Adblockers stop publishers serving ads to (or even seeing) 1bn web users - Press Gazette

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨1984@lemmy.today⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://pressgazette.co.uk/marketing/adblockers-stop-publishers-serving-ads-to-or-even-seeing-1bn-web-users/

They call it “dark traffic” - ads that are not seen by tech-savvy users who have excellent ad blockers.

Not surprised that its growing. The web is unusable without an ad blocker and its only getting worse, and will continue to get worse every month.

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Comments

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J52@lemmy.nz ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Bottom line: if I’m forced to consume ads on a device belonging to me - I will rather throw it away!

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some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

The trade body called it “illegal circumvention technology”, said 12ft.io has been locked by its web host, and promised to take similar action against other paywall bypassing technologies.

Just because you send bits to my network does not oblige me to render them. That’s like saying I broke the law back when I had cable and changed channels during ad breaks. Falls flat on its face.

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killeronthecorner@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
The use of the term “Dark traffic” here is to paint the use of ad-blockers as something nefarious. Don’t use it, fuck these people right in their stupid mouths.

I propose using the terms “clean traffic”, for ad-blocked website traffic, and “dogshit traffic” for everything else.

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- grueling_spool@sh.itjust.works ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Maybe we could turn it around: adblockers are tools that block ads and other kinds of dark traffic such as trackers and malicious scripts.
  
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- x0x7@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  They are so short sighted to. Ad blocker help advertizers. It allows sites to fill up sites with ads to the point of being unusable while not losing 100% of traffic. That keeps these site relevant enough that old people who don’t have ad blockers end up there too when they follow links or google ranks a site high because it has traffic.
  
  If they got rid of all ad block somehow they would have to decrease the ads because I wouldn’t use the web. Or online communities would be way more conscious of the ad level of the things they link to.
  
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  - interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    The tech community is pacified into not taking action against the polluters by our adblockers because we don’t see the egregious ads and so we don’t fight the good fight for the user.
    
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- purplemonkeymad@programming.dev ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Something simple that people would ask why you want it. Also needs to be non-aggressive. Like non-content traffic. Why would you want something that is not the content?
  
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- Bytemeister@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Goodput vs shitstream.
  
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Almacca@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

The trade body called it “illegal circumvention technology”

Lol. Fuck off.

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- zerofk@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
  Say here’s a thought: can we sue ad companies for theft of electricity? They’re using my electricity to display their ads, without my consent.
  
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  - Almacca@aussie.zone ⁨30⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
    Not to mention my internet fees.
    
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- BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Once the data enters my network it’s my fucking data and I can do with it what I please.
  
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  - halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Likewise, I can prevent anything from even entering my network that I don’t want on it.
    
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- U@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Yeah. As if hacking into someone's mind is their right. Talk about entitlement...
  
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- IllNess@infosec.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  What should be considered illegal circumvention is allowing articles behind a paywall to be included in search results.
  
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- ramble81@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  And this is exactly why Google did away with Manifest v2 (what uBlock runs on) and why they wanted to introduce their “web integrity” standard. At that point the pages would be signed with ads and in the signature didn’t match the page wouldn’t even be shown.
  
  They tried to play it off as “ensuring that you truly get the correct copy of the page and no bad hackers have intercepted it” but really it would have 100% forced ads.
  
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  - chellomere@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    To think that Google once had ads that I considered OK, just a bunch of text and links. How times have changed…
    
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  - Almacca@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Then I guess I’m not looking at those pages. No skin of my nose. That said, Firefox with Ublock Origin plus a couple of ad-blockers seems to be working pretty well for me. Anything with a paywall, I just move on.
    
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- NarrativeBear@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  The O.G. add blocker.
  
  1000029607
  
  The concept is close to the same, how this could be seen as “illegal circumvention technology”? Just shows us how disconnected the people in these positions can be.
  
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- 1984@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  They wont be happy until eye tracking technology makes sure we sit and watch their fucking ads before the actual content appears.
  
  I mean, none of this is getting better. Its only going to become worse. I have ads in the fucking pause screen on my streaming tv app. So if I want to take a toilet break, I get an ad in my face. Its just so ridiculous.
  
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  - Almacca@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Image
    
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  - Booboofinget@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    What most of these people don’t get is if they didn’t get so invasive with those ads, people would not have to resort to ad blockers. Be it tho shut up the ads every few seconds on YouTube or having to play whack-a-mole every time I read an article, eventually you run out of patience and say “enough!”
    
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- grue@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Fuckers want to colonize my property (my computer). that illegal!
  
