November 1, 2023 • 50 mins
First came the web ad. Then came the ad blocking software. What is the history of ad blocking? What challenges does it create for industry, and what services does it provide beyond, you know, blocking all those pesky ads? We get into it!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland,
and I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the
tech are you? So today I thought we would talk
a bit about ad blocking. It's no secret that lots
(00:27):
of folks out there aren't crazy about ads, and it's
totally understandable whether those ads are on television or on
the web, or on a streaming video platform which is
kind of an offshoot of the web, or yes, in podcasts.
Folks can get fed up with ads, and I get it.
Trust me, I get it when the ads are for
(00:49):
stuff that doesn't relate to you at all. For example,
you know, if I hear an ad that has anything
to do with sports, it's probably not gonna be very
effective on me. I'm just not a sports person. Not
that I begrudge anyone who loves sports that's awesome, It's
just not in my interests. But I also understand the
(01:10):
negative reaction people can have for ads that relate to you,
perhaps a bit too much, because targeted ads that you
might encounter on things like social network platforms, for example,
can get downright creepy, like I go back and forth.
As an example of my own life. Just recently, I
was checking in on Facebook to see what my friends
(01:32):
were up to, and I saw an ad for a
band performing here in Atlanta. The band being Southern Culture
on the Skids. They've been around forever, and it's a
band I really like. So this was a very targeted ad.
It was a band I liked, specifically performing in a
venue that's not far from where I live. In fact,
(01:53):
it's right next to where I used to work. And yeah,
that can feel a little creepy on the flo. If
I hadn't seen that ad, I wouldn't know to get
me a ticket so that I can listen to them
play songs like Banana Pudden and camel Walk. But I'm
sure all of you know I mean, it's it's very clear.
(02:14):
It's very much at the very center of ads. Ads
are a way to generate revenue, and in turn, revenue
can be used to fund stuff like creating content. And
if you didn't have the ads in place, you would
have to have some other means of generating revenue to
not only cover the costs that you encounter when you're
doing stuff like creating content because you know, just to
(02:39):
create stuff does cost money, and then you want to
have some money left over, right, You don't want to
just be able to cover your costs. You want to
have a little profit so that you can do things like,
I don't know, pay for rent and food and that
kind of thing. But there's no question that the history
of ads online has also It's been a history of
(03:01):
developers and advertisers and platforms making decisions that have at
times frustrated or other times caused actual harm to people
who are browsing the web. There are examples of ads
that have contained malware or ads that were peddling various scams.
I see a lot of those on social networks as well,
(03:22):
So like when I do go to Facebook, I don't
just see ads that are targeted to me. I see
ads that are highly suspicious, and then by looking into them,
I find out, oh, this is one of four hundred
different variations of this same ad, all of them purporting
to be from slightly different businesses at different locations, and
(03:42):
all of them being a scam. There are examples of
ads that auto play video and audio, which should be
illegal in my opinion. I mean, if you're like me,
and I think a lot of you are. When you're
using perhaps a desktop or laptop computer browser like a
web browser, you might have lots of tabs open, Like
(04:03):
I could have a dozen or more tabs open at
a time, And if audio starts playing in one of
those tabs and I don't immediately know which one it is,
then I'm looking for that little speaker icon in the
tabs so I can find out which one I need
to mute. It is really irritating, right, So, Like, there
are lots of ways that ADS have been intrusive and
(04:28):
not great from a user experience. So I would argue
that there are at least some cases where there is
a very forgivable tendency to want to block or skip
ADS entirely. And that's before we even get into the
privacy side of things. Right now, before I go any further,
I do have to acknowledge. I mean, there's no denying it.
(04:48):
This podcast is ADS supported. You all know that I
know that there's no denying that. Without ADS, I would
not have a show. I would not have my current job.
If it weren't for ADS, I would be doing something else,
and I would probably be really unhappy about it. Generally speaking,
I am against ad blocking because of how it can
(05:11):
impact creators and companies that make the stuff I want
to see and experience. I'm also against it because it
pushes some platforms to lock things behind a paywall that
makes it harder for other folks to access it without
breaking the bank. Some of us can afford to pay
those subscription fees to access content, others can't. I mean,
(05:33):
obviously that also fuels development of workarounds and loopholes to
try and get access to content without paying the paywall.
It just creates more problems. But again, creating stuff isn't free.
These companies and creators do need to generate revenue somehow,
and if folks are going to block ads, that only
leaves a few other options as far as revenue generation.
(05:55):
On the privacy side of things, it is much harder
to fight the practice of ad blocking. I see that
as being really important. I think users do deserve to
be able to protect their privacy, and for that job
of ad blocking, I don't think I can put up
an argument like I don't think I can argue against it.
(06:17):
So while I think the ads are important in order
to help support the content you love. I also think that,
you know, the practice of collecting user information and the
practice of buying and selling that in large amounts across
the web, that's disturbing and I cannot really, you know,
(06:37):
put up a good argument for it. So I feel
very complicated about the whole subject. But in the grand
scheme of things, if we boil it down, I guess
I would say I'm against ad blocking. I do not
use an AD blocker on the computer I'm recording on,
for example, because I think it's important that when I'm
(06:59):
researching stuff that the various sources I'm pulling from are
also getting some AD revenue in the process. However, I
do understand why people use ad blockers. So let's go
over the history of online ad blockers. Now, obviously that
history is somewhat tied to the history of web ads
(07:20):
and the web. Right. Web ads were not always a
guaranteed outcome, by the way. That's because of how the
Internet evolved and the entities that contributed to the creation
of the Internet. So you have to remember the Internet
was a sort of an evolutionary step of the earlier arpenet.
(07:40):
There are two different things, but you could say the
Internet was kind of spawned by the development of Arpenet.
Arpenet was a US government funded project that would create
the technologies necessary to allow different computer systems in different
locations to interc connect with one another and interoperate with
(08:03):
one another. This required a metric buttload of work, according
to my calculations. Researchers had to figure out how to
make very different computers talk to each other. Right, they
weren't all working on the same operating system. That in
itself was already a complicated part of the puzzle. But
(08:23):
they also had to figure out how to create the
actual mechanisms for sending information over different kinds of connections.
Those connections could be through things like telephone lines, or
through radio waves, or beaming information up to satellite, which
is still you know, radio waves, but much further away.
(08:44):
I guess the entities that made up arpinnet and later
the early Internet involved a lot of public organizations and
private organizations, but not commercial organizations, So I'm talking about
things like colleges and universities and government offices. Military installations
(09:05):
were a big part of it. Research facilities that sort
of thing, And in those early days there really weren't
a whole lot of attempts to commercialize networking. You know,
there were some attempts to commercialize within a specific location,
right to network all the machines within a business, for example, Yes,
(09:26):
but between businesses or between businesses and the world in general,
not so much. In fact, most people weren't even aware
that anything was going on at all. They just thought
of computers as being kind of independent silos. Like you
would have a personal computer, but it didn't connect to
anything unless maybe you were dialing into a bulletin board
system back in the day. Now, by the time we
(09:48):
get to the transition of arpanet into the Internet, which
again it wasn't like an evolutionary step. It was two
things that, you know, one developed after the other, but
they we had a lot of overlap. Well, one of
the major organizations that would contribute to Internet infrastructure was
the National Science Foundation or NSF. The NSF worked with
(10:11):
various organizations, both public and private, to build a significant
part of what was called the Internet backbone. Still is
the Internet backbone. NSF just isn't really part of it,
I'll explain. So you can think of the Internet as
kind of like the nervous system that you would find
in an organism, right, Like you could think of an
end computer as being the very end of the line
(10:35):
where a nerve ending happens to be. But any signals
from that computer or that nerve ending has to travel
to the brain, and to get there has to go
up the nerve and then connect through the spinal cord
all the way up to the central nervous system essentially
the brain, not just the central nervous system, because I
(10:55):
think technically that does include the spinal cord. It's been
years since I've taken biology, but you know, it has
to travel across the spinal cord in aid to get there.
