Info Sec - Software Engineer - Game Designer - Mod Dev - Digital Artist

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • It wouldn’t matter whether it was intentional or not. Put simply, Google can continue indirectly punishing creators for tolerating adblockers then redirect blame, even though they could have easily separated the metrics from the advertising and telemetry endpoints that blockers filtered. This way they get their money either from unblocked ads or from creator’s reduced view counts, win-win for Google.

    As an added bonus for Google, by ensuring view metrics get fucked up, it double punishes creators featuring sponsored content that rely on those metrics to determine how much the sponsor should pay them. Meanwhile Google could, in theory, sell ad placements attached to their own internal metrics that differ from the affected ones publicly visible.











  • The problem isn’t so much blocking the ads on a page, that’s a solved problem, it’s doing so without incurring side effects. The main problem usually comes in two ways.

    1. Ads are now being pre-baked into the content delivery itself in which there is no easy way to rip it out without destroying the content in some way. Twitch is notorious for this on streams where the ad portion completely replaces the video feed before your browser ever sees what was originally there. You may never recover what was there, but if you try to block the ad playing you trigger problem 2.

    2. There are departments dedicated to developing ever changing anti-adblock scripts and detectors that enforce ad placements and detect tampering. In some cases this results in punishing the user by refusing to deliver content until the ads load, blocking or kicking the user off the page, throttling connections or access, or in Twitch’s egregious case, more invasive ad interruptions. This has become a never ending arms race with ad blockers to keep up with minefield of invasive scrips monitoring what you do with their website.

    TLDR: Ad blockers like UBlock Origin are already filtering how you’re asking for bur advertisers are attacking the plugins themselves and have their own arms race of scripts to punish those who interfere.