TechStuff Classic: How Ad Blockers Work

things to say about ad blockers. I'll save it for the end, and it's likely going to be repeated in the actual episode, which you know, full disclosure, I have not gone back and listened to, so it may very well be that everything I say is repetitive. But that way, I'll just throw it at the end, and if you hear stuff I've already said, you know you just stop it. Anyway,

let's go back and listen to this classic episode. Before we get started on this, We'll go ahead and say that you know, there there are the advertisers who make ads are not necessarily trying to make them to annoy you. That would actually be counter productive to what the ad is supposed to do. Well. I would argue that some ad theory um states that if you annoy an audience enough to get their attention, then that's a good thing.

But that's but but we're getting into sticky territory there, and we'll we'll cover all of that as we go along. But if you wanted to hear a really simple story about how ad block came to be bad news everyone. As it turns out, ad block has got an incredibly complex story because it is one of those things where

it's kind of like a hydra. You know, eventually one head would get cut off and two other heads would spring up, and those two heads would each be doing kind of what the first head did, but they're doing it in a different way, and they're not really communicating with each other, and when they do communicate with each other, they're fighting a little bit. Yeah, it's a it's one of those that it's it's not so simple as to say, like, uh, you know this one piece of software. Now it's version two,

now it's version three. You actually have lots of forking going on. It's more like Windows. How Windows would occasionally fork into different groups and you're like, well, I used to be able to explain the history of Windows, but now not so much. But you can actually trace it back to a single point, a historical moment when the very first version of ad block came out, and it originally came out for the Firefox web browser. This was a browser extension. UM Firefox being open source, it allows

people to developers well, I mean developers are people. I didn't mean to. UM. It allows you to create extensions or add ons for the browser in order to change

or improve or to increase its functionality. Right, Yeah, because there's some things that a browser can do, and then occasionally the web develops in such a way where there's some really awesome stuff you could you if the browser just supported it, and the extensions kind of allow you to create that ability, right, and so according to one Vladimir Poland, a Danish programmer by the name of Henry Ostav Sarson, I think I got that right. Yeah, well

it's definitely better than I could have. UM who developed this extension. I I don't remember now if we said already in two thousand two. No, we did not. Yeah. By the way, the reason why we said we don't know already is because you guys do not get treated to the fact that our buildings started to vibrate because of something going on somewhere inside this building, and we figured you'd rather be you know saved that experience. But yeah,

three minute break in which we went what is that? Yeah, But in two thousand two, in fact, he did begin development on this. This was formally the ad Block Extension, and at that point it was spelled A D little B L O C K. No. The reason I say little B is because the other versions will talk about differentiate themselves with capitalization as well as adding other words. But this is the first one. Now, this one could block images, which at the time was pretty much the

main form of web advertising. It wasn't the only one that was the main one. So things like banner ads that were at the top, or the ones that are along the side of the column, or even just inserted directly as like a picture inside an article. That's the

kind of stuff that would block. Sure. And so if you found an image that you didn't like a probably because it was an add, you could add that that that images u r L to a list of blocked images, right, and it would actually go all the way back to where the source of that image came from and then

start blocking other images from that source. Because, of course, if there's one advertiser that happens to run a lot of different campaigns, and back in those early days of the web, there were a few that had lots and lots of clients. You could essentially blanket block a whole list stuff advert right. It was pretty effective at the time. Yeah, yeah, for for images. Anyway, they did have some downs sides. One of the downsides was that it did not actually

prevent the web page from loading the image. In fact, that the earliest version, which they called point three. Uh I assume that versions point one and point two or earlier dat yeah, yeah, and never were released. But this point three one, it did not prevent the images from loading at all. It would, in fact, first load the entire web page images and all, and then block those ads. Right now, this was an important deal, Like people really wanted to have it blocked, not just you know, from view,

but blocked period so it wouldn't download. Not just because people thoughts or at least some people thought that advertising was really intrusive and and it decreased their enjoyment of the surfing experience visually annoying, but also was using up precious memory and usage bandwidth. Yeah, so you would take you extra time to download a web page because I had to download all of those assets, including the ads, and if you could turn those ads off, then the

web pages would load faster. You know, this is the era of dial up. You know, I remember that era well, uh, not happily, but I do remember it well. I couldn't have find memories of it, not at all. Uh. You know when when someone would would say, hey, you need to go and look there's this funny picture, and you click on it and then six minutes later you go and make yourself a cup of coffee. Right, You're like, well, you know, I'm just gonna go wander offer a bit.