It can't just jump to the brain. Well, the NSF
was contributing infrastructure that was part of the Internet's version
of the spinal cord, So a lot of the traffic
(11:16):
on the Internet would travel across insf's networks, which would
be called NSF net Here's the kicker though. In order
to do this, the NSF had to secure a lot
of funding from the US government. But in order to
do that, there were certain rules that had to be
(11:38):
put in place, Like Congress said, yes, we'll provide you
the funding as long as it follows these certain rules
because we don't want this to turn into some sort
of commercial effort as opposed to what you are telling
us you want it to be, which is a way
to connect supercomputing sites together. So one of the big
(12:01):
rules was that these the NSF connections were not allowed
to carry commercial traffic that was not to go across
NSF net. And that became a problem because NSF net
became an integral component of the Internet backbone, and that
meant that if your work wasn't related to stuff like
(12:23):
scientific research or advancing knowledge, then you started to run
into the potential that whatever you were sending would be
against the rules and technically should not be allowed to
go across the nsf net part of Internet infrastructure. In fact,
until nineteen eighty nine, the NSF wouldn't allow any commercial
(12:45):
entities to even connect to the network. So Internet service
providers that could have potentially sprung up in various places
before eighty nine were stuck if the part of the
backbone that they needed to connect to was controlled by
NSF NET. Now in eighty nine, that changed. We started
(13:05):
to see some commercial ISPs come up, and the access
improved a little bit. In nineteen ninety one, but the
general restrictions on commercial traffic across NSF net would remain
in place until nineteen ninety five. That was a sticking
point for the development of the Internet. It wasn't illegal
to run commercial traffic over the Internet in general. So
(13:27):
if your connections just completely bypassed the nsf net, like
if in order to complete a commercial transaction between point
A and point B, you never had to cross any
of the network controlled by nsf net, that's fine. There
was nothing inherently illegal about using the Internet for commercial purposes.
(13:47):
The problem was the actual infrastructure was not supposed to
do that, at least in parts of it, and that
is what complicated everything. Now it was a huge joble
The solution ended up being the creation of a new
privatized network architecture largely built on top of what was
(14:08):
learned through creating nsf net, but independent of nsf net.
It essentially meant all these companies had to build a
almost like a copy of nsf net in order to
handle all that traffic and allow NSF to decommission nsf
net in nineteen ninety five, and now traffic would just
(14:29):
move across this other privatized architecture and there would be
no limitation to the know to commercial traffic. Now, there's
a lot more to that particular story. In fact, I
could do a full episode about the entire drama around
the transition of the Internet from a purely sort of
(14:50):
research based entity into a commercial entity, But for our purposes,
we're going to leave that part there. Let's talk about
the Web and web ads, because that's what this is
really about, right, Okay, I've set it up. When we
come back, i'll talk a little bit about the birth
of the World Wide Web and how that eventually led
(15:13):
to the creation of web ads and thus ad blocking.
But first, and trust me, I understand the irony of this.
We need to take a break to thank our sponsors. Okay,
(15:36):
we're back. So the beginning of the Worldwide Web. That
starts with the guy who's credited for inventing the whole
darn thing. He was a researcher who was working for CERN,
you know, the same scientific research center that runs the
Large Hadron Collider, and his name is of course Tim
berners Lee. Tim felt that we were really missing a trick,
(16:00):
you know, we had all these important documents. He was
probably mostly thinking about scientific documents. But we had all
these incredibly important documents, and they were stored on different
computers all over the world. And a lot of these
documents related to one another, or they each related to
common topics, but they were all distinct. They were disconnected
(16:21):
from each other. But what if you could build in
a way that would allow related documents to have a link,
to share a link with each other. You know, maybe
you've got a document that's about one research project about
particle physics, and you've got another research project about particle
physics that's slightly different, But combining the two would provide
(16:42):
future researchers with a lot more knowledge that would be
beneficial to more work. If you were able to link
those two documents together, that could be a really beneficial thing.
So Tim developed hyperlink technology, which would do just what
he was thinking. You could create a digital link between
different digital documents and navigate from one to the other
(17:05):
using some sort of client software. This was the basis
for the World Wide Web, and berners Lee was able
to convince CERN, which technically owned the research because it
was his employer, to release this technology to the world
in the public domain, rather than to sell it off
and have it risk becoming some sort of proprietary software
(17:28):
which would inherently limit its utility. Now, the world's first
website launched in nineteen ninety one on August sixth. Then
it was a text based document describing the basics of
the World Wide Web project, including how hypertext links work.
The very early days of the web were really all
about text based documents. However, it didn't take too long
(17:51):
for that to change. It did happen somewhat gradually because
keep in mind, outside of universities and research centers and
the like, those few people who had Internet access were
depending on stuff like dial up modems, So if you
were including things like images, it really slowed down how
long it took for a web page to load into
a browser. By the end of nineteen ninety three, there
(18:14):
were only around three thousand websites total. Now that was
still a growth spurt, because in ninety two it was
more like ten websites. And also in nineteen ninety three,
before the NSF net was shut down, we would start
to have our first web centric platform that would support ads.
(18:36):
And that platform wasn't itself a spinoff of a company
that at the time was called O'Reilly and associates. These days,
it's just known as O'Reilly Media. It was founded by
Tim O'Reilly and the company originally focused on creating technical writing,
technical documents and consulting that kind of stuff, and a
lot of different documents and even events have come out
(18:58):
of O'Reilly. The company is one of the reasons the
concept of web two point zero even became a thing.
For example, but we want to talk about the Global
Network Navigator or GNN. O'Reilly launched the GNN website in
May of nineteen ninety three, and essentially it was an
online magazine. In fact, originally it had a quarterly publication schedule,
(19:24):
so it would only change like four times a year.
But you have to remember, in the early days of
the web, web pages typically were static. You know, you
didn't have sites updating content every day, let alone multiple
times a day. Some websites would upload, and that was that.
It just served as almost like a Yellow Pages ad
or something. It didn't change. Also, I don't know how
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many of you know what a Yellow Pages ad is.
Moving on. So GNN was already a little different from
other web pages, right because it would actually feature updated content,
though only a few times a year, and and this
content largely focused on features about the blossoming technology of
the World Wide Web. Another way that GNN set itself
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apart from other web pages is that O'Reilly decided they
would allow for online advertising. GNN would offer companies a
chance to secure some space, some real estate on the
web page that would be dedicated to advertising to a
potential customer. And you could use hyperlink technology to facilitate
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traffic to a different destination where presumably someone who's visiting
GNN could become a paying customer of the company that
advertised on GNN. Well, this set up conditions for AT
and T to purchase the very first web banner. At
least as far as I can tell, it was a
brave new world. This was in nineteen ninety four when
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the first web banner ended up being displayed to the world,
and it meant there was advertising on the Internet now.
It didn't take long for there to be a kind
of land rush to the web. You know how a
lot of companies really jumped into the whole web three
slash metaverse, slash blockchain, slash NFT bandwagon not that long ago.
(21:19):
And how despite the fact that there were a lot
of unanswered questions about the technologies in general. There was
this perception that if you didn't get in there right away,
you were going to be left behind. That's kind of
what the Internet in general and the Web in particular
was like around this time, and there was a bit
of this struggle, this rush to get an online presence
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among various companies, and in turn that really picked up
the pace when the last restrictions on commercial internet traffic
went away once NSF net decommissioned. So in nineteen ninety five,
AOL purchased GNN from O'Reilly for the print lease some
of eleven million dollars, and in that same year a
(22:04):
couple of guys named Dwight Merriman and Kevin O'Connor came
up with a business plan. See GNN showed that online
advertising was a very real possibility, but a lot of
companies wouldn't have the know how or the resources to
facilitate advertising on their web pages. So what was needed
was a dedicated company to handle stuff like ad sales
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and performance tracking, you know, partnering advertisers with web pages,
all that kind of stuff, running ads across networks of sites,
not just on a single page and even getting into
the earliest, earliest days of what would become targeted advertising.
So the two created a service that kind of did
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all these things, and they called it Double Click. Kevin
Ryan would become an early investor in the service, and
later on would become CEO of the company itself. Now
this isn't the Double Click story either, but the company
did pioneer an era in which advertising would proliferate across
the web. And if you want to know what actually
(23:11):
happened to double click itself, Google announced that it would
purchase double Click back in two thousand and seven for
the even more princely sum of three point one billion dollars,
showing that web advertising had truly become a gargantuan business,
and it's now part of Google's overall advertising operations. But
(23:32):
let's get back to ads and ad blocking, and we're
back into the mid nineteen nineties. So web advertising begins
to gainsteam. Some folks start to develop ad blindness already,
because a lot of these ads were appearing either as
a banner ad across the top or the bottom of
a web page, or along the side like in a column,
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either to the left or to the right of the
main content of the web page. A lot of people
just got really good it not paying attention to that stuff,
but some folks were still frustrated that ads were showing
up when they were trying to just surf the web.
A group of students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina started
to come up with their own idea for a company.
(24:17):
So rather than selling ad space and slapping banner ads
all over the web, they were creating an extension to
the web browser Netscape, which at the time was almost
synonymous with the Worldwide Web itself. It's easy to forget now,
but there was a time where Netscape was essentially the
definitive web browser for the Internet. That would change, and
(24:41):
things would change dramatically. Like today, you could argue that
Google Chrome is one of the biggest ones out there,
but there's still there's better competition now than there was
back when Netscape was really dominating the landscape. Now, this
extension that the students created would actually block banner ads
from showing up in a user's web browser. The leader
(25:03):
of this group of radical revolutionaries was a guy named
James Howard. From why I understand, he wasn't even a
computer science major. He was actually focused on studying drama
as a theater, not as in, let me just walk
up to the stranger in public and see if I
can provoke a wild reaction. So Howard and his fellow
students ended up creating a company called Privnet, and the
(25:25):
tool they made, the ad blocking tool, got the name
Internet Fast Forward. Why Internet fast Forward, Well, we got
to understand how web ads work, right, So when you
go to a web page, what you're really doing is
your browser is sending a request to a web server
that hosts that page, and the web server serves the
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page up to you. It sends the page to your
web browser. Web ads, however, typically live on some other
web server. There's like a little section in the web
page that connects to this code that links to the
ad in question, and that means that there's another fetch
and retrieval process going on when you're accessing the web page.
