Maybe the ISP should start charging the ad network instead of the user for ad traffic. Then they can start blocking the ads of people who don't pay.
The user, who pays for the service, is getting no value out of the ads and the advertiser is freeloading the ISP's technical infrastructure and userbase.
The internet as you know it is the value you get out of ads.
You may hate ads, we all do, but at least recognize the hand that feeds you. The alternative is subscriptions for everything, and as far as I can tell that is far less popular than the ad model we have.
The valuable parts of the internet are, with few exceptions, ad-free. Forums like HN, personal blogs and sites, paid services—these are the places where real value is to be found on the internet.
The ad-funded content and services are almost universally low quality and designed exclusively to hack brains to keep them scrolling, not provide real value. What few exceptions there are to this rule are not worth the enormous drain on society that the ad-funded model has been.
> and as far as I can tell that is far less popular than the ad model we have.
This is a classic market failure. Corporations have figured out how to manipulate people into pursuing the corporation's interest (scroll indefinitely through pages and pages of ads and spend money on the things so advertised) at the expense of the consumer's interest (do anything else with their time and money). Popularity is irrelevant when it's clearly achieved by exploitative design, not value delivered.
Is this really true? Virtually all news sites, regardless what side you agree with, have ads. Basically all entertainment has ads (or subscriptions). Productivity stuff is either full of sales or upsells, aka ads, or alternatively sell your data (for future ads).
Those are all valuable things. The ad free ones are the exceptions. More over they only exist ad free because the money comes from elsewhere.
> Virtually all news sites, regardless what side you agree with, have ads.
Virtually all news sites, regardless of what side you agree with, are composed mostly of garbage designed to draw your attention, not inform you about things that really matter. They may provide some value in addition to that, but the advertising model ensures that they must hack your attention as their primary goal.
> Basically all entertainment has ads (or subscriptions).
Similarly, our entertainment options were better before they had to be designed to keep you on a specific streaming platform for a certain length of time.
> Productivity stuff is either full of sales or upsells, aka ads, or alternatively sell your data (for future ads).
Depends on who you're buying productivity stuff from. My Fastmail account does just fine with no ads and no data sales, and covers basically everything I need. Most other "productivity" tools I've tried have felt palpably exploitative.
> More over they only exist ad free because the money comes from elsewhere.
Ad-funded products are a civilization-wide trap like credit card rewards. They create an illusion that things are coming for free, but companies don't do this out of charity—they pay for ads because they have good data that strongly suggests that the people who see them will, on average, pay them back and more.
I'd rather make the cost of a service explicit than hide it behind hard-to-quantify behavioral hacks.
Reminds me of the days when ads were 5 or so minutes long, not just to convince you to buy it, but inform you why you should buy it. It wasn’t a dopamine laden 30s that tells you nothing about the product.
I listened to "The Shadow" radio episodes from the 1940s, sponsored by "Blue Coal". At 0:45 of https://www.beyondthebreaker.com/the-shadow-of-blue-coal/ "All signs point to a severe winter. Be prepared! If you want to be sure of even, dependable, helpful heat in any kind of weather, insist on Blue Coal. America’s finest anthracite mined from the fields of northern Pennsylvania. The coal that is colored a harmless blue at the mine for your protection."
That's about 20 seconds, and the blue color was 'a marketing ploy to distinguish its coal from that of its competitors. But the company took it one step further by actually promoting its product as being superior, longer burning, and even more “healthful” than other coal. No wonder the PR “spin” profession was so poorly regarded in that era!'
Also, 1971's "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke", was 1 minute long, and did not inform.
Happy HN-reader here who recently discovered Brave browser on Apple devices as an alternative YT player. I removed google’s YT app and live mostly advertisement free.
News (especially national or global) is largely idle entertainment for middle class people, and comes with large servings of propaganda. Subscriptions/commerce are fine. Productivity stuff IME is almost all FOSS or paid for. Ads tend to optimize for the opposite of productivity: engagement.
Existing ad-free because the money comes from somewhere is the point. That somewhere is more ethical and prevents the conflicts of interest that make ad-based services inevitably worth their nominal price.
Some obvious very high value parts of the Internet with no monetization: government services and information, free educational materials from pre-school through graduate university and research level, basically all software I use, creative commons music, art, and CAD designs, forums and blogs where world experts like Terence Tao post, forums and blogs where hobbyists post.
If you look to the Internet for ways to improve your life, you'll find the associated resources (which I'd characterize as the high value parts of the Internet) generally have no ads. It should be obvious why.
My brother in code, Hackernews is a blatant ad for YC, look at title bar. They just decided they could afford the subsidy to run it enough to be the sole supporter.
In general, its easiest to charge the wealthiest group with the greatest motivation to spend and that combination means in almost all cases corporations are better customers than individuals. Hence, advertising replacing subscription.
