[HN Gopher] Techdirt Is Now Without Any Google Ads or Tracking Code
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Techdirt Is Now Without Any Google Ads or Tracking Code
Author : nabilhat
Score : 235 points
Date : 2021-07-28 14:28 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.techdirt.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.techdirt.com)
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Fascinating. The URL was fully content blocked by default on my
| iPhone's adblocker.
| drcongo wrote:
| Ironically, the entire Techdirt site is blocked for me by one of
| my content blockers. I don't actually know what Techdirt is or
| whether it's worth unblocking.
| ipaddr wrote:
| What dns block are you using?
| Tagbert wrote:
| Techdirt is a tech news site with articles that are longer than
| soundbites. They cover a range of tech topics with a focus less
| on Company X just released this great product Y.
|
| I'd look into who sets the rules on your content blocker. I
| can't think of any reason why Techdirt might be blocked beyond
| the common tracking that we are discussing here and which they
| are trying to get rid of.
| ericholscher wrote:
| We were discussing with them adding https://www.ethicalads.io/
| which is our new non-tracking ad network. Sadly we're still only
| focused on developers, and Techdirt's content is very wide
| ranging, so we were only able to propose running ads on a subset
| of their content currently. We'd love to be able to support them
| when we are able to expand our audience to a larger tech-focused
| site in the future.
| shortformblog wrote:
| Please let me know when you expand in that way as well. I would
| love to look into it.
| ericholscher wrote:
| Totally! We're still working on firming up our existing
| niche, but looking to expand. You can subscribe to our
| newsletter to keep in the loop (~2x posts a month, sub in the
| site footer) and see our journey, but I'll also add you to a
| Trello card for folks to reach out to!
| shortformblog wrote:
| Keep me posted. Would love to see a revival of The Deck.
| ericholscher wrote:
| That's definitely the vision, we just need to get the
| word out.We're not the best marketers, but learning
| slowly as we go.
| doodpants wrote:
| If the site has no tracking, how come it shows a GDPR-compliant
| cookie warning?
| danudey wrote:
| The site has no Google Analytics or Google Ads. They didn't say
| no tracking, and they didn't say no cookies.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Recently there have been a few companies formally distancing
| themselves from Google, and doing so with a press release. Is
| there a reason why this is happening now?
|
| To my knowledge, Google's basic nature has been known for quite a
| while, and people who care have lined up on different sides
| depending on their ideologies and self-interests. What has
| changed in the last 6 months that makes so many companies change
| their opinions about working with them? Is it just that public
| opinion has crossed some tipping point where it makes sense to
| gamble on a temporary revenue hit in order to be on the "right
| side"? That seems unlikely, just because I don't know a lot of
| people who weren't skeptical of Google a year ago who are now.
|
| Is it related to FLoC? That seems like a wonky issue that's under
| most people's radar. Is it the EU antitrust hearings? Also seems
| unlikely.
|
| Honest question: why now?
| kmeisthax wrote:
| In order to understand this, we need to explain the
| "Adpocalypse" - a thing that happened to YouTubers and, more
| generally, online content publishers that sell ads through
| Google. More generally we need to talk about the changes that
| advertisers have made with respect to how they think about
| brand association.
|
| The way advertising companies used to treat online advertising
| a decade ago was that it didn't matter _where_ your ads were
| placed, as long as they were going in front of people who were
| interested in them. That 's why you had large ad exchanges with
| third-party tracking tools to build up behavioral profiles,
| because it was the best approach for linking advertisers and
| publishers. Publishers generally didn't care about who was
| advertising on their pages and advertisers generally didn't
| care about what pages their ads wound up on. This is, of
| course, a generality; there's always been picky advertisers
| and/or publishers, but the core point remains: the business
| _worked_ because inventory was _fungible_.
|
| And then advertisers realized that their ads were showing up on
| videos of Klu Klux Klan rallies and other far-right nonsense.