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It's not just the content of the page itself, it's
also the AD and that can slow things down. And again,
remember we're talking in an era where people are using
dial up internet, So you're using your dial up internet
to access a web page and it's taking a really
long time, because not only is it pulling from the
website you're going to, but any web ads that might
(26:33):
be included on the web page that you're trying to visit.
So Internet fast forward, but speed things up by blocking
those ads now. As you might imagine, the emergence of
ad blocking immediately prompted a lot of criticism from various
other parties. Obviously, ad companies were really upset because this
was their business and blocking ads was a bad thing.
(26:57):
Like if you're especially if your business is dependent upon
and the performance of ads, and people are able to
block the ad entirely, well, that performance drops to nothing
if everybody's doing it. Content companies were also upset, right
because this was how they were making revenue and being
able to allow access to the content without otherwise charging
(27:19):
for it. So a lot of people spoke up and
said that in order for content on the Internet, well
really specifically the Web, to remain free to access, there
was this unfortunate need for ad revenue because in the end,
nothing is free. There are costs associated with everything, whether
it's creating the content or hosting it, and unless you
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have a pipeline to endless resources, you have to have
a way to generate revenue to cover costs or stuff
goes away. Now, I've read a few articles that actually
published back in nineteen ninety six. That's when the Internet
fast Forward tool started to really get attention. By the
end of that year, another company called Pretty Good Privacy
would actually purchase priv Net, the creator of Internet fast Forward,
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and a couple of years later they would actually have
to shut down the tool because they were being threatened
with legal cases from various companies, and in order to
avoid any incredibly expensive legal fees, they shut it down.
But anyway, back in ninety six, the interesting thing that
hits me from these articles is that Howard would be
(28:30):
interviewed all the time. I mean, this was big news.
It was making like TV news, and Howard framed ad
blocking is a way to cater the browsing experience to
user preferences. He was saying, shouldn't the end user be
able to determine how they get content? Like, shouldn't they
be the ones to ultimately decide whether or not certain
(28:54):
types of Internet content come their way, which includes ads?
So why not give them a tool that lets them
block those ads if they want to? And again, you know,
since we're talking about the era of dial up modems.
This can mean saving time for the end user. Of course,
the user's time is important, so why not give them
a tool that lets some access what they want faster
(29:17):
by blocking stuff they don't want, namely ads. But interestingly,
while I was looking at all these different interviews and stuff,
one of the conversations I did not see or one
of the topics that did not really pop up in
those And maybe it was simply because the media didn't
know to ask the question was really about privacy. Privacy
(29:42):
would become an integral component of ad blocking moving on,
but in those early days, you just didn't see it
being talked about. See back in nineteen ninety four, a
computer programmer named lou Montuli had this idea. There was
a need to preserve a use when a person was
(30:03):
engaging with a web page. So let me give you
an example. Let's say you visit an online store, and
let's say you start shopping around and you're filling your
virtual cart with various items. But before you can actually
go and complete the transaction, you have to log off
your computer to go do something else. Now wouldn't it
be nice when you later had the time that you
(30:26):
could log back in on your computer, go right back
to that web page, and your cart would still have
all the things you had put into it when you
visited earlier on. Wouldn't that be nice? Of course it would.
That's kind of how the web works, you know, Otherwise
you would have to start all over and that'd be
a frustrating experience. Well, you would have to store that data,
right You would have to have a place where that
(30:47):
data would be associated with your visit to that store,
and these were the items that you specifically chose. Storing
that data on web servers look like a non starter
because maybe you would never come back to the virtual store.
Then the virtual store is just storing this data on
its servers for no reason. It's just bloating up all
(31:12):
the data storage as all these different customers come and go.
Storing the data on your computer made more sense, right, Like,
if you had just a tiny little block of data
that sat on your computer, that's not a big deal.
But holding millions of blocks of data on a server
that just didn't make sense. So then the web page
(31:33):
could access this little block of data living on your
computer through the connection with the web browser, and you
would be right back where you were from your earlier session.
You'd be able to continue shopping. This technology was already
in use in other realms of computing and it was
called a cookie. So in nineteen ninety four, cookies became
a thing for web traffic once developers created the Web
(31:55):
Specification for them to work in Netscape and later in
other browsers as well. When we come back, we'll talk
a bit more about cookies and how that would end
up fueling another era of development in the ad blocking space.
But again and again, the irony is not lost on me.
We have to take a break for some ads of
(32:16):
our own. Okay, we're back, and before the break, I
was talking about cookies.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
Now.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
The thing about cookies is that they can not only
preserve a state that you were in when you were
visiting a website. So, for example, if you logged into
a website, like if there was a user name, password
kind of gate to the website, it could preserve that
log in so that you're using the same device you
(32:52):
revisit the site, you don't have to log in again.
That kind of thing. Well, they could also potentially be
used to ida to fy someone and to track a
user's activity across the web. It gets fairly complicated, but
the basic issue here is that if you want to
really browse the web privately without worrying about your activity
(33:14):
being tracked back to you personally, cookies are one of
the things you have to be concerned about. And so
developing a use case for ad blockers focused not just
on blocking you know ads like web banner ads. It
became a matter of protecting user privacy. The content platforms
(33:34):
and advertising companies didn't really like that either, but the
die had been cast, so by the late nineteen nineties
and into the early two thousands, a whole bunch of
different ad blocking solutions emerged and became available to folks.
One of those was the CYBERsitter Internet filter tool. You know.
Internet filters allow people to set a filter to determine
(33:59):
what kind of content is allowed to come through and
what kind of content should be blocked from a web
browser entirely, and often it's used in a way where
you could argue it's used in a way to censor
information from the web. You could argue it's in a
way to protect say, children from seeing content they really
(34:20):
have no business seeing. That kind of thing. There are
lots of arguments both for and against internet filters, but
Cybercenter was a big one, and it added an ad
blocking feature in the late nineteen nineties to its its service.
A company called Wrq offered up a filter called at Guard.
At Guard around the same time that CYBERsitter introduced its
(34:45):
ad blocking tool. At Guard would block ads as well
as cookies and other content, and could also serve as
a general firewall service. While some ad block critics dismissed
ad blocking as a nuisance back when Internet f ast
Forward showed up, now people were starting to get a
little bit more concerned, right, So you did have people
(35:06):
who are saying, oh, this threatens the entire structure of
the web from a revenue standpoint, But a lot of
other people said, Oh, the average person's not going to
bother downloading an ad blocker, Like maybe a few grouches will,
but not everybody will, and so it's more of a nuisance.
It's not really that big of a deal. By the
(35:27):
late nineties and into the early two thousands, it was
starting to look like a big deal because now ad
blockers were one getting more popular and two bringing a
little more attention to things like cookies that in part
could lead to more effective targeted advertising, but the flip
side of that was it could lead to a lot
(35:48):
more tracking and identification, and people were starting to feel
pretty squirreling about that. Part of the reason that web
users were starting to experiment with ad blocking really had
to do with how web ads themselves were starting to change.
So early ads mostly involved simple banners, and they weren't
that bad right, especially early early days, because everything was
(36:11):
pretty static. You didn't have things like lots of animations
or video or audio playing in web banner ads. It
was just kind of a static image. Later on that
would start to change as things became more dynamic on
the web, the ads became more obnoxious. But really what
pushed things into high gear was the development of the
(36:32):
pop up ad. And I'm sure most of you don't
need to be told what a pop up ad is,
but just in case, a pop up ad uses JavaScript
so that when a browser accesses a web page, the
JavaScript prompts a new window, typically a smaller window, to
open up on top of the web page you actually
(36:53):
wanted to go to. So you all know these ads
they can be awful. And because of that JavaScript thing,
you can actually end up with a whole string of
pop up ads, and you know, closing one ad can
prompt another ad to open, and so on, because developers
could link pretty much any user action with a prompt
to open another pop up, and so closing one can
(37:16):
make another one open. There were also variations to this.
You didn't just have pop ups, there were also pop
under ads. This also prompts another window to open, but
it opens below the web browser, so it's hidden from
you unless you're paying attention to, like a taskbar or something.
