
And when you *are* looking at mower related pages? How about a review of the B&D 5000 - will B&D stand for it if you are advertised the new Bosch 12k? Maybe you think you should see an ad for Bob's Mowers, in downtown Sydney - what, not relevant because you are in Halifax? Oh, if only you were being tracked...
> Ads used to be like that
No, they really didn't. When you take off your rose-tinted history specs, you will remember that the time when ads were only related to the content of the page was the time when practically none of the pages you rely on now even existed. Totally related-to-the-content-of-the-page ads were (and a few still are) sponsorships or similar deals that were costly - time & effort - for the page owner to set up. But they could then be pleasingly unobtrusive static banners. Oh, but how few pages there were, because they cost money to create and host. Hang on - banner on the page? Banner ads! Remember those? A fixed space on the page was put aside by the creator and then fed by a third-party feed; gosh, that feels like a long time ago now. But we all remember fondly how those banners were so relevant to the page contents. We never saw an ad for Golden Thingie Casinos, nope, it was cleverly targeted to match the page content.
I'd assume by 'relevant' here, they meant relevant to the content and the context in which it's being viewed, not to them personally. Funnily enough, I can remember a time when most interest-based advertising was targeted this way, and when publishers spent a lot of time and energy in analysing and understanding their audiences in order to attract the right kinds of advertisers to their platform. All the modern Stasi form of interest-based advertising has done is centralise all the power and profit in the hands of the big online ad-brokers, at the expense of publishers, advertisers and consumers. Its unsustainable, and there's already signs that regulators are waking up to all this at long last. But until the Internet ad-slingers' lobbying and litigation funds run dry, there's ad-blockers to save us from the worst excesses of it all.
And what will save us is this...
...at the expense of publishers, advertisers and consumers
With a bit of help from regulators - mainly by just making sure that tracking-blockers still work - it will be the advertisers themselves who will eventually save us. They don't want to pay for people who've already bought a lawnmower (or are just not interested in lawnmowers) to receive their lawnmower ad and they will eventually realise that their only option is to only pay for ads on garden-related sites.
Sure, Google can stick around sending irrelevant ads to people without ad-blockers and get paid almost nothing for them, but the advertisers will only spend significant money with relevant sites, or adjacent to search responses for relevant searches.
Of course if the advertising industry smothers them with statistics to show how accurate their targetting is they won't know they're wasting money. The two relevant data items the advertising industry won't be in a position to collect are that the lawnmower has been bought and the alternative one, that the potential buyer has changed their mind.
When I want to buy a lawnmower I'm happy for adverts showing lawnmowers. I'm not happy to still receive them three weeks after I bought one and am trying to buy a computer.
It just shows how crappy the software is.
Even Amazon will often recommend products of the type I've just bought completely unrealistically. I'll probably never buy another chain rivet tool in my life, let alone a week after buying one.
> When I want to buy a lawnmower I'm happy for adverts showing lawnmowers. I'm not happy to still receive them three weeks after I bought one and am trying to buy a computer.
> It just shows how crappy the software is.
AFAIK it is basically a sliding window average - so if you look at chain rivet tools for a week, it gains in the weightings, but then you have to wait for it to get flushed out. So to flush it faster you need to have a flurry of other searches and browsing just after buying.
Now I think of it, maybe it is time for an experiment with cURL: a batch file that simulates searches & browsing for something you *don't* mind seeing (the tricky bit). Don't forget to use the option change the browser id string.
> Even Amazon will often recommend products of the type I've just bought completely unrealistically. I'll probably never buy another chain rivet tool in my life, let alone a week after buying one.
Again, wild guessing: I've come to believe that some products are often bought in bulk: you may not want more than one rivet doodad but they've spotted that a significant number of buyers get enough to fill the school work shop, so it is worth trying to se if you do want another.
I base this mostly on the ONE time I bought a concordance (for a gift) and then got suggestions about assorted Bibles for well over a year: buyers of concordances are presumably keen enough on the book that they buy in bulk and hand them out to anyone they meet - and/or try to get the whole set and compare translations.
"maybe it is time for an experiment with cURL"
Or maybe just run an ad blocker or three. So easy that even me computer illiterate DearOldMum figured it out for herself.
"and then got suggestions about assorted Bibles for well over a year"
To be fair, people who buy bibles are demonstrated suckers and thus are easy targets for swindlers and con-men advertisers.