|
| Well, they didn't so much realize, as much as they were
| publicly embarrassed when journalists started writing news
| stories about it. Consequently, you saw multiple waves of
| brands making a show of pulling all their advertising until
| exchanges implemented better controls for brand association and
| advertiser safety. Of course, this means that exchanges wound
| up over-enforcing ad safety, constantly harassing publishers
| that might be on the line. Journalistic outfits were unusually
| impacted, because their content is _rarely_ advertiser
| friendly, even though they 're not the right-wing nutters that
| started this mess.
|
| This problem isn't related to trying to keep right-wingers out
| of ad money, though. There's a sort of converse Adpocalypse
| that happened to publishers, called malvertising. This can take
| many forms - from fake popups for scam tech support companies,
| to just outright dropping a zero-day exploit on your victim.
| This causes reputational problems for publishers, since safe-
| browing services will flag your site (basically making it
| unusable without lots of scary warnings, and heavily punishing
| it in search engines) if it starts dropping drive-by downloads
| on users.
|
| So, advertisers are unhappy because of bad publishers, and
| publishers are unhappy because of bad advertisers. What about
| the users? Well, they're installing ad blockers in record
| numbers because they don't want to get hacked by malicious ads.
| Also, many of them aren't actual users; the online advertising
| business has had click fraud problems way before malvertising
| or brands getting cold feet over what content they're paired
| with. That's actually part and parcel of why online advertising
| is so tracking-heavy; it lets them detect the difference
| between an actual reader and someone just clicking on their own
| ads all day to defraud advertisers. Guess what? Users don't
| like ad tracking all that much either (especially when
| exchanges are so directly in-your-face about it.)
|
| In any fungible market, the presence of "bad" commodities
| drives out "good" ones. What you have now is a toxic market,
| one that Google more or less owns outright because everyone
| else has been driven out of business or acquired. Google isn't
| the _cause_ of the toxicity, but they benefit from it
| regardless, since Search display advertising will remain brand-
| and user-safe in ways publisher advertising isn 't. In this new
| market of TV-like, non-fungible advertising; Google is no
| longer a business partner. They are a hostile, dogged
| competitor paying them ever-shrinking table scraps.
| teddyh wrote:
| I'm sure it's not the only factor, but loading JavaScript from
| external domains (like from Google) changed from being good for
| caching - i.e. faster web pages - to being meaningless and
| usually slower:
|
| * https://www.stefanjudis.com/notes/say-goodbye-to-resource-
| ca...
|
| * https://wicki.io/posts/2020-11-goodbye-google-fonts/
| hinkley wrote:
| There are several group dynamics I see in this. The one I think
| they want you to focus on is that typically nobody defects
| until someone high profile does. Then the floodgates open and
| everyone defects. Somebody has to go first, and sometimes
| several somebodies if the tribe is big enough.
|
| More cynical dynamic is virtue signaling, which can pretend to
| be the former.
| srswtf123 wrote:
| I think its as simple as this: people are fed up with FAANG; it
| seems like Congress might actually get off their asses and do
| something, and a few people smell blood-in-the-water.
|
| You know, the sort of thing that could potentially kick off a
| frenzy... as unlikely as that seems.
| readflaggedcomm wrote:
| Google's pushing advertising clients away. Techdirt started
| this path by at least August when they reported on Google
| flagging their pages (third link in this story), and it took
| time for them to shop competitors who are really resellers.
|
| I would have guessed it would be most of their readers blocking
| easy-to-block ads, and the low payout, but it seems capricious
| policy enforcement is happening across Google and Youtube
| especially.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| I'd dare say that the growth of DuckDuckGo, Apple, and a number
| of different VPN services are proving that consumers are highly
| interested in privacy and don't want to be tracked everywhere.
| This is also reenergizing the subscription vs ad revenue
| debate, particularly for big companies that have a vested
| interest, or, 30%, for pushing subscriptions.