It's hidden from you until you close out of your browser,
(37:36):
and then surprise, you've got another window that's been opened
this whole time. Now, not only was the scene as obnoxious,
it also created opportunities for malicious folks to create all
sorts of problems. On the arguably less harmful side, you
can really troll visitors to your website site by having
like one of these chains of pop ups activate, which
(37:57):
just means the user ends up having to play whack
them with all the low pop up windows while just
trying to navigate the page they were actually interested in.
That was stupid, but who is at least, you know,
relatively harmless but you could also try and house links
to malware and pop ups. This was already an issue
with ads anyway, right you had malicious actors who would
(38:20):
work with legitimate ad companies or in some cases they
would run an illegitimate AD company and secure space on
popular web pages and nestle a link that would take
people to a place where they could potentially end up
being infected by malware. That's a real issue. It's one
of the Again, one of the reasons why ad blockers
(38:41):
were really starting to take off is that companies were
not being super careful and super picky about the types
of ads they were displaying against their content, and that
meant that occasionally you had these cases where people were
getting their machines infected by malware because they clicked on
an AD and you had to follow a couple more
(39:01):
steps like installing something and then activating it or whatever.
But the point is it was not a good look,
right Well, in two thousand and three, Henrik Sorensen introduced
a Mozilla browser extension, and this one was called ad block,
and this for a while became one of the big
(39:21):
names in the ad blocking world. However, it has changed
quite a bit since Sorensen first launched the extension, because
in two thousand and six, another developer who had been
working with ad Block, a developer named Vladimir Palant, took
over ad block and essentially he stripped it down to
its foundation and then rebuilt it, and the new extension
(39:45):
was called ad block Plus. So with ad block Plus,
users could determine what they wanted to filter out or
to allow through. And again this was following that same
philosophy that priv net had set up in the mid
nineteen nineties, this idea that end users should be allowed
to control what does and does not go into their
(40:05):
web browser rather than having some third party make those
decisions for the users. And if a user doesn't mind
certain ads but hates other types, like maybe they don't
mind banner ads, but they hate pop ups well, or
they don't mind ads from certain types of companies, but
they hate ads from other types of companies, why not
let the user filter out the stuff they don't like.
(40:28):
While on the advertising side, you had folks who felt
there were a lot of reasons why that shouldn't happen, because,
of course, there are a lot of money and ads.
Allow me to remind you that Google itself is not
really a search company that is related to, say, a
video platform, namely YouTube, and other companies as well. Google
(40:51):
is really an advertising company. In fact, YouTube is really
an advertising company. Those search results on Google Search and
the videos that you get in YouTube, really that's just
a way to serve more ads to users, and the
ads generate a ton of revenue will actually come back
to Google in just a moment. Now, moving on with
(41:12):
the history of ad blockers, y'all might remember that the
world faced a massive economic crisis in two thousand and eight.
Some places were hit much harder than others. One of
the places that was hit pretty hard was Russia. In
the aftermath of the economic crisis, a few Russian developers
created a tool called net chart and that would provide
free web analytics, so you could use this tool for
(41:35):
free and get web analytic information. However, in the process
of creating and then distributing this tool, the team realized
that one individual data has an awful lot of value
to it. Two, most people didn't really understand that their
data had so much value, and they were just handing
(41:56):
their data over for free. So there was this massive
gaps there right between the value of a thing and
the general public's understanding that that thing had value. This
in turn led to situations where people had no clue
just how trackable and identifiable they were, and ultimately how
(42:17):
exploitable they were. So the developers got a little concerned
about this and they decided they would make a tool
to address it, and they introduced ad Guard, which launched
around twenty ten. So, like ad Block, ad Guard would
become a really big name in the ad blocking community.
The team turned it into a paid software application for
(42:38):
the Windows operating system, so it was an independent thing
that you would purchase, download and install, and it would
work whenever you were accessing the web on a Windows machine.
Back in those days, Google had launched its own web
browser in two thousand and eight that was called Chrome obviously.
Then a couple of weeks after Chrome launched, Google also
(42:59):
laun paunched a smartphone operating system that being Android, and
for a few years, Google was kind of hands off
when it came to ad block extensions. In fact, Google
even offered some elements of filtering as well on its browsers,
so developers could create an ad blocking extension and have
(43:20):
it for an Android device, and even list the app
in the Google Playstore. But a few years later, in
twenty thirteen, Google kind of changed its policy and began
to remove ad blocking apps from the Playstore, including ad Guard,
and you could still get the ad Guard browser extension
for Chrome. Doing so for Android was a little bit trickier.
(43:41):
It's not like it was impossible, but it was harder
to find. And the world was migrating toward mobile as
being the primary way we interact with the Internet and
the web. So there are two massive motivating factors going
on here, right, motivating factors among users who might not
(44:01):
want to be bombarded with ads, or if they were
on slower cellular networks, maybe they wanted to limit the
ads being displayed to them because again, it was slowing
down the browsing process, it was racking up the data charges.
Why would you want to be paying for the privilege
(44:21):
of seeing ads because you know you're running over your
data limits when you could just block those ads and
speed everything up. Right, It was just like back in
the dial up days. So a lot of people wanted
to have an ad blocker on their phone just so
that they weren't having to wait so long for web
pages to load. Up or to have to navigate a
(44:43):
web page while also trying to dodge all these different
ads that might display in a really irritating and frustrating way.
So there was that. But then on the other side
of it, on the industry side, there was this big
shift of people starting to use mobile devices more frequently
access the web than they had been with desktop and
(45:04):
laptop web browsers, So there was a huge incentive for
the industry to really push to make ad blocking difficult
to do on mobile devices. So is this struggle between
the two. Meanwhile, other companies would actually try to use
legal means to force ad blocking software companies to discontinue
(45:26):
their products. For example, there's a media company called alex
Springer which is based in Europe, and it sued ad
block plus in the German court system, arguing that the
service was against the law, that it was interfering with
the way alex Springer was trying to display web pages
(45:47):
to users, and that it should be illegal or it
was illegal. This case went all the way to the
German Supreme Court and ultimately the Supreme Court of Germany
ruled that it wasn't against the law. The ad block
plus wasn't doing anything illegal. Ad blocking itself was not illegal,
(46:08):
which was seen as a huge victory for the ad
blocking community. Of course, that's one court in one region,
so the battle rage is on all around the world.
And again we can understand both sides, I think, right,
you can understand the side that says we need to
find a way to be able to support what we're doing,
(46:29):
so we have to generate revenue. But you can also
understand why people are one frustrated with the experience because
there are a lot of web pages that incorporate ads
in a way that's just terrible. I don't know how
frustrated you are with web pages that are supposed to
be an article about something, or this happens all the time,
a recipe and you have to scroll and scroll and
(46:51):
scroll past like ten paragraphs of text before you get
to the point. That's because all that scrolling is taking
you past web ad versus web ad.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
Right that it's the same thing as all the articles
that were turned into slide shows back in the day,
because you could display different ads against every slide.
Speaker 1 (47:12):
In the slide show or the gallery or whatever. That
kind of stuff is what really rubs people the wrong way,
because again, they see the sausage at work, right, they
see the sausage being made and they resent being part
of that. Or it can be very intrusive with the
ones that are playing video or audio. So you can
totally understand that. And that's before you get into the
(47:33):
ad tracking part and the privacy and security concerns. Those
are obviously very understandable too. So again, I understand ad blocking.
I understand why people use it. I try not to
use it. I don't use it on this computer. I've
had it installed on another computer where I will occasionally
use it if I'm encountering web pages that are just
(47:54):
impossible for me to navigate without it being truly intrusive.
So good about it. But I'd be lying if I
said I never used it. But yeah, that's kind of
the history of ad blocking. Now, one thing I didn't
talk about are the actual mechanics of ad blocking, and
that's largely because that's a seesaw kind of discussion. Right.
(48:16):
The advertising world develops new technologies, the ad blocking world
develops new ways to get around those technologies, and it
goes back and forth. So that would require a whole
series of episodes and get into some very technical details.
I didn't think we're really necessary to get an appreciation
of how we got here. Hopefully we will eventually enter
(48:38):
into an era where everyone understands the value of their information.
We have systems in place to protect information, people have
more control over what information they do and do not share.
But until then, I think the ad blocking stuff is
really playing a necessary component in being a digital citizen
and being one that is being careful of their own identity.
(49:01):
It would be disingenuous to say otherwise, despite the fact that, yes,
this show is ad supported and I love my advertisers
like I love the folks who agree to support this show,
and for the most part, I think we've done pretty
well with partnering with companies that do do it the
right way. But yeah, you can't deny that there are
(49:25):
reasons to be careful in the ad world out there online. Okay,
that's it for this episode. It was going to be
a you know, tech stuff tidbits episode, but uh, coming
up on fifty minutes that's not a tech stuff tidbits,
but it was important. I look forward to covering related
topics that I've touched on in this episode in the future.