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- RickAstleyfounddead@lemy.lol ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Lol they will even say blocking phishing links are unethical
  
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- Itsamelemmy@lemmy.zip ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  That was for 12ft.io Bypassing a pallway. Not blocking ads.
  
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  - Almacca@aussie.zone ⁨30⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
    They can still fuck off.
    
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- Ulrich@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  I actually agree with that but the only other solution is subject yourself to deeply concerning levels of surveillance, not to mention surveillance pricing.
  
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  - lemmyng@piefed.ca ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    All ad networks, even the less intrusive ones, can be abused to distribute malware. In this day and age not having an ad blocker is like rawdogging internet strangers.
    
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  - muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Toggles like that are available in other adblockers too and they pose a problem. They ad a random to showing you ads. You don’t want the ads but if the advertisers pay the adblocker company they get whitelisted and you see the ads anyway.
    
    Never use those toggles.
    
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logicbomb@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
I used the internet for a long time before ad blockers even existed. Everybody simply ignored ads, instead. But that wasn’t good enough for the advertisers. They weren’t happy unless we were forced to look at the ads. Extraordinarily obtrusive ads. Popup ads. Popunder ads. That’s when people started blocking ads. When you realized that your browser always ended up with 20 extra advertising windows.

Nobody really cared about blocking ads until advertisers forced us to. They made the internet annoying to use, and sometimes impossible to use.

Advertisers couldn’t just be happy with people ignoring their ads, so they forced our hands and fucked themselves in the process. Now, we block them by default. I don’t even know any websites that have unobtrusive ads because I never see their ads in the first place.

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- ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  the big turning point I remember was a combo of popups and interstitial ads
  
  Popups we all know and hate as they still exist and are disgusting. They were obviously gross and ate up ram and stole focus and shit
  
  But the interstitial ads were also gross. You’d click a link and then get redirected to an ad for 10 seconds and then redirected to content. Or a forum where the first reply was replaced with an ad that was formatted to look like a post
  
  Like adblocking was a niche thing prior to the advertising industry being absolute scumbags. The original idea that allowing advertising to support free services like forums and such wasn’t horrible, put a banner ad up, maybe a referral link, etc. but that was never enough for the insidious ad industry. Like every other domain they’ve touched (television, news, nature, stores, cities, clothing, games, sports, literally everything a human being interacts with).
  
  The hardline people that blocked banner ads way back when and loudly complained allowing advertising in any capacity on the internet would ruin everything were correct. We all groaned because no one wanted to donate to cover the hosting bills (which often turned out to be grossly inflated on larger sites by greedy site operators looking to make bank off their community) but we should have listened
  
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  - CileTheSane@lemmy.ca ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    The turning point for me is when banner ads added sounds. I would tolerate and ignore the flashing lights and the fake “games”, but then I encountered one that any time my mouse went over top of it an emoji screamed “HELOOOOOOOOO!!!” at me and I couldn’t download an ad blocker fast enough.
    
    It’s never enough for these assholes unless they have all of your attention all of the time.
    
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- BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  The main clencher that got me running a blocker were the few sites whose payload was 90% ad related and as long as the page was open it kept feeding me more ads until a gigabyte of RAM and 5% of my CPU were dedicated to something I wasn’t even looking at.
  
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  - shalafi@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Ex was mad that my PiHole was blocking some FB stuff so I turned it off.
    
    “The internet’s slow.”
    
    Looked over her shoulder and pointed to her (still loading) screen:
    
    “Ad, ad, ad, ad, ad, ad, ad, ad…”
    
    “FINE! Turn it back on!”
    
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- cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Ads used to be static text in the sidebar that the site owner manually put there. They didn’t have any tracking and didn’t slow down the loading time. Once they started adding images, I started using an ad blocker. I was stuck on dial-up until 2008 and a single, small image could add 10 or more seconds to the page loading time.
  
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  - victorz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    2008! Bro I feel for you, retrospectively.
    
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  - 418_im_a_teapot@sh.itjust.works ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I was even okay with images. It’s when the images started moving, making it difficult and distracting to read text that I realized if they are willing to sacrifice the core purpose of the page for ads, it’s only going to get worse.
    
    Remember the target that would move back and forth really quickly to try to get you to click it?
    
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- Steve@startrek.website ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Dont forget the ads that are straight scams or malware
  
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- Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Preach!!!
  
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NutWrench@lemmy.ml ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Website: “You appear to be using an ad blocker.” Me: “You appear to be correct.”

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- m3t00@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  ‘disable ad block to contine’. no
  
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  - Jolteon@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    There’s almost always another website that has the same thing.
    
