Submitted 2 days 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.
I actually like how people are again on the wave of understanding that anarchism is right even if you’ve voluntarily consented to hierarchy. And other similar things.
Sometimes you need to break rules. Entropy and life are more important.
One could only dream my friend. One day we will all help and care for each other.
Ads on websites are deals the sitemaker made with themselves. The internet is free.
[rant] The Internet is not FREE. Its just free at the point of use!
Just like ad funded websites aren’t free to use, they are also just free at the point of use!
People seem to forget where the all this ‘ad money’ comes from. It’s not growing on magic money trees, it’s coming from every product you buy and it’ll be interesting to see how much products have gone up against the sheer amount of ads that are shovelled everywhere now.
The reason the internet used to be great was because people shared information with no expectation of monetary gain. Just the love of what they knew and the joy of sharing information.
So the sooner everyone realises you’re all paying for the ads on every product/service to be shown already, and blocking them actually saves you money because the more ads that are shown, the more websites get paid, the more ad/tracking companies charge companies and yes, the more expensive you’re product and services get! [/rant]
I don’t mean free from operating costs. I mean free for the person using it to experience it how they choose.
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.
You bro. Looks like you are looking at some information without 15 things popping up in your face. I see you are into the “dark traffic”
Or just a protocol like Web Monetization where you put money into a pot on your browser and it’s handed out to sites you visit based on how much time you spend on a given site, with options to denylist sites from payment as needed
Okay I checked out Gemini. I love the vibes, but the amount of dead links just in the quick start guide makes it hard for me to even try to get into it
How about this link ?
Gemini looks cool, but I wonder if Gemtext isn’t a bit too simple. I think the ideal format would be to go back to the idea of “hypertext”, without the CSS and Javascript.
Good. Hopefully the advertisers will realize that it’s not profitable to advertise online anymore, and then we’ll be left the hell alone.
Sites are lazy and greedy. They throw dozens and dozens of 3rd party javascripts into their headers, that punish and annoy people for not using an ad blocker - they slow the site down, bloat the memory, consume energy, track the user and festoon the page with garbage. As soon as people hear that an ad blocker is a thing, then of course they leap at the chance of using one.
It would be straightforward for sites to insert ads into their content - make the ad urls, images and links indistinguishable from actual content. i.e. serve them up from the same domain, from non predictable paths and use html structure where ads and content are intermingled. Even if an adblocker wanted to block the ads, there are no patterns that work and every single site would require different rules. But that requires effort. I suppose we should be glad that sites don’t do it.
Exactly, adblockers don’t block a static <div> on the page with some text, an image and a link. It’s only the user-tracking, obtrusive ad-networks they block. Every old-school form of advertising didn’t track users and did just fine. Even today, billboards are priced based on the amount of traffic on the highway, not based on checking inside each car and building a profile on each driver (though I wouldn’t put it past them trying to figure out how to do that soonish).
God, I can just see the wet dreams of an advertising exec now. If an australian bloke can replicate million dollar systems with $100, the advertising companies can surely wank out the money for license plate readers a quarter mile ahead of their billboard with good identification. The new electronic billboards already switch what ad they’re showing every half minute or so now, and I bet they could do what ze big boiz do with the auctioning of ads.
I think right now most of the US doesn’t allow random API access to license plate and registration data, but I really have no idea… How much do you think companies would bribe pay for some laws to be changed about that?
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.
I just got cable again after not having it for… 13 years?
I don’t even get the point of it. It’s the exact same thing it was 13 years ago. Same shows and everything. Ads. I tried to watch it a few times and I think I’ve watched a total of 2 hours since I got it a month ago. It’s awful.
We should bring back paying to read a newspaper, magazine, (pc-magazine :P)
Get the hell out with AI slop and constant dark marketing
Let the idiots live on Instagram and don’t depend on their ‘content’
We should bring back paying to read a newspaper, magazine, (pc-magazine :P)
You are probably not wrong, and we should be paying for a lot more things, but the genie is out of the bottle for many things here and it’s difficult to roll that back.
For example, newspaper reading habits have changed a lot. Before the internet, you’d usually stick with one newspaper and that’s it. Maybe two if you have too much money. You buy your newspaper and you read it front to back, probably even the topics you don’t particularly care about.
