How we fought bad ads in 2015
googleblog.blogspot.com
googleblog.blogspot.com
http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ (transparent and no overhead, works on Android too!)
https://www.eff.org/privacybadger
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock (a handful of websites will detect it - you can then switch to visual blocking for that domain to get around it, for FF: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/ublock-origin... )
https://noscript.net/ (overkill for some, a lot of hand tweaking required to keep the Internet working)
Result: 0 (zero) explicit ads
Long term result: more money being poured into covert marketing
And let's call the advertising business model what it is: a get rich quick scheme. Undercut the straight up competitors that charge for their product by fooling consumers into thinking you're offering what the other guy is offering, but for free. Come on, who could turn down that? Or make something "valuable" that no one is willing to pay for (WTF?), so again make it appear free.
Only the truth is it isn't free. We all pay in the end. The lunch is not only not free, it's costing us more and its loaded with toxic crap.
Admittedly I suck as a writer, but ever time I make my very strong case that advertising may be the primary evil of internet[1], I almost invariably receive a great number of silent downvotes. Upton Sinclair explains why:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
-
I'd be interested in hearing/discussing a solid pro-ad argument, but I've yet to find one.
* You need to bind real world money to online browsing, somehow. This means you need some kind of blunt "want to see the content? Pay X money, here are paypal and CC info links".
* People who do not have access to these tools - there is still a sizable chunk of America without a bank account, and often without access to credit cards - are thus cutoff from most web services.
* The Internet was predominantly built on principles of no barrier information exchange. Putting a paywall up is implicitly putting up a barrier to knowledge, which has deeper effects than just bottom lines on culture.
I would absolutely a lot of sites currently ignoring monetiziation and just using ads as a surrogate are making a mistake. I also recognize advertising is predatory and while I am arguing ads open up the Internet to the poor advertising also disproportionately harms the poor by manipulating them into making superfluous purchases they cannot afford.
But I also cannot condone a paywalled experience where you need to pay $3 to watch youtube, or $2 a month for Facebook, or $1 a month to use Twitter. Rent seeking is one of the great threats to civilization in our current era and the fundamental is that all these websites build value off of their exclusivity guaranteed by the state, thus making them the ultimate renteers of the services they offer because by definition nobody else can compete with them at being youtube or facebook or twitter - you can just make alternative products meant to fill the same niche. Its like using hand soap as a substitute for bar soap because someone owns the rights to physical bars of soap. It can do the same job but its not the same product.
Which is why I am extremely wary of pushing a paywalled Internet as a solution.
Now, there are absolutely alternatives to both models - Wikipedia demonstrates an annual fundraiser model akin to Kickstater or Patreon class crowdfunding to keep things running without ads or paywalls - but at the same time there are tons of comments about how Wikipedia should use ads so people don't have to feel guilty about not contributing when they don't have the money to do so while Wikimedia runs the large banner ads in December. Its the same psychological manipulation as ads, except possibly more benign since its from the project itself.
In a perfect world, all our software endeavors would be paid for before we even start writing them so that the code could be free and the servers run forever without worrying about money, but that model doesn't align with western shareholder-value driven markets at all. The whole point is to make something at fixed cost and extract potentially endless revenue from the monopoly IP gives you. For better or worse, that is how this economy is operating now.
Not really. Sure, that's an alternate that people propose, but not one I think will ever take off. And honestly, I don't care. I think the "funded" web has a lot of potential, but it has just ended up squandered.
> ...but that model doesn't align with western shareholder-value driven markets at all.
So? I don't really care about that market. For a long time people made software without being paid. I write free (as in beer and speech) software in my spare time. It's cheaper than ever to run your own server. I don't view the "western shareholder-value" market as valuable to the internet as your making it out to be.
That's because there is no argument to be had. Ads subsidize the vast majority of content on the internet, full stop. Just as they did TV stations before cable. That content wasn't free, those ad companies paid for their ad spots, which paid for those television shows. The same is true for the internet, without ads, the internet would look very, very different. Without ads, there would be no innovation, and a hell of a lot less content, 80% or more less. We're talking going back to the mid 1990s, and not in a good way.
