Adblock shenanigans

[Aractus]

Okay onto the some of the "current" opinions...

Youtubers hate adblock and don't mind saying so:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_SVd927h0I

Well Hank, nice of you to tell us that you and John don't use pre-roll ads on your channel 'vlogbrothers' because you "don't like pre-roll ads". But that's really a half-truth isn't it? Since you do use them on your other channel, CrashCourse.

Here's a really irate loud-mouth American Youtuber mouthing-off about Adblock users for a full 20-something minutes!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTHPSTAXtGA


Oh no, adblock users are "stealing" your content? Your content that you publish at no cost to you on Youtube? Give me a fucking break, you don't even pay hosting fees or anything, your videos are displayed at no cost to you - do Youtubers really not understand that concept? Do they not understand just how hypocritical they sound when they complain about users viewing "their" videos using a browser extension? Not to mention their Youtube channels fucking suck anyway, and I don't understand why people subscribe to their generic shit.

I already went on about this in a previous thread, but to re-cap. Youtube is driving adblock use at the moment because of how saturated the service is with ads. If Google put in place better sanctions on how many ads can appear to viewers (for example let's say one or two pre or post roll ads per hour of Youtube viewing), then people would be much less annoyed. But then again, if Google did that then well more than 40% of the revenue from advertising would be lost, so they don't want to do that because it would mean an even greater loss of present revenue when compared with what they get at the moment. But let's face it, Youtube still isn't profitable to Google even with the advertisement saturation. If Google - the world's largest and most profitable internet advertising company can't make Youtube turn a profit for them - it just proves we have a platform that's currently unsustainable - see if users were actually charged hosting fees for their videos, they might then start to realise that it actually costs money to host shit on the internet.

"Non Intrusive? Really?

Yes Min I don't agree that 'all advertising is intrusive', in fact consumers do have certain kinds of advertising they prefer. If a shop puts a Store Catalogue out the front of their shop - lo and behold people actually choose to pick it up and read it. In fact, catalogues delivered in the mail - while I hate them and never read them - many people just love for some reason - and they will keep them in their homes on their coffee tables for weeks without throwing them out as well.

But here's the problem with PageFair. They swap-out intrusive advertising for non-intrusive advertising - so this begs the question, why don't websites just cut-out the middle-man and change all of their advertising to "non-intrusive"? Well because they don't want to - PageFair actually allows them to keep the intrusive ads, and yet still show ads to a number of people using ABP/AB/AG. So they actually aren't supporting the shift away from the more intrusive ads, they're simply helping websites keep them without being penalised by the "acceptable ads program". Get your head around that.

"Adblock is stealing"?

This claim has been made a lot of times. By many different companies. But advertising companies themselves are actually quite careful not to make the claim.

There's actually been a declining trend in the use of popping up messages to users to "disable your adblock please to support this site". For example, DuckDuckGo abandoned the use of the 'anti-adblock-message' a few months back, even though it was relatively non-intrusive as far as 'please disable your adblock' messages go:

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If you haven’t read about ad blocking in the recent past, I envy you. For those of you who did escape the bonanza, please share the location of the rock you were living under.
...
It’s undeniable that ad blocking creates a better Internet experience. Nice clean pages, no flashing ads, or, God forbid, pop-ups.
...
Secret Media, on the other hand, is a full-on assault on the ad blockers by trying to outwit them. Whilst pleasing a few hundred publishers, they deny what a billion Internet users want: no ads.

Philip Inghelbrecht, Oct 2015

Pretty bold to be published on a company that relies on internet advertising for revenue.
But what's perhaps even more startling is opinions from the sector itself. AdNews, which was founded in 1928, recently published this, and I suggest reading it in full, but here are some snippets:

Candide McDonald | 8 October 2015
There is not a person on the planet who loves ads more than I do. I just happen to love AdBlock too. I love it because I don’t want to know the “secret” reason why a 57-year-old grandmother looks 27. If you can’t grab my interest before the ‘Skip’ button kicks in, you don’t deserve to be on YouTube. And whatever is in my phone is not for anyone else to see, unless I send it to them. I am not alone in Team AdBlock - see what these industry creative think below.

