MMO-Champ Excessive Cookie/Ad Tracking

[Vellus]

Up until recently, I've been open to pausing my ad-blocker for MMO-Champion because I want to support a site I visit regularly. Recently, after re-downloading my browser, my defaults set a blocker back on MMO-Champ. I am absolutely STUNNED at the amount of blockers, cookies, and advertising trackers I am bombarded with when visiting the homepage alone. I have seen the amount of trackers range into the 60's in some cases.



Am I the only one that finds this troubling? Almost every website I visit, this number very rarely breaks double digits. As someone who works in data analytics, I know for a fact this is affecting performance of web pages. I find this incredibly troubling for my own privacy and I will not be unblocking MMO-Champion moving forward.

[ComputerNerd]

What we want from advertising.
Simple, non-intrusive, not detrimental to the browsing experience.
Static images or text, non-tracking if we opt into Do Not Track, and not doing anything behind our backs or that we did not specifically opt into, such as autoplaying.

If I get that, then I will turn off blockers.

Just seems no ad supplier is willing to do that unfortunately.

[Sunseeker]

My blocker is currently sitting at 48. Like you, almost every other website I visit rarely breaks the double digits and when it does, it's 11 or 12, not 48.

I will posit that this is something related to MMOC being part of the Curse network, as Curse and MTGSalvation also prompt incredibly high numbers of blocks.

[ComputerNerd]

If that is the case, then how come I am seeing 17 different companies named in the trackers/advertising in Ghostery and 38 (undetermined) items in Ublock origin.
If there were so many from google for instance, why would they be pointing to that many.
And that is the number of companies blocked, let alone how many elements from each one.

In addition to the behaviour issues I mentioned.
Autoplaying video ads are common on this site.

[Vellus]

What we want from advertising.
Simple, non-intrusive, not detrimental to the browsing experience.
Static images or text, non-tracking if we opt into Do Not Track, and not doing anything behind our backs or that we did not specifically opt into, such as autoplaying.

If I get that, then I will turn off blockers.

Just seems no ad supplier is willing to do that unfortunately.

Unfortunately it seems MMO-Champ has dug themselves a hole. They need ad revenue to survive, and have had to scale up the trackers and ads leading to more usage of blockers. The sheer number of trackers that need to load now degrade page loading significantly which I'm sure everyone notices. When ads and trackers stop putting me at risk for infections and unwanted privacy breaches, then I will unblock. Oh how I miss the early 2000's advertisements

[apples]

the internet shouldnt be a place to passively make money

so until the ad model changes, im keeping adblock on everywhere

[ComputerNerd]

Unfortunately it seems MMO-Champ has dug themselves a hole. They need ad revenue to survive, and have had to scale up the trackers and ads leading to more usage of blockers. The sheer number of trackers that need to load now degrade page loading significantly which I'm sure everyone notices. When ads and trackers stop putting me at risk for infections and unwanted privacy breaches, then I will unblock. Oh how I miss the early 2000's advertisements

Yeah, gaudy animated gifs at worst give me a headache.
Hell even google do it better on their own site, (tracking aside) with simple text links.

I want an ad to tell me what it is advertising, instead of bombarding me.
I want to make a snap decision to click or not.
Not having to wait 30 seconds.

The medium of advertising is the problem, not that we have ads.
What they do clearly in front of us, and what they can do behind our back.

[Blur4stuff]

I still don't understand why they use ads the way they do. It's simple and easy to 100% bypass adblockers AND have it not be obnoxious or risky for the user. They would make more money if they stopped what they are currently doing.

[Gloriandus]

I usually give a site that I frequent a chance and go blocker-free until I see more than one of the following:

- Ads that takeover the background of the website;
- Ads that distract from the site's content (e.g., a giant banner ad at the top that pushes content further down the page;
- In-line ads that break up the flow of text/content;
- Ads that load before most of the actual site content does;
- Sites that appear to be specifically designed around giant ad spaces instead of a coherent content layout;
- Video ads that autoplay (this went out of style years ago but has come back into practice)

MMO-C has, unfortunately, ticked too many of these boxes.

And for me, the "unforgivable sin" is any site that just won't show you the content unless you disable your ad blocker completely. I put those on the rubbish heap and never visit them again.

Example: Chrome, all extensions disabled. Heck, even after giving me that "locked up" feeling upon loading, the ads won't even load fully, so there's a ton of wasted space at the top.



A few seconds later, extensions re-enabled. Cleaner, faster, better experience.

[Gib Lover]

I'm having the worst deja-vu right now.
This exact thread has happened with these exact responses, especially Gloriandus'.
I'm not even joking, this is so surreal.

Also, I'm sitting at 39 ads blocked right now, this site will probably never be on my whitelist

[Vellus]

I still don't understand why they use ads the way they do. It's simple and easy to 100% bypass adblockers AND have it not be obnoxious or risky for the user. They would make more money if they stopped what they are currently doing.

Unfortunately there's no alternative at the moment. Forbes attempted to deviate from this model with an "ad-light" experience barring ad-block users. To this day their splash page saying "Turn your ad-blocker off" to pigeonhole you into driving revenue for them to simply look at their "Top 10 celebrity nip slip" articles is entirely not worth your time. They've since seen tremendous drops in visits since this implementation.

