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