And the fucking videos that auto play in the bottom corner with audio. I think the old people that recently found out about internet are trying to turn it into regular TV.
Plus they made the whole industry weird and obfuscated like bulk produce or something even though it didn't need weird distribution models and dark unseen players in every corner of every ad bought and seen. Why is it this way? I honestly don't know. How did advertisers willingly make it that way over just paying site owners or 1 aggregator or something... I guess Facebook has kind of become that now
Seems unrealistic. In reality, they'd be asking how often the seizures occur and would figure out if the increased ad revenue from going to 90% would offset any potential lawsuits.
Used to be if I found the site of a newspaper I thought I liked, I'd turn off my ad blocker to see how it goes.
I don't even try any more. Again and again and again, every time I turn it off the page gets so cluttered that following the article becomes a chore and takes up so many resources that even scrolling slows to a crawl. Ludicrous nonsense.
The cluttered pages with "videos" running all over the place is what frustrates me the most. I go in and disable javascript and see how it goes. Javascript seems to be the herpes of the internet as far as I am concerned.
Fr. I legitimately wouldn't mind just a few banner ads to pay for things, but as per usual, the corpos got too damn greedy. So congrats, now you get no ad viewage from me.
I installed an ad blocker once I started getting unmuted video ads. I would be studying for an exam and suddenly start getting blasted with a super loud ad. This was in like 2015, before Chrome added the speaker icon next to the tab playing sound I had to look through every tab to find the source and mute it.
This is 100% the fault of shitty advertisers spamming us with literal scams, malware, and spyware.
And the shitty websites running those ads with just a shrug of their shoulders saying "oops, 3rd party. I can't be expected to control what's on my website."
Nah. While that obviously sucks, I personally don't like people selling me shit. The ads are designed to occupy as much of my mental space as they can and that's a serious breach of what's most valuable to me.
If the phone costs $500, they simply increase your monthly bill by $500 / 24 months = $20 a month.
It's a bit more complicated than this, and they'll likely have some interest built in as well, but functionally, it's no different than being given a loan to buy the phone and then paying the loan off over the two years. That's why carriers often require a credit check before doing this.
I guess if that's that only kind of financing you can get.
That's exactly what it is. Look up the statistics on how many people can't afford an unexpected $500 bill. Most people simply don't have the money to pay out of pocket for what smartphones actually cost, so they're stuck with exploitation, or nothing.
As somebody who's been purchasing my phones directly from the OEM at full price since 2016, I see this as being crazy. It's made me realize for certain that I don't need the absolute newest thing, and so I always go with mid-range devices. I feel like people who buy their devices outright don't buy mini iPhones LOL. If they do, they hold on to them longer, treat them better, or buy them used. So some other fool takes the hit of depreciation.
Oh my heart is fantastic, Suzanne, but thanks for your concern.
I just don't go online and complain about the terms of legal contracts that I signed while blaming the company for being the bad guys for setting forth the terms that you, again, agreed to.
🤦
Edit: And your downvotes mean nothing either rofl.
Tracker Control on Android works well for system-wide tracker and ad blocking, and you can configure custom blocking rules per-app. Works without root by using a VPN profile (but no data leaves your device via the VPN, it just routes the traffic through this app).
Set your DNS servers to dns.adguard-dns.com (Settings > search for DNS). Also you should install the DDG app and enable App Tracking Protection. You don't actually have to use the browser portion of the app for it to work. After doing these two things, ads and trackers will be blocked in every app.
Go down to the configure manually option and follow the instructions for iPhone.
I think next guard is also supposed to be decent, but they won't let you use it without an account.
The nice thing about the dns approach is it works for more than just your web browser. There's a bunch of Android games that are essentially unplayable without an adblocking dns.
As a disclaimer, a bunch of sites are ramping up requiring enabling ads or they won't let you load the content. I'm ok with just hitting back and not viewing those sites, but my MIL just asked for help removing the ad guard dns because her news sites wouldn't let her in.
At least, you can change your DNS to one who blocks ads. It's not as efficient as uBlock origin and system wide on Android. But, it's better than nothing.
That is a free service and I really like it make sure you read their website basically when you sign up which requires no login it'll give you a unique dns entry to use as your DNS
The reason I like this one is it's not just ad blocking it fixing a bunch of anti-tracking and other features
Definitely look into Next DNS. There are also some Safari extensions that can block ads.