Additionally this why consumer internet is so hard to standup and SaaS feels so much easier to take from 0 to 1.
The term is "content marketing", and yes, ads are ads but ultimately people trying to release quality content for free to shill their brand is not very high on the list of worst things about advertising, I'm sure you'll agree.
This comment doesn’t make sense. Someone is paying for it, and sometimes those people paying for it are making money through advertisement to pay for this site (I.e. if Google “sponsors” your site.”
Someone is paying for it, there is no “failure” here. This is just classic leftist talk - you are welcome to create a new model and show everyone how it’s done. But then you will need money to host, code, etc. I’m happy to take something free if you want to pay for it.
A) I know I'm doing something right when I'm alternatingly accused of being a leftist and a right-winger. Thanks for providing the regular counter to the usual accusations I get of shilling right-wing politics! Can I quote you on that next time I get one of those?
B) If there's an argument against my stance in your comment here I'm missing it. I'd love to have a dialog if you have a counterargument!
As far as I can tell, subscriptions aren't a reliable way to opt out of ads and ad tracking. Look at cars, cable, Uber, Spotify, Amazon prime, newspapers, telecoms, ISPs, etc. They all show sponsored content and upsell services to subscribers.
I've tried putting my money where my mouth is by switching to subscription services for everything and I still have to go out of my way to avoid advertising with adblockers.
I wonder if advertising really is a waste of time and money for the most part, and it's just that the advertisers are really good at convincing people otherwise.
I worked for an ad measurement firm; we developed a causal ad measurement methodology based on a research tool used for observational data in clinical trials. Roughly 1/3 of the thousands of consumer packaged goods (toothpaste, canned soup, breakfast cereal, etc) studies we performed showed no effect of advertising. Another 1/3 didnt have enough of an impact to justify the ad spend (ROI < $1.00), and about 1/3 showed more revenue than ad spend.
Obviously, different industries are likely to show different distributions of results, but CPG companies are the biggest ad spenders, I believe.
The internet as we know it is a dystopian hellscape. As somebody who has been around long enough to remember the internet before every interaction on it was monetised, all I want is for the ad industry to die.
Or chrome, or gmail, or firefox, or ... sadly most of the internet is financed by ads. Only some parts remain free of them. Wikipedia for example. And even HN here ... you can argue it is payed for by the occasional ads, or rather all of it is an ad for the VC ycombinator.
Even Wikipedia feels like each page has a prominent “Plea from Jimmy Wales” ad at the top of every page (even after donating), even if it isn’t billed as such.
Many of the YCombinator companies advertise jobs on this forum, and some also post ‘demos’, which are often advertising to potential investors, clients, and partners.
I do not get this argument at all. We all eventually bear the cost of ads by them adding cost to the products being advertised that we buy. Nothing is free.
Not to mention that treating ad-funded as equivalent to free arrogantly assumes that I, personally, am somehow immune to the manipulation inherent in advertising.
Companies pay for ads because they have good reason to believe that some significant percentage of people who see them will buy something that they otherwise would not have bought. They spend enormous sums setting up the infrastructure to attribute sales to specific ads. Meanwhile we, the consumers, have no really good way to quantify how much drains from our bank accounts each year due to the ads we see.
Might I be the exception to the rule and be un-manipulatable? Possibly. But I don't have a strong reason to bet on it, and I'd rather see the price of the service listed outright as a subscription than simply hope that the ad-funded version will net to a lower cost for me.
I get what you're saying, but you're disregarding the point of my (admittedly tongue in cheek) proposal. I'm not saying there shouldn't be ads. Currently, the ad industry is subsidized by consumers because they pay for the traffic. Instead, the advertiser should pay, since they get the most of it.
Besides, this argument that without ads content can't exist is bogus. Firstly people have been creating art and knowledge without thought for pay since time immemorial, it's a basic human instinct. Were there ads paying for the paintings in Lascaux? In the early days of the internet there was little money to be made online, and yet the quality of the content was excellent - and yes there were banners and tracking cookies but it's interesting how the best sites had little or none of that, and when they did have ads the quality of the ads was very high too - relevant to the audience and not some worthless crap that is much worse than competitors.
To this day people freely publish quality content with 0 monetization, just because they want to. That type of content gets shared on this site daily. Technology has advanced greatly and simply putting a website up is very cheap now, and people have a decent number of hours to put into their hobby.
"The internet as you know it is the value you get out of ads."
Perhaps this statement is meant as a figure of speech. If so, please disregard the remainder of this comment.
If not, the statement makes no sense. The truth is Workaccount2 does not even know imoreno's name, let alone how imoreno uses the internet, i.e., "the internet as imoreno knows it".