[chaud]

To address some points yet again:

• The number of things blocked is not equal to the number of ads you see.
• There are lots of things listed because multiple ad networks bid for the ad spot on the page, which fires off a bunch of tiny requests. This accounts for the vast majority of the blocklist. The rest is stuff like Google Analytics and the Facebook like buttons on the front page.
• As far as I know, we aren't selling any kind of tracking information, just displaying ads on the page. Any tracking comes from the ad networks.
• If there was an ad network that had better ads and still paid well enough to keep the site online, we would use them. Unfortunately that doesn't exist.
• If 5% of our users would give us $1 a month, we could probably turn off most ads. If 10% would, we could probably turn off all ads. Sadly this also won't happen.

[Mad_Murdock]

I never ran a ad blocker for the longest time (like up to 2 months ago). But there was something about the more recent set of ads that were killing my systems. About half the time of responding to a post my performance would go to a crawl and typing a letter took 2-4 secs to appear o the screen. I thought it was limited to internet explorer so I had moved to chrome and saw the same issues there, then I saw the thread Gib Lover mentioned and opted to try out. Now I never get any lagged out responses, the website is so much more responsive.

I'd prefer not to use an ad blocker and for the majority of sites I visit I can leave it disabled. Unfortunately MMO-C isn't one of them. The price of success I guess. I wonder if the more people who block them, the more ads they'll have to run to make up for it, pushing more to either quit coming or use an ad blocker.

[Gloriandus]

Give me a premium, ad-free subscription option and I'll throw money at the screen.

[Vellus]

To address some points yet again:

• The number of things blocked is not equal to the number of ads you see.
• There are lots of things listed because multiple ad networks bid for the ad spot on the page, which fires off a bunch of tiny requests. This accounts for the vast majority of the blocklist. The rest is stuff like Google Analytics and the Facebook like buttons on the front page.
• If there was an ad network that had better ads and still paid well enough to keep the site online, we would use them
• As far as I know, we aren't selling any kind of tracking information, just displaying ads on the page. Any tracking comes from the ad networks.

Plenty of websites share the same ad networks, yet I have yet to encounter any on the scale MMO-Champ is on with the volume of items blocked, whether that be from the ad network or the site itself. Is this not seen as a problem?

[Aori]

MMOC is one of the main culprits that lead to me getting adblock in the first place. Whatever scripts were running in the ads was making my system completely unstable while browsing MMOC.

[Self Inflicted Wounds]

To address some points yet again:

• The number of things blocked is not equal to the number of ads you see.
• There are lots of things listed because multiple ad networks bid for the ad spot on the page, which fires off a bunch of tiny requests. This accounts for the vast majority of the blocklist. The rest is stuff like Google Analytics and the Facebook like buttons on the front page.
• As far as I know, we aren't selling any kind of tracking information, just displaying ads on the page. Any tracking comes from the ad networks.
• If there was an ad network that had better ads and still paid well enough to keep the site online, we would use them. Unfortunately that doesn't exist.
• If 5% of our users would give us $1 a month, we could probably turn off most ads. If 10% would, we could probably turn off all ads. Sadly this also won't happen.

I appreciate your response here. But do you have any plans for mobile devices? I would love to surf on my phone. And what about video ads with noise that randomly activate?

[chaud]

I appreciate your response here. But do you have any plans for mobile devices? I would love to surf on my phone. And what about video ads with noise that randomly activate?

Better mobile support for the front page and forums is on the list, hopefully something we will get to this year. As far as auto playing audio, definitely not something we want.

Plenty of websites share the same ad networks, yet I have yet to encounter any on the scale MMO-Champ is on with the volume of items blocked, whether that be from the ad network or the site itself. Is this not seen as a problem?

Most of them don't have multiple ad networks bid for the slot. This doesn't cause any significant performance issues as the requests are tiny and don't block the page loading.

[Erolian]

Better mobile support for the front page and forums is on the list, hopefully something we will get to this year. As far as auto playing audio, definitely not something we want.



Most of them don't have multiple ad networks bid for the slot. This doesn't cause any significant performance issues as the requests are tiny and don't block the page loading.

I would love to be reasonable about my adblock with you guys but this website is/has been one of the most annoying places ever. Auto playing ads around here are nothing new. They're actually the very reason I started using adblock years ago. This website. Just this one alone is what pushed me to use it to begin with.

[Vellus]

Better mobile support for the front page and forums is on the list, hopefully something we will get to this year. As far as auto playing audio, definitely not something we want.



Most of them don't have multiple ad networks bid for the slot. This doesn't cause any significant performance issues as the requests are tiny and don't block the page loading.

I'm not sure I agree with the performance issue bit. It's entirely possible the trackers themselves don't affect performance, but as someone who's experienced this on multiple devices, with multiple different networks and in multiple countries, having an adblocker scour the page for 45-50 items on every page and then block them certainly does have an affect. And I would imagine without a blocker, the enormous banner ads among other types even without their trackers would also cause performance issues. Not all of us can afford those Unicorn builds