My naive take is: wouldn't it be easy to go around ad blockers by:
1.) Making all ad traffic route through the origin website.
2.) Serving ads in the same way that the content is served -- so it is more difficult to separate.
Note: To get some things out of the way: I like that ad blockers are effective. I understand that content producers need to make money and sometimes the only viable option may be ads. Some exceptions: youtube and some social media sites are able to serve ads effectively. I am focused on the "web" in general.
> “1.) Making all ad traffic route through the origin website.”
AFAIK, ad networks don’t want to do this because it would allow the origin website to tamper with the traffic and commit ad fraud.
However, there are some ways to make it look like it’s coming from the origin website (when it’s really not):
- CNAME cloaking: set the DNS record of one of your sub-domains to point to an ad network (b.example.com -> adnetwork.com). This method used to be effective, but now adblockers (such as uBlock Origin) will check the DNS records for CNAMEs and prevent this.
- Instart Logic: I don’t quite understand how, but somehow this company successfully (!) made 3rd-party requests look like 1st-party (on Chrome only. Firefox doesn’t have this issue). A separate extension, uBlock Origin Extra, is required in order to un-disguise these ads.
There is more. Facebook runs its own ads, so it doesn’t rely on a 3rd-party. It has been successfully disguising Sponsored posts as normal posts for years. Adblockers still can’t distinguish between the two. https://www.dylanpaulus.com/2019-11-24-how-fb-avoids-adblock...
Even if the origin web site were honest there are many technical reasons statistics like that can be wrong; for instance a browser might render the page out of a cache.
The origin could have the ads served by the buyer but then the origin has to trust what the buyer says.
Having a third party serve the ads makes it at least possible that an impression or click is honest, but even with the safeguards we have the ad fraud problem is dire: