About google's attack on adblockers

[CaffeineAddict]

For some reason, I am unable to select or deselect some domains in ublock Origin. That's in Firefox. I'll have to try this soon.

To understand uBlock to it's full potential this is a must read:

Home

uBlock Origin - An efficient blocker for Chromium and Firefox. Fast and lean. - gorhill/uBlock

github.com

 

[KGIII]

Ads are their primary source of income.

Yup - and, curiously, that's changing.

https://abc.xyz/assets/a3/91/6d1950c148fa84c7d699abe05284/2024q4-alphabet-earnings-release.pdf (That's a PDF link.)

It doesn't look like they're losing ad revenue but that it is changing because they have increasing revenue from other streams. Their ad revenue looks to have remained fairly stable, without any major growth overall in the most recent declarations.

That's the most recent data I could find. Q1 won't be over until April. They'll file new reports at that time.

Also, while I understand math, I'm not a corporate accountant. (Nor would I ever wish to be.) But, it looks like ad revenue has been fairly stable but dropping as a percentage of their income as other revenue streams have been growing. That's my grasp of the data when I looked at earlier three year period of data.

(This data is public, 'cause they're a publically traded company. It must be public and easily available, which these days means just making sure it's online in a somewhat organized fashion and storing it for at least 7 years.)

I looked and that's the best data I could find.

The short of it is that you're 100% correct in that that's how they make most of their money. That number appears fairly slow in growing, albeit not quite static, as other revenue streams are increasing - such as things like services.

 

[KGIII]

I'll have to try this soon.

uBlock is intentionally a simple application. If you enable the advanced features, you will get some advanced features. Those features are very powerful and can break some websites. If you disable third party scripts, that will break sites that rely on those scripts. You'll have to enable them selectively, using the 'least permissions' principle.

It may be worth actually grabbing uMatrix to play with. You may need to dig around to figure out how to install it but you can side-load extensions with the developer mode enabled. It shouldn't be much work as I've done so myself, albeit not in quite a while.

You can think of the advanced features as being like a 'stateful firewall'. If you set the defaults (again, on about:blank), then you can change the entire working of the extension on all sites that you visit. (I'm pretty sure. That's how it did work.)

This will break things. This site loads some 3rd party stuff, for example. If you block those, the site may not function as expected.

 

[Condobloke]

for those interested.... umatrix, by Raymond Hill

It has a more than interesting ..."About this extension" on the page linked below

​

Search results for "umatrix" – Add-ons for Firefox (en-US)

addons.mozilla.org

Out of the box, uMatrix works in relax block-all/allow-exceptionally mode, meaning web sites which require 3rd-party scripts are likely to be "broken". With two clicks, uMatrix can be set to work in allow-all/block-exceptionally mode, which generally will not break web sites. See https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard/wiki/How-to-use-HTTP-Switchboard:-Two-opposing-views for more details on this topic.

etc
Etc....

Etc

 

[mrcrossroads]

I realise this is an old thread, but after a year, google has started a new campaign to try and dissuade users here from blocking ads by sending the message in the image below:
View attachment 24938

There's nobody logged into google on this machine, and the window can be closed by clicking on the cross in the top right hand corner (partly obscured).

Google is asking the user to allow ads, or try "YouTube Premium".

Interestingly, the adblocker on this machine, Ghostery, has detected that google is trying to have ads blocked, and has popped up a window of its own on the top right of the image, with the suggestion to open the video in a private window.

Fortunately, it wasn't necessary to use a private window since clicking both pop up windows off was sufficient to play the video.

The only hindrance was that the user was delayed by about 5 seconds before the video would run, but when it ran, it did so normally.

These windows have been fairly regular over the last few days, but decreasing today to a single occurrence.

It was surprising to get this message after about a year of not getting any, but I guess it's a neverending struggle for both the company and the ad blocking coders.

Google's new motto is "Do evil."

I prefer Ghostery myself.