So I guess if that's your ideal internet, sure, that's not an argument for ads. But for me, I prefer the current internet. I like my websites like reddit, facebook and youtube. I like having the news at my fingertips. I like being able to watch any TV show I want.
It's a butterfly effect on a massive scale - you remove ads from the equation, the majority of what we know as the internet goes with it because they're directly responsible for the bulk of the innovation.
There are myriad of other choices than just "ads like now" or "no ads". There are also other revenue streams, other forms of advertising, other forms of commerce. The way you picture the situation has nothing to do with reality of choices.
And I say, bring it on. Majority of the Internet is crap. It'll be better to see it go. Most content that's actually valuable is treated either as a loss leader or simply cost to be covered from external sources. The rest can be covered with donations. People who want to share something useful will share something useful. What we will get rid of is all those poor attempts at making a quick buck off people.
I think Gizmodo is crap, so I don't read it. But Gizmodo's existence doesn't bother me.
> ads subsidize the vast majority of content on the internet, full stop
And most of that content is bullshit. I wouldn't miss most of the ad-based sites. Most of the "innovation" is bullshit. I disagree that we'd go back to the mid-90's setup, but I'd even prefer that to what it is today.
The internet did just fine before ads, and it'd do just fine if they disappeared. I stand by my statement of there being no solid pro-ad argument.
Seriously, let people be.
Now, I am not saying I like the surveillance economy, and I don't, by any means, enjoy ads. I also think we are risking a lot by the erosion of privacy as a value in our societies in the name of ad targeting. But I thought I'd point out there are social ills associated with pay services as well.
Freemium is another option, but it quickly becomes about finding a balance between providing a good enough free service that people want to use and thus promote it, and yet crappy enough that enough will upgrade to the pay version.
Note: My paycheck or the future of my current workplace does not depend on ads ;)
However, the real cost is the content that's not created. If an author is paid by the book then they tend to be of reasonable length. When paid by the page, you get content that never really ends. Compare MMO's with single player games and generally MMO's last much longer, but are less fun while your playing.
Advertising driven content is similarly insidious. You don't want people to spend a lot of time reading or thinking, just click click click.
Also, sure, some content works better when each copy is paid. But my point is that a lot of the software platforms themselves: a) seem to be doing quite well on ad revenue, b) wouldn't necessarily be better for most people if they charged fees instead. Again, this applies to software services (search engines, email servers, social networks), more so than produced content itself (books, movies, games). As far as I know, the only real contender for traditional sales in the content space is crowdfunding[1].
News (investigative journalism in particular) is an interesting third case, where it is not clear whether ad supported or subscription are viable at all long term.
[1] Anecdotally, some of my favorite games and comics are crowdfunded, one of my favorite "tv" shows, but none of my favorite movies or books. Even though crowdfunding a book should not be expensive at all.
You know what's more important than "quality of access"? Quality content and quality services. The perverse incentives of the ad-supported model results in great quantities of poor if not negative quality crap. The kind of stuff that manipulates and exploits the very people you are speaking up for, those who can least afford it.
Clearly there are other models. It's up to us, the technologists, the so-called innovators. Where are our innovative powers to come up with alternate busniness models? Where are our backbones to stand up against selling out the internet so that we can get rich quick?
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." – Jeff Hammerbacher, fmr. Manager of Facebook Data Team, founder of Cloudera
But we still need a press that's independent from the govt, and we can't expect everyone to run all websites as a charity.
It's interesting just how much of a disconnect young people have with this topic (in my experience, older people are skeptical of all the free content on the 'net. My grandmother thought she was going to get a bill from youtube for watching so many videos and not having to pay anything up front). Perhaps it's one of the reasons why they call our generation "the entitled generation". We've always had free content on the internet so we don't appreciate or understand how the people who create that content get paid.
Content itself wouldn't exist for you to view. There would be very little (nothing at all) for you to P2P. The internet would essentially be the IRC. People don't write in-depth articles for the hell of it. They expect to get paid.
The internet itself wouldn't even exist without ads. So your premise is wrong. Ads are the biggest driver of innovation on the internet right now. Inherently so. Because people want to get paid so they get more and more creative. Everything from youtube videos to web content, to science articles. They all flourish and exist because of ads, not because of your make believe hypothetical solution. You know, the one that is still not invented, nor have you even explained it. If such a solution was possible, we'd be using that instead. Until then, let's stick to reality, thanks.