| n3k5 wrote:
| Is anyone here familiar with Matomo? I noticed the linked page
| attempts to run it because Ghostery blocked it.
|
| It's a "Free software alternative to Google Analytics" "which
| _can_ easily be configured to respect your visitors ' privacy"[0]
| (emphasis mine). But can it be configured in a way so you can
| claim "without any tracking code"? I wonder whether the claim in
| the headline was supposed to be merely "no third-party tracking".
|
| Or maybe I'm supposed to know that "no tracking" is jargon for
| something like "attempts to not store PII" in this industry? I
| doubt that it can be configured such that, for example, unique
| visitors are statistically estimated instead of counting unique
| IDs from tracking cookies -- but I'm too lazy to research that in
| detail, so it would be interesting to hear from someone who knows
| more.
|
| [0] https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo
| beebeepka wrote:
| NoScript is reporting the following:
|
| 1. techdirt.com
|
| 2. cloudflare.com
|
| 3. fontawesome.com
|
| 4. s3.amazonaws.com
|
| 5. soundcloud.com
|
| Now, I don't know what kind of scripts are being loaded from
| these sources but things are looking refreshingly spartan,
| considering techdirt is an online publication
|
| For comparison, arstechnica usually has like 18 sources, 10 of
| which are trackers
| asdff wrote:
| Tech sites have been in a bad state for over a decade at least,
| after the arms race that occurred that 'freshened up' these
| websites from what they were around 2005 or so. Thankfully they
| still have RSS feeds or I can use services to scrape an RSS
| feed from them.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Ads should be relevant to the site, not the user.
|
| For example, I buy hot rod magazines to get the advertisements
| selling hot rod parts in those magazines. I don't buy them to
| read toothpaste ads. I even _pay money_ to get those ads.
|
| But if I was visiting a site about dental hygiene, I'd be
| interest in the toothpaste ads.
|
| I've tried to configure context-sensitive ads from Amazon on my
| web site to be books on programming. But Amazon would insist on
| showing:
|
| 1. batman movie ads
|
| 2. the same ad for a C++ course over and over and over and over
|
| So I wound up removing those from the site. Instead, I created a
| list of good programming books myself, and would randomly cycle
| through that list to show an ad.
|
| It would be so much better if I could enable:
|
| "Only show books from this category."
|
| as my aim is to only show advertisements that would be of
| interest to the people reading the site.
|
| Google has context sensitive ads, and one would think this would
| work. But it doesn't. For example, I have a page on the American
| Revolution. Google's context sensitive ads are usually for travel
| agencies, presumably based on the place names on the page.
| Actually relevant ads would be for history books. I tried meta
| keywords, etc., nothing worked. I gave up. Google's context
| algorithms are worthless and the site owner should be able to
| provide guidance.
| ericholscher wrote:
| This is the exact approach we're taking with EthicalAds
| (https://www.ethicalads.io/advertising-vision/#what-is-
| ethica...). We allow targeting by site content (keywords), and
| we've found that it works quite well (see our pricing for how
| this is marketed:
| https://www.ethicalads.io/advertisers/#pricing).
|
| This post reminds me we need to write up a full blog post on
| how it works, and how we're seeing great results from it. We're
| trying to prove the model works, so always happy to have folks
| support us!
| WalterBright wrote:
| Note to Google/Amazon:
|
| My hand-curated list of well-regarded programming books that my
| programming site cycles through has been a success. Not a
| single person has ever complained about those ads.
|
| I view a proper set of ads that are relevant to the site
| content as a _service_ to the user, not an annoyance.
|
| I (and presumably my viewers) would appreciate a way of
| specifying this to your ad servers. I would also appreciate a
| way of restricting ads to being text/picture/link and _nothing_
| more.
