Effort invested in technical solutions to work around ad blockers might just lower CTRs and be worse for everyone involved.
(edit: I don't mean to insinuate that online advertising is anything like a scam; just that there are parallels in terms of targeting the correct audience so that the effort is effective.)
[1] http://blog.pagefair.com/2015/adblock-users-click-more-ads/
Google could transcode ads directly into YouTube videos, but they don't. They preroll or popover and both can be blocked. If YouTube did transcode pre-roll ads, we'd have an auto-skipper. If YouTube transcoded hard popovers on videos, well, that would probably upset more video authors than consumers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HpIZrOH4zc
Even though it's set in the future they manage to sell them as being retro cool. It's almost impressive.
I take the pessimistic viewpoint that ads are going to seep in no matter what. The harder you make it, they more they'll mask themselves. Personally, I'd prefer banner ads.
plus, with a transparent AR setup with proper overlay ability, you can in-reality block photons bounced off or emanated from advertising units (billboards, bumper stickers, old spice commercials, etc) from even hitting your retinas.
It's like how before a movie comes out, all the actors in the movie go on all the talk shows. Think it just happens by magic coincidence? It's contractually part of their job to appear and promote the properties they appear in so it drives up demand for their productions (movies/books/tv shows/congresscritters).
Don't respond to user seek commands until the add is done playing - at that point best they can do is block output and wait - which ends up a similar experience to just watching the ad for classic 2-10 min video youtube browsing or songs - for longer content buffering could work.
As a simple example: it breaks ad networks, which rely on you having a cookie that is shared across many domains to figure out what ads to show you. That doesn't really work if that 3rd party script is blockd.
The industry's dirty little secret is that for all the hand wringing about tracking and targeting, the tech is still really in its infancy and doesn't work very well.
Network ads already don't pay very much (IMHO) and removing the ability to build profiles on demographics would make them worth much less.
You're right that it's not a dealbreaker -- my startup would be OK since we ads direct to clients -- but mostly people aren't in a position to do that. It takes a team of ad sales and support staff, and a very particular kind of niche content.
You (and the ad networks) seem to be under the mistaken impression that you have some sort of a right to that information. You don't, and acting like a stalker should be treated as such.
As another poster said, you target your ads to the content it is being published next to. Seriously, can you not see the damage you're doing by pushing "surveillance as a business" model? If your hopefully-profitable idea relies on a key aspect basically every single dystopian story ever told (fiction and non-fiction), maybe that's a sign you should find another way?
The alternative, if you want to keep pushing stupid gimmicks like that "coupon" thing, it will just push more and more people into treating the advertising industry (and later, internet commerce in general) as the enemy.
That sounds awesome.
This is a very effective response by publishers because many users who would have enabled 'No Ads' simply will not bother to enable 'Do Not Track'
I'm not sure what the problem is - all they need is to ask the publisher to set the cookie for them. Then it's a first party cookie that is relayed on the back end to the ad network, who gets all the same information from it that they used to get.
Here's what it managed to get from my iPhone 6[1]. This would be the same 'fingerprint' as virtually every iPhone 6 user in the UK.
I guess the next step would be to automatically add noise/tiny amendments to the content to get around the checksum...but then you could use object/character recognition to identify content and block the ads based on that.
Publishers have been brainwashed that everything must have: an ad, a tracking widget, and a user survey. Oh, and each page gets ten of those elements and each element comes from 3 to 5 unique externally hosted providers.
Have you tried browsing popular sites on an iPad? Every 3rd site has an ad unit that ejects you to the App Store to download a freemium game. It's insane. Block those advertisers and never look back. (Yes, Apple shouldn't easily allow eject-to-app-store from a Safari tab, but they also want users to be able to click-to-go-to-appstore on demand. It's a hacky abuse of javascript by ad networks to simulate false user intent.)
Since all of those elements are "as a service" you just block the invading services and all is well again.
This is the primary problem in my opinion. Having ads present doesn't seem terrible to me (and like other people have said, having promotional content clearly demarcated is a bonus). Having ads become an obstacle to the main content sucks, and third-party script injection that makes at least a handful of additional third-party http calls is an obstacle.
Imagine you're a small publisher. You want to spend most of your time creating awesome content and you don't want to put up a paywall. So do you try to hire an ad sales person to sell direct placements on your site? Or do you use some sort of network, which necessarily requires some level of aggregate tracking and profiling to deliver ads that are at all relevant.
I would think that the people savvy enough to install 3rd party ad blocking extensions are smart enough to know that the issue is their extension. Not Apple. But who knows.
Of course I'd never go and raise a bug for such behaviour, as I instantly remembered what it was whenever it struck.
> The publisher won't want those users on their site anyway if they can't be monitized.
Remember if those users with ad block find it a bad experience and never come back, this means less times they click on links to that site which means less referrals to use as ranking in search engines. If it's a large enough group (hell even a small group in a highly competitive area) can make a difference causing the site to lose readers due to search rankings.
You can check for cosmetic filtering (CSS reapplied to your ad-divs) by checking their width or something like that. You can check for blocked domains by getting this information channeled back somehow.
There are only so much relevant filter lists (maybe 15?) out there. They are freely accessible & parsable, so generating an URL on the fly which should be blocked on your domain in one of those filterlists shouldn't be too hard.
So if publishers adopt a freemium model (the most common) and they present a crappy experience to users who block ads then they won't be willing to buy a subscription. That's why most websites today don't punish users who block ads and that position will likely continue on mobile as well.
According to Opera Mediaworks, as of Q1 2015, Android makes up 65% of mobile traffic, 3x more than iOS with 22%, as well as beating iOS out of the top spot for ad revenue. You can read this report here: http://operamediaworks.com/sites/default/files/file_attachme... (page 2)
And I am sure those numbers are worldwide when really US revenue is the most relevant for US publishers (which are the bulk of major news sites). In which case Apple dominates:
http://www.cnet.com/news/apple-outshines-android-in-us-mobil...