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Show HN: AdBlock detection by abusing the streaming parser

by mechazawa on 1/10/17, 12:15 PM with 25 comments

  • by Nadya on 1/10/17, 8:35 PM

    This has been done and thought of before. I'll go over why you don't see anyone using it. :)

    Now obviously the "2 seconds" would need to be tweaked to be slower. Throttling my internet to 'GPRS' in Chrome results in the site thinking I'm using an ad blocker (for this demonstration, I disabled it). It took 2.10s before my browser tried to download adv.css which resulted in me being flagged for using an ad blocker.

    You'll want to serve your site to users quickly or you'll raise your bounce rate (and possibly get less ad impressions as a result). But now you're looking at a 3s~ delay just to serve an image. Imagine if you had a site, more images, some javascript, etc? Would users even attempt to browse your site if every page load took 3-5 seconds to read the content because you were waiting to serve content while detecting if they are using an ad blocker?

    If AdBlockers hurt you so much that having a 3-5s delay to serve your website is a realistic alternative you're better off shutting up shop or dealing with the fact your site is simply not profitable.

  • by pawadu on 1/10/17, 12:40 PM

    Interesting concept, but do we really need to make web sites even slower to load?

    ---

    START OF RANT

    If you block ad-blockers (like forbes.com just did to me), I will only share your articles via archive.is .

    Sure, your children may starve to death, your wife may leave you but don't blame me because in the end you did all this to yourself. I was happy to use your site when it had a couple of non-intrusive text ads to pay the bills but then you went to fill 60% of the screen with flashing images, autoplaying videos and malware installing flash ads.

    END OF RANT

  • by Nyubis on 1/10/17, 12:23 PM

    Interesting concept, but I don't expect it to be used commercially anytime soon, because of how slow it makes the page load.

    Then again, maybe your site being annoyingly slow for people who block ads is a feature rather than a bug.

  • by ffggvv on 1/10/17, 5:36 PM

    I love it. Great idea! If people don't want to see ads on my website they souldn't consume my bandwidth.
  • by tenryuu on 1/10/17, 1:02 PM

    BEAR CHIPS