| renewiltord wrote:
| The problem is that most people spend most of their time on
| "Which Harry Potter character am I" and stuff like that and
| they're already Harry-Potter-saturated at that time. Contextual
| ads have their place, certainly, but chasing ROI ultimately
| does lead you to target segments based on other things.
|
| For instance, if you were browsing high-end networking hardware
| and you decided to go browse chicken recipes, it's still better
| to show you network device ads simply because even if you have
| a 1/1000th chance of converting on them, you'll be worth more
| than buying chicken.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Note that I'm willing to _pay_ to browse relevant ads, as are
| a large number of people who buy specialty magazines.
|
| But there's no advertisement broker that provides such a
| service to web sites. They all follow the google/amazon model
| of serving irrelevant and annoying batman and travel agency
| ads, which motivate people to install ad blockers.
|
| Note that (before the intertoobs) there were other products
| where people were willing to buy ads to browse:
|
| 1. the yellow pages
|
| 2. newspaper classified ads
|
| 3. JC Whitney catalogs
|
| 4. Hemmings Motor News
|
| 5. all the computer/electronics/hobby magazines
|
| Another method is exemplified by the "Detroit Muscle" car
| show. It is ostensibly about how to soup up your car. But
| it's actually an ad platform, as they use various tools and
| supplies to do the work, and show how to use them. That's
| what pays for the show and it's _why I watch the show_. I
| like ones about how to bend metal and here 's the tool that
| does it. There are shows on how to weld and here's the welder
| for the job.
| asdff wrote:
| Those paper based ads works exceedingly well particularly
| if you don't know the area. For example, growing up my
| grandparents knew next to nothing at all about what toys
| kids were interested in. When they wanted to buy us toys
| for christmas or a birthday or something, they'd seek out
| relevant advertising in the form of the Sears catalog toy
| section, and browse through all popular toys on offer and
| their prices all in one place. We'd even circle the toys in
| particular we wanted from that catalog. I can't imagine
| what they'd do today if they were still around trying to
| buy things for grandchildren. You can't exactly get a
| catalog from Sears anymore.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I ask people to send me Amazon links to their gift list
| :-)
| asdff wrote:
| If it was about chance of conversion and being worth a lot,
| why aren't I getting ads for learjets all the time instead of
| for paper towels? If the learjet ad converted 1/1000000 of
| times, I'd be worth probably an order of magnitude more
| buying a $50m jet than buying a $6 pack of scott towels even
| with the low conversion rate, but the scott towel ads are
| what follows me around the web after searching once for them,
| and these are ads I continue to ignore because what
| influences me with my paper towel choices isn't an idylic
| image of some smiling person wiping a table, but how much
| they cost at my grocery store.
|
| It just seems like conversion rates would improve no matter
| what you are selling if you just spend a little bit more time
| thinking about advertizing in relevant areas vs the firehose
| approach that is done now, banking on the large numbers of it
| all to overcome the small conversion rate. If Scott wants to
| sell more paper towels to me, they could almost guarentee my
| business if they stopped advertising via irrelevant ads, and
| included a coupon for their paper towels with my weekly
| grocery store mailer that made their offering cheaper than
| their competitors.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Mike Masnick/Techdirt's political lobbying arm, Copia Institute,
| still proudly promotes their sponsorship from Google on their
| front page: https://copia.is/
| Derbasti wrote:
| And yet it still asks for a boatload of cookies. If it really
| were "clean", it wouldn't need the cookie banner (see Github, for
| example).
| shp0ngle wrote:
| The lesson is that it's incredibly torturous and hard to not
| actually serve Google Ads or Google Analytics, and that's sad.
| Animats wrote:
| It's also a business opportunity.
|
| Sign up a few major brands that market to everybody, such as
| Ford and Pepsi. You tend to not see those on Google. Offer
| 4-second GIFs.
|
| Get acquired by IAC.
| dheera wrote:
| Maybe like letsencrypt we need letsanalyze that lets you easily
| self-host your analysis and generates pretty Material Design
| reports with nice fonts and touch friendly graphs.