I hope you are joking, or knowingly exaggerating. The internet was around waaaayyyyy before ads. Even when hte internet became a conduit for commerce, the first ads were just banners that advertisers bought on a (usually) related web page. Kind of like newspapers.
Then Google decided that they would show ads based on what people were looking for. Rather than guessing my interests because I'm on the West Marine web page, they will show me ads related to my search inquiry. Starts to get a little creepy, but as long as they don't save my queries it's probably ok.
<insert a montage/>
And now we are where we are today.
This statement is so laughably and obviously wrong to anyone that is aware of the history of the Internet, or has the abilitiy to think logically.
"Ads are the biggest driver of innovation on the internet right now. Inherently so"
That is completely irrelevant to whether or not the Internet would exist and be good if Ads didn't exist.
"Because people want to get paid so they get more and more creative"
You don't seem to be aware of the difference between "getting paid" and "getting paid by using ads"
"Everything from youtube videos to web content, to science articles. They all flourish and exist because of ads"
Again, this is laughably wrong to anyone with the capability of thinking.
"your make believe hypothetical solution" - You mean, "pay for content". Yay, I know that's crazy! The reason that we don't have good ways to pay for content, is because Ads have made that incredibly difficult, because Ads give the illusion that you're getting something for free. How do you compete with that? You can't. Because Ads are here, and they're ruining the Internet, and they're ruining any innovation that would occur in non-Ad payment methods.
Internet advertising used to be done far less creepily. For example, you can do context-advertising: show me an ad for surfboards when I'm reading about surfing. I have no problem with that. You can guess that I'm interested in surfing if I'm reading the article. You don't need my shopping history for that.
And please also see this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10949265
What IS bad, especially with respect to the 'net is the sheer volume, hostility, low quality, and threat to our safety that our current methods of advertising (ab)use. Why should an article on WSJ be megabytes of download? Why is every action I perform with default settings on public sites being tracked with an efficiency and persistence governments could only dream of? Why can't I opt out globally? Because of the hostility of the environment I think it is acceptable, fair, even responsible to do everything in our power to regain control of our identity and information.
The part everyone needs to figure out is, how can I find out about quality products and services in a way that is meaningful and safe. Maybe it is simply to do everything we can to make ads distasteful and rely on word of mouth and hunting for things when we need them, but there's probably a balance in there somewhere.
You realize you are a hypocrite for saying this, right? You cannot on one hand say all ads are bad, and be an advertiser yourself without being a hypocrite. This is probably what leads to the down votes.
Additionally your points are badly argued. I can't follow your argument that advertising is a get rich scheme at all. You seem to be arguing that advertising makes people offer dodgy business models, but the two don't seem to relate at all. For example one area where buyer hostile business models is very common is in enterprise software, and those sales rely very little on advertising and instead on relationships.
In summary, your complaints about being downvoted seem unjustified.
It does everything NS does, and more. Though at the cost of a more complex interface, and a few more failure modes.
This includes: Scripts, cookies, CSS, XHD, frames, and other elements, on a host-by-host, or domain, basis, with optional default rules.
Unfortunately I've had friends & family fall for this and similar scams (see also "birth certificate copy" "criminal record" "arrest record" "US travel authorisation" "US visa" et al), and sometimes they don't even file on your behalf (just take your money and run).
These things have been going on YEARS, and I can find numerous examples in seconds with no research. When is Google going to put a stop to this?
PS - It is disturbing how many less computer literate people have no concept of what is an advert and what is a result in a search engine. They'll just click the top thing, which is scary for the above examples.
PPS - Bing is much MUCH worse. More scams, and ads are harder to spot (by design?).
For example:
- Let people mark different links as spam
- Hire a larger team to police this
Certain searches should NOT be monetised at all. When people are looking at entering sensitive personal information (e.g. passport, visa, birth certificate, arrest record, tax filing) it is too dangerous to allow adverts which may contain phishing scams into the mix.
Too many people click ads thinking they're search results.
- How much money does Google make from 'bad' ads? (Or how much does Alibaba make from 'counterfeit' product ads? Or Amazon, etc.)
- How many false positives will 'good' actors tolerate before they substantially reduce their spending on your platform?