Andy Flemming, creative director M&C Saatchi Sydney
... From now on, I’ll just tell (research companies) that people hate what we do so fucking much that they’re willing to use a bespoke program that completely eradicates it from their lives.
Because when all’s said and done, the vast majority of what the industry puts out is shit. It’s shit because of many factors.
Researchers. Nervousness. Lack of talent. Researchers. People have had enough.
And who can blame them? We show the same ad literally thousands of times on YouTube. ...

Barrie Barton, strategy and insight director Right Angle Studio
... There’s no point in lamenting blocking software – people quite naturally just want what they like the most, with as little distraction as possible. Viewed optimistically, adblocking isn’t even a problem, it’s a provocation to think of better ways to engage our audiences and make money. ...

Matt Gilmour, executive creative director Archibald/Williams
... I love adblocking and I love how it blocks ads. So when I was asked to write about ad blocking being a problem, I was slightly concerned. Have I been doing the wrong thing by the ad industry all this time? How much larger could my penis have become? How many Russian brides might I have married? I’ll never know. ...
Obviously, adblocking will increase in popularity, but that’s a good thing because it’ll make us work better. ...

Lee Stephens, CEO Switch Digital
While adblocking is a factor in the market, it remains a secondary issue behind advertising accountability and quality. ...
In June 2014, Adobe conducted a study of 150 million US browsers and found that young men (aged under 29) and tech savvy consumers are the highest users of ad blockers. ...
Young men are a notoriously difficult target audience to engage, and a reliance on desktop banner advertising alone is a rookie mistake. ...
On the whole, adblocking has been met with a similar hysteria to that experienced with cookie blockers 10 years ago. ...

Kristy Russell, executive producer, Tribal Melbourne
... If people are going to the trouble of blocking ads, then it’s pretty clear they don’t want to receive irrelevant ads, and brands could benefit from not pissing people off. ...
Adblocking is a simple reminder that the advertising world is constantly evolving and we live in a world of empowered audiences. ...

Ben Keenan, interactive creative director Clemenger BBDO Melbourne
My grandfather used to design some of the original 728 x 90 banners back in the early 1990s. They’d lay each pixel by hand back then. ...
They were so evocative in the way they blinked, asked us to “click here” – where was I clicking to? ...

See even the industry realises there's a problem, and it's not the consumer. Loud-mouth Youtubers might be blaming the consumer, but they aren't the problem. Print advertising and other forms of advertising are not privacy-invading and a security-risk in the way that 3rd-party internet ads are.

OK, I'll bite.  What's "downright intrusive" about the ads on startpage.com?  I'd never used startpage.com before about 60 seconds ago, I just happen to have ABP installed in this browser (it's an oversight), and the ads there look pretty much like standard Google Adsense text ads - and quite frankly, if you're going to have ads, I'd rather they be those rather than the exploit-laden bullshit that everyone else serves up.  The only thing about them that's even remotely obnoxious is that there's little little to distinguish them from ordinary search results.

As far as the rest of it goes, yeah, I agree, uBlock Origin is the way to go.

Well let's have a look at a comparison between SP and DDG then:

Startpage:



Duckduckgo:



There's a number of differences I could point out. First note that these screenshots are exactly the same size (594x548 taken from the top-left at 75% zoom). They both show the first three search results, although DDG also shows Wikipedia above the search results. Startpage has 3x ads that are nearly indistinguishable from the first search result, whereas DDG's have  distinct style that doesn't try to make them blend into the search results. Now this isn't to actually indemnify DDG, as sometimes they do serve ads that are are the same width as the search results, in the same style, and merely marked with the yellow "AD" marker.

And Adsense seems to randomly decide upon whether it will serve three ads or just two on Startpage, which makes it even more difficult for users to find the first search result.