The alternative is not "subscriptions for everything" because that is what so-called "tech" companies are already trying. Obviously it does not work very well if the subscription seller is only an intermediary with nothing that people want to pay for. As such, these websites must rely on surveillance and/or ads.
There are a number of internet users who generally do not "sign up" or "subscribe" to anything, other than internet service. Apparently this number is large enough to leave so-called "tech" companies no other option than to sell internet users out as surveillance subjects and/or ad targets.
The alternative is that the number of so-called "tech" companies (unnecessary intermediaries) able to continue as a going concern would drop. Naturally anyone invested in such ventures will be very defensive about their entitlement to conduct commercial surveillance and profit from ads. We see this in HN comments along the lines of "internet ads are mandatory" all the time. The "arguments" made in these HN comments are often quite funny, like "We cannot go back to the time before the internet had ads" or "If we do not have unfettered proliferation of internet ads, then the internet will suck."
Even assuming you’re right in principle, there’s a basic problem here: ads have value (to the advertiser, to the network, to the site showing them, and potentially to the user). And ads have costs paid by the parties other than the user (lots of money changes hands and some compute may be incurred, too), and that’s fine, and the parties in control are strongly motivated to control those costs. But there are also costs that are effectively externalities as far as the companies involved are concerned, and those are bandwidth, battery usage, and degradation of the user experience.
So if anyone wants to seriously call the modern ad system a benefit to the user, then those externalities should be controlled. Either the actual bandwidth costs should be accounted as losses to the user, or the advertiser should be forced to pay those costs. And I bet that ads would start using far less bandwidth with no change in appearance if the advertisers started caring.
The way I see it: if your service forces me to watch ads or pay for a subscription, then I have two choices: either I watch the ads (probably not) or pay for the subscription (slightly more likely but it really depends), or I simply don't use your service. For the most part, I have gone with option #2 in the majority of cases so far.
I have no bad conscience whatsoever to use an adblocker. Heck, I get eye cancer every time I have sit in front of somebody's webbrowser who does not have an adblocker installed.
Even though I use the internet quite a bit as we all do, if the free internet were to go away tomorrow, I'd probably find something else to do with my time.
The alternative is hobby sites, sites that make money from sales like Steam and paid content. I’m honestly fine with that. Fuck ads. If I could remove all ad and data mining supported content from the web I’d do it without hesitation.
That's a false dichotomy, the website earns $0.01 from my ad view(s) on a given page, why should that be replaced with a subscription? Just let me pay $0.01 to view the content.
If the ads were just text-based and related to the content I visit at the time rather than "me" I would have much less hate towards them.
If I visit a webpage about CPUs I am probably interested in CPUs, maybe I am building a PC, send me ads about that which I may actually find useful. Why would you send me irrelevant ads about gardening just because I am into that also? If I am looking to buy a CPU I am not gonna click on something irrelevant like that.
The something in between alternative between these two extremes is universally working hassle-free micro-, or even nano-payments, with accordingly priced articles, without any further subscription pressures.
There is a feast. You get a crumb. The problem isn't that part of that the internet needs part of that crumb to function. The problem is that you get only a crumb. Let's not pretend otherwise.
Bullshit. I guarantee you that if tomorrow, by some regulatory or technological magic, the vast majority of invasive ads were eliminated from online content and platforms, creators of content would still find ways to deliver the goods, simple because the interest would be there. This would happen even if people showed an enormously strong tendency of not paying for subscription offers.
Before ads and ad "partners" became as pervasively parasitic as they are today, there was still plenty of fine content available online, much of it free of charge, and even now, many platforms exist that offer the same, or at least keep their ad systems unobtrusive to users.
Also, as another comment below mentions, even when you do pay, many platforms still bombard you with ad garbage, or create frankly abusive bullshit like paid tiers in which you still can't opt out of ads. Looking at you and many others Netflix.
But it's a marketing win. Imagine an ISP that blocks most ads automatically, and what it doesn't block is excluded from your data cap. Shut up and take my money!
That sets a terrible precedent. You do not want ISPs picking and choosing what content to deliver, or forcing content providers to pay extra to deliver content to their customers.
precedent? This is already a common practice. Since early 2010s ISPs were doing it in USA [1] and trying to lower net neutrality standards in Europe to do it [2]. That's how the whole net neutrality debate started in US https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajit_Pai#Net_neutrality_in_the...
OP was suggesting an outright block of traffic from ad providers. I don't believe any US ISPs have gone to that extreme, at least not yet. They allowed peering points to become congested which affected Netflix traffic, but weren't blocking it.
It will result in a more poor experience online. You want the people providing the service act on their own behalf. Not a more controlling entity to do so. I agree
Surprising they don't mention what I imagine has to be the obvious culprit: video ads.
