Forum Moderators: LifeinAsia
A team of Princeton and Stanford University researchers has fundamentally reinvented how ad-blocking works, in an attempt to put an end to the advertising versus ad-blocking arms race. The ad blocker they've created is lightweight, evaded anti ad-blocking scripts on 50 out of the 50 websites it was tested on, and can block Facebook ads that were previously unblockable. The Ad Blocking Arms Race May Now Be Over [motherboard.vice.com]
It was roughly 7% which is less than I would have expected based on all the time I spend in forums with paranoiac webmasters who run Privacy Badger... like me.
But I do have a great deal of concern about how I connect to the web and how that content is delivered for both security and privacy reasons.
one of my favourite news sites has just gone behind a pay wall. they let you read three articles a month, and that's it. then you're blocked. so i don't use it anymore.
The rise of malvertising, invasive tracking and surveillance, and heavyweight scripts that can bog down browser performance mean that there is a strong case to be made for blocking ads (a recent study found that advertising and scripts slow down web pages by an average of 44 percent).And because of this scenario, all sites loose much of their ad income to the adblockers. Sounds like a loose-loose situation.
... is novel in two major ways: First, it looks at the struggle between advertising and ad blockers as fundamentally a security problem that can be fought in much the same way antivirus programs attempt to block malware, using techniques borrowed from rootkits and built-in web browser customizability to stealthily block ads without being detected. Second, the team notes that there are regulations and laws on the books that give a fundamental advantage to consumers that cannot be easily changed, opening the door to a long-term ad-blocking solution.
We complain that a page takes a horribly inconvenient 8 seconds to load, when it could open in 5 seconds (assuming the aforementioned 44%)
What I would like to see is a sort of reverse "Adsense without just one middleman" (i.e. the broker, but not the advertiser) where I put money in a bank and if I go to your site, I see the ad-free version. The problem I have with the subscription/donation model is not with the sites that I visit all the time and want to support, but with the ones where I read one article per year, but they want a $20 subscription.
Most sites are earning less than $0.01/pageview. If I were willing to pay $0.02/pageview (and screw you if you turn your pages into slideshows), then publishers would make more money, I wouldn't have ads and if 200 sites that I get most of my media from participated, all would be good with the world.
[edited by: LifeinAsia at 8:47 pm (utc) on Apr 19, 2017]
[edit reason] AdSense revenue specifics removed [/edit]
What's the point of that?
Yesterday, I had 6,867 pages viewed with an ad blocker
As against how many page views without an ad blocker? And how many of those 6,867 people recommended your pages to friends, or posted links on social media, where they will be seen by people without ad blockers?
As for social media... I'm positive that we send more traffic to them than they do us.I used to feel that way. I kept hearing about all the traffic SM had but I never saw much coming my way.
One factor may have tempered the confidence of the researchers' predictions – if only they had taken it into account. Advertising may eventually become indistinguishable from the content around it, as in the case of native or branded advertising. The only way to avoid native advertising is by shunning the content – the TV show or the website – entirely .