- How many resources do you put on the problem while making sure you continue to earn a large % of revenue from the 'bad' actors while minimizing negative consequences from your users or regulators?
Google as a search engine falls under a strange category. On one hand, users put more trust in what they see on Google, making the ad inventory more valuable. On the other hand, if something bad happens they understand it isn't from Google -- something which may not be as clear cut as say, purchasing a defective product off Amazon from a third party seller. (Then there is the revenue that comes for display ads, syndicated search feeds, things that 99% of users had no idea it was Google gaining much of the monetary benefit in the first place.)
On top of all of this a large portion of users who do click on ads on Google have no idea they even clicked an ad in the first place.
I usually find much more valuable information on non .gov sites just because it's not hidden fifty links deep. The only valid reason (imo) to go to a .gov site is to e-file (or whatever they're calling it) something.
https://i.imgur.com/iimLjyW.png
Can't reproduce
I can reproduce 100% of the time: http://i.imgur.com/9KJ4LSm.png
I receive identical ads on my Android smartphone connected to a completely different network (4G T-Mobile).
So then I RDC-ed into an Azure instance (2012 R2) I have running in the "West US" zone, identical results.
So if I have a malware infection then it has also infected my phone and a virtual machine running half way across the country. Three networks, three operating systems, same results.
And yes, bing is much worse, look at those ads (or are they search results? hard to make difference): http://imgur.com/a/l7mMv
I just visited the download.com page for Chrome and it has two ads served by Google. Both ads contain fake download buttons: http://i.imgur.com/eAATuwb.png
Google ads are dangerous.
It's interesting that you thought they are. What made you think that?
The website even claims the symbol is Google's: http://imgur.com/tWV4ROd
Yet when I search for "download Firefox", the thing I see is malvertising. https://i.imgur.com/IRQ85fx.png
I just went and downloaded the app from that add and compared the checksum against the APK on my phone of the same version (version 42.0.2, downloaded from Google Play)
They both match. (Both SHA256 checksums are D0B5A524ABFD5AD9D73DFF4DA398423CB7B337797FBA0C039F3A44CAE259B4B0, if you want to verify it from me as well)
So that site is providing an untampered download of firefox, so there is no "malware" anywhere.
In fact that site (HTZapps) seems to be a curated list of "safe" apps available to download, an alternative app store much like fdroid or the amazon app store.
It even follows the Adsense guidelines on their download page (clearly called out advertisements, no more than 3 on the page, only one above the fold, they don't interrupt the flow of the page, etc...)
Their home page looks like what i'd expect an app store's home page to look like, full of apps. There's not even any ads on the home page!
And besides, i don't care what it looks like "at first glance". if you are going to call out someone's website as "malware" then you'd better do your damn homework first.
It's an advertisement which seeks to get users to download software from an unofficial source. The site does not provide links to the official sources.
The advertiser has paid money to get users to go to their site instead of the official source. The advertiser seeks to misdirect users into visiting their site (which is loaded with ads) instead of the official one. I consider this misdirection to be malicious.
You're correct though in that just randomly picking mirrors is a bad idea. I seriously doubt your average person is utilizing checksums.
Sure, if you're utilizing checksums the way they should be then go ahead. But honestly, even I don't care that much - my ad-heuristic was sufficient so far :). I should probably start using them. I guess it's like with all things crypto - the UX sucks so bad that most people don't bother.
Well...it would take a particularly craft individual and far too much time, but spoofing a malicious MD5 checksum should be considered plausible. The chances of it being malicious, however, are drastically reduced to such a large degree as that it is safe to consider it negligible. (Note: I only make this claim about MD5 checksums, not SHA-1 or SHA-2. I do not consider MD5 secure in any manner and my trust of SHA-1/SHA-2 isn't exactly high either.)
I provide SHA-1 and MD5 checksums of any software I distribute - if only because I think it is the proper thing to do. Even if most people don't bother checking them (let alone know how to check them)
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/11643/Exploiting-MD5-col...
Author and publisher accountability.
Advertising providers, and advertising publishers, who forward "bad ads" are given a time-out.
Perhaps 10 minutes for the first instance, but increasing durations for repeat ocurrences. Days, weeks, and months for gratuitious violations.