It's not even about advertising for me -- static ads don't bother me that much. But whenever there's autoplaying video in the corner of a page, I hate it so much. Whether it's an ad, or a news site that inexplicably thinks I want to multitask and watch their news channel at the same time I read their article. It's genuinely hard to read the article when there's constant motion an inch or two away at all times!
That's your monkey brain hard at work making sure you notice movement that could mean danger in your peripheral vision, funny how much technology is built off of manipulating primal parts of our brains
The other day I was on a page with an autoplaying video. When I started scrolling it popped out into the corner so I closed it, and there was another autoplaying video underneath it. I've never seen anything like that and I just had to kind of look at it in amazement.
Ads work around lack of autoplay by loading massive image filmstrips containing video frames (often split across hundreds of image files), and animating that in JS or CSS. This has all the annoyance of autoplay, with even worse bandwidth and memory usage.
uBlock Origin can also block media elements larger than X MB (I use 8 MB so it still loads large images), preventing the video from loading in the first place. Disabling autoplay prevents it from playing, but the video is still downloaded.
A lot of web pages only work for me on my iPhone if I use reader mode. Otherwise, the page keeps resetting over and over again. Firefox, but I assume Safari is probably the same, since Apple mandates they all be based on WebKit.
You can try adguard on iOS. It’s an app that you buy as an extension for safari but the block lists are very good and you can enable DoH systemwide as well.
As someone who switched from Iphone to Android, Adguard is very poor compared to uBlock, and it was in fact one major reason (of several) why I switched. But now that Google is killing adblockers, I might just stop browsing the internet entirely.
Hopefully Firefox will keep support for manifest 2 for the foreseeable future since they also have their own extension "store". In Chromes extension store new downloads of Ublock Origin have already been disabled and existing installations are slowly being disabled as they roll out the changes. I'm still on Vivaldi, but will be switching to Firefox very soon.
The fact that Firefox has had a near-perfect ad blocker for years and years, and the internet has only got less usable without an ad blocker and it's still struggling to break 1% on mobile is just so strange to me. It should be marketing open goal. Especially as the biggest competition has a conflict of interest that prevents them ever doing ad block well, so they can't lose out to a pivot by Chrome.
If you root your android then I believe AdAway is still a fantastic option because of the custom filters. Non rooted you can get personalDNSfilter from f droid, same thing but via VPN
Nothing is published yet. Whatever gecko build might be there might be whithering away on the vine, I don't believe Mozilla cares for supporting it just for the EU.
What web pages are you seeking out? I feel like I read hacker news, the New York Times and some local Reddit channels more or less. Search is so squirrelly and the passion GeoCities pages or Uni home pages are long gone, and blogs are corrupted by insidious sponsor endorsements, let alone ads?
I would prefer you to put hacker news in another category this site has quality information and comments unlike many other sites. This site also is not riddled with ads, which is a plus for all of us here. What makes you see that any other way?
The same is true for me on Safari. I've tried with and without AdGuard and the experience on plenty of sites that I just want to get a quick tidbit from is awfully painful.
I suppose, but Safari/Webkit shows that you can get what feels like 95% of the way there with static block lists which are ideal when they are sufficient.
They're faster and they're trustless. The only attack surface of a block list is that someone removes their site from the list.
(Video portals aside)
The text you want to read: a few kilobytes.
The (oeconomical, an economical) cost of the ads surrounding it:
several dozen to a hundred megabytes.
You cannot convince me that this _isn't_ unsustainable quackery that got out of hands really, really bad.
Unsustainable for who? The websites use CDNs for dirt cheap bandwidth, mobile providers love that 20gb doesn’t go as far as it used to. It inevitably creates a synergy, between stuff like news websites and local telcos, and YouTube love it too. hell, it’s not like all bandwidth cost the same, especially when major orgs will cache + colocate or peer to your isps.
If you’re a consumer you might be right, but your opinions and feelings aren’t of importance to those in power.
Bandwidth is never free from environmental impact, and given the same server/CDN/whatever the environmental impact will increase monotonously with increasing bandwidth use.
Besides the FBI recommending it for security, running a good adblocker is one of the most "green" ways to reduce your footprint from internet usage.
Regardless of how efficient the CDN, it still has a lower footprint to not connect to it at all.
>hell, it’s not like all bandwidth cost the same
I don't see where anybody says that, nor where that claim would be necessary to support the thesis.
Let’s be honest, general browsing internet usage is probably the least offensive use of energy in existence, particularly when talking about bloated filesizes of javascript. Feel free to disregard me while watching Netflix in 4k on Netflix approved hardware decoders on your 100 inch tv and surround sound, while using your heater to keep you warm, and enjoy your Uber eats hot chocolate for desert while scrolling tiktok on a phone you’ll throw away in two years time, though.
I don't disagree, but ecological impacts aren't addressed by one big magic bullet solution, it's a game of adding up pennies.
