1182
Adblockers stop publishers serving ads to (or even seeing) 1bn web users - Press Gazette
(pressgazette.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025
1182 points (99.4% liked)
Technology
73066 readers
2631 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I don't mind the old system of one or two ads on a page or a 10-second ad at the start of a YouTube video if they don't track their users. But these days it is growing out of proportions, we are almost at American television with the amount of ad breaks in a YouTube video, and it's absurd.
It's far far worse than American TV. TV commercials are a scattershot hope that you show the ad to 2 million people and 10,000 see it and buy your product.
With Google fingerprint tracking, advertisers are selling hyper-targeted ads so a company buys only ads to show to the right 10,000 people over and over. It's a literal dream for advertisers. But it's a fucking dystopian nightmare for us.
What's become really disturbing in the past ten or so years is how they've applied ML to the targeting. Used to be it was just basic keywords and demographic stuff. Now the big platforms put your entire last decades' worth of history (often both web browsing and social media) through a bunch of filters and spot that people who are like you are more likely to buy this product or join this website.
The reason why it's fucked up is that "people who are like you" could mean things like anorexia, or addiction problems, or the kind of relationship trouble that makes you a soft target for incel indoctrination, or a bunch of other protected vulnerabilities that would get a company sued through the floor if they actually did it up front. But because it's all just a bunch of untagged probability distributions in a black box, it's impossible to "prove" that you deliberately and knowingly targeted a gambling addict to push a high interest credit card, or a recovering alcoholic with booze, even though that's exactly what happened inside the bundle of weights.
The hilarious thing is if you turn off your adblocker (or use a service/device that doesn't support it) and pay attention to what is being advertised to you, a lot of it is wildly irrelevant. They'd probably have better targeting by following the old TV Ad model than whatever the heck is happening with targeted web ads nowadays. My wife watches a lot of livestreams on twitch and any ads that aren't for a game just consistently seem to be wildly irrelevant despite being "targeted" or it's even worse when she's listening to Spotify and the ads are so consistently for products or services we would never have a desire to use
Before I used Firefox on Android, any search about a game I'm playing would result in a half page video ad in the top half of the screen, accompanied by the bottom half being a request to share your data with 1496 trusted data partners.
Now I use Firefox with add ons, and I get the results I requested. The modern web is basically unusable in it's raw form.
I am used to rejecting the cookies if they are not automatically blocked by Vivaldi or Firefox, but on my phone I use Safari, which still has a decent add blocker by default so most of the time it is just a cookie banner where I have to reject them. Or put the site in reader mode
There are also market effects on what type of content is produced / profitable to advertise on.
And mostly unknown psychological effects of advertising on the human mind. Maybe advertising has altered your mind so much that you "don't even mind" it any more. It is a brainwashing technique after all haha. Maybe all those youtube ads made about 5% of the people's brain soft enough to vote for MAGA. Maybe the effect of advertising is as bad as lead in gasoline.
There is nothing like a free lunch.
You either have to directly pay for something or indirectly pay for it by selling your time or data.
Companies need to get their name out there and in the past you did that with a banner on your building, a space in the phone book and maybe your name on the side of the vans. Now we live in the digital world and we use digital advertisement. Heck a lot of companies sponsor certain event including charity events.
If we would totally remove advertisement, your local mom-and-pop shops will get more traffic, but in a lot of countries they would have basically a monopoly unless another competitor exists in the same region.
I don't really mind watching a bit of advertisement on something like a YouTube video or a banner ad on a site. Heck, buildings or vans with logos etc are fine as well in my opinion. My issue is more with the tracking and some forced advertisement (putting your logo on my clothing, vehicle etc).
Ok, it's obviously a complicated task, and banning advertising will make things more complex. But that is what progress often is.
But before the internet we used to even have TV shows reviewing things, under the mandate they don't get paid to do so. People do have an interest in learning about new cool things or improvements to old, and comparative reviews. There is no reason this wouldn't serve the legitimate need for information better. Now we have ratings and that could be improved as well, through better technology to gather independent reviews.
And yeah, there are not free lunches from corporations, but there are from people or from the government. We pay collectively for things and distribute them for free all the time. Public broadcasting could be extended to youtube or even news papers, to make them more independent from profit driven behavior or owners. You can't have democracy without free press, and currently we don't have that. We have corporate press and every single youtube channel has to serve corporate news. And as you point out, in capitalism there is no free lunch. But we can make it free so we can stop the insanity of neoliberal and fascist propaganda currently destroying our civilization globally.
Another thing I forgot to mention, advertising is the main vector to increase consumerism. Which is killing our planet.
Independent reviews are a good thing yes and they shouldn't be sponsored by a related company to keep their integrity, that doesn't mean they can't get paid from a different form of advertising. Heck you can even check on the integrity of professionals differently. In the accountancy, we are paid by the clients who we need to audit or need to advice etc. Using things like third party audits and a high accountability for professionals.