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- burgerpocalyse@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Image
  
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- normalexit@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Then I just sigh and go to archive.is and solve their captcha, so I can read the article.
  
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UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.

– Banksy

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- yetAnotherUser@lemmy.ca ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Cool quote, where did you get it from?
  
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  - itslola@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    From Banksy’s 2004 book Cut It Out. Banksy, in turn, ‘got’ it (in its original form) from Sean Tejaratchi’s 1999 essay in his Crap Hound zine. 😅
    
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  - ErmahgherdDavid@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    From banksy’s limited run “Cut it out” book apparently. Yours for only £310
    
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TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I used to maintain a website for a bicycling club in my county that was great for getting people into biking, getting people out the house, making friends, and staying fit.

We had a banner ad along the top of the site for a local bicycle/bicycle repair shop that aided the club a lot and was very reasonable.

He got something out of it (publicity and a seal of approval towards the value/quality of his work), and we got something out of it (money to run the site, and a bit left over for things like puncture repair kits and the occasional celebratory drink after an arduous ride).

Nobody bats an eyelid to those ads. They are reasonable.

What we have now isn’t that. What we have now is an insecure, malware-infested privacy nightmare that ruins webpages and stresses everybody out.

Use Firefox + uBlock origin for your own sanity. Don’t let big tech make you feel guilty for not going along with their game.

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- ramjambamalam@lemmy.ca ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  
  Use Firefox + uBlock origin for your own sanity. Don’t let big tech make you feel guilty for not going along with their game.
  
  100% this and also, consider allow-listing specific sites which deserve your support, or better yet, contribute directly if you can. Your local bike club forum, your local newspaper, a blogger whose work you enjoy, etc., assuming of course, the ads are reasonable.
  
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- Tiger666@lemmy.ca ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Guilty? Hahahahahaha
  
  They will never make me feel guilty because they are the guilty ones. Guilty of greed and of destroying our society. Fuck big advetisers. They would put billboards in outre space if they thought it would make them a tenth of a penny more in profit.
  
  I dont even consider them human to be honest.
  
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flop_leash_973@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
If ad networks weren’t the number 1 way to get malware installed on your machine, didn’t slowly take over the dedicated space for the actual content of a website, or put pressure on the websites in question to only publish things inoffensive to the advertisers maybe adblockers wouldn’t be such an issue.

If your site can’t exist without being a cesspit of annoying and useless infomercials and a deployment mechanism for malicious code injection then your site should not exist.

Not too many people had an issue with static banner ads back in the day after all.

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Randelung@lemmy.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Millenials are killing the ad industry!

Good.

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- tempest@lemmy.ca ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  It would have to be millenials since Gen z exist almost entirely in the walled garden of a phone app.
  
  Most people now a days don’t even use a desktop with a browser. I honestly expect that most of what they are “seeing” is just web scrapers for the LLM. Those are likely to “block” ads simply based on efficiency, since it shows down crawling.
  
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  - buttnugget@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Why would anyone use a desktop? That’s like a baby’s toy!
    
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DarkSideOfTheMoon@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Maybe if they didn’t use very intrusive ads people would not install ad-blockers so much

Many website put a video playing in later in top of the text, with another layer of ads and tiny space to read… the website would be unreadable without ad-blocks

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- glog78@digitalcourage.social ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  @DarkSideOfTheMoon @1984 and all this additional JavaScript and Elements and makes the side's just horrible slow. Compare this with CSS+HTML only sides omg how good they can feel ... I also prefer nowadays text mode browsers again, cause a good readable font + focus on what is important ... the content itself. I really get pissed if websites with public content can't be run anymore without javascript (wtf is up with you guys ?) ....
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Gibibit@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
They got it the wrong way around. Visitors who use adblock are not “dark traffic”, the bullshit scripts and tracking they use are dark. The adblock users are actually the only clean traffic. The adblockers aren’t “brutal”, the people without blockers are being brutalized.

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- squaresinger@lemmy.world ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  “dark” as in “not visible”. Adblock users can’t be tracked (or at least not as easily), hence they are not visible to the ad companies. “Dark”, in this instance, is not a derogatory term.
  
  “Brutal” is, though. So I totally agree with you there. Ads are the brutal thing nowadays.
  
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  - burntbacon@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    The way you word things matters. How many polls have shown the difference in opinion on ‘obamacare’ compared to ‘affordable care act?’
    
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pachrist@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
The web has almost always been unusable without an adblocker. Ads today are less malicious, but more insidious. Clicking the wrong ad in 2003 would brick your computer. Clicking the wrong ad today means you’ll have to cancel a credit card after your personal data is compiled and sold on the black market.

