this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025
1185 points (99.3% liked)

Technology

73066 readers
2451 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. 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.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
technopagan@lemmy.world
L4s@lemmy.world
L3s@hackingne.ws
L4s@hackingne.ws
1185
Adblockers stop publishers serving ads to (or even seeing) 1bn web users - Press Gazette (pressgazette.co.uk)
submitted 2 days ago by 1984@lemmy.today to c/technology@lemmy.world
347 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

They call it "dark traffic" - ads that are not seen by tech-savvy users who have excellent ad blockers.

Not surprised that its growing. The web is unusable without an ad blocker and its only getting worse, and will continue to get worse every month.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

This is easily solved by not using 3rd parties and tracking data for ads. If the ad was just part of the page (similar to an ad in the newspaper) then ad blockers would not be able to detect them at all. A YouTuber saying "before we get started, this video is sponsored by [relevant related company]" does not get blocked by ad blockers.

However, in order to do that websites would be responsible for the ads they display. If they don't do their due diligence they won't be able to pass it off as "we're not responsible for it, it's our ad company that put it there." They don't want to be responsible for the ads they show, but they want you to be responsible for the ads you don't watch.

[–] SkyezOpen@lemmy.world 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

A YouTuber saying "before we get started, this video is sponsored by [relevant related company]" does not get blocked by ad blockers.

Well, there's sponsor block which uses crowd sourced timestamps to skip those segments, but yeah you're right.

[–] CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 day ago

I personally feel no need to get sponser block because:

  1. The sponsership is not annoying as fuck.
  2. I can fast forward through it.

Everything the ads do to force you to pay attention it to (like not being able to fast forward) makes it easier for ad blockers to detect and block.
Everything the ads do to demand your attention (by being annoying as fuck) drives people to block them.