[HN Gopher] Adblockers stop publishers serving ads to (or even s...
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Adblockers stop publishers serving ads to (or even seeing) 1B web
users
Author : thm
Score : 27 points
Date : 2025-07-20 17:33 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pressgazette.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (pressgazette.co.uk)
| chris_wot wrote:
| That's why Chrome hates it.
| altairprime wrote:
| Without adblockers, this link immediately forces a full page
| legalese popup that's so long you have to scroll to click Accept
| on mobile:
|
| > _We and our 909 partners store and access personal data, like
| browsing data or unique identifiers, on your device_
| pinum wrote:
| >The greatest proportion of users who self-activated a hard ad-
| blocker found out about it through advertising (34%)
| ranger_danger wrote:
| Yea that's the point.
| stop50 wrote:
| > Dark traffic is unlike anything we have seen before. It's
| demonetising publisher content at scale without user consent.
| Bull**:
|
| 1. Regardless which type of adblocker (dns, browser, modified
| apps, ...) it always is with users consent, since its not the
| default.
|
| 2. If ads hadn't got this annoying, privacy abusing and
| dangerous(fake hotlines, malware, scam, ...) this wouldn't be
| something that is even required for an good security baseline. My
| employer requires that we use adblockers.
| cvoss wrote:
| I'm all for adblockers, but I'm not sure I follow your
| complaint.
|
| From the article:
|
| > The study discovered that the majority of users did not
| choose to block ads, with ad-blocking technology often
| activated by a third-party like their employer at a network
| level, their educational institution, security software they
| installed, or public Wi-Fi networks.
|
| So, it's mostly not done by user opt-in. I'm further puzzled to
| find that you self-identified as a user with an adblocker not
| by your own choosing:
|
| > My employer requires that we use adblockers.
| jniles wrote:
| In an employment context, do we consider the user to be the
| employer or the person using the computer? I would think it
| would be the device owner, which generally would be the
| employer.
|
| If so, then I would think the previous statement about
| adblocking being opt-in would still hold. It is just that
| advertisers are trying to indivually track and monetize
| employees on company devices and time. On my work machines I
| am generally not allowed to run software that my employer
| does not approve, why should ads be treated differently?
| Yeul wrote:
| The thing is ad blockers have been around since somebody put
| the first pop up on their website. We are talking mid 90s
| ancient history here. And once someone has installed an ad
| blocker they are converted for life.
|
| I wonder if this is why smartphone apps are taking over? Much
| easier to inject ads that cannot be easily blocked.
| veeti wrote:
| "Web traffic that cannot be measured, and therefore monetised...
| [ad blockers] block all on-site analytics"
|
| I don't think that's true at all. Clients can not prevent
| measurement through server side logs. Publishers have just
| decided to put all their eggs in one basket by deploying a bunch
| of trivially bypassed JavaScript adtech trackers, and now it has
| come back to bite them.
| scinadier wrote:
| Hear, hear!
| SkiFire13 wrote:
| The quote talks about "on-site" analytics though no? How are
| server side logs "on-site"?
| veeti wrote:
| Well, client-side "on-site" trackers are used because it's
| easy and flexible to do so using JavaScript tags (and then
| get blocked by privacy aware user agents). But in my
| experience at a publisher many years ago, most of the
| important client side measurements tracked (think page views,
| conversions) ultimately correspond to a browser request made
| to a server in the publisher's control, such as fetching the
| article's contents or finalizing a purchase.
|
| It logically follows that the same measurements could have
| been made by tracking events on the server, possibly without
| involving additional client side scripts at all. No, it
| wouldn't be as easy or allow tracking everything the user
| does down to the pixel, but that's not the adblock
| enlightened user's problem...
|
| It is my understanding the industry is moving towards server
| side "tagging" to improve performance and probably also to
| try and obfuscate it from ad blockers. But I haven't paid
| much attention to that.
| _bent wrote:
| How do they want to measure traffic that by definition "cannot be
| measured"? As an adtech it's in their best interest to
| overestimate this anyways
| ok123456 wrote:
| "Dark Traffic"? Give me a break.