I also suggest buying refurbished unlocked phones in the future instead of going for the carrier freebies which you can see are scams designed to lock you into paying for their overpriced service each month for over a year.
To set a DNS based adblock, it is easy to setup, opensource, and free.
I have been on Android for a long time but I still have an old iPhone that works fine for reading articles. Bonus, there is no Sim in it so no one can call me. It's my drinking coffee device.
As a quick and easy alternative, you can set it to automatically open sites in reader mode. I’ve been trying that lately and it definitely helps although also mixed results where sites block part of their content from reader mode.
With automatic reader mode, I click to hide reader much less often than I formerly clicked to enable it
The main problem is 3rd party advertising. If the New York Times ran ads on their website like they did with the physical newspaper, we would not have this problem.
Publishers need to take direct responsibility for every ad on their platform.
Plausible deniability. Oh, a mildly sexual ad has shown to you? Someone probably approved it on the third-party site. Oh, you didn't want to see it? Sorry, we got nothing to do with it.
I am surprised the reason for blocking ads doessn't include making sites somewhat readable. I guess faster loading could be it? But generally it's more of a layout problem than a bandwidth one.
I tend to not use adblockers, or when I do it's on a black list system for worst offenders rather than by default. However, I absolutely refuse tracking, and if it's the only option I go to firefox reader mode immediately.
The usual false dichotomy of "personalised ads or you're killing us!" is not acceptable.
Ad tech IS the tracking, so if you're not blocking ads, you're not actually refusing said tracking. I think you might be conflating cookies with being tracking (they are), but that's only a part of it.
I wonder why ad tech can‘t be „Let‘s show ads that correspond to what‘s being talked about on that website.“ Kinda like what Google suggested with Topics but without following me through the internet.
There is no real technical challenge in displaying ads that are based on the page content. But ads based on tracking users is much more profitable. Plus they can sell the data collected to anyone else that is interested.
Look, you need to understand that advertisers are Hell-bent on forcibly extracting as much money from you as possible. If they could strap you to a chair, hold your eyes open like in A Clockwork Orange, and then charge you for everything you so much as glanced at, they absolutely would.
If that's not how you want to live, then they are your enemy.
You know i think i understand companies sometimes but then i keep being baffeld at how evil a company can be.
Apple for example had me surprised with the reaction to the DMA and i previously thought that they couldn‘t possibly suck harder wirh alö their anti-repair stuff.
I still have a bone to pick with Tim Cook himself for rendering my well working Mac Mini 2012 unusable for my app development job by simply not updating Xcode and introducing a breaking change that prevented me from adding support for new iOS versions to old Xcode.
I wonder why ad tech can‘t be „Let‘s show ads that correspond to what‘s being talked about on that website.“ Kinda like what Google suggested with Topics but without following me through the internet.
They could be. Sites could talk directly to advertisers, and put the ad directly into the page itself instead of asking the ad server for a random ad. Most ad blockers probably wouldn't notice it because it's part of the actual page.
But then they'd lose out on the tracking data and would be responsible to make sure the ad doesn't annoy the shit out of you, so they're not going to do that.
I use them on my personal systems but not my work laptop. I have to use an ad blocker on my phone because so many sites, including "respected" news organizations, are an absolute mess when ads are enabled.
It's bad when you go to one of the top news company's websites in the US and there's a pile of content covered by advertisements. I guess I didn't need to read those sentences anyway.
I guess faster loading could be it? But generally it’s more of a layout problem than a bandwidth one.
There was a website which I allowed ads on to help support them. One day, I went to that site in my browser and my laptop fans spun up at that time. Turns out that ads on that site caused my processor usage to spike near 100%. A reload fixed the issue. Once that same thing happened 2 to 3 more times, I just blocked all ads on that site from then on.
There are times that people can't throw the resources of an Intel i5 processor towards rendering the advertisements on one website. I would think that is more common these days with Chromebooks running the modern equivalent of a Celeron processor. Phones also don't have much processing power to give and will warm up and drain batteries all towards the all important goal of "render those advertisements".
I think people tend to allow advertising until it becomes a major problem that needs resolved (such as if the site is bogging down your computer or if the advertising makes the site unable to be read easily). Since those people would then need to fix the issue and hopefully fix it for good, it is easy and efficient to just block out all advertising forever.
And there are so many scam ads that look like UI buttons and such. I can see why people get fooled sometimes. Those sort of ads should automatically be rejected by af networks and the sites that host them. But $$$
Is this still really a thing? I remember getting some viruses from ads in the very early days of the internet, like late 90s / early 2000s, but can’t remember getting anything in at least the last ten years.