"To be fair, people who buy bibles are demonstrated suckers "
On the basis that Gideons will give you one gratis?
While almost totally unreligious I might purchase King James Version (1611) as a literary source (the language is of the time William Shakespeare after all.)
Full of gems like: That which is crooked cannot be made straight: and that which is wanting cannot be numbered.§ Eccles. 1:15 KJV
Some of the modern renderings are complete rubbish.
Of course the KJV is freely available on Gutenberg and most bibles are available online from a vast array of sites for side by side comparisons. eg https://www.biblegateway.com/
People buy Bibles for all sorts reasons, very few probably read them and of those that do, bother troubling themselves by attempting to understand the text which is probably for the best.
§ could be applied to countless politicians ;)
No need to spend money on that schlock, though. skepticsannotatedbible.com is free and has the idiocy and dirty bits indexed for you.
"Even Amazon will often recommend products of the type I've just bought completely unrealistically. I'll probably never buy another chain rivet tool in my life, let alone a week after buying one."
The thing you are missing is that Amazon isn't trying to sell you another chain riveter, rather Amazon is trying to sell advertising space to whoever it is that is hawking chain riveters. Amazon is trying to sell space on YOUR machine to display that advertising. You are paying to display that advert, not Amazon. That's called "cost shifting", and is illegal in most civilized countries.
So logically, seeing as it's not you that Amazon is trying to satisfy, Shirley you blocking Amazon to silence the noise, electricity used and general wear and tear on your equipment is warranted?
> When I want to buy a lawnmower I'm happy for adverts showing lawnmowers. I'm not happy to still receive them three weeks after I bought one and am trying to buy a computer.
Now, this is a bit of the discussion that I find it hard to get behind.
> I'm happy for adverts showing...
Ok, so it is not the form of the ads that is a problem here, so guessing we're not referring to those ads that bounce up and down, obscure the main article or play loud voice clips.
> I'm not happy to still receive...
The gist here seems to be that you *want* ads and actually are invested in reading the ads, to the point where if they are no longer interesting it sparks a noticeable emotional reaction.
Which is ok, you do you - but you are also getting a significant amount of support, indicating that there is a significant section of the audience here who are also similarly affected.
Aren't ads just part of the background noise? So long as they are not of the vulgarly intrusive style, we have all been seeing these irrelevant ads everywhere, for our entire lives: roadside banners, flyers on walls, in newspapers and magazines, on TV and in all of the other media we consume.
And this background noise can just be quietly ignored, no need for any reaction to it one way or the other.
I use an ad blocker because I find the ads annoying and intrusive, and given that they're usually arriving courtesy of Javascript from an unknown third party broker, I don't want that script, which is potentially a malware vector, running on my system. I also run a script blocker, which is an eye-opener to see the huge variety of third-party scripts that some sites run. Again, a potential malware vector, so I try to only run the minimum necessary to load the page. If it's too difficult I give up and go elsewhere.
Anyone who can implement a decent server-side ad-dispenser will probably do well with it, because then the ads get served as part of the page load rather than a separate script and would be way harder to block. It also avoids the malware problem because static images are way less likely to be a source of something dodgy. However, all those third party data-collection companies would find their business models dented.
Me too. My normal browsing is using Firefox (on Linux) through a proxy (which changes address often) with every tab in a brand new disposable container except for a very few trusted sites (including El Reg). Several adblockers, privacy tools and anti-fingerprinters (combined with manual tools if I want to nuke parts of the page or javascript) allow me to read reasonably safely.
If that setup is too restrictive for some particular task (normally because I don't trust the site enough to allow it to run any javascript in that environment) I use a disposable sandbox running Brave, also quite locked down but a little less extreme, to access just that site for that task (no other pages open). If that doesn't work, I don't use the site at all.
Ok, seriously? "66 percent of experienced advertisers, 72 percent of experienced programmers, and 76 percent of cybersecurity experts use ad blockers."
Only 76% of people who call themselves "cybersecurity experts"?????
Who are the 24% of so-called "cybersecurity experts" who don't? And WTF is wrong with them?
My clients don't get a choice. I install blockers for them. And I don't even call myself a "cybersecurity expert" because security is only part of what I do.
(I kind of expect it out of some programmers, some of them are definitely in the idiot category.)
I’ve used blockers for years. Early on I had convinced clarkconnect to include adzapper for this purpose. Then I kind of relaxed about ads thinking “ok sure, necessary evil”.
