Submitted 8 months ago by 1984@lemmy.today to technology@lemmy.world
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.
Only a billion. Need to quintuple that.
What’s frustrating to me is the idea that law makers and advertisers believe I don’t have a right to alter data that comes onto things I own. And nobody chime in with the brain dead “☝️🤓 actually you don’t own it.” Because even if you wanna waste time with that stupid distraction, I own my computer. I built it from parts.
Controlling my perception is my right. If I wanna use things that block ads that’s my right. PERIOD. I NEED TO BLOCK ADS BECAUSE OF MY DISABILITY.
You have that right at least in Europe. The nuance is that website provinding content can choose to not serve it to you. Or something like that but maybe more complexe.
Advertisers do not have the right to demand my attention, or to brainwash me. I have every right to deny them. This is war.
Tangentially related but britta filters actually suck; they’re like the worst water filter for removing materials. Did a test myself with a fresh filter - 105 ppm tap to around 72 ppm vs 0 ppm for zero water pitchers and around 30ish for epic, it’s been a bit so the numbers are rough for the britta and epic but I test my tap and ZW pitcher routinely.
More necessary than that, really.
Bottom line: if I’m forced to consume ads on a device belonging to me - I will rather throw it away!
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.
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills whenever I hear them say things like this! These things belong to me, I should be able to control them. My perception, my LITERAL GATEWAY FROM MY MIND TO REALITY is mine and I have a right to control what I see.
Or saying it’s illegal to hang up on telemarketers
“Excuse me, but you didn’t allow this sales person to complete their pitch. We’re taking you to jail.”
Beautifully worded 🙏
When piholes go mainstream they are fully cooked
Not even a linux guy, but I had a Pi from a decade ago that I never opened, decided to set it up and use it for something useful, friends suggested Pihole. pained myself for 2 days getting everything working (most of my trouble had to do with peripherals and IP addresses not the device itself) but after the grief, got it working and it was well worth it.
I even printed a sticker for it that said “where ads go to die”
sorry doubleclick, but you’re toast
I tried to give my mom a pihole, she made me get rid of it because it broke the NY times and some rando mobile game she plays. Some people can’t be helped.
You just make excuses and after a couple days mom’s forget about it and move on to other games
Fuck yeah, advertiers are a cancer.
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.
A true visionary, taken too soon.
what is with p.i.p video everywhere. hate it. can’t figure out how to block it. firefox
Have you tried AdNauseam?
mostly desktop, android phone is mostly unusable with ads. use ‘privacy badger’, ‘ublock origin’, ‘umatrix’.
I love uMatrix.
You know you can get those extensions for Firefox (and forks) for Android, right?
used opera for a while. firefox default. phone too small for my eyes. hard to read, avoid using
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.
Website: “You appear to be using an ad blocker.” Me: “You appear to be correct.”
Then I just sigh and go to archive.is and solve their captcha, so I can read the article.
‘disable ad block to contine’. no
There’s almost always another website that has the same thing.
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?
25 years of adblockers and that is the single most important thing that keeps me from cutting myself off the web. I’ve donated money to adblockers and will continue to do so until I die! I send emails to the web sites that ask me to remove the blocker to tell them I will not and that there are many other sites that welcome my adblocking ass!
I think about doing that except with VPN’s.
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
This is super intentional. Look for the Fitts law en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts's_law
@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 ?) ....
Let me know when you can’t inject malware via ads…
This is easily solved by not using 3rd parties and tracking data for ads. If the ad was just part of the page (similar to an ad in the newspaper) then ad blockers would not be able to detect them at all. A YouTuber saying “before we get started, this video is sponsored by [relevant related company]” does not get blocked by ad blockers.
However, in order to do that websites would be responsible for the ads they display. If they don’t do their due diligence they won’t be able to pass it off as “we’re not responsible for it, it’s our ad company that put it there.” They don’t want to be responsible for the ads they show, but they want you to be responsible for the ads you don’t watch.