If there are any that y'all think are exciting? Get
(49:47):
in touch with me. Let me know. I don't know
how you'll get in touch with me. I guess you'll
figure it out. Until then, I'll talk to you again,
really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
(50:10):
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland,
and I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the
tech are you? So today I thought we would talk
a bit about ad blocking. It's no secret that lots
(00:27):
of folks out there aren't crazy about ads, and it's
totally understandable whether those ads are on television or on
the web, or on a streaming video platform which is
kind of an offshoot of the web, or yes, in podcasts.
Folks can get fed up with ads, and I get it.
Trust me, I get it when the ads are for
(00:49):
stuff that doesn't relate to you at all. For example,
you know, if I hear an ad that has anything
to do with sports, it's probably not gonna be very
effective on me. I'm just not a sports person. Not
that I begrudge anyone who loves sports that's awesome, It's
just not in my interests. But I also understand the
(01:10):
negative reaction people can have for ads that relate to you,
perhaps a bit too much, because targeted ads that you
might encounter on things like social network platforms, for example,
can get downright creepy, like I go back and forth.
As an example of my own life. Just recently, I
was checking in on Facebook to see what my friends
(01:32):
were up to, and I saw an ad for a
band performing here in Atlanta. The band being Southern Culture
on the Skids. They've been around forever, and it's a
band I really like. So this was a very targeted ad.
It was a band I liked, specifically performing in a
venue that's not far from where I live. In fact,
(01:53):
it's right next to where I used to work. And yeah,
that can feel a little creepy on the flo. If
I hadn't seen that ad, I wouldn't know to get
me a ticket so that I can listen to them
play songs like Banana Pudden and camel Walk. But I'm
sure all of you know I mean, it's it's very clear.
(02:14):
It's very much at the very center of ads. Ads
are a way to generate revenue, and in turn, revenue
can be used to fund stuff like creating content. And
if you didn't have the ads in place, you would
have to have some other means of generating revenue to
not only cover the costs that you encounter when you're
doing stuff like creating content because you know, just to
(02:39):
create stuff does cost money, and then you want to
have some money left over, right, You don't want to
just be able to cover your costs. You want to
have a little profit so that you can do things like,
I don't know, pay for rent and food and that
kind of thing. But there's no question that the history
of ads online has also It's been a history of
(03:01):
developers and advertisers and platforms making decisions that have at
times frustrated or other times caused actual harm to people
who are browsing the web. There are examples of ads
that have contained malware or ads that were peddling various scams.
I see a lot of those on social networks as well,
(03:22):
So like when I do go to Facebook, I don't
just see ads that are targeted to me. I see
ads that are highly suspicious, and then by looking into them,
I find out, oh, this is one of four hundred
different variations of this same ad, all of them purporting
to be from slightly different businesses at different locations, and
(03:42):
all of them being a scam. There are examples of
ads that auto play video and audio, which should be
illegal in my opinion. I mean, if you're like me,
and I think a lot of you are. When you're
using perhaps a desktop or laptop computer browser like a
web browser, you might have lots of tabs open, Like
(04:03):
I could have a dozen or more tabs open at
a time, And if audio starts playing in one of
those tabs and I don't immediately know which one it is,
then I'm looking for that little speaker icon in the
tabs so I can find out which one I need
to mute. It is really irritating, right, So, Like, there
are lots of ways that ADS have been intrusive and
(04:28):
not great from a user experience. So I would argue
that there are at least some cases where there is
a very forgivable tendency to want to block or skip
ADS entirely. And that's before we even get into the
privacy side of things. Right now, before I go any further,
I do have to acknowledge. I mean, there's no denying it.
(04:48):
This podcast is ADS supported. You all know that I
know that there's no denying that. Without ADS, I would
not have a show. I would not have my current job.
If it weren't for ADS, I would be doing something else,
and I would probably be really unhappy about it. Generally speaking,
I am against ad blocking because of how it can
(05:11):
impact creators and companies that make the stuff I want
to see and experience. I'm also against it because it
pushes some platforms to lock things behind a paywall that
makes it harder for other folks to access it without
breaking the bank. Some of us can afford to pay
those subscription fees to access content, others can't. I mean,
(05:33):
obviously that also fuels development of workarounds and loopholes to
try and get access to content without paying the paywall.
It just creates more problems. But again, creating stuff isn't free.
These companies and creators do need to generate revenue somehow,
and if folks are going to block ads, that only
leaves a few other options as far as revenue generation.
(05:55):
On the privacy side of things, it is much harder
to fight the practice of ad blocking. I see that
as being really important. I think users do deserve to
be able to protect their privacy, and for that job
of ad blocking, I don't think I can put up
an argument like I don't think I can argue against it.
(06:17):
So while I think the ads are important in order
to help support the content you love. I also think that,
you know, the practice of collecting user information and the
practice of buying and selling that in large amounts across
the web, that's disturbing and I cannot really, you know,
(06:37):
put up a good argument for it. So I feel
very complicated about the whole subject. But in the grand
scheme of things, if we boil it down, I guess
I would say I'm against ad blocking. I do not
use an AD blocker on the computer I'm recording on,
for example, because I think it's important that when I'm
(06:59):
researching stuff that the various sources I'm pulling from are
also getting some AD revenue in the process. However, I
do understand why people use ad blockers. So let's go
over the history of online ad blockers. Now, obviously that
history is somewhat tied to the history of web ads
(07:20):
and the web. Right. Web ads were not always a
guaranteed outcome, by the way. That's because of how the
Internet evolved and the entities that contributed to the creation
of the Internet. So you have to remember the Internet
was a sort of an evolutionary step of the earlier arpenet.
(07:40):
There are two different things, but you could say the
Internet was kind of spawned by the development of Arpenet.
Arpenet was a US government funded project that would create
the technologies necessary to allow different computer systems in different
locations to interc connect with one another and interoperate with
(08:03):
one another. This required a metric buttload of work, according
to my calculations. Researchers had to figure out how to
make very different computers talk to each other. Right, they
weren't all working on the same operating system. That in
itself was already a complicated part of the puzzle. But
(08:23):
they also had to figure out how to create the
actual mechanisms for sending information over different kinds of connections.
Those connections could be through things like telephone lines, or
through radio waves, or beaming information up to satellite, which
is still you know, radio waves, but much further away.
(08:44):
I guess the entities that made up arpinnet and later
the early Internet involved a lot of public organizations and
private organizations, but not commercial organizations, So I'm talking about
things like colleges and universities and government offices. Military installations
(09:05):
were a big part of it. Research facilities that sort
of thing, And in those early days there really weren't
a whole lot of attempts to commercialize networking. You know,
there were some attempts to commercialize within a specific location,
right to network all the machines within a business, for example, Yes,
(09:26):
but between businesses or between businesses and the world in general,
not so much. In fact, most people weren't even aware
that anything was going on at all. They just thought
of computers as being kind of independent silos. Like you
would have a personal computer, but it didn't connect to
anything unless maybe you were dialing into a bulletin board
system back in the day. Now, by the time we
(09:48):
get to the transition of arpanet into the Internet, which
again it wasn't like an evolutionary step. It was two
things that, you know, one developed after the other, but
they we had a lot of overlap. Well, one of
the major organizations that would contribute to Internet infrastructure was
the National Science Foundation or NSF. The NSF worked with
(10:11):
various organizations, both public and private, to build a significant
part of what was called the Internet backbone. Still is
the Internet backbone. NSF just isn't really part of it,
I'll explain. So you can think of the Internet as
kind of like the nervous system that you would find
in an organism, right, Like you could think of an
end computer as being the very end of the line
(10:35):
where a nerve ending happens to be. But any signals
from that computer or that nerve ending has to travel
to the brain, and to get there has to go
up the nerve and then connect through the spinal cord
all the way up to the central nervous system essentially
the brain, not just the central nervous system, because I
(10:55):
think technically that does include the spinal cord. It's been
years since I've taken biology, but you know, it has
to travel across the spinal cord in aid to get there.
It can't just jump to the brain. Well, the NSF
was contributing infrastructure that was part of the Internet's version
of the spinal cord, So a lot of the traffic
(11:16):
on the Internet would travel across insf's networks, which would
be called NSF net Here's the kicker though. In order
to do this, the NSF had to secure a lot
of funding from the US government. But in order to
do that, there were certain rules that had to be
(11:38):
put in place, Like Congress said, yes, we'll provide you
the funding as long as it follows these certain rules
because we don't want this to turn into some sort
of commercial effort as opposed to what you are telling
us you want it to be, which is a way
to connect supercomputing sites together. So one of the big
(12:01):
rules was that these the NSF connections were not allowed
to carry commercial traffic that was not to go across
NSF net. And that became a problem because NSF net
became an integral component of the Internet backbone, and that
meant that if your work wasn't related to stuff like
(12:23):
scientific research or advancing knowledge, then you started to run
into the potential that whatever you were sending would be
against the rules and technically should not be allowed to
go across the nsf net part of Internet infrastructure. In fact,
until nineteen eighty nine, the NSF wouldn't allow any commercial
(12:45):
entities to even connect to the network. So Internet service
providers that could have potentially sprung up in various places
before eighty nine were stuck if the part of the
backbone that they needed to connect to was controlled by
NSF NET. Now in eighty nine, that changed. We started
(13:05):
to see some commercial ISPs come up, and the access
improved a little bit. In nineteen ninety one, but the
general restrictions on commercial traffic across NSF net would remain
in place until nineteen ninety five. That was a sticking
point for the development of the Internet. It wasn't illegal
to run commercial traffic over the Internet in general. So
(13:27):
if your connections just completely bypassed the nsf net, like
if in order to complete a commercial transaction between point
A and point B, you never had to cross any
of the network controlled by nsf net, that's fine. There
was nothing inherently illegal about using the Internet for commercial purposes.
