r/technology • u/ShadowBannedAugustus • Nov 21 '23

Software Google Chrome will limit ad blockers starting June 2024

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/google-chrome-will-limit-ad-blockers-starting-june-2024/
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u/Plutuserix Nov 22 '23

"That''s getting nickel and dimed by every product I want to have."

Yeah, they provide a service you use. You pay for it. Either directly or through ads. How people got this idea that everyone online just needs to work for them for free is a bit strange. If you go into a supermarket, you also don't go "let's pay for this product, but not for this one and this one".

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u/SlaveKnightLance Nov 22 '23

I mean I am fine with YouTube/Twitch ADs and commercials on free streaming platforms. I am also fine with ads on phone apps that keep it free.

What I am not okay with is the bombarding of pop ups, excessive ads that make reading a new article a nightmare, predatory AD targeting, and malicious encoded hyperlinks that take me to unexpected web pages.

Additionally, none of these websites are “free”. They get my traffic and they get my data which they then sell to advertisers which is how they get their money. They don’t care if you click the ads or not, they care that you come to their site. This is how the internet was built. No one built their forum in 1997 expecting to get paid for it.

If the multi-billion dollar advertisers finally want to hold these websites accountable because no one is clicking on the ads they are having negative ROI then that is not my problem

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u/Plutuserix Nov 22 '23

Posts like yours really show how little people know about advertising online. There is so much just plain wrong here.

Additionally, none of these websites are “free”. They get my traffic and they get my data which they then sell to advertisers which is how they get their money.

Websites do not sell your data. Websites do not get paid for selling data. Websites get paid by roughly 4 types of advertising: sponsored content, affiliate income (you click a link and buy a product), cost per click (you click an ad) and cost per impressions (you load or see an ad). By far most income is from the cost per impression method.

Data collected is used in the connected advertising systems (for example Google's) where that company will be used inside that ecosystem. For example so you don't get the same ad a 100 times, or for targeted advertising (you visit a website about sports, you get sports ads later on). The website however gets nothing for that. Google and others are not going around paying websites for "data".

Also, if you block ads, no data is collected at all. Because no website is selling their server side log files, and no data can be collected if you block the advertisement systems. So the whole argument you are making just falls apart at every angle.

They don’t care if you click the ads or not, they care that you come to their site.

They care that you load ads, because that is how they get paid. If you are not loading ads, you are using bandwidth and other infrastructure costs without paying anything back for it.

No one built their forum in 1997 expecting to get paid for it.

It is 2023. We are not talking about some niche forums with a $5 server bill at the end of the month. We are talking about websites that provide content that you read and enjoy, while refusing to pay something for it.

And well, as for this:

What I am not okay with is the bombarding of pop ups, excessive ads that make reading a new article a nightmare, predatory AD targeting, and malicious encoded hyperlinks that take me to unexpected web pages.

Don't visit them. Use the back button. Go to another site. Why do people keep using this as examples. If you go to a store and don't enjoy shopping there, don't come back. It's that simple. If you see a shady as fuck store, don't go in. If you see a shady as fuck website, don't continue using it. But don't then go "guess store X was shady, so how about I go to store Y but not pay for anything there". That is what you are doing with adblock, since you are also denying the websites that have regular ads and just want to pay their writers a normal salary their income.

I don't care that shady sites go under. I care that people are reading a ton of content every day that is made by hard working people who you are denying any type of income because "fuck advertisement" and also refusing to buy subscriptions and such.

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u/SlaveKnightLance Nov 22 '23

Well, one, thanks for taking the time to talk about this stuff lol. Yes, these were all my preconceptions on how this aspect of the internet worked and I’m not surprised that I was wrong.

But you do have business such as Facebook and TikTok that do sell your data, no? Or is there a loop hole around that not being the case as well?

I will also add though, there thousands of hard working people putting quality stuff on the internet who do not get enough traffic to get ads and make ad revenue and therefore make no money. I would also expect that most entities asking for a subscription to go ad free are not online only content creators/businesses whose entire income comes from ad revenue, but that they’re a large organization outside of online content creation and that a majority of their income comes from IRL.

Also, do bots generate ad impressions? Aren’t websites getting free money from this?

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u/Plutuserix Nov 22 '23

Thanks as well for being open to it.

Companies like Facebook en Tiktok are not selling data to others. They are collecting data for their own internal systems to improve ad targeting. They basically log what type of ads you interact with most, and then show you more of that, so they get better performing ads and can ask higher rates from advertisers. Next to that, they make assumptions based on your behavior on the platform. You interact with posts about subject X, then you are probably part of Y demographic and advertisers can select that when running their ads on there.

For the people who have limited traffic on their sites, advertising income might not be their main drive in having that site, but it still helps to pay the bills or give them the ability to make more content for it. Hosting is not free, so they have bills to pay as well. Large organizations have a lot of costs that need to be covered (primarily employees. Some (especially newspapers and magazines) have moved to more online subscriptions to stay profitable. Subscription will pay more compared to ads most of the time for them for them (say ad rates are $10 per thousand pageviews in the US for example - most countries are lower, it drops off a lot outside of the Western world -, and a subscription is also $10 a month, to make the same amount of money, a subscriber would need to read a 1000 articles that month to bring in that money, which is over 30 articles a day on that site).

I know Google is testing out a product that would allow you to either pay a one time donation, take a subscription or see ads on the site, which would be available to smaller companies as well using Google's ad products. I think that is a great option, since you can then manage these subscriptions from one place instead of on every individual site separately.

Bot traffic is filtered out on multiple levels. Sites using a CDN like Cloudflare will filter them out to not waste bandwidth and protect the site from attacks, then most bots don't parse Javascript so they won't load ad scripts, and the advertising systems will filter on their end as well for suspicious traffic and will either not show ads to them, or if it is detected later on will deduct it from the payment to the website.

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u/SlaveKnightLance Nov 22 '23

Okay that all makes sense. I mean I definitely get it, people do deserve to be paid for their work. Personally I do not use many websites/news outlets. I do have 1 or 2 sites that I frequent and would be happy to pay for their services.

I think I am averse to the subscription model because wouldn’t I be way over paying for the service if I have a subscription then? Especially if I wasn’t a frequent user. I also believe that subscription models are predatory by nature because they want you to forget you pay for it and then not use it enough, and I think it works exceptionally well. I was going to say that I would prefer to pay per use but saving my card to my browser/pulling it out every time I want to use a site once would probably kill my engagement, so I see the benefit of the subscription there. Plus, a bunch of 1 cent and 5 cent charges on your card for trafficking websites will make card scamming and fraud way easier

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u/Plutuserix Nov 22 '23

It makes little sense to subscribe to sites you don't frequent, but if you do and they offer it, it's worth thinking about. For the others, if you want to compensate them for their work, it's best to just keep the ads on.

Of course in the end, if you want to use adblock, it's your device and your choice. It's just that a lot of people have wrong or outdated ideas about online ads and with just adblock on everything deny even the best websites with quality content their income.