But anyway, so this ad block version was limited in its use, but it had potential. And so the next version of ad block came along from someone else. Because Sorenson was interested in creating this tool, but not necessarily interested in continually updating it and uh and and and giving it more features. It was kind of a one off for Sarrenson. So we then have a mysterious figure. So someone by the handle of Rue, whose name I'm

still not sure of. Yeah, Ru are you e? As in uh, you know that that spelling not r O O. But the Ru created ad block zero point four and went in a completely different way used XML binding language also known as x b L. Now that's a web markup language, so HTML is hypertext markup language. This is similar except instead of it telling specifically like a browser, how to display things, it's more about defining specific behaviors of elements that would be displayed in a web page.

So it's all about letting a program know what any particular element is supposed to be able to do, so that the computer does that thing when you make the command. So an easy example is a scroll bar. If you were to put a scroll bar within the context of a web page itself, you know this isn't this isn't the browsers scroll bar, but something that's inside the web page. Then you might use XBL to define those behaviors, so you say, when the user drags the scroll bar, this

is the thing that's supposed to happen. Now, in this case, they were using XBL to sort of, uh, just prevent again these these display these ads from displaying. But it could prevent more than just images because it was working

within the code of the browser. It could also prevent flash and Java objects right, and this was another big advance as far as ad blocking was concerned because anyone who has been using the web for a while knows ads that are just pictures that appear on the top or the side, or within the context of an article or something. That's just a small slice of the types of web advertising we've seen out there. There are a lot of things that have float over ads, float under ads,

AutoPlay ads, which boy, are those my favorite. I definitely feel some sympathy here for folks who really get tired of ads that have, you know, a negative impact on your user expect if they're intrusive. Absolutely. I mean, if I go to a website where there's some sort of audio component that I want to listen to, and because I moved my cursor and it goes over a AD panel and then some advertising audio starts playing at the same time, that's clearly not an enjoyable experience. You can't

really get around that. But anyway, Yeah, this meant that it was more useful than the point three version of ad block, But it should be said that because it was using a different approach, while it was called ad Block zero point four, it wasn't necessarily a direct descendant

of ad block ad Block zero point three. And this is where we already have some confusion, right, right, further confusion would happen because Um Latimer point who who we mentioned earlier, was basically unaware of of this update going out and created his own point for right. So you have Ladimir saying, okay, I know that this this thing that Sarnsen did was useful, but it was very limited. I want to make my own approach and try and create a more versatile, useful platform to block this sort

of intrusive advertising. Uh and started working on and then was prepared to release it, and then discovered through some I have no idea what the tone was from the basis of the history that that that Pollent wrote, I would like to imagine that Rue was a little miffed. Great was the message thereof and that um and that Vladimir found out that he couldn't release it as a point for because there was already a point for. So now comes the discussion of whether or not Vladimir's work

should be incorporated into a point five version. So keep in mind that while this is all going on, Firefox itself is continuing to slowly release updates, which necessitates that browser extensions be updated as well. Because exactly. Yeah, So this was not, you know, just an academic discussion of should this go forward or not. It needed to keep

developing for it to be useful. So his approach was to look at content policies to both predict and block ads, which ended up being an advance over the previous versions because it was finally allowing the user to have these ads blocked before the page even loaded. So now we get into that that era where things can be sped up because you don't need to load all the assets. He also had this discussion with Rue about what needs

to be done. They decided to kind of collaborate, but according to Plans history, he got very frustrated that Ru would kind of piecemeal pick the bits that Vladimir had created and then ignore everything else. And Laddim felt that a lot of the things he had contributed were being ignored and that uh, and that some of the things he had made we're being used in ways he had