Now it’s often the other way round. Most people read news from quite a few sources (or often just follow links on social media and don’t really even care for the publisher), but they don’t read their news from virtual cover to virtual cover. Instead, they stick to the topics they care for, or maybe even read about the same thing in multiple publications, comparing what they have to say about it.
For this kind of newspaper reading, current forms of monetarisation don’t really work. Most newspapers only offer subscriptions to the whole newspaper, often in the range of €5-15 per month. So if I were to pay for the ~20 newspapers that I read news from at least semi-frequently, that’s €200-600 per month. No way I can or want to afford that.
Some allow you to pay per article, but that is usually pretty expensive too (€1-3 per article) and also I need to register to every single newspaper. That’s not great either.
What I’d really like to see would be a industry-wide subscription. For example, I pay €10 per month and that allows me to read 100 articles per month across all newspapers. That would be really nice.
Would love to but a lot of them have shut down now since people didnt buy them.
“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.””
“Without user consent” is a load of crap.
Honestly the scale makes me wonder how much is because it’s fucking AI bots.
listen, if browsers just block ads as a matter of their existence and the average joe is unaware they are blocking ads, then all the better. this article references a poll that specifically asks if the users know they are hard blocking ads, and just under half say they were not. which is good news, as that is farther reach then what user competency rates would have got. i am just taking that poll at face value.
Good, I hope they go the way of the telegraph and whale oil salesman.
The quote is even worse when you take this snippet from above:
The study discovered that the majority of users did not choose to block ads, with ad-blocking technology often activated by a third-party like their employer at a network level, their educational institution, security software they installed, or public Wi-Fi networks. For example ad-blocking tech can be bundled with VPNs (virtual private networks that hide a web user’s location) and built into browsers like BRave and Duck Duck Go. There are also dedicated apps and cross-platform brands such as AdGuard which describes itself as “the world’s most advanced ad blocker” that can “even” block on Youtube.
So they are trying to frame corporate security policies as “no consent”. Which totally does not make sense as the contract the worker signed is consent for corporate IT to manage the computer and also to secure it against malware serves via ads. And to even suggest that users who are using a VPN with built in adblock or an alternative browser do not want to use the features the software they installed come with, is crap
Oh no. 🎻
Well no one ever had to sell me on how nice a fire smells.
Whatever number it is, it ain’t big enough yet.
More power!
And the good old guilt tripping at the end.
Good 🖕🏻
Largest boycott in human history.
I confess that I don't have the money to frequently donate and fund the services that I use (if they allow to donate) and recognize long time ago ads would be an okay alternative. but like everyone said, ads just became a lot more cancerous and have to block it. despite the shortcomings of the FBI, even they advise to use adblockers.
though I guess I just have to suck it up and donate once in a while as well.
Damn people, enshitifying the internet for the advertisers.
I switched to GrapheneOS which uses Vanadium browser by default, which doesn’t support any content blocking yet. I use ProtonVPN which seems to block everything.
The issue with extensions (including adblockers) is you are trusting someone with access to your shit and money buys bad behavior. So I dislike the lack of blocking there but I can understand why that decision was made.
Praise be
mostly desktop, android phone is mostly unusable with ads. use ‘privacy badger’, ‘ublock origin’, ‘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
Well now, here’s one that comes up under “other”.
I started using an adblocker because I was using an elderly netbook for my studies. Ads junked up resource usage so much they used to freeze my laptop, and render most sites unusable.
Thanks to my adblock, I was able to finish my studies.
These days I use adblock because I object to virus-like code execution on my hardware. I tell others about adblock and get them set up to get free tea/coffee (and to watch their faces as sites become usable again).
The quiet mention of the 12ft.io being taken down is disturbing, it was a good tool for students to read article sources. This kind of change forces them to rely on AI (Gemini respects paywalks, Copilot just ignores them), which risks misinformation being spread!
I run uBlock Origin for the browsers, and Pi-Hole for the network. Plus a wireguard VPN server that my phone connects to when I’m not on the home wifi for ad-blocking on the go.
I switched to adguard home recently, much nicer user interface and I dont miss any features from pihole. :)
I actually don’t mind add but only if it is general ad, not targeted ones.
The only site I allow ads on is photopea.net because it’s awesome and I use it regularly. Fuck ads otherwise
umbrella@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
GOOD. most people wouldn’t care about blocking ads if they werent so keen on shoving them down your throat ever harder.