Study of Ad-Blocking Software Suggests Wide Use

[onehandle]

Guillermo Beltrà spends a lot of time surfing the web. Yet like many avid Internet users, Mr. Beltrà hates the annoying pop-up advertisements that litter many websites. “It’s just very cumbersome,” he said.

So like a growing number of people, Mr. Beltrà, a Spaniard who works for a consumer protection organization in Brussels, decided to block them by downloading software for his desktop browser that removed any online advertising from his daily Internet activity. While he acknowledged that advertising was often the primary source of income for many websites, Mr. Beltrà said he remained wary of how much data companies were collecting on his online activities.

“If I don’t know what data is being collected on me, I’d rather block it,” he added. 
Mr. Beltrà is just one of an increasing number of Internet users who are taking sophisticated measures to sidestep efforts by broadcasters, publishers and advertisers to sell their wares online. 
The prominence of this so-called ad-blocking software — which allows people to remove online advertising by downloading a plug-in to many popular Internet browsers — is highlighted in a report being released on Monday by two companies opposed to the software.

Ad-blocking will lead to almost $22 billion of lost advertising revenue this year, according to the report, put together by Adobe and PageFair, a Dublin-based start-up that helps companies and advertisers recoup some of this lost revenue. That represents a 41 percent rise compared to the previous 12 months, and the levels of ad-blocking activity now top more than a third of all Internet users in some countries, particularly in Europe, the report said.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/10/study-of-ad-blocking-software-suggests-wide-use

I've been blocking ads and data collection for years on my Mac. Now advertisers are turning to iPhones and iPads to make up for the lost revenue. That's why the mobile experience has been getting worse and worse.

Apple is about to change all that with the release of iOS 9. Ad and tracking blocking is going to explode on mobile. Google and other ad spammers are going to lose many, many billions.

[Liberal Veteran]

1. I get that sites need revenue, but a lot of sites just go to the extreme with ads.

Pop-ups, pop-unders, anything with music and annoying movement or seizure inducing flashing, or ads trying to disguise themselves as content are just fucking annoying.

Of course, another thing that is annoying though not ad related is video that starts playing automatically (Huffpost is a huge offender on that). I can actually read an article. I don't require some idiotic empty head repeating word for word what is in the article.

Crap like that makes me miss the days of Lynx and Gopher.

[backscatter712]

5. Yep. The web advertising industry brought it on themselves.

They got greedy, demanded more intrusive and obnoxious ads, paid web sites peanuts for anything less, and now they find users are fed up and blocking them, and every time they circumvent the blocking, the blocking tools become better.

[Liberal Veteran]

8. Oh, and I forgot the most egregious of website sins...

"Are you sure you don't not want to not install our piece of shit software plug-in?" Press "Confirm" or "Yes"

[elias49]

12. Oh, the pop-up videos infuriate me, too.

If you're running Windows, get the extension called "Flash-Block" (or similar application. This is not spam!) It prevents vidoes from playing automatically. It presents a gray or black box where the video would ordinarily pop-in and play. In the corner of that "box" there will be a small icon which, if you click it, the vid will run.
Awesome extension.

(Actually, I believe you can do it with a Mac, too.)

[TM99]

2. Funny that Apple won't loose out on those ads.

Sure they will block them in Safari.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2485827,00.asp

But all of the iOS apps will still contain Apple iAds.

This might trigger some scrutiny from overseer's.

[KamaAina]

3. Cry me a river, and call them a

[randome]

4. Hell, some pages load so slowly, you can close a pop-up before any of it becomes visible.

[hr][font color="blue"][center]"There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."
Leonard Cohen, Anthem (1992)[/center][/font][hr]

[NuclearDem]

6. Ads are a necessary evil.

Content producers on YouTube often depend on the cut of the ad revenue Google gives them to make a living.

Quite a few sites know how to host or run ads as unobtrusively as possible, but I will gladly turn on a blocking software for the more obnoxious ones.

[Liberal Veteran]

7. Makes you wonder if intrusive ads are why so many people are ill-informed and mean.

It feels a bit like the ads on the screen in Idiocracy during "Ow! My Balls!"

[kcr]

9. Oh well. Hopefully enough use of ad blockers kills this model.

The current clickbait model gives us crap content. I'll be glad if it dies.

[Daemonaquila]

10. Let's keep losing them money.

Every time a site loses revenue, I'm happy. There is endless garbage thrown in our faces. If we don't want to see it, that's our business. Anyone who whines about it not being fair that they're losing revenue is a loser. You either find a reason to put content out there without ad revenue, or you charge for it if it's truly expensive with no up-side to you and it's a valuable enough service, or you get off the web. Oh, no - we might lose crap like naturalnews.com! Whatever shall people do, without horribly inaccurate, clickbait crap?

[Jamaal510]

13. +1

[mrdmk]

11. Yes, some ads are really annoying not to mention deceiving. The real problem is

The data collection, it is very troubling. That is way too personal in my opinion.

When Internet advertising is used to support a site for time involved and expenses, I have no problem with that. I will support the website by clicking on the ad.

When the advertiser or other entity starts collecting information on who I am and the information I have stored on my computer I will do everything in my power to put an end to that. The advertiser/entity has no business there.

What it all comes down to is knowledge is power, thus somebody collecting information about me through my computer without my consent it will be stopped, period...


On edit, learn about Internet cookies here. The information is correct and well explained:

link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie

<snip>

Cookies have some important implications on the privacy and anonymity of web users. While cookies are sent only to the server setting them or a server in the same Internet domain, a web page may contain images or other components stored on servers in other domains. Cookies that are set during retrieval of these components are called third-party cookies. The older standards for cookies, RFC 2109 and RFC 2965, specify that browsers should protect user privacy and not allow sharing of cookies between servers by default; however, the newer standard, RFC 6265, explicitly allows user agents to implement whichever third-party cookie policy they wish. Most browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and Google Chrome do allow third-party cookies by default, as long as the third-party website has Compact Privacy Policy published. Newer versions of Safari block third-party cookies, and this is planned for Mozilla Firefox as well (initially planned for version 22 but was postponed indefinitely).[40]

Advertising companies use third-party cookies to track a user across multiple sites. In particular, an advertising company can track a user across all pages where it has placed advertising images or web bugs. Knowledge of the pages visited by a user allows the advertising company to target advertisements to the user's presumed preferences.

Website operators who do not disclose third-party cookie use to consumers run the risk of harming consumer trust if cookie use is discovered. Having clear disclosure (such as in a privacy policy) tends to eliminate any negative effects of such cookie discovery.[41]

The possibility of building a profile of users is a privacy threat, especially when tracking is done across multiple domains using third-party cookies. For this reason, some countries have legislation about cookies.

The United States government has set strict rules on setting cookies in 2000 after it was disclosed that the White House drug policy office used cookies to track computer users viewing its online anti-drug advertising. In 2002, privacy activist Daniel Brandt found that the CIA had been leaving persistent cookies on computers which had visited its website. When notified it was violating policy, CIA stated that these cookies were not intentionally set and stopped setting them.[42] On December 25, 2005, Brandt discovered that the National Security Agency (NSA) had been leaving two persistent cookies on visitors' computers due to a software upgrade. After being informed, the NSA immediately disabled the cookies.[43]

<end of snip>

[Jamaal510]

14. .

[Shandris]

15. Blockers aren't enough. Use other tools also.

Don't post links, post pastebins and archive.today's. They don't give advertising hits while links do.

Starve the beast. Ask Gawker if it works.