It's currently late and I am on my phone, so I can't research this too well, but for example this thread and official Microsoft link discusses th Adrozek malware which injects you with unwanted ads and information directly from your browser.
Sure, it's not a virus in the older sense of the term where someone either burns your drive or takes over your computer and locks you out asking for a ransom, but it's still piloting you unsuspectingly and you don't want it.
I don't think I could use the internet if I didn't have an adblocker. Ads genuinely anger me. I think it's just from the early days with pop-overs and unders, blinking, non-collapsible and the like holding content hostage. Intrusive or not, I'll do everything I can to not see an ad.
I use Mullvad so naturally, I can pick my exit country. Since I'm an iOS user (aka, no NewPipe etc) I always choose an exit country that is majority non-English-speaking. It makes the YT app adds so much more bearable if I can't understand what they're saying.
Many parts of the Internet has become functionally unusable without one. And given online advertising's history as a vector for malware, as blockers are just the sensible choice.
uBlock Origin at a minimum. But I would suggest a privacy focused browser. Librewolf, Mulvad or even Brave. Browsers leak
so much information about you it is easy for sites to fingerprint and track you even with an ad blocker.
I know Librewolf is working on their DNS leakage (last section on privacytests.org), but they also allow you to select a privacy focused DNS server which is nice when you’re not on a network you own, so you can’t run PiHole.
Pihole will also block non-browser traffic (e.g. your OS phoning home). Adblocking extensions are typically restricted to just blocking traffic of the browser it’s installed on.
It also operates on your entire home network, so it can block junk traffic on devices that can’t run adblockers.
I've been using an ad blocking DNS for years and would not consider using the internet without it. Since it's a DNS it works everywhere on mobile or Wi-Fi. I just figured that an ad blocker of some sort is basically a digital condom and must be used. When I see people who don't use one, I think they are crazy.
Both, I use a DNS level ad blocker on my entire network and use UBlock origin on my browser. That way most ads are killed outside of the browsers as well and it keeps my system from contacting malware servers by domain name at least.
Edit: Mind you, most of my apps are open source and have no ads to begin with, but for the few that are closed source. That's what the blockers are for.
Had my boss trying to grab a pdf (crosswords, colouring pages, printed for kids in a pub) while using Chrome without any adblock extensions.
The volume of ads, trick links, and shite on that one website in particular was outstanding. She asked me if a link was OK to click. Promptly pointed out she should use Firefox (which has unlock and other extensions added) instead of chrome as the link she had clicked was for some sketchy software and not a crossword.
I can't imagine the internet without ad blockers. Ublock is a great addition, removing elements from pages is a huge advantage. So many sites sling rubbish wherever they can.
That shitty Epoch Times used to do that. I was watching a bunch of satire videos and one of their commercials was on, and I legitimately thought it was part of the skit because of how stupid it was.
Then it hit me it is a real ad. And real people are watching it. And that’s how I got radicalized even more.
I was fine with unobtrusive ads, I was fine with a minute of ads before a YouTube video. But it got so bad it was constantly interrupting everything. Also want to know what’s extremely unpleasant? Political ads calling for a moral panic against you or taking bigotry against you as a general assumption. I’m not watching that bullshit. My life is better without ads
Does anyone ever actually click on an ad? Like "hey thats cool I wanna check it out/buy it right here right now"?
I have adblockers active everywhere and only disable then somtimes for specific sites that really don't work otherwise, but even if the unlikely case would come up that something is interesting I would just look it up separately? Mostly I just turn a blind eye on them anyway, but just wondering, some people gotta really click/buy from these ads? It just seems so surreal to me..
The only obvious ad I've ever clicked on was for a "free" IQ test. I figured I'd never done one cause they're fake, but I had time to kill, so I clicked through. After 20 mins or so answering questions, it ended on a transaction page. The only way to see your "results" was by paying $20. I obviously didn't pay, and instead tried to report the ad, only to discover that Google Ads has zero mechanism to even report scams to Google. After some research, it turned out that this blatant bait and switch scam had been operating via Google Ads for like 5 or 7 years. Google doesn't give a fuck if scammers use it's ad tech to scam your grandma or inject your system with malware, as long as they get paid for the privilege.
