Twitch made a move and uBlock community made another move.
Looks like this has become another back and forth.
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If youâre running a platform and youâre aware of this cat and mouse with ads. Why spend the resources to protect ads?
Whatâs so valuable about an ad popping up, that may just be ignored in the most analogue fashion anyway?
You have to put a token effort into it or the advertisers just leave.
Also, if you do get through the ad blockers, you get to a demographic that the advertisers salivate over.
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Digital advertising is all about inventory. This is why they really donât want people to block tracking either.
Letâs say I want to buy ads. I go to website X. I tell them I will pay you $X to show my advertisement 1000 times. They say OK.
They now have to get 1000 people to visit their site to see the ad. If they can get 2000 people to visit the site, they can get $2x because they can sell another block of inventory. Website X doesnât care if you actually watch the ad, but the buyer does. They only get paid if the buyer is satisfied.
How do they satisfy the buyer? The buyer demands that website X proves to them the ad was shown that many times. They canât trust what website X tells them. Website X will just lie. They can look at how much their sales were impacted with referrals from the ad, but knowing how many hits you got doesnât matter without knowing how many shots you took.
So what happens is the buyer puts a third party tracking of some kind on website X. This third party tracking stuff might be their own, or it might be a third party like Google. The point is, that itâs something they trust to not lie in website Xâs favor and falsely inflate the number of views the ad got.
So you come along with your ad blocker. It blocks that tracking. Website X provides you service, and makes no money on it. Their inventory doesnât go up by 1. The buyer knows you didnât watch the ad. Now website X needs 1001 viewers to get paid enough money for 1000 viewers.
If website X spends money and time on making itself more popular with marketing theyâll get more views. Theyâll also get more views if they spend money and time fighting ad blockers. Both of those things will increase the size of the ad inventory. Both are probably worth it depending on what the buyers are willing to pay to access the audience of website X.
The pro move is to go back to old-style ad blockers. They actually downloaded the ad and made the browser think you saw it.
Done correctly, thereâs no way to detect it. The advertiser canât know if someone watched it or not.
There are upsides and downsides to both methods. Actually downloading the ad and simply not displaying it helps website X, but hurts the advertiser. However, it also hurts yourself in that there is still some security risk, some bandwidth cost, and you are completely giving up on not being tracked.
Think of the simplest ad tracker, a tracking pixel. Just a 1x1 gif hosted at a URL. You want to download it and not display it? Thereâs a lot of data in that HTTP request you sent to request that 1x1 gif youâre not going to display. They store that in their database and now they have information about you.
And this is why you want to not even make the requests or establish the connections to the ad servers in the first place.
Check out Cory Doctorowâs great thread on ad-tech.
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Yeah, we talked about this a bunch today, elsewhere. Weâve been saying pretty much the same things for awhile.
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I was debating whether this belongs in âThis is Googleâ or here, since itâs relevant for both, but I ultimately decided on here.
Google is trying out a new shady ad program called FLoC. Thankfully, browser owners (even the more advertiser-friendly corporate ones) are nope-ing the fuck out of that nonsense. The article below includes their own statements on FLoC.
Obviously, block FLoC everywhere always. But what I find interesting is that FLoC is supposed to be less bad and privacy invading than previous tracking methods like 3rd party cookies and such. Yet, the concern and alarm over FLoC seems to be much greater. Yes, absolutely block all these things, but if FLoC replaces all the existing tracking methods, that does seem to be an actual improvement for user privacy.
TIL about these:
https://marketingreportoptout.visa.com/OPTOUT/request.do
Iâm sure these exist for other payment processors as well.
There are many reports of people making purchases and then Google and others suddenly showing them many advertisements for those products, and related ones. Itâs possible that itâs some sort of cognitive bias contributing to reports of this phenomenon. There are also many other channels via which online ad systems could get that information and tie it to a person. Regardless, this is supposedly one of those channels, and the opt-out is legit. I see no harm in opting out at long as you verify you are on the legit website of the payment processor, since you have to type in your CC#.
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Throw your Oculus Rift away.
OH FUCK NO. Thatâs just wrong.
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Inevitable, the demographics of Oculus users basically cuts across prime discretionary spenders.
Thankfully the industry is pushing hard into Steam VR and non-Facebook non-Oculus directions.
My only worry is that Quest/Rift is (was) a good low-end VR entry point.
Also, a lot of the live events (like the Kizuna Ai concert) are on Oculus/Facebook stuff.