Plus I do not like ad fraud. I get lots of captchas. I also don't wanna give money to Google and Facebook.
If uBO sells out (I don't think gorhill will, but I don't know him) it'll be the top link on HN
https://www.lowyat.net/2020/224264/chromium-versions-nano-ad...
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/10/popul...
If this silently clicks ads in the background the click rate goes up but the goal action (buying, signing up) remains at 0 which smartprices the ads and tanks the value of the ads for the real clickthroughs.
If you must block ads just use uBlock Origin so you are treated like your visit doesn't exist.
A deeper question is it moral to consume content and block the ads. Wouldn't that be the same as pirating a movie? (not that there is anything wrong with pirating). Are there people who would block ads and complain about people pirating, or even stealing from a store if you can get away with it.
Doing what I can to prevent all that doesn't present me with any moral quandary. Advertisers certainly don't follow any sort of moral imperative.
Advertising is not inherently bad but modern web advertising is ridiculous.
I don’t know how many of you people remember the Internet around 2000. People actually paid to be able to publish their stuff on the Internet. Because they wanted to. Without any intent on getting revenue. Unthinkable, I know!
Theft requires the action to not be voluntary, but a web server replying with a page is free to reject my request. It is entirely moral.
My mp3 player will play that song you downloaded as well.
It's like your butler downloading a torrent with a song played to you.
I won't argue pirating is not moral. But it has the same morality as blocking ads.
It's the same.
The free ones they hand out in subways contain 80% ads. If you cut the ads out you will have nothing left to hold onto.
That would create a subset of "no attention stealing" web.
But actually ads placed in separate elements are convenient in a way . It would be much much worse if the ad industry switched to a sponsored content to invade that area.
> Does AdNauseam's automatic Ad-clicking create billable events for advertisers?
> It depends on the advertising business model and the degree of effort they are willing to put into filtering. Some might, others would not.
So it seems like the extension only "generates revenue for site owners" if it's either
- small enough for ad selling companies to not know it exists (and sophisticated enough to defeat their baseline filtering measures) or - large enough for ad selling companies to notice it exists and sophisticated enough to defeat active attempts to filter clicks from AdNauseam specifically
I don't know how this arms race usually turns out, but it seems like there could be a chance that this is just a uBlock Origin that consumes more bandwidth.
EDIT: From their paper:
"The second goal is to provide a means of proactive engagement, allowing users an avenue for expression of their dissatisfaction with current advertising mechanisms to those in control of such systems. In the case of AdNauseam, this expression has an interventional aspect, as the software actively attempts to disrupt the economic model that drives advertising surveillance"
What percentage of google ads targeted to me are from small businesses?
(I've no way of guessing as I just block all of them)
But since this extension is banned from the Chrome Web Store, you'll have to install it manually there. On Firefox it's available from their add-on store.