Ad providers and publishers who find they're being timed out for violating standards are, likely, going to clean up their acts, and find ways to ensure that mistakes don't happen. Including direct vetting of content -- on their own if not by Google.
This is in Google's interest, because, as with others on this thread, the way I fought bad ads in 2015 was to install 60,000 lines plus of /etc/hosts entries, uBlock origin, Ghostery, Privacy Badger, uMatrix, and, for added pleasure, Styleish, to rewrite site CSS myself. On all my own platforms.
And across the desktops of users I administer for.
Virtually all advertising is worthless, targeted advertising doubly so, and Google are in for hurt if they cannot reverse this perception. Meantime they're best positioned to buy themselves a few more years of time.
The other end they could try fixing is to make the results of directed product search -- that activity that happens when people are actively seeking products or services -- not suck as abysmally bad as it does now. Boot camp for vendors of how you should, and shouldn't, write ad copy, take product images, etc., might not be out of the question. Not that Google's to blame for all of this (not in the least) -- Amazon's product search pages are as bad as any I've seen online (Ikea, by contrast, does well, the moreso because they showed me what I wanted to look for at the store).
Or maybe it's time for a true Federated Retail initiative.
These ads push unrelated content in an unwanted way by aggressively interrupting the normal flow.
This is not acceptable - Internet is not a TV.
I think that the video ads are a huge detachment from the initial way Google handled the ads.
But stop spamming every article related to ads with comments about it. Half of HN readers work in a company powered by ad-tech and some of us actually want discussion about the article in question.
We built this prison.
They don't make anything easier. If I want something, I will get it, otherwise it's just annoying.
It's great that they are working to make ads safer (which is obviously in their interest as well), but they have already lost me (and I guess many others). Even AdSense ads are obnoxious these days (see [1] for a taste). On mobile many websites are completely unusable because of ads.
I suppose something subliminal is at work even so, but I imagine there are many more people like who just avoid even donating their eyeballs to an advertisement.
Allow me to repost a previous comment of mine[1]:
Whenever a debate about advertising pops up on HN, many people defend it as the necessary way for consumers to find out about good products. Healthy free markets depend on informed consumers, but to think that advertising results in informed consumers makes little sense. I find it strange that a community of logic and science oriented people can hold such a notion.
When communities were small, reputation was king. If your town had two bakers, everyone knew which one was good and which one sucked. No amount of advertising would fool the townsfolk into going to the sucky one.
But this doesn't scale to huge cities with tens, hundreds or thousands of choices. We can't know the reputation of such a wide array, and we can easily be fooled by advertising. Internet-based recommendation systems make the grapevine and reputation scalable. I hope we see more innovation. Yelp is a start, but it fails miserably because if I rate a place 5 because I love very authentic Thai food, and another person rates it a 1 because they are used to Americanized Thai, the restaurant gets a 3 (I'm simplifying for illustrative purposes). In other words, Yelp's rating is useless to both me and the other person.
I'm hoping for a future where recommendation systems and collaborative filtering get so good that they render marketing and advertising useless.
-
People do have similar patterns of thinking in the more familiar real world. Which area in the city you think is safer, and has more honest businesses - the clean one, with occasional company name banner, or that with every square meter of vertical surface taken by an ad?
If we extrapolated the view you're describing to the world at large, someone would have already noticed the general lack of correlation between advertising and revenue and the ad industry would be decades dead. As it stands the correlation is pretty solid and advertising is still profitable to be in and sought after by those who want to grow and shape their brand image.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/08/why-good...
An independent agency is likely to provide consumers with more accurate advice, AND can more effectively establish trust in decent products. I know Which? exists in the UK, and apparently there's something called Consumer Reports in the US. Is it any good?
And what are all the ways you can discover things you want? I'd say the top two for most people are word-of-mouth and advertising.
Advertisers: please piss off and let me discover the world on my own.
I agree with you on the second part. I block all ads on all computers I use, so they're pretty useless to me, but I still understand why they exist and the job they do.
The very root of suffering is desire. -Buddha (paraphrased)
And this article doesn't mention malgorithms. I do a bit of stuff around suicide prevention, and it's surprising how often rope sellers turn up after a search for [suicide rope], which feels suboptimal.