not intended. There was one in particular way said users were complaining about this particular interface, and the problem was I had never intended users to be activating this interface. It wasn't meant for us. But now it's part of what because I'm not the one who I don't own ad block and not implementing these changes myself, and so that became kind of a source subject. So you move forward to two thousand and five, and no one had

really worked on ad block. Yeah that there was still some of that xbl stuff involved, and and some of Ladimir's approaches were in there. He was kind of a mishmash. It was like a Frankenstein's Monster version of the of what what each person like rou and Ladimir had both had in mind. But out of this grew um what

was going to be called ad Block Plus. Yeah. This is when a fellow named Michael McDonald who used the handle mc m came along and he created a new version going back to point three as sort of the point of inspiration with enhanced features. He did call it

ad Block Plus. And at this point one of the things that was added was this ability for users to white list certain file sources so that they would still get those shown to them, right, white white listing being the opposite of blacklistings, certifying that a certain thing or person or entity is acceptable exactly. So instead of just having a giant X over any advertising, this would allow you to be more selective, so you could say, no, I want to see these particular types of ads, these

ads are okay. So Vladimir and Rue continued there discussion about what should be ad block, and Ladimir even went so far as to offer to rewrite, uh the zero point five version of ad block and then adding the new features as well as try and tweak some of the stuff that he felt was clunky or not user friendly. But there was more disagreement between Rue and Ladimir, and

then eventually Ladimir contacted McDonald mc m about ad Block Plus. Yeah, and m c m said, you know you can, you can come on over, you can come on over here, because I don't really want to to forever be developing this this extension, just like you know Sartinson did years ago. He you know Sartenson said, no, I made this thing, but I don't want to have to keep making it. And especially at the time Firefox was going through this kind of like update every other day sort of process,

it was really rapid. Yes, So McDonald said, you know, I really don't have the time and effort that to to be the steward of this extension. So so Latimer, if you want to take it, take it, and Latimer say a yeah, okay, fine. So in January two thousand and six, they launched ad Block Plus zero point six. So again, the versions are starting to get a little confusing because this ad block Plus was not directly connected to ad Block. It existed as his own thing at

the same time. So we have two different versions going on, two different approaches um and two different communities of users. So then Pilot decides he'll he'll keep on working on ad block Plus and he wanted to try. You know, it's not that he hated the old ad block. He actually tried several times to address issues because as the the extension got older and less relevant, it also became clear that there were some security vulnerabilities, and so he said, listen, guys,

I found these vulnerabilities. You really should patch them. You need to. You need to update ad block so that doesn't remain a vulnerability for users. And then it got to a point where it's like, really, I mean, I can I can help do this if you need to. But it was kind of one of those things where ad Block just sort sort of began to die out at that point. In ad Block Plus was the it's wrong to say the winner because it wasn't like it was a real battle, but it's the survivor of the two.

Yeah yeah, I was about to say it sounds like like internet Darwinism. Yeah yeah, it kind of is. So h then you get into I got really snarky with this note, y'all, But I'm going to go ahead and include it because schadenfreude. No. In two thousand seven, PC World, the magazine named ad Block Plus one of the one best products of two thousand seven. The reason why I felt the need to include this is because today PC

World is online only. It ended its print format in two thousand thirteen, and now it depends very heavily on the online format, you know, the one that is sported. Yeah, so, um, I did. I didn't want to mention though, that that it's certainly not the only award that ad Block Plus is one. Um. For example, it also nabbed best Firefox Extension from Lennox Magazine, in which, by the way, you can still get in print, So bully for them, how

about that. So then we move up to December eight, two thou nine, and boy, we just we just got to the point where we narrowed it down ad block Plus was the only player in the game. It was going to be so much easier to talk about this for the rest of this podcast. And then Google made an announcement, which led to a whole bunch of more mass happening. Well, we have more to say about ad blockers, but first, um, hey, what do you know? We have

some ads. We'll be right back. Okay, so December eight, two thousand nine, and this is the first time where we can actually put a specific date on one of these things. You know, again, developers don't necessarily write down stuff for historical records, which, guys, you've got to start doing that. Yeah, seriously, everyone get on that. I know. Well, actually, I mean everyone is on that at this point because