This is after focusing a lot on the other personal emission sources, but OTOH "install uBO and set it to Easy Mode" is one of the cheap and easy (low-hanging) interventions. Incidentally I generally watch videos at 360p, unless it's a lecture with small text on slides. Most 'taking head' content is just wasted pixels at higher resolutions.
I don’t think the savings of my browser are at all comparable to say, the Chinese industrial carbon footprint, not by a million miles.
A better approach than your current lifestyle would be to focus your efforts into something scalable that would actually have an impact rather than wasting your time.
I'll say it again: combatting ecological impact is a game of pennies.
You're missing the point by complaining that it's a smaller impact than all the industry in China (what isn't?), because there's nothing I (or anyone else) can do to eliminate the impact of all the industry in China. That is not one of the available 'moves' in this 'game.' It's a red herring.
That's what I meant by "magic bullet" thinking: you imagine you can only do one thing, and that one thing must fix 100% of the problem. In real life this problem (like most problems) isn't like that.
Also adblockers don't waste my time, they actually save me time. As far as mitigations go it has a good cost-to-benefit ratio, hence "low-hanging."
> focus your efforts into something scalable
Like, say, convincing lots of people (ideally some convenient population of technology thought leaders) that they should install uBlock Origin? :-)
But again, this premise that we're only allowed to do one thing is silly. I contain multitudes, and so do you.
I've been long enough on HN to hear this argument since early 2010s, yet the market keeps proving everyone (including me!) wrong. Nobody cares if your website loads 20kb of text with a side of 1mb of ads. Most people are just swiping through megabytes of videos on TikTok and IG anyways.
html email was the start of a slippery slope. i remember complaining about data consumption of non-text email BITD. that was when the state of the art for email servers was to dedup list email so that the server would save only one copy and just reference it for all recipients.
Yes - advertising is very profitable. Increasing the cost would lead to a short term reduction in spend by advertisers, which would squeeze the adtech industry. They’d respond with improvements to their specs which reduce bandwidth and return levels closer to normal. Totally fixable problem with the correct incentives.
Interesting note, the privacy sandbox apis that google (was) is pushing were extremely bad for bandwidth to the point that in early tests our servers often did not respond in time to successfully bid in an auction. This occurred in many steps different steps of the auction (ssps as well). Google of course kind of moved away from this set up before fixes were implemented. (If the time between a user loading a page and the result of a programmatic auction is too long, ads may not be served)
If all the externalities were priced in, the model would certainly cease to exist. Several years ago I found a UN report saying the same about business more generally. I’ve recently tried to find it again, but it seems to have been removed.
Advertising doesn't inherently imply wastefulness or even being spyware or a malware & scam vector.
If all the negative externalities were properly priced in, a lot of bottom-feeding crap at all layers of the stack will die off, but advertising itself will remain and would actually become better as a result for all parties involved.
This is desktop, not mobile, but: I turned off ad blockers, scrolled to the bottom, and waited.
60.9MB transferred https://imgur.com/a/ftGkR3m. They are in fact worse than the rest of them. It is still going up as the ads rotate. I count 11 ad placements.
Saving the article text locally and gzipping it (which lacks html tags, but should be approximately right), it's ~1.5 kB. So 2kB for the article and say 5kB for a cacheable site-wide template is what things "ought" to be.
My 1GB mobile data plan should be enough to read at least 10s of thousands of pages in a month. Instead at 60MB, I could read... 16. Naturally I never use mobile data, and my only real use for a phone plan at all at this point is being forced to have SMS for banking.
I’m due for a new phone and I’m strongly considering going to a dumb phone with a tablet around the house for browsing. I can carry a Kindle or something to kill time waiting for a train.
Question for the thread*: are we at a point where we build apps that chew through ad/user data, but put ourselves in a position to not have our
data chewed on?
*Mostly asking because I have come across this sentiment before, not because I think op(s) are engaged in this
I'd do that but a smartphone is unfortunately a great pocket camera. The sweet spot for me would be something like a modern version of the Nokia N95 — great camera, unrestricted OS that lets me write apps in Python or whatever, and terrible web browsing experience.
Opening this page 6 and a half times would exceed the monthly download limit on the first broadband internet plan my family had about twenty years ago in Australia.
Even though I use an adblocker, I got a huge table showing three Amazon products that took more space screen than any of the text block of the actual article.
I can't even imagine how the site looks like without an adblocker...
I agree. It's insanely user-hostile that the "never auto-play" setting in Safari (for example) doesn't work and hasn't worked for years. To be honest, I have no recollection of it ever working reliably.
Although it is an arms race and obnoxious web pages can have javascript/webassembly video players that render into a canvas, etc., I still blame Apple for not sorting this out, and even backtracking on click/tap-to-play.
