#AdBlocking #WebsiteDesign #OnlineAdvertising
Have you ever wondered why website designers haven’t cracked the code on making ads completely undetectable by Adblock? Well, let’s break it down for you!
##The Rise of Ad blockers 🚫
With the increasing popularity of ad blockers, which are browser extensions that filter out online advertisements, website designers have been facing a challenge in delivering ads to their target audience. These tools essentially block ads from appearing on web pages, resulting in lost revenue for websites that rely on advertising as a primary source of income.
##The Cat-and-Mouse Game 🐱🐭
Website designers have tried various tactics to outsmart ad blockers, such as using anti-ad-blocking scripts or creating native ads that blend seamlessly into the content. However, ad blockers have also evolved to detect and block these strategies, leading to a constant cat-and-mouse game between designers and ad blocker developers.
##User Experience vs. Revenue 💰
One of the key reasons why website designers have not made ads undetectable by ad blockers is the emphasis on user experience. While ads can be a valuable source of revenue, they can also disrupt the user experience by being intrusive or irrelevant. Designers strive to strike a balance between generating income from ads and ensuring a positive user experience for visitors.
##Compliance and Ethical Considerations 📜
Additionally, there are ethical and legal considerations that website designers must take into account when it comes to online advertising. Violating user privacy or placing misleading ads can damage a website’s reputation and lead to regulatory consequences. Therefore, designers prioritize transparency and compliance with advertising standards to maintain credibility and trust among their audience.
In conclusion, the complexity of the digital advertising landscape, combined with the evolving nature of ad blockers and user preferences, poses a significant challenge for website designers in creating undetectable ads. While they continue to explore innovative solutions and strategies, the ultimate goal remains to deliver a seamless and engaging user experience while ensuring sustainable revenue streams for their websites.
So next time you encounter an ad while browsing online, remember the intricate dance between website designers and ad blockers that shapes your digital experience!
Simple answer: they try, and the Adblock developers adapt. That’s why the adblocking software needs regular updates. Those developers and the ad creators are in a kind of “arms race”, constantly trying to beat each other.
Whenever a website designer makes an ad that bypasses Adblock, a user who starts seeing the ad can then add a custom filter to block that specific ad. That user can then report this new ad to the Adblock community and it can be added to the filter list.
The ad can never be undetectable because the purpose of the ad is to get the end user’s attention. In getting your attention, it can be detected.
Websites have to point the ads where to go, if they didn’t the ads wouldn’t know where to go. Just like the advertisers can see where the ads go, so can ad blockers.
They *do* try to make ads undetectable.
Then the ad blockers figure out a solution.
Then the ad companies try something new to made ads undetectable.
Then the ad blockers figure out a solution.
To expand on this, why don’t more websites enforce penalties for ad blocking? While many newsletters outright block access when an ad blocker is detected, why isn’t this practice more widespread across all websites?
web devs DO know how to get around adblockers. its not hard. literally naming the banner or obfuscating class/id names and done. but its not that part that adblockers usually work on. its the ad deployment services / ad servers (like google ads etc) that are more easily blocked.
Ads aren’t served or hosted by the website you’re visiting, they’re served by ad networks. Any time you visit a site, think of the ad banner spot as a blank billboard in which an incredibly fast auction is performed by the ad network server to actually decide what goes on the billboard.
Site owners have some control over the types of ads shown, and tracking cookies give the ad networks some idea of the type of user viewing the page, but that’s it.
The reason they’re easy to block is because they’re from networks (Google AdSense is a big one), meaning if you block network traffic from that network you can effectively block its ads from displaying (somewhat of a simplification, but that’s the general idea)
What they have done is developed the ability to see you are running an ad blocker and try to prevent you from going to the site.
It’s possible to a degree if the ads or their containers are natively part of the site’s code. This is why some ads still show up on Facebook even if running an ad blocker, for example.
If you want to make great money from ads, you need two things: 1. You need to make the ads difficult for the ad blockers to block. 2. You need to find people willing to pay you a lot of money in exchange for advertising space.
However, these two goals are not separate. Goal #2 contradicts with goal #1. Goal #2 makes it harder to achieve Goal #1. Do you see why?
The best way to find people willing to pay you for advertising space is to make a deal with a large ad company. But the large ad companies might also be targeted by the ad block engineers.
So you have to choose between working with the large ad companies that are willing to pay lots of money for ad space.
You also need to serve ads in a way that is cheap. You could probably make it harder to block your ads, but at the cost of making it more expensive to serve those ads.
It’s actually quite easy. But neither the web site owners nor the advertisers like it.
It’s like if you stepped into a small closet to have a private discussion with someone, and they happened to have a takeout menu from a local restaurant and a poster from a TV show on the walls, vs. if you stepped into a small closet to have a private conversation with someone and other people kept opening the door and barging in and yelling about things.