| teddyh wrote:
| Like Matomo? https://matomo.org/
| e40 wrote:
| But, ironically, the safari content blocker won't show the page
| for me. On mobile.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| It is on a perpetual loop for me on Desktop Safari. I have
| NextDNS and AdGuard turned on.
| wayneftw wrote:
| tl;dr This link should work for you:
|
| https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210726/09441047251/techd...
|
| Same here, with Adguard.
|
| The problem is with the title part of the url, since the title
| contains the word "ads".
|
| I did an experiment: If you remove the words after "-google" in
| the url, it still works. You could probably remove the entire
| title of the url and it will still work by article id... So
| here's a link that will work with Adguard enabled:
|
| https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210726/09441047251/techd...
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| Wow, I'm running a huge set of Privoxy rules I've worked on
| for the better part of two decades which tends to err on the
| side of blocking, and yet it doesn't get tripped by this
| positioning of "ads", because it's in such an innocuous
| position.
| Semaphor wrote:
| That sounds like a terrible ad blocker? Why would it trigger
| from a word in the URL? And doesn't it even show a "show me
| the site anyway" page?
| Tagbert wrote:
| Which content blocker are you using? That url loads just fine
| for my on iPad and iPhone safari.
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| Two steps in the right direction, but this one page still sends
| requests to soundcloud.com, rawgit.com, cloudflare.com,
| googleapis.com, amazonaws.com, fontawesome.com, sndcdn.com,
| stackcommerce.com, stackassets.com, stacksocial.com, and
| gravatar.com.
|
| Their "self-hosted" Plausible content is pulled from
| tics.techdirect.com, which resolves to 46.101.161.209 and shares
| a reverse DNS with custom.plausible.io. Can't tell who runs the
| web server on the other end of this, so it may well be self-
| hosted.
|
| The site also dropped a first-party one-year cookie, and let a
| third party drop a week-long cookie.
|
| My browser is set to send Do Not Track requests, so my explicit
| wishes are still being flagrantly ignored.
|
| There is still a lot of third-party tracking going on here, as
| well as execution of remote code under the control of third
| parties. It's remains a privacy and security clusterfuck but it's
| better than it was.
| shakna wrote:
| > ... rawgit.com ...
|
| Wait, they're still serving things via rawgit? They started
| shutting down in 2018! That service has been deprecated for
| three years. That sounds like an attack that is just waiting to
| happen.
|
| > GitHub repositories that served content through RawGit within
| the last month will continue to be served until at least
| October of 2019. URLs for other repositories are no longer
| being served.
|
| > If you're currently using RawGit, please stop using it as
| soon as you can.
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| Fire and forget mentality. Wasn't long ago that some advert
| video hosting site's domain was taken into new ownership to
| host porn. It must take a lot of effort to integrate all this
| third-party garbage into a site. If only a site's security
| was given a similar effort.
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| I am not surprised at all. Technical debt, periodic refactors
| or security analyses are very low on the list of things that
| get rewarded, and shiny new projects are high. That's until a
| security incident takes place, then people are reprimanded
| and things will be okay for a month or two.
|
| Until that's fixed, things like this will keep being
| commonplace.
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| Even if unsurprising, it should be embarrassing for a "tech
| blog"
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I can easily see that after 2 years there is nobody left who
| remembers what APIs are in the code.
| jackson1442 wrote:
| > My browser is set to send Do Not Track requests, so my
| explicit wishes are still being flagrantly ignored.
|
| I have a dollar that says most websites you visit do not
| respect this setting unless they don't use trackers at all.
| google234123 wrote:
| Is that DNT deprecated?