A YouTuber saying “before we get started, this video is sponsored by [relevant related company]” does not get blocked by ad blockers.
Well, there’s sponsor block which uses crowd sourced timestamps to skip those segments, but yeah you’re right.
I personally feel no need to get sponser block because:
Everything the ads do to force you to pay attention it to (like not being able to fast forward) makes it easier for ad blockers to detect and block.
Everything the ads do to demand your attention (by being annoying as fuck) drives people to block them.
“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.
Bold of them to claim they produce quality content. Such businesses should die right along with their advertisers.
They always care about us when they are losing money arent they…
Definitely. They are likely laying the groundwork to make using an adblocker a criminal offense.
Oh no. 🎻
Well no one ever had to sell me on how nice a fire smells.
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.
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.
The insidious ads are still there.
There was a time in the 90’s where ads were mostly banners, and that was fine; google’s text-only ads were completely acceptable.
But that didn’t last long - it went downhill with the proliferation of popups, especially the nefarious kind which created even more popups or tried to stop the user from closing them, and usage of dialog boxes.
And whoever was the first person to add sound to an ad, i wish you and your entire family tree that your genitalia translocate to your forehead.
the shocking sound stunts were fun to spring on people. well, for a couple days. recall ads referred to as ‘death of the internet’. adblock to the rescue.
Congratulations, you won
Adds in the 90’s and 00’s would just layer toolbars onto your browser. Is still have a a nervous twitch when I see a thick toolbars or animated cursors.
You store your credit card in your computer? If browser credit card management isn’t secure enough to avoid that attack you shouldn’t be using it.
My view is that if we can’t have the things we want without ads, then we need a new business model. I’m not super into the whole kindness and donations model. If we need it to be state funded, so be it.
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.
I believe this to be true.
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.
I’m starting to notice that a lot of people don’t even notice what are ads or not. When i installed pihole and enabled it for all devices at home. My gf was complaining why suddenly a loy of pages wouldn’t work anymore. Yeah, so she always clicked the ad/sponsored link everywhere and didn’t have the slightest clue. And let’s not start about social media and how basically 75% of it is (hidden) ads.
Personally I’m of the mentality if some company force feeds me their ads while i was not actively searching out their product type, I’ll think 3 times before ever considering their products. Thankfully, i see basically no ads (online) anymore these days.
i guess it’s true that technology has been getting too easy to use. the barrier to entry being too low means people aren’t really ready to use them safely.
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.
Well, “dark traffic” sounds SCARY. You wouldn’t want to do anything scary, would you? Like, use the computer you paid for to control the content you want to see? /s
depending on your household’s browsing habits, it can be downright insane how much traffic goes through ones network (and the web at large), that is just nothing but dog shit.
I monitored my pihole at my place and my own traffic is usually no more than 15% garbage with about 750,000 domains blocked, but the second grandma or grandpa starts doomscrolling boomer things on their phones and ipads. I saw the network traffic at 60% blocked one time and I had to confront them and flatly ask them “what the fuck are you doing on your phone?”
also set up a Region exemption or whatever, blocking russian, chinese, and a whole bunch of other untrustworthy TLDs and im literally showing my grandmother the repeated attempts to communicate with something in fucking China in real time whilst she’s playing some solitare game she downloaded.
I saw the network traffic at 60% blocked one time and I had to confront them and flatly ask them “what the fuck are you doing on your phone?”
Be careful of the answer. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.
You shouldn’t say that to your Grandma or Grandpa. :)
If we’re could figure out how to block ads on TV we might actually still bother posting for cable again. I’m the mean time, fuck 'em, they’re too rich as it is.
Millenials are killing the ad industry!
Good.
“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.
“Publishers already face an existential-level threat in the face of AI reducing referral traffic. This is another slice that publishers cannot afford to lose.””
DragonOracleIX@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
Dark traffic?!?! LMAO. Can we start calling malicious ads dark advertising?