of the popularity of blogging and micro blogging. But at any rate, right, this is when Michael Gunlock developed his own ad blocker called ad block with a capital B this time. Right, that makes it totally different obviously spelled the same way as the original ad block, except that the B is capitalized. Like you said, Look, it's the Internet. Things can be case sensitive. I just think that's funny that you already have a product called ad block Plus, so clearly what you want to come out with is

one called ad block. But you know, again, these are open source approaches. It's not like these these different developers are all getting into it in order to make book who's amount of money. It's stopped something that they felt was necessary to extend functionality, and it's a passion thing. Absolutely. So this is totally separate from the original ad block and also ad block Plus. And originally this was an

extension for Google Chrome. And in fact, the reason why I said December eight, two thousand nine, is that's also the very first day that Google allowed extensions in Chrome,

only in the beta version of Chrome. Actually at the time, it would roll out extensions for for Chrome as a as a whole a couple of months later, but you know, they made this amount announcement, and gun Launch checked to see whether there was already an ad block for Chrome, and specifically ad block plus for Chrome because he really liked that block plus it was his favorite Firefox extension. And he saw that there wasn't and started coding one

like on the spot. Yep, and so uh and now these days you can actually get it from multiple uh browsers, not just Google Chrome. Also there's version for Safari and one for Opera. Ad Block Plus, by the way, also available on multiple browsers, including Chrome, Safari uh as well as Internet Explorer and of course Firefox where it got started.

So now we're covering pretty much all the basis and some of these you know, you're you're limited on choice, Like if you're using Opera, Uh hello, Now, I mean, I know that the Opera fans out there are big passionate fans. They love that browser. I just I think there might be three of you. But hey, if you're one of those three, write us and tell us why Opera is the best, because I would I would love to hear it. I've I've used it a couple of

times and that's all I know about it. So at any rate, uh, you had ad block going under version numbers like two point oh being the first one that's being released for actual use, so we're no longer at the zero point whatever. For ad block, it's it's on a totally different path. Again, it's not really connected to those other ones other than the fact that the end result is it blocks ads. Right, It's supposed to be based on the same concept, so it was written from

an entirely separate bit of code exactly. So one of my favorite stories about the the ad block extension is what happened on April Fool's Day two thousand twelve. So this day, the developer decided to do something playful by tweaking the code a little bit, so instead of just blocking ads so that you don't see them, it replaced ads with the Internet's favorite thing, little cats. So it

became cat block Day. And in fact, it got so popular that and people loved it so much that they went ahead and added cat block as an as an optional add on it. Yeah, you could subscribe and get cat block if you wanted everything to permanently well everything all the ads to permanently be switched over to cats, not not the entire and not just a cat browser, although someone's got to have done that, I'm sure, right,

I'm positive anyway, Yeah, so uh interesting, yeah yeah. So. Features of good launches ad block are that it can it can block resources in Google Chrome so that the elements won't even load in the browser, right, um, and that includes uh, not just pictures but also flash elements. It can block ads and videos like if if YouTube plays an ad before a video, it can just wipe that from creation, right yea, at least as far as your concerned. Yea. Um. The current version I believe is

available in more than thirty languages. Yep, yep, it's got international capabilities built right into it. Also a note of interest in good Luck launched a successful Crown funded campaign to and and follow me closely here, kids create ads for ad block so that ad block can block more ads. I'm pretty sure you're talking about bob blah blaws blaw blog. That's that's what it sounded like to me. It was. The campaign was to advertise his his service ad Block,

because not that many people use it. I mean, I think that as as of the campaign, he was saying that only three and ten Internet users had any kind of ad blocking software at all. Um. And so he thought that, you know, more people need to know about this thing awareness problem, right right, Yeah, and and that you know, if people knew so, right, So he launched this campaign and yeah, they made enough money to like

put up a billboard in Times Square. Yeah. So they took an analog and ad blocking company paid for an advertisement and what is one of the world's most well known advertising Mecca's meat Space, where no one can block it. Yeah, okay, I'm my brain is hurting right beautiful, Well, anyway, if you're one dring, Hey, what happened ad block? Plus? He