|
| Was a user's choice to mute or skip ads on live TV "dark
| viewership?"
| friedtofu wrote:
| Yeah I have a feeling a lot of people who aren't technically
| inclined would get this confused with dark
| web(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_web) which as we know
| is completely different.
|
| Just straight up call it what it is in the title; traffic with
| adblockers enabled or adblocked-traffic. Otherwise this article
| just comes off feeling like it was intentionally written as a
| click/rage-bait.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| Ads are (non-governmental) propaganda. The ad industry will
| use propaganda techniques to encourage people to consume
| their propaganda.
| Marsymars wrote:
| That's not why they're calling it "dark traffic" though. This
| is more analogous to people who pirate TV content being "dark
| viewership" as far as Nielsen ratings are concered. (I'm not
| equating ad-blocking with piracy in terms of ethics, just in
| terms of not being tracked by viewership analytics.)
| debarshri wrote:
| Adblockers can be very tricky.
|
| They have access to everything you are doing. If you have
| installed a random adblocker it might have your very private
| information and could probably be selling it.
|
| I think there is a opportunity out there where in adblocker also
| acts like a subscription management platform similar to spotify
| that allows users to monetize their content and subscription
| revenue is shared with thr content providers.
| hagbard_c wrote:
| No, content blockers (which block more than just ads) should
| remain in their niche as content blockers to keep their
| creators from having to decide whether to block content based
| on payouts by content creators. If you want to push some
| subscription service I'd say go ahead but keep it wholly
| separate from anything meant to rid the user from
| obnoxious/intrusive/malicious content.
| ethin wrote:
| All I'll say in response to this: good. These adtech companies
| deserve it. Let the adblockers thwart them every single time they
| try to do anything. Maybe they [the adtech companies] will learn
| (eventually) that malicious, privacy invading, and outright
| dangerous ads are not, in fact, okay at all. Or pigs could fly,
| too...
| akomtu wrote:
| That's the danger of educated populace: they stop eating your
| bullshit.
| 3036e4 wrote:
| I don't even bother with ad blockers anymore. I just use
| NoScript. That it removes some 99.999% of ads is just a nice
| side-effect, but if a site was just displaying some ads without
| the tracking nonsense I would be fine with that, within reason.
|
| If I visit a site about some type of game and there is a generic
| ad banner for some such game, as on one or two sites I frequent,
| that can even be useful to me. It's all the sites that try to
| show personalized ads tracking me between sites I do not want to
| ever see. Luckily almost all those sites rely on client-side ad
| scripts served from some third-party server, which means they are
| blocked by default by NoScript, so rarely a need for more
| advanced blockers.
| general1726 wrote:
| I have installed adblocker cca 10 years ago when I got a full
| screen ad over a page with a close button jumping around.
| Advertisers has unintentionally poisoned their own well.
|
| Today we are in a positive feedback loop. Advertisers are getting
| more aggressive, more sneaky and when they can show you an ad
| they want to milk that attention so more people are using
| adblockers. Advertisers are running towards extinction thanks to
| their stupidly aggressive tactics.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| I don't use an adblocker.
|
| I use a pretty regular Firefox albeit in PortableApps form for...
| at least 7 years? The only thing is what I select the strict
| option for the 3rd-party access.
|
| The amount of times of times the sites guilt-trip me into "you
| are using the adblocker you scum" is quite amusing.
|
| I like the idea of 'pay with money or views' so I'm _totes fine_
| with seeing the ads... but apparently the site owners don 't want
| to burden themselves with serving the ads _from their own
| systems_ which is the reason I don 't see half the ads in the
| first place.
|
| No, I don't have a solution for the current situation but I
| certanly can say - I'm glaf to see the ads what _supports you_ if
| you are okay to serve them yourself.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| The problem for most sites is not the hosting but the sales of
| those ads. The market is very centralised around Google. Small
| sites can't really sell their ad inventory profitably direct to
| advertisers. They're all putting it in the big Google auction.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| Those 1B web users are experiencing a safer web. Ad blocking is
| personal infosec.
| RGBCube wrote:
| Good!
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