IIRC, at some point Apple did roll out default click/tap-to-play on iPhones, and there was a huge outcry from web developers (probably including Google/youtube) that it broke their sites. I expect the real complaint was that it interfered with pushing unwanted video advertisements.
The fact that we need a "stop the madness" app for Safari is proof of Safari's insanity.
If Stopthemadness actually works reliably, it is also an existence proof that blocking video autoplay is possible, and that Apple is simply not fixing the "never auto-play" setting in Safari.
Perhaps Apple and Mozilla should just remove the "never auto-play" settings in Safari and Firefox and say that they are doing so in order to empower web sites and adtech companies (including Google/youtube, who pays them a lot of money) to force you to view unwanted video advertisements.
> AFAIK, a lot of mobile ad blockers work by proxying your traffic through their servers.
I don't know what your basis is for this claim. Mobile Safari had an API for content filter lists, and every ad blocker I’ve tried required me to enable several of these filters through the system settings. I don't think there's any way an iOS extension even could configure a proxy without user confirmation.
iOS ad blockers primarily work through the content blocker API, since several years ago. An app gives Safari a blocklist (which it's responsible for updating) and Safari applies that to any URIs it's asked to load.
I've been using Wipr for a few years now. It's basically set and forget.
My solution is a PiHole instance at home, combined with a split tunnel WireGuard connection to route my phone's DNS queries through it while I'm on the go. It's completely app- and platform-agnostic.
i’ve been doing the same for a few years now. wireguard’s “on demand” feature is perfect for this. the odd time i’ll have to shut it off to get through a captive wifi portal, but otherwise it (along with browser ad blockers) has made mobile browsing significantly less terrible
It is not only the data amount but also power. Those who display ads on your computer are stealing these things from you, so they are the thieves. However, it is not only the ads, but also other stuff, such as spyware, inefficient programming, excessive animations and fancy effects, etc.
Ads? Which ads? None on my devices at least. Block the filth already, there is no reason to subject yourself or your family to it. Get a device which is under your own control - nothing made by Apple, get an Android device on which you install something like LineageOS or GrapheneOS or another similar AOSP-derived distribution, do not use unmodified stock Android distributions - and install several layers of content blocking. Use a VPN with an endpoint at your own router on which you have more content blocking, that way you can safely use public WiFi hotspots. I never see advertising and would not accept anything else.
Most of the ads, except for those which Apple wants you to see, except for those in Apple applications, except for the fact that certain applications can not be changed because Apple controls which applications the device will use for given purposes, etcetera. Apple products remain under Apple control whether you like it or not unless they are 'jailbroken'. No, if you want as much control as possible Apple is not your friend.
This is the #1 reason for ad blocking in Eastern Europe and Asia (eg dolphin browser). It’s also why the current “solutions” big tech is providing viz. privacy and non-annoying ads doesn’t move the needle there.
Despite all their crypto bullshit and internal ad networks (which you can ignore/turn off), Brave mobile is great at blocking ads.
For instance ive never paid for YouTube premium to get rid of ads on mobile and allow background audio (yes they charge for background audio). On Brave mobile you can turn on background audio for all media and ive never seen/heard a YouTube ad.
Firefox mobile is great for this too. uBlock + sponsorblock + the fact that FF continues playing media when it's backgrounded make listening to long videos (like publicly recorded university lectures etc) a real breeze, it's a godsend if you like to listen to lectures while on long drives etc
Edit: ironically my post in this thread about how ads are partially enshittifying the internet, reads a bit like a sponsored endorsement for FF :-) ah well. It's still good.
I wish Brave had succeeded with their YouTube Premium model of web browsing. Let me pay one single provider to remove all web ads and paywalls, and that provider pays creators. Still a great mobile browser.
I assume the worst offender in this is youtube. It’s awful because ads ALWAYS load immediately, but the actual media i want to watch always lags or is buffering.
When i’m on mobile data advertisements are always super clear and in super high resolution, but i often get pushed low-res versions of the media.
I really hope some better company comes and dismantles YouTube as a business.
Edit: i’m using plain YouTube on plain iOS, so it’s all on google/YouTube.
Worst example I've seen is an app called Foodora here in Norway (like Uber Eats, Door Dash, etc). On the order confirmation page where you're following your order status, following the driver on the map, etc, they would have video ads playing _uncached_. It was literally using like 1 MB/s of traffic continuously while you were checking the order page.
Honestly, just stop using your phone most of the time. You can try to keep up with the adblocking arms race, but it is ultimately a losing battle. It's not actually difficult (in principle) to avoid mobile ads: don't use your phone in the first place, don't browse to web pages, and don't install apps. For anyone who says "but what if I'm out and I need to?" -- that's a fine exception if you're not actually using your phone the other 99% of the time.