kept on keeping on. Yeah. In two tho it would receive an anonymous donation that was generous enough to allow Ladimir to quit his day job and work full time on the project for two entire years. Yeah. He during that time expanded it for use with all of the browsers that we were talking about a moment ago. Oh and also Firefox Mobile and Android. I didn't even mention the mobile operating system, right, um and then inn would incorporate what became a very controversial feature, UMU developer led

white listing. Yeah. So you know, the earlier white listing we were talking about was about users defining Okay, I want to see this particular content, right, every personal user using this ad blocking software. This is on the developer side, This is before it ever gets to the user. And the idea was that the philosophy was kind of interesting to me. The the premise is that people want ad

block because they don't want annoying, intrusive ads. However, a lot of people still want to be able to support the sites that they go to, and they realize that those sites depend on AD revenue exactly, so in order to make sure they are not denying these these different sites that add revenue, that they are allowing their participating in this kind of marketplace where we can have people paid for the work that they're doing and other people

can enjoy that work. Ad blog plus took it kind of upon itself to define what a good ad is versus not a good ad. Yeah, the whole thing grew out of a partnership between Ladimir and uh person by the name of till fed A who's who's an online marketer who agreed that lots of online ads are really terrible. Um but but right, But he didn't want to see

the revenue from online ads dry up entirely. Yeah, So it's kind of an idea that ads that follow a certain set of rules are okay, right if if they're not um, if they're not preventing you from accessing the content that you went to that page to read, or or auto playing sound which is terrible all the time, or video or or otherwise just coming up the works in such an annoying way that that you want to

block that thing. Yeah. In fact, ideally according to this that has very strict size restrictions that you know, ads have to be a certain size and write all that down. But there ideally our text only, which advertisers do not care for. Uh. You know it's you know, it's not as eye catching as something like picture of so. But according to the white listing approach, it's supposed to be text only. None of that AutoPlay stuff, whether it's sound or video. It's supposed to be um, like you said,

it's supposed to be unobtrusive. So it's not supposed to cover up things you can't have like a scrolling swoop in or scroll in or or shadow box or yeah or reform all the words to spell out this product is awesome. You know, it's not supposed to do any of that kind of stuff. Uh. And that if you played by those rules and if you filled out some forms and stuff, you could work with ad blocks because

to get onto this white listed program. So like a company that would provide advertising, because you know, the companies that you see advertising online, they're usually not the ones that are handling the actual ads. It's usually an ad agency. There are some companies that have their own ad departments, but a lot of them will go to a third party. So if these third parties partner with ad block plus and create ads in this way, those ads would in

theory not be automatically blocked by the ad blocker. However, if if as a user you wanted to still say I don't want to see any ads. I don't care about the revenue thing, I don't care. All I want is all the free existence, you could actually turn that option off so that you it was automatically on by default, but you could turn it off in the settings and uh and block all ads whether they are on a quote unquote good ad list or not. Also, it was

kind of a um honor system approach. It still is kind of an honor system approach because ad block plus doesn't have an automated way to make sure that the ads that are submitted in fact follow those criteria. Right. Once a company gets gets white listed, all of their ads are white listed, and it's up to the developers and also to the users of the program to pick out ads that they still find offensive and submit a

report about them. Right. So, if as a user, you see something on a web page and you think, wait, that doesn't fit the criteria, and I've totally got ad blocker plus on and it should be blocking all this stuff. You can report the ad and then add block plus could take action and say, hey, guys, this isn't following

the rules that we said. Of course, there was still pushback from from users about this, who said that, um, you know, first of all, they didn't agree with a group of developers making this choice for them of what was and wasn't acceptable um. And second of all, that there was a potential that ad block plus was getting

paid to serve ads to them. Yeah, there was a blogger named um Sasha Palenberg who first said that ad block plus was an advertising mafia, that this put them in charge, like they were the ones who could say what ads are showing on the web in which ones aren't effectively at least to the audience that uses ad

block Plus. And then someone who has not been named as far as I can tell, an anonymous person alleged that the developers of ad block plus had demanded a share of ad revenue in order to white list ads from his or her site. We don't know who this person is, We don't know their gender or anything, but According to this, one person who presumably works for an advertising company ad block plus was saying, okay, well, if you share a third of your money that you make

