transluzid

I just want to get this observation out while the info seems not to be publicly discussed yet:

I suspect google is the first big player who has had the idea I have been carrying around for the last few years: the obvious way to get around ad blocking software.

Ad blockers (e.g. the tremendously useful Firefox Add-on “Adblock Plus“) work with the very simple fact that - up until now - most ads were served from specific locations (specific directories, servers, etc.) that were different from the ones that the content came from. Therefore, the URL of any embedded javascript, picture or other object contained some indication that it was an ad. So all an adblocker needs to do is filter out those URLs. The quality of adblockers differed in the way you could configure that blocking - how you could use wildcards, whether you could collectively share blocking expressions, etc. It may be that CSS classes and other markers could be used to recognize advertisement as well.
The very obvious way to get around this blocking mechanism is to make content URLs and objects indistinguishable from ads - and the best would be to even set all those URLs, CSS classes etc. randomly and dynamically. Obviously, this would immediately make the adblockers useless, but it puts a higher load on the delivering server - because it needs to perform all the replacements dynamically and in real time.

I do suspect that google has now done this deed. For a few days now, I start seeing the ads inside my gmail account. If I look at the pages source code, I start seeing a lot of random strings in class names etc.

I wonder how soon this will be adopted by other websites and CMS. When I had thought of this idea in the past, I always concluded there wasn’t a way to make a business of it, and I did want to enjoy ad-free life while it lasted, instead of “sharing the secret”. Now that it’s out there, let’s see how quickly it spreads…

Update: Thanks to Wladimir Palant of Adblock Plus, I realize that google isn’t quite there yet. They have just obfuscated the code a bit more, but ads are still distinguishable enough for adblockers to work after adapting the filters. So we still have a bit more ad-free time ahead.