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| It's still an option in my modern Web browser. A site admin
| can choose not to track me if they wish - my software is
| making my wishes clear and in according to a standard.
| Conlectus wrote:
| Worth noting that the spec was abandoned in part because
| enabling it actually makes you more likely to be tracked.
| It's another datapoint that can be used to fingerprint your
| device.
| Griffinsauce wrote:
| > gravatar.com
|
| That's not tracking right?
| Ndymium wrote:
| I doubt Automattic runs Gravatar for free out of the goodness
| of their hearts. It can track in two easy ways: firstly the
| user that requests different avatars, as they move through
| the web and different sites, and secondly the users whose
| avatars are requested, as to what services they use. Their
| privacy policy allows for this at a quick glance.
|
| Personally I proxy Gravatar requests through my web service's
| backend to get rid of the first type of tracking.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _Can 't tell who runs the web server on the other end of
| this, so it may well be self-hosted._
|
| That looks like it's Plausible's "they host it" system.
| google234123 wrote:
| Who is "they"?
| martin_a wrote:
| plausible.io
| firloop wrote:
| FTA
|
| > are now using both Plausible and Matomo (self-hosted),
|
| Is it possible they only meant self hosted Matomo, not
| Plausible?
| marcodiego wrote:
| My uBlock Origin blocks 3 requests, AdBlockPlus blocks 5 and
| Privacy badger blocks another 3. en.wikipedia.org and
| news.ycombinator.com have 0 on all three filters.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| The message is that Techdirt is without Google Ads, Tracking Code
| or analytics.
|
| This may be a set in the right direction but.....
|
| The same page on which they posted this is running CSS from
| fonts.googleapis.com, as well as embedded frames from
| soundcloud.com & w.soundcloud.com which I also believe is google
| owned.
|
| So, count me a little skeptical
| _jal wrote:
| They're working on it. If you don't read TD regularly, you're
| probably not aware of how long this has been going on. They're
| trying to survive independently without selling users out, and
| that is not easy.
|
| > So, count me a little skeptical
|
| Be as skeptical as you want, they are transparent about what's
| going on. A decent background piece specific to the Google
| piece of this madness explains part of it here:
|
| https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200810/11335745081/why-a...
|
| (I've met with Mike a couple times, but otherwise have no
| connection to them, other than being a long-time reader.)
|
| Also, Google does not own Soundcloud.
| seph-reed wrote:
| Is SoundCloud owned by google? I looked it up, but it didn't
| seem to be.
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=google+owns+soundcloud&t=brave&ia=...
| jjulius wrote:
| It's not, but the implication is that they're touting their
| effort to be "much more protective of the privacy of
| Techdirt's readers" as they begin self-hosting their tracking
| tools, while reader data is still being sent to SoundCloud, a
| private third-party with a heavily-vested interest in user
| tracking.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| Thanks for the correction, apparently I was mistaken.
| megablast wrote:
| You haven't actually said what you were mistaken about.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| > mbedded frames from soundcloud.com & w.soundcloud.com
| which I also believe is google owned.
|
| This is erroneous, as soundcloud is not google owned.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| Appreciate the fact check and correction :)
| mtnGoat wrote:
| Try Microsoft ads, they aren't backstopped by Google in any way.
|
| Regardless of ownership, you'll run into same problems almost
| everywhere if you publish articles critical of your advertisers.
| That's nothing to do with Google and just the market working as
| intended/expected.
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| Microsoft ads are still run by an abusive brand which is even
| hostile to the privacy of their paying customers.
| dljsjr wrote:
| What's the use case for using both Plausible and Matomo at the
| same time? Just pseudo-"A/B" testing for which one is a better
| fit or are there major feature differences where using both is
| needed?
|
| Or just for kicks?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| rraval wrote:
| I evaluated both Plausible and Matamo as privacy preserving
| analytics options for my blog, and ended up rolling my own
| solution for cost reasons. Cloudflare workers and Pulumi make
| this pretty trivial to self host.
|
| Here's the Show HN that never picked up steam:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27175347
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(page generated 2021-07-28 19:01 UTC)