from these ads, then you can totally be on the list. Um. Not a lot. Not that everyone who applies to get on the list makes it right. Most people don't, and ad block has has. Ad Block plus rather has said a lot about this issue online and in blogs and interviews. UM. They they published a uh clarifying piece in October stating that it rejects over half of its applicants based on unacceptable ad practices right out the door um, and that overall it only has accepted about nine point five percent

of its applicants to the program. Meanwhile, over at ad block you have the founder saying, hey, uh, I'm sure if I had an option, they're saying, show me ads that don't suck. Those are his words that my users would opt in. But it doesn't actually have that functionality. This would become so controversial that ad block plus actually ended up, and not not just among advertisers. Clearly it's controversial to them, but also to users, users who said, hey,

I don't want this to be on by default. I don't want to have to go into my settings and change it. They ended up for king ad block plus because it couldn't get more confusing, right uh, and created ad block Edge, which doesn't have any of the white

listing features. It's essentially this is this is just going to block everything unless you manually go in and tell it not to write um and and a brief point going back to that monetary issue UM In that company blog from ad block Plus, basically they said that less than ten percent of the applications that they've advanced to the final stages UM were submitted with some kind of monetary benefit to ad block plus. So some were submitted

with monetary benefit. Yes, that just raises more questions. Really, I don't know that I would call that so clarifying anymore. I think there needs to be a clarification of the clarifying statement. After this next set of ADS, I promise will block more until we need to run more ads. Take it away ads. This is, UH is beyond just the issue of I don't want to see ADS or

I find this intrusive. There there are other thing considerations that are legitimate that people have because today the way the web works, there's a lot of different ways to kind of gather information about users, even in ways that don't necessarily name who you are, but if there's enough of your behavior there, they can totally tell who you are.

They can and they can certainly track you anonymous user number, you know x online as much as they want to, and people do continually, and a lot of that tracking software is packaged along with ad serving software, so so you know, and these are are modern times of big data.

It's kind of an issue. Um As of March, ad block plus claim to have the capacity to block eight thousand six different trackers, you know, different cookies and scripts and all that other stuff that runs in the background of sites that you visit, collecting continual information about you and your activities and your habits to either use or to sell to other companies, you know, companies that are sifting through it for whatever potentially nefarious purposes they choose

to or just other advertisers. It may not be so much nefarious, but it could just mean that you're going to get yet more ads right right, and and those weird creepy ads that show that they know what you've been looking at on Amazon dot Com right right, Like when you go to Facebook and you notice that all the ads on Facebook somehow match things that you had

just been browsing on a totally different site. What really confuses me is when they serve me ads of something that I just purchased because I'm like, I I did like that thing. Yeah, I already thought it. I bought the thing that you told me to. I'm not going to buy it again. I'm not going to click there. What confuses me is when I get the ones for enormous muscles, because y'all, I don't know if you see

me recently, but I mean you're basically already already human perfections. Actually, I mean, like you know, I don't so much have a six pack as I have a raging kicker. That's what I've got going on. But anyway, so to get down to the the side that we're on. So we're Lauren and I Obviously we both work for a company that's a web based company. We get, uh, you know, there there are ads that run on how Stuff Works dot com. Absolutely, and so we run ads in our podcast.

It's a it's a different kind of thing certainly, but still it's it's that's how that's that's one of the main ways we generate revenue. Yeah, that that is what allows us to have jobs. Right, So if everyone were to block it and it got to a point where advertisers said, well this, this isn't working because now we can no longer make any money. Like essentially, if you pull the rug out from underneath that entire industry, you, uh, it forces everyone to have to rethink how do I

make money? Because if I can't make money, I'm not going to do this. I'm gonna go do something else where I can make money. Sure, so you know, are you going to put your content behind pay walls of various tiers or are you going to rely on donations or merchandise? Uh? And and none of those are as easy I guess as just selling ad spaces, right, Yeah, And it all depends. Like there's some larger organizations that have a historical following that could do things like shift

