"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.
> Publishers have just decided to put all their eggs in one basket
Isn't that just the ecosystem provided by the Big Tech ad platforms? Publishers at some point very much wanted to sell ads directly as the CPMs were 10x of what they are now. Then FB and Google took over as the middlemen, pushed CPMs down, added sophisticated targeting and set the precedence for how things are implemented.
Sure the tech giants could team up with the publishers to take back control but they'd need to share more of their revenue in exchange which I am doubtful they'd go for. Not just because it means losing control but also it creates the hassle of having to deal with a fractured landscape of publishers of very varying technical acumen.
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.
> 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.
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:
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?
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.
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.
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...
"Pihole + Unbound recursive DNS" has been one of the best decisions I made years ago, alongside De-Google 2 years ago.
Everything is blocked on the network level so SmartTV and IoT doesn't even know things are being blocked while still works fine.
OPNSense Firewall makes sure that nobody except Piholes can get out, it is beautiful.
If I am out, WireGuard VPN sends all the traffic through my home network.
Everything loads bloody fast, ADs???
Tracking???
Personal data collection???
What are those???
When I need to access other networks like the office, it feels like people are living in a whole completely different world, seeing people's phone with so much garbage being loaded.
Since I went De-Google with GrapheneOS and replaced the majority of apps with their mobile web version, things have never been better.
On Android, some apps have plus 20 permissions which can be blocked on GrapheneOS including the ones hidden with normal Android, from messages to the device sensor.
All of these data is being collected to feed targeted ADs.
"Oh I don't care because I have nothing to hide", you do you :)
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.
> We must recognise users are not the main driver causing this
The main driver causing users to adopt ad blockers is, unsurprisingly, ever more aggressive and obnoxious adtech which turns web browsing into a miserable experience.
Add in tracking and security risks, and it's unsurprising that organizations would want to adopt ad blocking as well.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Wonderful. Something in the tech sphere is working as desired. To the companies unhappy about this reduction in their parasitic data leaching, as parasitic data leeches, fuck you.
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.
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.
"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.
> Publishers have just decided to put all their eggs in one basket
Isn't that just the ecosystem provided by the Big Tech ad platforms? Publishers at some point very much wanted to sell ads directly as the CPMs were 10x of what they are now. Then FB and Google took over as the middlemen, pushed CPMs down, added sophisticated targeting and set the precedence for how things are implemented.
Sure the tech giants could team up with the publishers to take back control but they'd need to share more of their revenue in exchange which I am doubtful they'd go for. Not just because it means losing control but also it creates the hassle of having to deal with a fractured landscape of publishers of very varying technical acumen.
Hear, hear!
The quote talks about "on-site" analytics though no? How are server side logs "on-site"?
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
Tailscale+AdGuard are the new pop up blockers and browsers with extensions for the masses.
Cracking apps on Android that remove the ads and other garbage from popular apps are the new leet proggies.
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
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.
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...
"Pihole + Unbound recursive DNS" has been one of the best decisions I made years ago, alongside De-Google 2 years ago.
Everything is blocked on the network level so SmartTV and IoT doesn't even know things are being blocked while still works fine. OPNSense Firewall makes sure that nobody except Piholes can get out, it is beautiful.
If I am out, WireGuard VPN sends all the traffic through my home network. Everything loads bloody fast, ADs??? Tracking??? Personal data collection??? What are those???
When I need to access other networks like the office, it feels like people are living in a whole completely different world, seeing people's phone with so much garbage being loaded.
Since I went De-Google with GrapheneOS and replaced the majority of apps with their mobile web version, things have never been better. On Android, some apps have plus 20 permissions which can be blocked on GrapheneOS including the ones hidden with normal Android, from messages to the device sensor. All of these data is being collected to feed targeted ADs.
"Oh I don't care because I have nothing to hide", you do you :)
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.
> We must recognise users are not the main driver causing this
The main driver causing users to adopt ad blockers is, unsurprisingly, ever more aggressive and obnoxious adtech which turns web browsing into a miserable experience.
Add in tracking and security risks, and it's unsurprising that organizations would want to adopt ad blocking as well.
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
"Dark Traffic"? Give me a break.
Was a user's choice to mute or skip ads on live TV "dark viewership?"
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.
Ads are (non-governmental) propaganda. The ad industry will use propaganda techniques to encourage people to consume their propaganda.
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.)
Those 1B web users are experiencing a safer web. Ad blocking is personal infosec.
I wish the article had listed some of the adblocking software so I can be sure to avoid it.
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.
That's what Brave is doing with their Brave Ads + Rewards + Brave Token
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.
Wonderful. Something in the tech sphere is working as desired. To the companies unhappy about this reduction in their parasitic data leaching, as parasitic data leeches, fuck you.
>The greatest proportion of users who self-activated a hard ad-blocker found out about it through advertising (34%)
Yea that's the point.
That’s why Chrome hates it.
That's the danger of educated populace: they stop eating your bullshit.
Good!
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.
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.