Yep, it's just completely frictionless and just works. Haven't really seen an ad in Firefox for over a decade. I don't know why anyone would put up with anything less.
The only ads I have to deal with are the ones on my TV YouTube and ones in apps, which I try to use the websites for instead anyway because I consider installing some app usually a sign of defeat. If someone isn't trying to scam you out of at least some attention and some personal data, they'd have a functional website.
Considering we have 25 years of adtech and we presently have multiple effective solutions for adblocking on mobile and desktop, I’d need some additional evidence to be sure that is “ultimately a losing battle”.
So I consider myself to be pretty aggressive compared to the normal user when it comes to adblocking. I use Pihole, pfsense (just some blocking IP lists), ublock origin + custom filters & lists, noscript, and also just have a firm household policy about unavoidable ads. (companies have a "1 strike you're out" policy in my household for anything egregious. Spotify earned a lifetime ban probably over a decade ago. It's likely the original offense has not been relevant for years, but I don't care. They're out of the running permanently.)
That said, there's a lot of time and energy keeping up with what works, and what does not in the ecosystem. From the pfsense (ie, IP blocking) side of things I'm wholly dependent on filter list authors -- and of course IP blocking ads is marginally effective at best. From the pihole side of things, you have similar problems: dependency on domain lists, and the ever-looming threat of server-side ads. The only reason pihole (or any DNS-based blocking in general) is not wholly useless is because it represents a minority of users. If the technique were even marginally popular, the industry would move on and render it almost totally useless. uBlock origin suffers similar problems, and of course Google has moved to neuter it via Manifest v3. They are also in something of a tug of way with Youtube, and I get the sense that if they really wanted to, they could easily circumvent the plugin. As could any other website. I'm not really worried about losing Youtube, mind you, but it feels pretty clearly that the door is closing on the ad-free internet. And worse, the time when the users on the internet had more power than corporations is dying with it.
Well, I couldn't even tell you off the top of my head where I see ads these days on mobile outside of the odd news site that takes up <1% of my browsing.
So I can't relate to this battle you paint that's so dire that we should stop using our phones.
Ads are ok if they’re fixated on a page and aren’t intrusive but holy crap, some sites just takes to other sites when you click something and then when you come back it’s not the same page so you got to go back again and the cycle resets. I can’t imagine places where internet is super expensive and you deal with daily
I finally took the time this weekend to get the family switched over to using NextDNS. I use uBlock Origin on my laptop but it's nice to have something for mobile too. I've been getting heated when my partner hands me her phone to show me a recipe and it's completely covered in ads.
This reminds me of the very first prosecution against "Hackers"
according to the lore of Bruce Stirling [0].
Since there were no cyber-laws to charge trespassers on digital estate
the intruders were charged with "stealing electricity".
Perhaps we forget that ads are also a crime of resource
misappropriation. Advertisers are not like vampires that are off the
hook if you invite them in.
Ad people also don’t even care about best practices. Many times years ago we’d see multi meg static banner ads. The situation isn’t better today, massive gifs are still used in place of video.
Few things are more soul crushing than having a VP of CTO mandate a bunch of metrics for page size and load time and then to have someone load up all your hard work with trackers, analytics and ads. Like what was the point of us doing all this now the page loads in five seconds so you can be nosey?
I've solved this by mostly not even using most sites on mobile anyway. The vast majority of whatever dreck is served up is purely worthless anyway, social network-powered chum, listicle nonsense, or whatever does load up reflows eleventy times and crashes the tab. This link included. What little is left beyond that is just shallow information that you can mostly get from the original sources (this link included).
Wipr has been pretty reliable for me on iOS. I know digital advertising has helped support many web innovations but it's just getting brutal out there.
Same, with NextDNS. I used to deal with rooting and Magisk to use a hosts file based approach (Adaware) but as Android has become more locked down, DNS blocking has become the much less invasive solution.
AdGuardHome and WireGuard running at home. WireGuard connects on-demand when I leave home.
I choose to run it at home because there are cases where services and/or sites block datacenter IPs, and I have complete control over what and how I block, no proxying through any blocking service.
A solution for you and some other tech savvy individuals; not a great solution for the rest of my family. Plus, it ignores the systemic problem in exchange for personal one-off bandaids.
A one-off solution like this is really the only type of solution we have in the face of a massive ad tech industry that largely piggybacks on top of, and inserts itself into, foundational network and web protocols.
Fixing the problem itself would likely require legislation and regulation to get ad tech companies (or the companies that use the ad tech) to pay attention to the data use.
Homes, sure - what about mobile devices? What about the rest of my family who's not at home? What about the sysadmin work I'll have to put in to support this?
You can either set each up yourself, or there are a variety of containers available. A chatbot of your choice can likely guide you through it, since it'll depend on your specific network setup and how exactly you'd like it configured.