to a paywall method and still stay afloat. There are others that cannot, just as there are examples of uh companies that or or individuals who exist on on patronage. There's there's the site Patreon now where you can pledge a certain amount per month for people who are doing things and a crowdfunding you know that the controversial Penny Arcade crowdfunder that that basically let them run their site

for a year for you. So, I mean there there are other ways, but it's not necessarily something that's within

the grasp of everyone. So sure, you know, I think that the general recommendation is too if you like a site, uh white list it and and let let it serve you ads, right and uh so yeah, I mean this needs to be an ongoing conversation between users and advertisers and the companies that want to advertise, right, because, like I said, most most companies are saying, we want people to be encouraged to buy our goods and services or to at least have a more increased awareness of them.

We would rather that increased awareness doesn't come along with Oh, those are those irritating so and so's that always block it whenever I want to watch such and such a right, right. I think it's really interesting that in all of this Google, which is an ad company, don't don't ever think it's a search company because that's not what they're there for. Um, you know, they allowed, they chose to allow ad blocking

extensions for for Chrome for its browser. UM. Speaking about the Jonathan Rosenberg, the senior vice president of Product Management as of two thousand nine, wrote in an in company letter UM that aiding users with options can can really only grow and enrich the Internet community at large. Yeah, it's a very interesting take. I mean, particularly from someone who, like like you said, is working for essentially an ad company. You know, they absolutely didn't have to do that, and

I think it's pretty pretty beautiful that they do. I have a quote actually from another Google employee, one um Linus Upson, who is of at least was Google's engineering director, about this entire issue. He said, it's unlikely ad blockers are going to get to the level where they imperil the advertising market, because if advertising is so annoying that a large segment of the population wants to block it, then advertising should get less annoying. Yeah, I agree with that.

I think that, you know, the best way of going about this is to design ads that are that definitely advertise your product or service, but don't do so at the expense of the user experience. It's really I mean, that's easy to say, it's really hard to do because but but you know, I kind of appreciate that it's pushing the design impetus back to the people responsible for it.

It's saying like, don't create bad stuff. If you want people to not block it, don't don't go with the easy approach of using something that blocks their view of what they're trying to get at, or something that's so eye catching that you literally can't pay attention to anything else on the page. Right if it if it looks like a MySpace page, let's the old school MySpace. By the way, it's like Geo c s that would have

been a better way of putting it. Yeah, if it looks like a Geo cities page, you may want to revisit that unless you're doing it specifically for the irony and it's going on a site that that would that would fit in well. And that wraps up that classic episode of tech stuff the things I wanted to say

about ad blockers. So I used to be a big user of ad blockers because a lot of ads were so intrusive, particularly the ones that would just launch with audio and video out of nowhere, and it was really disruptive, especially if you're someone who's doing a lot of research you've got a lot of tabs open, maybe you don't even know which tab is the one that's making the noise. I know that at least in Google Chrome you can see the little megaphone icon that shows which one is

playing noise. But when you've got like twenty tabs open, it's hard to even see that. So you know, it's one of those things where because the ad experience was so bad, I didn't want to have to deal with it. However, that being said, I also these days feel like it's really giving the short end of the stick to the companies that are running the uh, the site or service that I'm on. You know, that's how they generate revenue.

And if I'm denying that, then if you do enough people do that, then the stuff goes away, right, There's not enough money to support it. And as someone whose job depends upon ad revenue, I I get it. Um. I wish that ads could be less intrusive, and I've actually found some ads to be really helpful. I followed some ads, and I've bought stuff. Heck, I've bought stuff from other podcast ads and including some of my own.

I've used my own. I've used my own discount code to buy stuff, so they do work, but yeah, I don't like that. I still only the disruptive ones that ends up being something that sticks in my you know, six center my skin, and I don't care for it. But I definitely understand the need for ads, and um, yeah, I don't use ad blockers anymore. Sometimes that ends up being a challenging situation. But at the end of the day,

that was the choice I made. Not that I'm telling any of you guys how to choose to do things, just that it was something that I ultimately decided. I would, you know, live in an ad filled world because I want the stuff I to keep going. All right, that's it. If you guys have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, reach out to me. The best way to do that is over on Twitter and the handle we use as text Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again

really soon. Y. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.