Fighting AdBlock demands new tech-solution and understanding the user
While preferring the start of my statup’s website I cared about the money inflow. At the beginning we’d count on ads by Google. I am not afraid of ads because I think that Google’s personalization of ads based on collectable data is good and better than viewing nude people on the left or at the top of a page. Of course in Germany I am representing a minority because Germans are “Schisser” (rude word for people afraid of something) and can be easily freightened about data privacy.
Today I talked with an acquaintances about ads after he sent the link for a German ad-free network based on a subscription (costs 15 EUR). And he told me AdBlock is guiding him every day and he wouldn’t turn it off. He — an undergraduate at a German law school — doesn’t care about the losses for the page owners or that young startups counting on ads couldn’t afford many of their expenses without this income from ads. And I told him it often breaks terms of service and it is like stealing money. Journalists who read this may understand this because they count on paywalls or ads.
How it works and how to stab AdBlock from behind
However, I thought about this topic again and looked up for topics about the functionality behind AdBlock. On Quora I found this (http://www.quora.com/How-does-Adblocker-Plus-work-technically):
A CSS snippet is injected in the website, to hide elements that are supposed to be blocked. That way the ads are completely removed from the rendered page, so that the areas otherwise used for ads will now be used for the actual content of the web page, and even content that is part of the web page itself (like text ads) can be blocked. However this doesn’t prevent resources from loading in the first place.
by Mani Teja Varma and he (or she?) she added another option:
Request blocking: HTTP requests for retrieving resources that are supposed to be blocked will be prevented from loading. This will make the page load faster, reduce traffic, and even enables blocking content that is loaded from within Flash, like the video ads on YouTube.
Now it would be an option to find a solution for this. Unlike earlier inventions I hope that some tech-teams find a solution and it isn’t the porn industry who is pioneering a technology by massively using it the way it established Flash-alternatives.
And in another topic about AdBlock (http://www.quora.com/How-AdBlock-works-How-does-it-knows-its-an-Ad) Frederic Montagnon wrote:
The ads are not processed by the same server, the same technology and the same infrastructure that content.
Google and other ad publishers are required to act and to find an alternative way from the ad starter to the consumer. It is necessary to give ads a backdoor so that they come from the same server. The technology is another topic which is simple, but, I will talk about this and about content later.
I thought about a solution which let host operators and co. An example might be a new malware which used the space of motherboards so it couldn’t be deleted. Let AdSense & Co. use some space on the server to imitate the ad comes from the server itself. It would be like a backdoor or a switch. But it shouldn’t brake the website or the user itself.
Don’t bother the user
And here I want to talk about technological issues. I don’t use any ad blocker (only integrated pop-up blocker). But it’s disturbing if ads are slowing down your engine. Meanwhile videos occur, audio plays in the background and I see a lot of Flash ads. It’s bothering because I typically left open many tabs. And in rural Germany like other counties in the USA (e.g. Texas County, TX) bandwith is still small.
Future ads in the web need to be less “supersized”, eating my quota of LTE-speed data while making a user’s engine slow. This can be a reason why many users don’t turn off their AdBlock. No, we need fast and slim ads — which nobody can block.