And then I found out that they could track where my mouse moved on the screen, how long it hovered, or even where I touch the screen on my iPhone and iPad. And then that was enhanced by the way Facebook was “experimentally” recording keystrokes, so if you wrote a comment and decided to delete it THEY STILL HAD IT IN THEIR SYSTEM and gave it to brainiacs to work out why i (“the user”) didn’t pull the trigger.
I insist on blockers now. They did this to themselves. All of them.
> . And then that was enhanced by the way Facebook was “experimentally” recording keystrokes
But you *want* that to happen, don't you?[1] How else are they going to provide such vital UX features as the twinkling grey dots to let you know that somebody is currently typing a new comment (which you really want to hang around for[2] and read just as soon as it appears![3])?
[1][2][3] Nay, nay and thrice nay
I feel guilty using an ad blocker for The Reg, and a few other sites but it make the articles easier to read.
I don't have an ad blocker at work as the machines are managed elsewhere and installing plugins are frowned on. That means I see the ads on el Reg, and elsewhere. And most are so tuned to grab your attention that they are an obnoxious interference to point of making me cry. Between autoplay, colour saturation, and other techniques it makes me want to raze the ad mediation services.
And even with ad blockers we still have data exfiltration. Even with my custom rules in my firewall I still know, from what I'm presented with, that blocking is not perfect.
Alas, I do not see an end to this issue.
Don't criticise the guy. He's CEO of Home Bedroom Enterprises and centrally monitors his gaming system AND his porn NAS. He even has a MCSE framed on the wall for Windows 98 networking basics.
Even more, he has the right t-shirt and Dragon Ball collection :)
As someone in charge of IT security for a mid-size company, that kind of trick would get someone at least written up, possibly dismissed if it had happened before.
That said, I would encourage the use of approved add blockers. I would also have some form of add blocking in place at the firewall.
If you are seeing too many ads whilst browsing the web at work:
Don't stick your own PiHole on the company LAN.
Do talk to your IT guys and maybe demonstrate PiHole carefully (on a separate LAN - hey, tether it to your phone then browse with your tablet).
Don't keep banging on about it (or they'll realise how much time you spend browsing the web at work), just keep your fingers crossed.
Maybe the guys in the office will get the benefits of a filter once you've been removed for embarrassing IT and the CTO (who will, of course, have a brilliant idea, all by himself, of how to speed up the Chairman's Vital Online Research).
I think AdBlockPlus (ABP) got it right that as long as blockers default to zero ads, websites have little choice but to try to defeat them. It's an arms race which nobody wins.
ABP has the ability to block all ads, but it defaults to allowing ads that aren't a nuisance. No big banners, no animation, no JavaScript.
I left "acceptable ads" on and, frankly, I'm disappointed in how few ads I see. That means advertisers still haven't realized that being annoying is getting them blocked. Just by having a reasonable ad, they could reach many people like me with almost no competition for attention.
* * * *
Of course, the wildcard coming up soon will be the new version of Chrome coming out which will put the tracking in the browser and limit the ability of adblockers to work for "security". Google claims it is doing it for our own good, but Mozilla disagrees that it is necessary. For now, I'll be running Firefox.
I've been on the Internet since the start. Advertisers chose to be The Enemy.
It started with ordinary adverts outside of the area of the article or information you wanted. But that didn't work for them. I didn't click their adverts, so they made them jiggle. So I found where they were coming from and added their server to my hosts file with an address of localhost. I even installed Apache in the hope it would respond with 404 and eliminate waiting and retries.
Next I got an email from Doubleclick offering to sell me a PC. I looked at their whois entry and emailed their CEO to ask where they got my email address. This was back in the days when they only had a few staff. He BSed me about me having registered. So they got added to the hosts file too.
And it has continued like that ever since, but now we have the ad blockers to help us out and stay ahead of the bad guys. If someone wants to insist that I have to watch their video adverts, well I don't need to view anything on their site.
Remember those X10 animated popup ads and Adobe Flash ads that would peg your CPU to full? Those were the ads that drove me to start blocking things. If ads had remained unintrusive static images, I likely would have let them through. But advertisers had to push things, so I pushed back in much the same way you did with your hosts file, though I eventually used a SOCKS proxy rather than Apache to protect my whole home network.
Advertisers have no one to blame other than themselves.