I've always used an ad blocker, but the whole experience reinforced how anti-consumer and pro-criminal surveillance capitalism is. Permanent absolute ad block — without exceptions — is how everyone should operate, because none of these companies deserve any trust whatsoever. Even if you trust the site you're visiting, you can't trust any ad company they utilize.
The EU is currently testing a new payment framework that would make payments faster and easier and also enable very small payments.
This could finally enable micropayments in browsers (well, in Firefox and maybe Safari) which would eliminate intermediaries like Google and all the scummy ad companies and enable websites to work out deals directly with visitors on the spot (pay a very small amount like a cent or a fraction of a cent to read this article).
Obviously, Google will need to be dragged kicking and screaming into this.
And yet for content I can be reasonably sure is actually human generated (read: niche enough to not have been flooded to the point I no longer can trust the "usual"/"big" sites) I might consider paying for server costs a little.
The only obvious ad I’ve ever clicked on was for a “free” IQ test. I figured I’d never done one cause they’re fake, but I had time to kill, so I clicked through.
That click should have lead you to a page that says 'you failed'. 😂
If you're walking around somewhere and you see a person or people offering a "free personality test," do not take them up on their offer. They're Scientologists. They once refused to let my mother leave back in the 70s until she said she would start screaming "rape."
My wife does. But she's a sucker for "a good deal"
I dont ever click on them myself, but if I start searching for something I need/want, and I see a brand I'm familiar with thru advertising, I'm more likely to explore their product, at least. Simply just because, "of I've heard of this before"
I know ad rates and metrics are heavily based around click through, but does it even actually matter? I mean, TV ads are big money expensive, and nobody has ever clicked on those. I guess if you're advertising a shitty mobile game or something then it matters, but does McDonalds or whatever even want you to buy a hamburger before you watch a YouTube video? That doesn't really make a lot of sense.
As you've noticed, there are different types of ads. Not all have clicks as their goal. Some are just there to make you think about their brand, for example.
I have ad blockers everywhere, except native mobile apps. I've clicked on an Instagram ad for shirts. I bought the shirts. People keep complimenting me on the shirts. No regrets there
I've personally clicked on Instagram ads and made purchases from them. This has pretty much always been for various events, and I don't really have any regrets there. I've seen some cool plays and gone to parties that I'd never have known about otherwise.
I can't imagine what would ever drive someone to click on a random banner ad though.
Not only did my late father-in-law click on ads, he also clicked on spam emails. Yes, his computer was super slow and I regularly had to clean off the malware.
Sometimes the sponsored links at the top of a Google search are exactly what I was looking for. I just need to quickly disable AdAway so that I can follow the link.
I've always thought that the ad supported internet is something people will eventually get sick of and the financial foundation would evolve over time to find models that don't rely on infinite spam. Instead efforts are focussed on forcing us to view them. At this point I'm expecting the next version of Chrome to require the Ludovico technique while browsing.
I mean, many (several?) sites tried optional subscriptions where you pay to get rid of ads, but that doesn't seem to have worked. Judging by the fact that most sites that have subscriptions instead of ads use pay walls.
People have come to expect free access, so if you can easily use an ad blocker, why would you choose to pay to remove the ads that a blocker removes for free.
Let's just take NYT for example. Subscription costs $325/year. Why would I ever pay that much? It's not 1954. I'm not sitting down with my morning coffee and reading the damn thing front to back. I'm reading maybe one article a week from 15 different sources. Am I supposed to pay $5000/year just to cover my bases?
As with everything else in [CURRENT YEAR] the value proposition is so absurdly out of step with reality that fixing it basically relies on rolling out the guillotines.
Not only do people expect free access, they feel entitled to endless free content.
God forbid YouTube charge a subscription fee to help pay creators or show ads. No no, we all gotta jump on whatever app makes it free of ads and denies anyone a single cent for the content consumed.
Even if YouTube is the actual devil, other platforms exist that do a better job of paying creators but we don't talk about Nebula, we just talk about getting around the ads at YouTube without letting YouTube ever see a cent. As if having millions of videos available at the touch of a finger to anyone with an Internet connection is somehow free.
The problem with YouTube is they will keep adding more ads until people stop tolerating it.
It used to be a single ad at the start of the video you could skip after 5 seconds. Now it's multiple unskippable ads before the video starts. Often you don't know if this is the video you want anyway, and if it's not you spent more time on the ads than the video itself.