(13:47):
The problem was the actual infrastructure was not supposed to
do that, at least in parts of it, and that
is what complicated everything. Now it was a huge joble
The solution ended up being the creation of a new
privatized network architecture largely built on top of what was
(14:08):
learned through creating nsf net, but independent of nsf net.
It essentially meant all these companies had to build a
almost like a copy of nsf net in order to
handle all that traffic and allow NSF to decommission nsf
net in nineteen ninety five, and now traffic would just
(14:29):
move across this other privatized architecture and there would be
no limitation to the know to commercial traffic. Now, there's
a lot more to that particular story. In fact, I
could do a full episode about the entire drama around
the transition of the Internet from a purely sort of
(14:50):
research based entity into a commercial entity, But for our purposes,
we're going to leave that part there. Let's talk about
the Web and web ads, because that's what this is
really about, right, Okay, I've set it up. When we
come back, i'll talk a little bit about the birth
of the World Wide Web and how that eventually led
(15:13):
to the creation of web ads and thus ad blocking.
But first, and trust me, I understand the irony of this.
We need to take a break to thank our sponsors. Okay,
(15:36):
we're back. So the beginning of the Worldwide Web. That
starts with the guy who's credited for inventing the whole
darn thing. He was a researcher who was working for CERN,
you know, the same scientific research center that runs the
Large Hadron Collider, and his name is of course Tim
berners Lee. Tim felt that we were really missing a trick,
(16:00):
you know, we had all these important documents. He was
probably mostly thinking about scientific documents. But we had all
these incredibly important documents, and they were stored on different
computers all over the world. And a lot of these
documents related to one another, or they each related to
common topics, but they were all distinct. They were disconnected
(16:21):
from each other. But what if you could build in
a way that would allow related documents to have a link,
to share a link with each other. You know, maybe
you've got a document that's about one research project about
particle physics, and you've got another research project about particle
physics that's slightly different, But combining the two would provide
(16:42):
future researchers with a lot more knowledge that would be
beneficial to more work. If you were able to link
those two documents together, that could be a really beneficial thing.
So Tim developed hyperlink technology, which would do just what
he was thinking. You could create a digital link between
different digital documents and navigate from one to the other
(17:05):
using some sort of client software. This was the basis
for the World Wide Web, and berners Lee was able
to convince CERN, which technically owned the research because it
was his employer, to release this technology to the world
in the public domain, rather than to sell it off
and have it risk becoming some sort of proprietary software
(17:28):
which would inherently limit its utility. Now, the world's first
website launched in nineteen ninety one on August sixth. Then
it was a text based document describing the basics of
the World Wide Web project, including how hypertext links work.
The very early days of the web were really all
about text based documents. However, it didn't take too long
(17:51):
for that to change. It did happen somewhat gradually because
keep in mind, outside of universities and research centers and
the like, those few people who had Internet access were
depending on stuff like dial up modems, So if you
were including things like images, it really slowed down how
long it took for a web page to load into
a browser. By the end of nineteen ninety three, there
(18:14):
were only around three thousand websites total. Now that was
still a growth spurt, because in ninety two it was
more like ten websites. And also in nineteen ninety three,
before the NSF net was shut down, we would start
to have our first web centric platform that would support ads.
(18:36):
And that platform wasn't itself a spinoff of a company
that at the time was called O'Reilly and associates. These days,
it's just known as O'Reilly Media. It was founded by
Tim O'Reilly and the company originally focused on creating technical writing,
technical documents and consulting that kind of stuff, and a
lot of different documents and even events have come out
(18:58):
of O'Reilly. The company is one of the reasons the
concept of web two point zero even became a thing.
For example, but we want to talk about the Global
Network Navigator or GNN. O'Reilly launched the GNN website in
May of nineteen ninety three, and essentially it was an
online magazine. In fact, originally it had a quarterly publication schedule,
(19:24):
so it would only change like four times a year.
But you have to remember, in the early days of
the web, web pages typically were static. You know, you
didn't have sites updating content every day, let alone multiple
times a day. Some websites would upload, and that was that.
It just served as almost like a Yellow Pages ad
or something. It didn't change. Also, I don't know how
(19:46):
many of you know what a Yellow Pages ad is.
Moving on. So GNN was already a little different from
other web pages, right because it would actually feature updated content,
though only a few times a year, and and this
content largely focused on features about the blossoming technology of
the World Wide Web. Another way that GNN set itself
(20:09):
apart from other web pages is that O'Reilly decided they
would allow for online advertising. GNN would offer companies a
chance to secure some space, some real estate on the
web page that would be dedicated to advertising to a
potential customer. And you could use hyperlink technology to facilitate
(20:31):
traffic to a different destination where presumably someone who's visiting
GNN could become a paying customer of the company that
advertised on GNN. Well, this set up conditions for AT
and T to purchase the very first web banner. At
least as far as I can tell, it was a
brave new world. This was in nineteen ninety four when
(20:54):
the first web banner ended up being displayed to the world,
and it meant there was advertising on the Internet now.
It didn't take long for there to be a kind
of land rush to the web. You know how a
lot of companies really jumped into the whole web three
slash metaverse, slash blockchain, slash NFT bandwagon not that long ago.
(21:19):
And how despite the fact that there were a lot
of unanswered questions about the technologies in general. There was
this perception that if you didn't get in there right away,
you were going to be left behind. That's kind of
what the Internet in general and the Web in particular
was like around this time, and there was a bit
of this struggle, this rush to get an online presence
(21:43):
among various companies, and in turn that really picked up
the pace when the last restrictions on commercial internet traffic
went away once NSF net decommissioned. So in nineteen ninety five,
AOL purchased GNN from O'Reilly for the print lease some
of eleven million dollars, and in that same year a
(22:04):
couple of guys named Dwight Merriman and Kevin O'Connor came
up with a business plan. See GNN showed that online
advertising was a very real possibility, but a lot of
companies wouldn't have the know how or the resources to
facilitate advertising on their web pages. So what was needed
was a dedicated company to handle stuff like ad sales
(22:28):
and performance tracking, you know, partnering advertisers with web pages,
all that kind of stuff, running ads across networks of sites,
not just on a single page and even getting into
the earliest, earliest days of what would become targeted advertising.
So the two created a service that kind of did
(22:50):
all these things, and they called it Double Click. Kevin
Ryan would become an early investor in the service, and
later on would become CEO of the company itself. Now
this isn't the Double Click story either, but the company
did pioneer an era in which advertising would proliferate across
the web. And if you want to know what actually
(23:11):
happened to double click itself, Google announced that it would
purchase double Click back in two thousand and seven for
the even more princely sum of three point one billion dollars,
showing that web advertising had truly become a gargantuan business,
and it's now part of Google's overall advertising operations. But
(23:32):
let's get back to ads and ad blocking, and we're
back into the mid nineteen nineties. So web advertising begins
to gainsteam. Some folks start to develop ad blindness already,
because a lot of these ads were appearing either as
a banner ad across the top or the bottom of
a web page, or along the side like in a column,
(23:55):
either to the left or to the right of the
main content of the web page. A lot of people
just got really good it not paying attention to that stuff,
but some folks were still frustrated that ads were showing
up when they were trying to just surf the web.
A group of students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina started
to come up with their own idea for a company.
(24:17):
So rather than selling ad space and slapping banner ads
all over the web, they were creating an extension to
the web browser Netscape, which at the time was almost
synonymous with the Worldwide Web itself. It's easy to forget now,
but there was a time where Netscape was essentially the
definitive web browser for the Internet. That would change, and
(24:41):
things would change dramatically. Like today, you could argue that
Google Chrome is one of the biggest ones out there,
but there's still there's better competition now than there was
back when Netscape was really dominating the landscape. Now, this
extension that the students created would actually block banner ads
from showing up in a user's web browser. The leader
(25:03):
of this group of radical revolutionaries was a guy named
James Howard. From why I understand, he wasn't even a
computer science major. He was actually focused on studying drama
as a theater, not as in, let me just walk
up to the stranger in public and see if I
can provoke a wild reaction. So Howard and his fellow
students ended up creating a company called Privnet, and the
(25:25):
tool they made, the ad blocking tool, got the name
Internet Fast Forward. Why Internet fast Forward, Well, we got
to understand how web ads work, right, So when you
go to a web page, what you're really doing is
your browser is sending a request to a web server
that hosts that page, and the web server serves the
(25:49):
page up to you. It sends the page to your
web browser. Web ads, however, typically live on some other
web server. There's like a little section in the web
page that connects to this code that links to the
ad in question, and that means that there's another fetch
and retrieval process going on when you're accessing the web page.
