Stardate 20011002.0556 (On Screen): The web advertising war has been escalated -- but it isn't the final step. It's been something I've been expecting for a while: a new package for web hosters which checks to see if the advertising gets loaded at the same time as the main page. The idea is that if a given user loads the main page but doesn't load any of the advertising files, then they get blocked from accessing the site. But there are a couple of problems with this. First off, a lot of the advertising is hosted by other companies (i.e. Doubleclick) and correlating loads between servers belonging to different companies will be more difficult. They also have to be wary of false-positives; if they start blocking users who are not using ad-blocking software, there's going to be backlash. But the real weakness of this scheme is that what they're detecting is whether the files are
transferred and not whether they are
displayed. If this kind of checking becomes widespread, then the ad blocking software (such as is used by me) will be altered so that it transfers the advertising and then stuffs it in the bit bucket. And there's absolutely no way for the web hosters to detect that this has happened. It remains the case that web viewers control the experience.
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