For me, the straw that broke the camels back was when Tucows redirect all their downloads through their ad server. Blocked them, never went back and started blocking anyone being shitty, intrusive, obnoxious etc.
As for El Reg, this site is fully white listed but I don't see any ads because the ad slingers are blocked separately. I don't see how I could unblock them on only this one site without unblocking them everywhere. Likewise, google-analytics, googletagmanager and googlesyndication. The article itself puts Google pretty much at the top of the list for intrusion and tracking, so yeah, they stay blocked. If El Reg are running their own tracking scripts from their own domain, or choose to inject "safe" ads from their own domain, then they will get through and I suppose that's ok since it's their content I'm accessing. But that also make El Reg responsible for what they server from their domain. 3rd parties, not so much.
I think what will shake up the industry the most would be a successful case against a website for serving up malware. The current "defence" is that it's a 3rd party sending the ads via a contracted ad broker. But as with other areas of life, the supplier is responsible for the "goods" they deliver to the user and they don't get to hide behind "the big boys did it" excuse. If I buy something and the seller sends me a broken piece of shit, the seller is on the hook to sort it out for me, not some 3rd party wholesaler or OEM who I have no connection with.
Ugh, those Flash ads. I had one site that I used daily, and one day it had a Flash ad with an animated flame in the background that brought my machine to its knees. I emailed the site owner and told them that I had a choice between no longer using the site or blocking ads to make it usable again - they told me to feel free to block the ads!
If only advertisers would use first-party-hosted static images (or at most GIFs); that would eliminate everything I dislike about the ad experience. (User tracking, eye-catching movement, etc.)
" If someone wants to insist that I have to watch their video adverts, well I don't need to view anything on their site."
And I certainly wouldn't want to buy anything they're trying to flog me. Paying to show me ads for their competitors might be marginally effective.
Back in the day, ElReg had an online store called "Cash & Carrion". I'm fairly certain that they have already made far more money from me buying T-shirts and mugs and other tat than they ever would have made from me seeing adverts. Sadly, it went TITSUP[0] many moons ago.
An attempt was made to reanimate it back in the summer of 2008, and again in late 2014, but it failed both times, possibly due to lack of promotion (???).
Perhaps if enough people ask they will try again? Squeaky wheel & all that.
https://cashandcarrion.co.uk/index.html
[0] Totally Incapable of Transferring Selected User Packages
UBlock Origin
Ghostery
Privacy Badger
On my phone (Android) Adguard, for webpage browsing.
All shields up.
The horror of using an internet browser when I'm helping someone on their own computer who doesn't use ad-blocking stuff, and I have to go search for something.
I now consider adblockers in the same vein as AV and malware software. Absolutely essential to use an internet-facing device.
The modern internet is a cesspit and you need protecting from it.
The ad agencies are actually the only clients I had who didn't get adblockers forcibly installed on all their computers.
I wouldn't remove them if the user figured it out on their own, and I'd install them for the administrative folks, but the copywriters, graphic designers, and salesdroids didn't get them.
I'm fed up getting the warnings about it being 'illegal' to use Ad blockers on YouTube. It isn't so go 'F' yourself.
I'm not creating an account on your shitty site just so that you can slurp even more data from me. Google.com and over 100 other google domains are blocked by my firewall. If I want to access YouTube, I use a VPN from a Readonly VM.
We are in a war against the Ad slingers with Google their commander in chief. MSFT and AMZN are close behind.
but unfortunately my blocker (which I wrote myself on my Linux router) works by blocking a list of domains used by the advertising networks. So I can whitelist a specific advertising network if I know which one you want whitelisted, but my code isn't clever enough to take an instruction like "allow an ad if the previous page I loaded is the register". Would be nice if I could make it that good!
Nope. They want whitelisted, they'll bring the ads in-house.
That's the way advertising used to work, a newspaper would have an ad department, you want to advertise in that paper you called them up. The only tracking was they could tell you how many copies of the paper they distributed. And if you wanted to buy an ad that looked like it might be an article, it would get a box around it and a note making it clear it was an ad.
Outsource your ads to an ad network, you're getting blocked, even if I like you.
I am sure they have Sonny Bono working on that. :)
I was wondering whether AI/LLM tech could be used to deal with this crap much more effectively? Probably swallowing the spider to catch a fly§ and I am not entirely convinced that some of the ad. blockers etc don't harbour other nasties by design or otherwise.
§ Didn't end well.
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