Once you do find the video you want you get random interruptions mid sentence for more unskippable ads. If people just shrug and say "they have to pay for it somehow" then YouTube rubs their hands together and puts more ads in until they find the point where more ads = less viewership.
If the single "skip after 5s" ad was untenable long term then they shouldn't have started with a service they couldn't actually provide. I'm sick of these companies purposely running an unprofitable business just to get users, and then when they change the model to try to become profitable act like it's the users fault that the company sold them on something they can't maintain.
If you want to support a creator do it through Patreon. The amount they get from YouTube is garbage. If I didn't have a way to block YouTube ads I just wouldn't watch YouTube anymore, so they aren't losing any money from me running an AdBlock.
I'm not visiting any of those sites regularly. I'm not subscribing to any outlet without sampling their content, either. So that was always going to fail.
In the before times you were able to purchase one edition of a paper and be done with it. Now it's subscription only, so they won't see a dime from me.
IMHO the problem is the same one as everywhere. Companies are no longer interested in creating products, they are only interested in creating revenue streams. I've been working on my finances lately and it's incredible how many 'products' have become subscriptions over time.
I'd love to be able to buy a day's access, or access to an article. If I want to share it, I'm willing to pay a small fee to show it to certain folks. I feel like there could be a market there but in the current financial climate it would never get any interest or backing because it wouldn't be a method to capture people into a reoccurring billing cycle.
Something I think is interesting is that, in order for companies to adopt these better non ad reliant models, they would have to dramatically scale down.
In a climate where ad and clicks = revenue, your solution is to scale as large as you can and pump out content to maximize views. But that wouldn't work under normal models
Security knowledge and ethical concerns are two separate things. Whether we like it or not, we pay online creators through private data we must give to entities who will use it against our best interests.
Whaat‽
You mean auto downloading and executing foreign JavaScript in a users webpage from some server/CDN I might not even know myself as an ad company could be an attack vector?
Never!
(This mostly for those people who may not know that some [most? Dunno don't have a source for this] ad networks literally allow advertisers to inject small chunks of html into pages for "more interactive/better ads"!!)
This is a great point I try to convey to my less-technical friends and family. Looking at a webpage is not like changing the channel on a tv of old. Looking at a webpage pulls code from who knows where and executes it on your local machine.
These advertisers expect that I should blindly trust them to execute code on my cpu, in my memory, on my machine? Yeah fuck that, it's a privilege. I don't invite every hobo walking by to come into my house and take a shit in my toilet.
If they don't like that not everyone executes their syphilis-ridden javascript, then they should put their shit behind a paywall. But they won't, since they know they don't have a product worth paying for.
in the first half of 2023 alone, with phishing URLs leading the charge with a 140.7% increase.
...
Security Gladiators reports that on average, of every 100 ads that are published, at least 1 contains malicious code.
...
A report by Confiant found that in Q3 of 2021, 1 of every 108 ad impressions was highly disruptive or dangerous.
...
Safety Detectives’ malvertising report showed that the global cost of malware was $500 billion per year in 2015, but in 2021 that figure cost an average of $500 billion per month.
Yes and that's precisely the point. You can make the decision not to pay and there are good reasons to do so (I do so too) but you must recognise that someone is still not getting paid for their work.
Fuck that. We don't have to give them anything. They need to show they actually have put in the effort to protect their viewers. Until then, I refuse to do anything less than use everything available to me to block their ads. The days of whitelisting websites is over.
The surprise is that apparently 28 percent of "experienced programmers" don't have an ad blocker. I'm not sure how they got the data, but I wonder if their methods are up to the task of sorting out any possible inverse correlation between blocking ads and being willing to respond to polls.
"experienced programmers" in would have web developers fall under that umbrella, I'd guess web developers are less likely to adopt adblockers if their livelihood depends on them
There's a surprising amount of programmers that don't know basics of various parts of an operating system. I know people that know several languages, but get lost on installing a mod pack for a game or installing an app from within another app like a browser.
The engineer who sat next to me at my old job didn't use an adblocker. She also would just ignore anything on the screen that wasn't directly related to her task. There'd be "please update" OS popups or "do you want to install a plugin for markdown?" ide prompts on her screen for days. When I'd roll over to work on something at her desk I'd be like "how do you work like this?" she was like "like what?"
She was pretty good at engineering and generally smart. I don't know how she did it.
20 years pro experience here: I run several different browsers in various states of blockedness for various reasons. But when I'm off the clock, of course, it's firefox with ublock.