Dear marketing departments, I do not want relevant ads. I don't like unknown third parties influencing my decisions. If I must see ads, I'd rather see ads for tampons and sports cars and business real estate, because I'm not going to buy those things, so you're not manipulating me.
Please stop perpetuating the lie that you're somehow doing me a favor with "relevant ads", they are exactly what I invest a lot of effort blocking.
Don't tell me "I just google for something if I want to consume it," because truly innovative products and services are outside the realm of general imagination, that's what makes them innovative.
And all the great products and services you learned about from word of mouth? Guess how your friends heard about them...
Advertising is annoying as hell, but it has value.
Imagine you are thinking about buying a car. You think about your needs, your budget, the different costs involved, the technical choices etc.
You are then bombed with very relevant ads for some car X that is suitable for your needs.
From that point, if you decide to go on searching for the best car matching your needs, you'll be comparing the models to the X car, and your vision will be tinted every time you see it in the results.
Perhaps that X car is actually the one that fits your needs the best. But until you make a choice you'll have to make an effort to discard all the promotion and overselling surrounding X. You'll be spending energy to ignore information thrown at you because you need to think at it independantly to compare with the other choices.
In this sense, I also feel relevant ads are pollution
This is great because it makes sure most of the ads I see are not offensive and will have no effect on my life.
There is nothing an advertiser could do to convince me to listen to, read, or watch their ad. The hidden/in context ads are somewhat unavoidable (eg ads for YC on HN), but I write code to filter out such things when I see patterns. I'm working on releasing an extension that subs out all brand names on the web.
And yet, somehow, I still manage to live a modern life of plenty. If I need something, I'll look for it. In fact, I find that this leads me to higher quality and more innovative products that better fit my needs - if a service spreads through advertising, that's very good evidence that it's both shitty and not targeted at me. If your memory is polluted by advertising, you'll tend to reach for inferior products first. Advertising has negative value for the individual and the ecosystem, because companies compete on marketing and not on product.
This lifestyle works for you precisely because the vast majority of the rest of the market does not live this way. Capitalist economies (where the consumers are individuals rather than one large buyer like the state) require products and services to get public awareness. The best way to achieve public awareness is through paid for mass communication.
As more information-savvy and time-sensitive (read: higher-income) consumers reject advertising, companies seeking to target them will have to find alternate methods of reaching out to them. If information distribution continues to be disintermediated, then they might find that the only way to do that is by focusing on building things people legitimately want to use and tell their peers about. Traditional advertising will become even more a ghetto than it already is, and will primarily target low-value consumers.
Justify that this is of value to the people.
I'm pretty sure one could actually reduce your assertion to "capitalist economies require classes of products and services to get public awareness". I don't need to be constantly made aware of a particular brand of juice or a particular barber shop. It's enough I learn that there are things like "juices" and "barber shops". I'll find some when I need them.
There is no connection between these two statements, and the former is not the assertion I made.
Please define it concisely and accurately, using a quantifiable metric and no examples, so that I may either provide counter-examples to your statement or question the societal relevance of the metric you choose.
What it absolutely doesn't require is pushing information. If I need a product or service, I'll look it up. As for potentially useful services I don't even know they exist, I'll discover them when I'm bored and start browsing ad catalogues. Everything that I actually need I'll learn from friends and family anyway (aka. word-of-mouth).
Here is where advertisement stops being useful and starts being malicious: the very core principle of "creating a need". The idea that you need to create a need in customer that they didn't have before. This is wrong, manipulative and malicious. I don't need you to hack my life like this and profit off it. I can discover the world on my own.
On a clean system I was watching stuff on youtube and got some random malware ad being served up (not a video pre-roll ad, one of the banners that shows up in the video area). It was the typical "Drivers are out of date" type bullshit.
I spent about 20 minutes trying to report that it was malicious,but couldn't find out how to do it. Clicking on the "Ad by Google" link just took me to a random Adsense marketing type page.
They make it sound like they maybe run the ad through some automated tests and then just send it out.
A decent human approver of ads would never approve an ad that looks like a big green button that says "Download now".
"Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Taboola are paying the owner of Adblock Plus to unblock ads on their websites at a fee of "30% of the additional ad revenues" they would have made were ads unblocked."