(26:11):
It's not just the content of the page itself, it's
also the AD and that can slow things down. And again,
remember we're talking in an era where people are using
dial up internet, So you're using your dial up internet
to access a web page and it's taking a really
long time, because not only is it pulling from the
website you're going to, but any web ads that might
(26:33):
be included on the web page that you're trying to visit.
So Internet fast forward, but speed things up by blocking
those ads now. As you might imagine, the emergence of
ad blocking immediately prompted a lot of criticism from various
other parties. Obviously, ad companies were really upset because this
was their business and blocking ads was a bad thing.
(26:57):
Like if you're especially if your business is dependent upon
and the performance of ads, and people are able to
block the ad entirely, well, that performance drops to nothing
if everybody's doing it. Content companies were also upset, right
because this was how they were making revenue and being
able to allow access to the content without otherwise charging
(27:19):
for it. So a lot of people spoke up and
said that in order for content on the Internet, well
really specifically the Web, to remain free to access, there
was this unfortunate need for ad revenue because in the end,
nothing is free. There are costs associated with everything, whether
it's creating the content or hosting it, and unless you
(27:41):
have a pipeline to endless resources, you have to have
a way to generate revenue to cover costs or stuff
goes away. Now, I've read a few articles that actually
published back in nineteen ninety six. That's when the Internet
fast Forward tool started to really get attention. By the
end of that year, another company called Pretty Good Privacy
would actually purchase priv Net, the creator of Internet fast Forward,
(28:06):
and a couple of years later they would actually have
to shut down the tool because they were being threatened
with legal cases from various companies, and in order to
avoid any incredibly expensive legal fees, they shut it down.
But anyway, back in ninety six, the interesting thing that
hits me from these articles is that Howard would be
(28:30):
interviewed all the time. I mean, this was big news.
It was making like TV news, and Howard framed ad
blocking is a way to cater the browsing experience to
user preferences. He was saying, shouldn't the end user be
able to determine how they get content? Like, shouldn't they
be the ones to ultimately decide whether or not certain
(28:54):
types of Internet content come their way, which includes ads?
So why not give them a tool that lets them
block those ads if they want to? And again, you know,
since we're talking about the era of dial up modems.
This can mean saving time for the end user. Of course,
the user's time is important, so why not give them
a tool that lets some access what they want faster
(29:17):
by blocking stuff they don't want, namely ads. But interestingly,
while I was looking at all these different interviews and stuff,
one of the conversations I did not see or one
of the topics that did not really pop up in
those And maybe it was simply because the media didn't
know to ask the question was really about privacy. Privacy
(29:42):
would become an integral component of ad blocking moving on,
but in those early days, you just didn't see it
being talked about. See back in nineteen ninety four, a
computer programmer named lou Montuli had this idea. There was
a need to preserve a use when a person was
(30:03):
engaging with a web page. So let me give you
an example. Let's say you visit an online store, and
let's say you start shopping around and you're filling your
virtual cart with various items. But before you can actually
go and complete the transaction, you have to log off
your computer to go do something else. Now wouldn't it
be nice when you later had the time that you
(30:26):
could log back in on your computer, go right back
to that web page, and your cart would still have
all the things you had put into it when you
visited earlier on. Wouldn't that be nice? Of course it would.
That's kind of how the web works, you know, Otherwise
you would have to start all over and that'd be
a frustrating experience. Well, you would have to store that data,
right You would have to have a place where that
(30:47):
data would be associated with your visit to that store,
and these were the items that you specifically chose. Storing
that data on web servers look like a non starter
because maybe you would never come back to the virtual store.
Then the virtual store is just storing this data on
its servers for no reason. It's just bloating up all
(31:12):
the data storage as all these different customers come and go.
Storing the data on your computer made more sense, right, Like,
if you had just a tiny little block of data
that sat on your computer, that's not a big deal.
But holding millions of blocks of data on a server
that just didn't make sense. So then the web page
(31:33):
could access this little block of data living on your
computer through the connection with the web browser, and you
would be right back where you were from your earlier session.
You'd be able to continue shopping. This technology was already
in use in other realms of computing and it was
called a cookie. So in nineteen ninety four, cookies became
a thing for web traffic once developers created the Web
(31:55):
Specification for them to work in Netscape and later in
other browsers as well. When we come back, we'll talk
a bit more about cookies and how that would end
up fueling another era of development in the ad blocking space.
But again and again, the irony is not lost on me.
We have to take a break for some ads of
(32:16):
our own. Okay, we're back, and before the break, I
was talking about cookies.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
Now.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
The thing about cookies is that they can not only
preserve a state that you were in when you were
visiting a website. So, for example, if you logged into
a website, like if there was a user name, password
kind of gate to the website, it could preserve that
log in so that you're using the same device you
(32:52):
revisit the site, you don't have to log in again.
That kind of thing. Well, they could also potentially be
used to ida to fy someone and to track a
user's activity across the web. It gets fairly complicated, but
the basic issue here is that if you want to
really browse the web privately without worrying about your activity
(33:14):
being tracked back to you personally, cookies are one of
the things you have to be concerned about. And so
developing a use case for ad blockers focused not just
on blocking you know ads like web banner ads. It
became a matter of protecting user privacy. The content platforms
(33:34):
and advertising companies didn't really like that either, but the
die had been cast, so by the late nineteen nineties
and into the early two thousands, a whole bunch of
different ad blocking solutions emerged and became available to folks.
One of those was the CYBERsitter Internet filter tool. You know.
Internet filters allow people to set a filter to determine
(33:59):
what kind of content is allowed to come through and
what kind of content should be blocked from a web
browser entirely, and often it's used in a way where
you could argue it's used in a way to censor
information from the web. You could argue it's in a
way to protect say, children from seeing content they really
(34:20):
have no business seeing. That kind of thing. There are
lots of arguments both for and against internet filters, but
Cybercenter was a big one, and it added an ad
blocking feature in the late nineteen nineties to its its service.
A company called Wrq offered up a filter called at Guard.
At Guard around the same time that CYBERsitter introduced its
(34:45):
ad blocking tool. At Guard would block ads as well
as cookies and other content, and could also serve as
a general firewall service. While some ad block critics dismissed
ad blocking as a nuisance back when Internet f ast
Forward showed up, now people were starting to get a
little bit more concerned, right, So you did have people
(35:06):
who are saying, oh, this threatens the entire structure of
the web from a revenue standpoint, But a lot of
other people said, Oh, the average person's not going to
bother downloading an ad blocker, Like maybe a few grouches will,
but not everybody will, and so it's more of a nuisance.
It's not really that big of a deal. By the
(35:27):
late nineties and into the early two thousands, it was
starting to look like a big deal because now ad
blockers were one getting more popular and two bringing a
little more attention to things like cookies that in part
could lead to more effective targeted advertising, but the flip
side of that was it could lead to a lot
(35:48):
more tracking and identification, and people were starting to feel
pretty squirreling about that. Part of the reason that web
users were starting to experiment with ad blocking really had
to do with how web ads themselves were starting to change.
So early ads mostly involved simple banners, and they weren't
that bad right, especially early early days, because everything was
(36:11):
pretty static. You didn't have things like lots of animations
or video or audio playing in web banner ads. It
was just kind of a static image. Later on that
would start to change as things became more dynamic on
the web, the ads became more obnoxious. But really what
pushed things into high gear was the development of the
(36:32):
pop up ad. And I'm sure most of you don't
need to be told what a pop up ad is,
but just in case, a pop up ad uses JavaScript
so that when a browser accesses a web page, the
JavaScript prompts a new window, typically a smaller window, to
open up on top of the web page you actually
(36:53):
wanted to go to. So you all know these ads
they can be awful. And because of that JavaScript thing,
you can actually end up with a whole string of
pop up ads, and you know, closing one ad can
prompt another ad to open, and so on, because developers
could link pretty much any user action with a prompt
to open another pop up, and so closing one can
(37:16):
make another one open. There were also variations to this.
You didn't just have pop ups, there were also pop
under ads. This also prompts another window to open, but
it opens below the web browser, so it's hidden from
you unless you're paying attention to, like a taskbar or something.
It's hidden from you until you close out of your browser,
(37:36):
and then surprise, you've got another window that's been opened
this whole time. Now, not only was the scene as obnoxious,
it also created opportunities for malicious folks to create all
sorts of problems. On the arguably less harmful side, you
can really troll visitors to your website site by having
like one of these chains of pop ups activate, which
(37:57):
just means the user ends up having to play whack
them with all the low pop up windows while just
trying to navigate the page they were actually interested in.
