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.
The use of the term “Dark traffic” here is to paint the use of ad-blockers as something nefarious. Don’t use it, fuck these people right in their stupid mouths.
I propose using the terms “clean traffic”, for ad-blocked website traffic, and “dogshit traffic” for everything else.
The trade body called it “illegal circumvention technology”, said 12ft.io has been locked by its web host, and promised to take similar action against other paywall bypassing technologies.
Just because you send bits to my network does not oblige me to render them. That’s like saying I broke the law back when I had cable and changed channels during ad breaks. Falls flat on its face.
Dark traffic?!?! LMAO. Can we start calling malicious ads dark advertising?
Website: “You appear to be using an ad blocker.” Me: “You appear to be correct.”
An adblocker on your devices is equivalent to putting a Britta filter on your water tap.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
– Banksy
Cool quote, where did you get it from?
From Banksy’s 2004 book Cut It Out. Banksy, in turn, ‘got’ it (in its original form) from Sean Tejaratchi’s 1999 essay in his Crap Hound zine. 😅
From banksy’s limited run “Cut it out” book apparently. Yours for only £310
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I used to maintain a website for a bicycling club in my county that was great for getting people into biking, getting people out the house, making friends, and staying fit.
We had a banner ad along the top of the site for a local bicycle/bicycle repair shop that aided the club a lot and was very reasonable.
He got something out of it (publicity and a seal of approval towards the value/quality of his work), and we got something out of it (money to run the site, and a bit left over for things like puncture repair kits and the occasional celebratory drink after an arduous ride).
Nobody bats an eyelid to those ads. They are reasonable.
What we have now isn’t that. What we have now is an insecure, malware-infested privacy nightmare that ruins webpages and stresses everybody out.
Use Firefox + uBlock origin for your own sanity. Don’t let big tech make you feel guilty for not going along with their game.
Use Firefox + uBlock origin for your own sanity. Don’t let big tech make you feel guilty for not going along with their game.
100% this and also, consider allow-listing specific sites which deserve your support, or better yet, contribute directly if you can – e.g. your local bike club forum, your local newspaper, a blogger whose work you enjoy, etc., assuming of course, the ads are reasonable.
Guilty? Hahahahahaha
They will never make me feel guilty because they are the guilty ones. Guilty of greed and of destroying our society. Fuck big advetisers. They would put billboards in outre space if they thought it would make them a tenth of a penny more in profit.
I dont even consider them human to be honest.
Advertisers do not have the right to demand my attention, or to brainwash me. I have every right to deny them and decide what to allow inside my head. This is war.
“We paid for the right to show you this!”
You paid for the opportunity not the right, but you didn’t pay me, motherfucker – and my price is everything you have or fuck off and die.
Edit: You know what? This is how I really feel about ads.
This is a consent issue, and I will not allow advertisers inside me. They hire psychologists in order to exploit humans’ most vulnerable mental blind spots. They don’t just brainwash us. They mindfuck the entire human species, and they do not recognize consent. We need to treat advertising as the collective mindr*pe that it is, otherwise they will never stop exploiting us, and we will never be able to build a bright future for humanity and this world. They are manipulating the trajectory of an entire species with zero regard to any future well-being. The butterfly effects are inconceivable. Our minds are sacred. The advertising industry is committing a crime against humanity that we have failed to recognize as such, because money is all that matters today. They must be stopped before Big Tech perfects brain-computer interfaces.
If ad networks weren’t the number 1 way to get malware installed on your machine, didn’t slowly take over the dedicated space for the actual content of a website, or put pressure on the websites in question to only publish things inoffensive to the advertisers maybe adblockers wouldn’t be such an issue.
If your site can’t exist without being a cesspit of annoying and useless infomercials and a deployment mechanism for malicious code injection then your site should not exist.
Not too many people had an issue with static banner ads back in the day after all except greedy website operators and advertisers.
Millenials are killing the ad industry!
Good.
It would have to be millenials since Gen z exist almost entirely in the walled garden of a phone app.
Most people now a days don’t even use a desktop with a browser. I honestly expect that most of what they are “seeing” is just web scrapers for the LLM. Those are likely to “block” ads simply based on efficiency, since it shows down crawling.
Why would anyone use a desktop? That’s like a baby’s toy!
It honestly creeps me out that so many people don’t curate what they watch and just consume whatever ‘their feed’ puts in front of them.
Shrinkage does not mean industry death but I think we all know that.
Bottom line: if I’m forced to consume ads on a device belonging to me - I will rather throw it away!
They got it the wrong way around. Visitors who use adblock are not “dark traffic”, the bullshit scripts and tracking they use are dark. The adblock users are actually the only clean traffic. The adblockers aren’t “brutal”, the people without blockers are being brutalized.
“dark” as in “not visible”. Adblock users can’t be tracked (or at least not as easily), hence they are not visible to the ad companies. “Dark”, in this instance, is not a derogatory term.
“Brutal” is, though. So I totally agree with you there. Ads are the brutal thing nowadays.
The way you word things matters. How many polls have shown the difference in opinion on ‘obamacare’ compared to ‘affordable care act?’
That is not wrong. But interpreting “dark” as “evil” is just wrong in this context.
You may be right, technically, but based on the context, I’m quite sure the use of the word “dark” here is intended to frame the behavior as negative. It’s just like when various media authors refer to TOR as the “dark web” even though it has countless valid uses that are not enabling illegal/immoral behaviors.
Yeah it makes sense from their point of view. I turned it around on them for the hell of it.
Maybe if they didn’t use very intrusive ads people would not install ad-blockers so much
Many websites put a video playing in later in top of the text, with another layer of ads and tiny space to read… the website would be unreadable without ad-blocks
What’s frustrating to me is the idea that law makers and advertisers believe I don’t have a right to alter data that comes onto things I own. And nobody chime in with the brain dead “☝️🤓 actually you don’t own it.” Because even if you wanna waste time with that stupid distraction, I own my computer. I built it from parts.
Controlling my perception is my right. If I wanna use things that block ads that’s my right. PERIOD. I NEED TO BLOCK ADS BECAUSE OF MY DISABILITY.
Ad BwOcKeRs ArE StEaLiNg FwOm Us!!!
Meanwhile Google, Amazon, Facebook, and a billion AI web crawlers can hammer the fuck out of of your site and nobody cares.
The larger problem that is not discussed so much is the amount of Ai generated garbage that is put on the web now.
When these Ai web crawlers start to read that Ai garbage as source data, the models will start to become worse and worse, and as a result, our Ai clients will start to get worse and worse.
I dont think there is a way for the crawlers to understand what is Ai generated fluff and crap. The reasons the Ai responses are so good now is because people actually posted these solutions on the web. What happens when Ai crap overflows the web so much that good answers are drowned out?
Also, no ads in chat gpt yet. Thats going to change and it will become impossible to block those.
the web will die.
Maybe, but then who will supply the answers that Ai needs?
the AIs will just start their own circle jerks
While we talk about the Old Net beyond the Blackwall with our chooms.
Zombie internet!