I just turn on Ultimate Data Saving mode, and then I add some apps to the exception list. I always also have Power Saving mode on, and that restricts background data usage significantly.
ads aren't chewing though my mobile data. I generally don't go to any sites with ads. The few times I open a link and it's covered in ads I close the link.
You might not be seeing visible ads but you're going to plenty of sites that are using tons of tracking pixels and making a lot of requests with and about various data you are providing. That might not be as data intensive as auto playing a video ad but it certainly makes a big impact overall.
Dunno, I have a 15gb/month through Mint and just use 1Blocker on iOS. I watch Youtube on 5G and use my phone like anyone else yet have data left over. So it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of hidden data drain once you have a basic ad blocker.
Overtly consuming rich media from Youtube, Music, and Twitter dwarfs the data consumption of Safari.
Even your example of a tracking pixel is only going to be a handful of bytes.
iOS Safari has a setting that can use another app to do privacy controls and you can set Firefox Focus to be that app. It’s very nice. I got tired of how slow pages were loading on my phone, and got fed up one day and turned it on.
That and ads that resize and push down the content you’re about to click on to make you misclick were the final straws.
Aren’t browser-extension ad blockers (uBlock Origin, AdBlock, etc.) not helpful for solving this problem? As far as I’m aware, by the time the ad can be blocked by such programs, you have already consumed the data.
Wouldn’t a better solution be DNS sinkholing, like PiHole or AdGuard Home?
Be sure to read my follow up article, "How ads are funding the services you request the other half of your mobile data from, so you can use them without paying except with some mobile data and some pixels on your screen."
Those sites should consider sending surreptitious crypto miners instead, which would be more ethical. Then they'd only be using energy instead of using energy and bandwidth and also spying on and manipulating people.
Users should of course block all malware.
The other obvious thing to consider is that if you're going to write an article to convince people of your opinion, I'm not going to pay you for that. You're the one trying to influence me!
I hate intrusive ads as much as the next guy, but denying that ads have benefits and people overwhelmingly choose ad-supported services over paid ones is simply sticking your head in the sand.
Saying people overwhelmingly choose ads is conceptualizing things wrong. Take this blog: it just copied a BI snippet about a study some other party did. No one even linked to the original study.
People correctly value this at $0. This post is noise, and things like it just make web crawling/search harder to scale.
I would love to have a way to pay for most websites but experience shows that the genius MBAs get your subscription fee and then start tacking on ads and tracking anyway. So fuck them. ad blockers, proxies, pihole, vpns, whatever you have to do.
Google gave people that but ~nobody used it (it was called Google Contributor). Many similar stories over the years. People overwhelmingly choose ad-supported services over paid ones. Even when "MBAs" don't add extra ads on top or whatever other objection you have, it's all been tried before and failed every time.
Revealed preferences are not reliable in situations where individuals make choices based on factors other than their true preferences, such as... limited information, social pressure, financial pressure (!!), impulsive behavior, addiction, lack of technical knowledge to pursue alternatives (!!), or when their preferences change significantly over time or moment to moment.
Recourse to "people have revealed their preferences" is the last refuge of the defenders of the status quo of deeply corrupted "markets".
Sure, and the vast majority choose ad-supported services over paid ones. Even many of the ones who claim to want to pay don't actually put their money where their mouth is when given the chance.
If you have an iPhone, NextDNS is free/very cheap and blocks all ads everywhere (except in the YT app, for this you need to route the YT traffic over to Albania, they get no YT ads there for some reason)
"Don't worry. Now that net neutrality is certainly no longer a thing, arrangements can be made for adtech companies to pay ISPs directly to zero-rate their traffic. You won't benefit from this with any less ads or tracking, but your Internet bill may increase slightly less over time, at least until it's as high as your cable bill used to be."
Ridiculous thoughts from my grandmother. I disagree. People still watch TV even though there are ad breaks, ads on top of the show you are watching, and product placement within the TV shows. People clearly want ads otherwise they would use alternate means to get the information, such as DVDs, books, libraries, non-online classes, or seminars. If mobile data pricing goes up and the cost of ads to the end user is too high, the free market can sort it out. Honestly it's hard for me not to believe that blocking ads is anti-capitalist and against the free speech rights of advertising companies.
Correct. And scoffing at them won't change anything.
Even if they didn't, the amount of data ads use massively slows down the experience of using the internet, especially when outside of a tower-dense area.
I question the methodology of this: Enders used a browser that mimicked an iPhone 6 and accessed a total of eight "popular" news sites (though they didn't confirm what these were)."
'iPhone 6', an phone that's 10 years old. A sample size of 8 and undisclosed.
The user, who pays for the service, is getting no value out of the ads and the advertiser is freeloading the ISP's technical infrastructure and userbase.