That was stupid, but who is at least, you know,
relatively harmless but you could also try and house links
to malware and pop ups. This was already an issue
with ads anyway, right you had malicious actors who would
(38:20):
work with legitimate ad companies or in some cases they
would run an illegitimate AD company and secure space on
popular web pages and nestle a link that would take
people to a place where they could potentially end up
being infected by malware. That's a real issue. It's one
of the Again, one of the reasons why ad blockers
(38:41):
were really starting to take off is that companies were
not being super careful and super picky about the types
of ads they were displaying against their content, and that
meant that occasionally you had these cases where people were
getting their machines infected by malware because they clicked on
an AD and you had to follow a couple more
(39:01):
steps like installing something and then activating it or whatever.
But the point is it was not a good look,
right Well, in two thousand and three, Henrik Sorensen introduced
a Mozilla browser extension, and this one was called ad block,
and this for a while became one of the big
(39:21):
names in the ad blocking world. However, it has changed
quite a bit since Sorensen first launched the extension, because
in two thousand and six, another developer who had been
working with ad Block, a developer named Vladimir Palant, took
over ad block and essentially he stripped it down to
its foundation and then rebuilt it, and the new extension
(39:45):
was called ad block Plus. So with ad block Plus,
users could determine what they wanted to filter out or
to allow through. And again this was following that same
philosophy that priv net had set up in the mid
nineteen nineties, this idea that end users should be allowed
to control what does and does not go into their
(40:05):
web browser rather than having some third party make those
decisions for the users. And if a user doesn't mind
certain ads but hates other types, like maybe they don't
mind banner ads, but they hate pop ups well, or
they don't mind ads from certain types of companies, but
they hate ads from other types of companies, why not
let the user filter out the stuff they don't like.
(40:28):
While on the advertising side, you had folks who felt
there were a lot of reasons why that shouldn't happen, because,
of course, there are a lot of money and ads.
Allow me to remind you that Google itself is not
really a search company that is related to, say, a
video platform, namely YouTube, and other companies as well. Google
(40:51):
is really an advertising company. In fact, YouTube is really
an advertising company. Those search results on Google Search and
the videos that you get in YouTube, really that's just
a way to serve more ads to users, and the
ads generate a ton of revenue will actually come back
to Google in just a moment. Now, moving on with
(41:12):
the history of ad blockers, y'all might remember that the
world faced a massive economic crisis in two thousand and eight.
Some places were hit much harder than others. One of
the places that was hit pretty hard was Russia. In
the aftermath of the economic crisis, a few Russian developers
created a tool called net chart and that would provide
free web analytics, so you could use this tool for
(41:35):
free and get web analytic information. However, in the process
of creating and then distributing this tool, the team realized
that one individual data has an awful lot of value
to it. Two, most people didn't really understand that their
data had so much value, and they were just handing
(41:56):
their data over for free. So there was this massive
gaps there right between the value of a thing and
the general public's understanding that that thing had value. This
in turn led to situations where people had no clue
just how trackable and identifiable they were, and ultimately how
(42:17):
exploitable they were. So the developers got a little concerned
about this and they decided they would make a tool
to address it, and they introduced ad Guard, which launched
around twenty ten. So, like ad Block, ad Guard would
become a really big name in the ad blocking community.
The team turned it into a paid software application for
(42:38):
the Windows operating system, so it was an independent thing
that you would purchase, download and install, and it would
work whenever you were accessing the web on a Windows machine.
Back in those days, Google had launched its own web
browser in two thousand and eight that was called Chrome obviously.
Then a couple of weeks after Chrome launched, Google also
(42:59):
laun paunched a smartphone operating system that being Android, and
for a few years, Google was kind of hands off
when it came to ad block extensions. In fact, Google
even offered some elements of filtering as well on its browsers,
so developers could create an ad blocking extension and have
(43:20):
it for an Android device, and even list the app
in the Google Playstore. But a few years later, in
twenty thirteen, Google kind of changed its policy and began
to remove ad blocking apps from the Playstore, including ad Guard,
and you could still get the ad Guard browser extension
for Chrome. Doing so for Android was a little bit trickier.
(43:41):
It's not like it was impossible, but it was harder
to find. And the world was migrating toward mobile as
being the primary way we interact with the Internet and
the web. So there are two massive motivating factors going
on here, right, motivating factors among users who might not
(44:01):
want to be bombarded with ads, or if they were
on slower cellular networks, maybe they wanted to limit the
ads being displayed to them because again, it was slowing
down the browsing process, it was racking up the data charges.
Why would you want to be paying for the privilege
(44:21):
of seeing ads because you know you're running over your
data limits when you could just block those ads and
speed everything up. Right, It was just like back in
the dial up days. So a lot of people wanted
to have an ad blocker on their phone just so
that they weren't having to wait so long for web
pages to load. Up or to have to navigate a
(44:43):
web page while also trying to dodge all these different
ads that might display in a really irritating and frustrating way.
So there was that. But then on the other side
of it, on the industry side, there was this big
shift of people starting to use mobile devices more frequently
access the web than they had been with desktop and
(45:04):
laptop web browsers, So there was a huge incentive for
the industry to really push to make ad blocking difficult
to do on mobile devices. So is this struggle between
the two. Meanwhile, other companies would actually try to use
legal means to force ad blocking software companies to discontinue
(45:26):
their products. For example, there's a media company called alex
Springer which is based in Europe, and it sued ad
block plus in the German court system, arguing that the
service was against the law, that it was interfering with
the way alex Springer was trying to display web pages
(45:47):
to users, and that it should be illegal or it
was illegal. This case went all the way to the
German Supreme Court and ultimately the Supreme Court of Germany
ruled that it wasn't against the law. The ad block
plus wasn't doing anything illegal. Ad blocking itself was not illegal,
(46:08):
which was seen as a huge victory for the ad
blocking community. Of course, that's one court in one region,
so the battle rage is on all around the world.
And again we can understand both sides, I think, right,
you can understand the side that says we need to
find a way to be able to support what we're doing,
(46:29):
so we have to generate revenue. But you can also
understand why people are one frustrated with the experience because
there are a lot of web pages that incorporate ads
in a way that's just terrible. I don't know how
frustrated you are with web pages that are supposed to
be an article about something, or this happens all the time,
a recipe and you have to scroll and scroll and
(46:51):
scroll past like ten paragraphs of text before you get
to the point. That's because all that scrolling is taking
you past web ad versus web ad.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
Right that it's the same thing as all the articles
that were turned into slide shows back in the day,
because you could display different ads against every slide.
Speaker 1 (47:12):
In the slide show or the gallery or whatever. That
kind of stuff is what really rubs people the wrong way,
because again, they see the sausage at work, right, they
see the sausage being made and they resent being part
of that. Or it can be very intrusive with the
ones that are playing video or audio. So you can
totally understand that. And that's before you get into the
(47:33):
ad tracking part and the privacy and security concerns. Those
are obviously very understandable too. So again, I understand ad blocking.
I understand why people use it. I try not to
use it. I don't use it on this computer. I've
had it installed on another computer where I will occasionally
use it if I'm encountering web pages that are just
(47:54):
impossible for me to navigate without it being truly intrusive.
So good about it. But I'd be lying if I
said I never used it. But yeah, that's kind of
the history of ad blocking. Now, one thing I didn't
talk about are the actual mechanics of ad blocking, and
that's largely because that's a seesaw kind of discussion. Right.
(48:16):
The advertising world develops new technologies, the ad blocking world
develops new ways to get around those technologies, and it
goes back and forth. So that would require a whole
series of episodes and get into some very technical details.
I didn't think we're really necessary to get an appreciation
of how we got here. Hopefully we will eventually enter
(48:38):
into an era where everyone understands the value of their information.
We have systems in place to protect information, people have
more control over what information they do and do not share.
But until then, I think the ad blocking stuff is
really playing a necessary component in being a digital citizen
and being one that is being careful of their own identity.
(49:01):
It would be disingenuous to say otherwise, despite the fact that, yes,
this show is ad supported and I love my advertisers
like I love the folks who agree to support this show,
and for the most part, I think we've done pretty
well with partnering with companies that do do it the
right way. But yeah, you can't deny that there are
(49:25):
reasons to be careful in the ad world out there online. Okay,
that's it for this episode. It was going to be
a you know, tech stuff tidbits episode, but uh, coming
up on fifty minutes that's not a tech stuff tidbits,
but it was important. I look forward to covering related
topics that I've touched on in this episode in the future.
If there are any that y'all think are exciting? Get
(49:47):
in touch with me. Let me know. I don't know
how you'll get in touch with me. I guess you'll
figure it out. Until then, I'll talk to you again,
really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
(50:10):
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.