If the web site owner directly goes out and sells ad space to advertisers, and edits their site to include the ad in the content being sent from their server as part of the page, and updates it frequently, then adblockers are unlikely to notice or care. And you might notice but probably wouldn’t care much either.
But that’s a whole lot of work for the web site owner, and they’ll probably need to negotiate a whole bunch of deals with a whole bunch of advertisers, unless they can find one to sponsor their entire site indeterminately. And they’ll have to keep stats and report them to the advertisers. And they’ll have to frequently update the ads on their site. They don’t want to do all that.
Advertisers don’t like it because they would have to negotiate deals with a whole bunch of websites and create ads to fit each of those sites, keep up with the reports and manage the payments. They also wouldn’t really have any reason to trust the stats reported by the websites. They don’t want to do all that either.
Enter the third-party ad network. An advertiser can just say something like “I want 30,000 people who fit into these demographics to see this ad.” and the network handles putting it on whichever and however many sites for as long as necessary to get those views, and serves as a third-party providing the statistics (and other info like demographics) to the advertiser and handling the payments.
The site owner can just drop a bit of script from the ad network and some placeholders in their site, once and done. The network’s script will handle fetching ads and shoving them in there, switching them out, tracking statistics. The network handles all the deals with advertisers, all the billing, etc.
So both site owners and advertisers prefer to have the third-party networks as a middleman. But the third-party networks are what’s so easy to detect. Because it’s like having a bunch of strangers barging in and interrupting your private conversation to yell at you.
One of the things that’s really hard for advertisers to get past is hostname blocking.
When your computer goes to download a file (such as an ad) it has to look up the computer’s Internet address (like a phone number).
You can put a file on your computer with invalid addresses, and then when your computer goes to get the ad it can’t so it just gives up immediately.
For example, mine has thousands of lines like this in it:
0.0.0.0 ads.adtekmedia.com
0.0.0.0 ads.chacomedia.com
0.0.0.0 ads.grandonmedia.com
0.0.0.0 adserver.ministryofads.com
There’s nothing advertisers can do about that except not host their ads on the blocked machines.
And one reason to do that isn’t to block ads: it’s to block ad companies from tracking you everywhere.
You can download one yourself here: https://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/
I assume it’s because the people who use AdBlock typically don’t engage with ads, so although it’s pretty easy to combat it, it’s not worth the effort – allowing AdBlock to be effective basically means that only people who are more likely to engage with online ads are going to see it
It’s easy to make ads that are hard to block, you just put them right in the content. That’s the idea behind product placement. You can’t block the ad because it’s literally part of the content.
But not every product lends itself to that kind of advertising, and more importantly, the thing advertisers care about is measurability. It’s hard to do that with simple embedded advertising.
The real problem is that generic internet advertising is not very effective. Targeted ads are more profitable, but targeted ads require invasive tracking to work, and that means they need JavaScript and cookies, which means they have things that can be identified and blocked.
The general shittiness of modern ads is mainly due to Google allowing pretty much anything on their platform, including literal malware. The popup while you’re in the middle of reading, interrupting you when the mouse happens to move to a certain place, passive aggressive psychology tricks and other dark patterns are all things Google has taught people to do to improve their profits.
Ever heard of *sponsored content*?
Because developers don’t like to see ads either.
The developers who work for these sites are in a competition with the developers who make adblockers.
The reason latter is winning is because the former don’t have proper incentives to win. They still get the salary as expected. They do try some new things from time to time but it’s not hard to reverse engineer it and find out a way to block.
If a company posts an open challenge for developers to build unblockable ads for a reward of $100k or something, we might actually see some innovative way which can’t be blocked.
I have to keep patching YouTube revanced. It’s a race between the two, with the pirates always in the lead but always get taken down for a few days. YouTubes ads are horrendous and often creepy as shit. Fuck all that.
Twitch ads cant be blocked right?
Website developers aren’t generally hosting their own ads. They carve out a space, and when you visit that site, the website picks an ad for you based on your browsing history to display in that space.
That makes most ads very easy to tell apart from the website.
Websites could just host their own ads… but those wouldn’t be worth as much. A targeted add provides more value.
It’s reasonable to assume that websites have crunched the numbers : revenue lost to ad blockers vs revenue lost without targeted ads. And we see the result in action.
ELI5 answer: Ads are downloaded from servers. Servers have addresses. Adblockers block these adrdresses. Its like if you told your mailman to not deliver any mails coming from London. Then they build new server in Washington, so you tell (update) your mailman to not deliver any mails from Washington and so on and on and on. They cant show you the ads, if theres nowhere to download them.