Banner blindness

前幾天的 Hacker News Daily 上看到「Why do people not notice our enormous, prominent, clear and contrasting purple banner?」這篇 2018 年的討論,裡面在講為什麼使用者會常態性忽略 banner 的內容。

在答覆區裡面有人提到了維基百科上面的 Banner blindness 這個條目,題到了網站的使用者會刻意或是非刻意的忽略掉像 banner 的資訊:

Banner blindness is a phenomenon in web usability where visitors to a website consciously or unconsciously ignore banner-like information. A broader term covering all forms of advertising is ad blindness, and the mass of banners that people ignore is called banner noise.

開頭也提到了 banner 廣告 CTR 的變化:

The first banner ad appeared in 1994. The average click-through rate (CTR) dropped from 2% in 1995 to 0.5% in 1998. After a relatively stable period with a 0.6% click-through rate in 2003, CTR rebounded to 1% by 2013.

所以這個現象有個專有名詞來形容...

原來 Disqus 已經被網路廣告公司買走了...

在「Disqus, the dark commenting system」這邊才看到 Disqus 被網路廣告公司買的消息:

Disqus was acquired by an advertising company called Zeta Global in 2017. Obviously, advertising companies do everything to increase their revenue (Ex: the Big G).

引用的報導則是在「Zeta Global acquires commenting service Disqus」這邊可以看到,大約在三年前發生的事情...

基本上已經變成廣告追蹤平台了:

I analyzed the network requests log. Disqus makes HTTP requests to 11 different third-party domains through the browser. All of these websites are trackers/pixels (Even some were detected as malware by my security guard).

而且就算是付費會員也一樣,還是會追蹤:

When you provide a free product, money should come from somewhere. Disqus uses advertising for that. Now, I subscribed to a paid plan trial of Disqus to see if things change or not. No! Even in the paid plans, the same pixels are loaded on the client-side. Looks like there's no way to opt-out from tracking.

後面的推薦可以看看就好,自己架應該還是比較好的選擇... 用「open source comment system」搜有些東西可以參考。

廣告的 SDK 因為走 HTTP 傳輸而洩漏大量資料...

廣告走 HTTP 而且還帶了一堆敏感資訊,算是最近討論蠻熱烈的問題:「Leaking ads」。

而且還分析找出有哪些是超大的廣告 unencrypted domain,像是這樣:

不過裡面一堆都不熟悉的廣告業者,反倒是聯想的網域被抓出來了:

不過行動裝置上能控制的東西太少了... 裝廣告阻擋程式比較實際,iOS 上不 JB 應該是只有 VPN 的方案,而 Android 上的方案應該就比較多了,除了 VPN 以外有 /etc/hosts 甚至是 firewall solution。

判斷是否為付費文章的瀏覽器套件

AdDetector 是個 ChromeFirefox 的套件,可以在頁面上顯示這篇文章是不是付費文章:

AdDetector reveals articles with corporate sponsors.

會在最上面出現紅底的警告說明:

這個套件之所以未被發展出來,主要是因為付費內容即使被標注,也都是很不明顯的標注。這個套件的目的就是希望讓標注更清楚。