Blocking website ads with a hosts file

Re:Blocking website ads with a hosts file by Theodores on Wednesday January 23, 2019 @02:58AM (#18976507)

I disabled the ad-blocker on a Liverpool Echo page because I wanted to watch the video. 421 cookies and one reboot later I was able to watch the advert before the video and then the 50 second video clip.

I presume that the 421 cookies are tracking something, only a hundred or so go to the Liverpool Echo, the others go to 20 or so other places. Nonetheless there are not many people reading local papers online, it is too much effort wading through the junk that gets downloaded. 6 megabytes to display 15 sentences and a video embed is a bit much.

In the olden days the newspapers were read by many people. Nowadays the newspaper readers are 'read' by many people. It has gone back to front.

How often does anyone here see a link to a newspaper and think to jump straight to the comments in order to see if the article is worth reading? For me this does not happen if the link is to a blog or other site likely to be sensible with the inline spam.

The sooner this ad-spam business dies off the better.

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Re:Blocking website ads with a hosts file by isostatic on Wednesday January 23, 2019 @03:42AM (#18976683)

My local weekly paper has very little content, and they want £2 for it, that’s too rich.

Oddly they put every store on Twitter. And email me about it. God knows where they get the money from.

I do weep for the lack of coverage of local democracy though. Where journalism dies, political manipulation and blatant lies run rife. All we have left is private eye to cover the most egregious cases

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Re:Blocking website ads with a hosts file by yboris on Wednesday January 23, 2019 @09:20AM (#18978281)

Thanks for the note about coverage of local democracy correlating with corruption.

Perhaps you listened to the same Hidden Brain episode?

Starving The Watchdog: Who Foots The Bill When Newspapers Disappear?

https://www.npr.org/2018/12/09/675092808/starving-the-watchd...

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Re:Blocking website ads with a hosts file by reshie on Wednesday January 23, 2019 @03:22AM (#18976600)

>The sooner this ad-spam business dies off the better.

they have not yet. the interenet/computers does give a lot more control to the user though. ads are not going anywhere though unfortunately.

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Re:Blocking website ads with a hosts file by yzb on Wednesday January 23, 2019 @05:18AM (#18977094)

Unless you're using a platform where you can't run an ad blocker (and I can't think of any), a hosts file (or a pihole) is a hamfisted approach compared to having ublock origin.

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