"Steal TV and Youtube Dollars"? This headline is nonsensically sensational.

This is a pitch deck describing an upgraded Facebook video product. In it, they make a case for the effectiveness of their ad targeting, and its competitive advantages. The news is that they're entering the broader video market.

Also, while the contents of the deck may be protected by an NDA, my sense is that there's absolutely nothing in this deck Facebook doesn't want you to read. I'd strongly suspect that it was an intentional leak to build awareness.

I swear to god, the day people finally realize they can actually block ads, we're going to have a massive collapse of the industry. Fear that day.

Fear? No, I don't think so. I think there are a lot of people who are eager for business models that don't include having your data sold, or being advertised to.

Adoption of adblock isn't something that is happening too fast to respond to, and it is a good thing, I believe, because it should create some innovation on the monetization side. Ad revenue isn't the only game in town, and I think consumers are receptive to other models that give them more control.

The advertising industry is responsible for most malware and privacy concerns. They get money through manipulating people and I'm not certain they are actually adding much of value in the first place.

Recommendation engines for app stores and online stores like amazon do the job of informing people of new things much better, and I think replaces the need for them entirely.

Google and Facebook get money by manipulating people and aren't adding any value? Wow. Bold claim.

Ads themselves aren't. The sites supported on them might be, but the money is only coming from manipulating people into spending money they otherwise wouldn't.

I said that to dispute the argument that ads are a benefit to consumers by informing them of products they might value.

It's already happening: http://downloads.pagefair.com/reports/the_rise_of_adblocking...

I'd imagine a site like Facebook would have much lower ad blocking rates than average, though, due to low technical ability among users.

They have high adblocking among younger users (<35). This is why everyone is interested in buying (non-revenue-generating) chat apps lately. Adblocking hasn't matured enough yet to block ads wholesale in applications. Facebook and Google want to recapture the ad impressions and clicks lost on users who are using blocking technologies.

The lack of adblock options on mobile Safari and Chrome has to be a massive boon and a huge relief to advertisers. You can get third-party browsers that have some adblocking features, but I suspect the percentage of people on mobile who use them is in the low single digits.

It's possible to block ads using squid proxy with squidguard. Although less effective than AdBlock, and requiring a little more effort to get started, it does work.

I'm curious whether anyone on HN does this for themselves and, if so, is your squid server at home, on a VPS, or somewhere else?

AdBlock is available for Chrome and works just fine.

I don't know about Safari.

I'm talking about mobile Safari and mobile Chrome. Neither supports extensions, and neither has integrated ad blocking. And while you can get third party browsers that do adblock, they're somewhat crippled in that only Safari has the Nitro javascript engine. All other browsers pay a performance tax.

There's always a performance tax, even on desktop.

With that said, I did miss the "mobile" bit.

There may be truth to this. I only recently finally decided to get AdBlock... and man... I can't imagine a world without it. Then again, whats to stop Chrome Store from removing the extension?

> Then again, whats to stop Chrome Store from removing the extension?

The fact that I'll switch to Firefox the day they do that?

Chromium, Firefox, Opera

How about a simple antitrust argument: if Google wants to use their power in the browser market, where they have majority power, to dictate the shape of the online advertising market, I think DoJ would have a pretty slam dunk case. Especially since Microsoft would be happy to pay for the best lawyers out there to write all the briefs in the case.

Why doesn't anybody exploit the never ending stream of Windows zero days to install blanket ad blockers on every machine possible?

It's definitely true that content blocking is the user's trump card in the online tracking vs. privacy debate.

It amazes me that facebook has achieved this sweet spot of harvesting personalized ad dollars while providing so little utility.

So little utility defined how? I'm hard pressed to believe that a site almost a billion monthly uniques isn't providing utility to any of them. Or are you just on your latest "holier than thou" act and need to tell the world that you don't like facebook? Then congratulations for not liking facebook.

The amount and conviction of users doesn't imply usefulness. There are pretty obvious examples of this.

I don't dislike Facebook. I'm just amazed that their bargain is so lucrative. I don't think it will be best for consumers or the industry, but that's not really Facebook's responsibility. Is it?

Would you share some of the "pretty obvious" examples?

Not everyone is a genius and the fact that I can't figure it out, actually makes me feel insulted by your comment. The tone is just obnoxious!

>I don't think it will be best for consumers or the industry

Now again, do you think this because you don't like and/or use facebook, or do you have data to back this up?

Facebook and the iPad are in at least one way the two most useful and amazing tech products I've ever encountered. My mom never "got" computers despite having a house full of techies to help her. She got an iPad and Facebook and without even so much as asking me or my brother how to do something, is now e-mailing, texting, and sharing videos and videos of my daughter with her other grandparents. It's been a total and utter game-changer.

Other than Google search and maps, Facebook is the most useful service I use on the web.

How does sharing digital content with people you know qualify as 'little utility'?

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." -- Jeff Hammerbacher

> Jeff Hammerbacher is founder and Chief Scientist of Cloudera, Assistant Professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Director at Sage Bionetworks. Formerly an Entrepreneur in Residence at Accel Partners. Before Accel, [Jeff] conceived, built, and led the Data team at Facebook.

Well, he could start by not working for institutions whose entire business is predicated on making people click ads.

This is why his words carry weight. He's probably watched capable engineers and managers go from successfully building an impressive software system to pulling out their hair because they're constantly trying to figure out human systems, which are highly variable.

This "accidental" leak turned out to be a pretty good advert itself for Facebook video ads.

FaceBook is such a waste of time & treasure. They should all be ashamed of working for such a useless company.