Ratings aren't that great especially on platforms like Amazon/AliExpress and other crap offering dropshipping platforms from corrupt countries.
Corporations generally don't do anything for free, but a lot of companies do, but that is generally to get their name out there or because the owner wants to decuct his private life from his company profit ... Even governments can't spend money or personal all they want, in the end it is money from the people. People here in NL are pissed that the government spend money on things like getting the NATO here for the last meeting or for the royal family. The public broadcasting is also something that is under heat and not just here.
In most countries you have some kind of government funded press heck I think most press aren't even corporations, but more companies except some of the larger once maybe.
Almost nobody is going to work for free for the majority of their life. It would be better if all of us did more work for society, but most people aren't in the position I am in that they just can take an extra week off to do that.
I agree consumerism is killing our planet, but there is a huge difference between the crap a companies like Google are doing and your local plummer who has advertisement on the local radio on their van and make a slightly SEO optimised website. Advertising is often the only way to get your company visable if you are competing with a well established company. Same reason as that there is nuance between companies and corporations.
Yes we need to promote repairing, reusing, recycling and the circular economy I agree, but somebody like iFixit wouldn't really thrive without their advertisement. We also need more financial transparency by the company we buy from and just skip on companies from China, the US and other obvious corrupt countries.
Yeah public broadcasting is under attack because of advertising. Advertising fuels private broadcasting and it's in their owner's interest to push anti public broadcasting propaganda.
Any system humans design to serve us as a society will over time become "min maxed" by people or institutions seeking to maximize their profit or gain more power or maintain power in the face of changes. Advertising is a primary vector how those with the most economic power can influence society without people even realizing it. And everything is political.
For example take the ratings and something like yellow pages and announcements for new businesses like a plumber - needing to invest additional capital in advertising has an effect too. It makes it so new businesses are more indentures, more like wage slavery, than if no advertising existed at all. Obviously no advertising at all would favor seniority. But we have advanced in technology since we designed our government systems - there should be an independent "forth estate" or fifth or something for economics and regulation. They could be independently voted on to the executive or legislative. And their job would be to deal with regulation in the public's interest, and sponsor things like an independent ratings portal that is moderated, and force shops like amazon to use the independent ratings for the products and the vendors. It will stay a struggle to stay ahead of people trying to abuse the system for gain, but right now we pretend the tools we have right now are somehow god given. We Europeans are far more conservative than we like to think.
If we want to have any resiliency against what is coming (because we destroyed our planet and let wealth inequality spiral and social media is nearly completely controlled by plutocrats) we need to push for better tools to govern democratically. And advertising is a major obstacle because it allows unmitigated influence of those who own the world.
TLDR: We don't *have to * screw over new plumbers, but we should do it if we had to because stopping the brainwashing is more important.
Well I agree we need a better structure to keep people in check I agree with that. Things like social media and a companies like RTL having a massive stake in private television will help to destroy the planet and keep the difference between the lower class, the middle class and the rich.
But I disagree that we should just get rid of all advertisement completely. Again there is nothing wrong with banner ads, websites, vans with logo's and other low stakes form of advertisement.
If governments would start to pay YouTubers instead of YouTubers earning money from adverts and sponsors it would not only allow the government to control the narrative, but people will still abuse the system. Same way as that social security or subsidies are abused currently.
Consdering I work in an accounting firm I do see the amount of cost some companies have with advertisment, but most of them with a lot of costs do it to get more customers. Some of them need to do it to keep their profit rising or the same.
There is an issue with misleading adverts including misleading prices (excluding tax), there is an issue with hidden ads (like logo's). But personally I think social media (including Lemmy) is just the bane of our existence. Yes a lot of that is funded by adverts, but also by selling your data and the like. Personally I believe that they are brainwashing people more with that, than with a lot of the advertisement. Ow and the people who keep on defending companies like they are their family are also a big part, people saying they are going to get Domino's instead of pizza f.e.
We had advertising supported media for 100-ish years before surveillance capitalism, obtrusive pop-ups/overs, and ad-network distributed malware were a thing. No one cared about blocking ads on the Internet until those 3 things started either. Even today, if you put your mattress ad as a static on some mattress review website, adblockers won't block it. It's just that no one does that.
SmartTube is so much better. Even the UI is intuitive and makes sense. You can hide shorts, actually find content you want to watch.
Sadly I don't believe I can use SmartTube. I was really limited in options for my TV box due to regional reasons and Googling blocking way more surrounding casting than Apple with airplay
What device? FireTV/Firestick/etc all support it (surprisingly).
Amazon is crap, so my only two real options where an NVIDIA shield or an Apple TV and since we are an Apple household I went with the Apple TV, which doesn't support it.