Nothing new. Ads don’t fuel a free internet. They fuel a business model. The free internet is fueled by the time and donations of kind, dedicated people.

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- bargu@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
  
  Ads today are less malicious
  
  I disagree, ads today are way more malicious than they used to be, ads are the biggest vector for malware today, they are used to stalk users to an insane level and most ads are porn, gambling, drugs or fascist propaganda.
  
  At least back in the day you would only get sketchy ads on sketchy websites.
  
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solrize@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Obligatory xkcd 624:

Browsing without adblock

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Blackmist@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Ad BwOcKeRs ArE StEaLiNg FwOm Us!!!

Meanwhile Google, Amazon, Facebook, and a billion AI web crawlers can hammer the fuck out of of your site and nobody cares.

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spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Besides the miserable experience unchecked advertisements cause, it is simply not safe to allow those advertisements to load these days.

A few years ago (before SSDs were common) there was unusual PC hard disk activity when loading a popular link aggregation site. A bit of investigation turned up a Trojan on my system. After removing it and reloading that site, my PC was immediately reinfected. The site owner denied any responsibility and said it was the advertising company’s fault.

The way the Internet operates now means no one is responsible for the content their site provides or the damage they cause. Imagine if restaurant owners were able to deny responsibility for the atmosphere in their establishments or food poisoning episodes they caused? IMO it’s the same thing.

Advertisers and websites have created the “dark traffic” mentioned here by repeatedly poisoning the public and they deserve the massive loss of revenue their behavior has caused.

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nonentity@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Advertising needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking.

It arbitrary pollutes any environment it’s conducted in, and causes secondary harms to non-participants by incentivising insecure hoarding of private information with the intent to better target individuals.

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Ironfacebuster@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I personally am not bothered at ALL by the banner video ads overlayed on top of another banner ad that opens a new tab when you try to close the banner video then another one opens covering the original banner then the page scrolls all the way back to the top and shows you an email list sign up, why would I be?

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besselj@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Raw-dogging the internet is about as irresponsible as not using contraception

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Binturong@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
So this confirms that people have a negative reaction to ads, which every actual internet user knows in their bones already. This means they ALSO are not even doing their one job of persuading people to buy shit. Of course this won’t lead to companies reducing investment for ad carrying or finding ways to make them more appealing, that costs money, instead they will use AI generators to produce WORSE ads and leverage their capital to have governments capitulate and force users to watch by banning blockers, probably VPNs too. Bill Hicks was the most correct about advertising, and remains undefeated.

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pyre@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
i know this may go against the general attitude here but i gotta say this does make me a little sad when i think about it. and i use adblockers as well, but i never knew what the numbers were. when it’s put into context like this it’s hard not to be discouraged by the fact that this is still probably a minority of users. i mean what the hell, how are people still using the internet with ads turned on.

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Jimmycakes@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
When piholes go mainstream they are fully cooked

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Vanilla_PuddinFudge@infosec.pub ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
News Media: “ADVERTISERS CAN’T DISTRIBUTE ADS BECAUSE OF YOUUUUUU”

g-good!

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nuko147@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I used my mother’s lapton once 2 years ago, and i was like, how the fuck do you people browsing without an adblock?

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the_riviera_kid@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Fuck yeah, advertiers are a cancer.

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mle86@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
I feel like one thing doesn’t get talked about enough is that websites feel the need to implement ad services that want to track the user in order to serve ads. Which I just find weird, the expectation to givw up pnes piracy, just to get served an ad.

Instead, the ads should just be relevant to the content of the page where an ad is embedded, which would automatically make it relevant to the reader, without tracking them.

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Bebopalouie@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Almost 70. Spent way too many years watching cable shit tv. I hate ads. I fucking hate ads with a nuclear passion. I have ad blockers, pirated shit and some services that do not show ads so far. If there are ads I find an alternative or read a book. Our teen son screams ad every time he sees one that sneaks through ad just to get me going.

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AeonFelis@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

“The growth of dark traffic undermines the ability of publishers to fund the production of quality content, or even operate as a business. We must recognise users are not the main driver causing this.”

And Scott Messer, founder of publishing adtech consultancy Messer Media, added: “Dark traffic is unlike anything we have seen before. It’s demonetising publisher content at scale without user consent.

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Vinstaal0@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
I don’t mind the old system of one or two ads on a page or a 10-second ad at the start of a YouTube video if they don’t track their users. But these days it is growing out of proportions, we are almost at American television with the amount of ad breaks in a YouTube video, and it’s absurd.

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SonOfAntenora@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
The fbi suggests using an ad blocker. Guess what an ad blocker is as important as an antivirus.

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