Reports of cancellation of AdSense accounts

Neither does what Adsense does per se. What Adsense does is it reads the content of the page, and loads relevant ads from from its database of ads (things people put in adwords) and from GDN (also things people put in AdWords, and DBM, only they're pictures). The GDN bit has always been a bit icky IMO.

So, no, they aren't alternatives. Chiticka and others WERE alternatives, but there was a quality control issue (also supply side issues, because Google is a HUGE brand) which led to their eventual demise and/or pivots to waaaay dodgier practices like popunders.

For Google apps, if you have a business account ($5 a month per user no minimum), their phone support is incredibly good. You can call right in, talk right with a support person. I have had to call a few times on migrations for email and some issues with Google docs and the support has been nothing less than impressive.

* Ad impressions have gone up - its getting easier and easier to launch sites so the absolute number of ads on the internet is definitely going up. That doesn't speak to either side of the 'ads are dying' claims.

* CPM rates are more or less going down

* As CPM goes down, publishers are looking to recoup their losses, so they use bigger/more invasive ads, and/more ads more .

* Again, this leads to 'Ads have increased by a LOT in the last 10 years'

* Just because there's a lot of it doesn't necessarily mean it's gotten better.

* Native advertising is good and all, but it's out of reach for _a lot_ of people. There's a huge opportunity here to bring quality native advertising to smaller publishers. Maybe there already is, I don't pay too much attention to that specific space.

* Even still, it's naive to say that display advertising (banners, mrecs etc) is limited to just porn sites.

* Feel free to 'name names' - it's no secret that Adblock Plus has it's Acceptable Ads program https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads

* As ads get more invasive and out of control and start to detract from the browsing experience of sites in measurable ways, user's are wanting to take back the control. That's not a scam.

Ad Networks and Publishers (at least the larger ones) have clearly brought this problem on themselves by building great products and websites, and then sticking a really shitty ad network on top of it and suck the performance all out of the site. I've measured this directly by disabling ad code on certain sites and seeing a very significant improvement in performance.

But instead of trying to understand _why_ users are using adblockers, they're instead just sticking their head in the sand and saying that what they're doing now is the only way forward when clearly it's not. As well, I feel while publishers definitely deserve a lot of this criticism, I'm constantly shocked by how little blame Google and other ad networks get.

I get the predicament that smaller publishers are in though. The only way for them monetise their site so it slap Adwords on and call it a day. They see adblockers as a direct assault on them but they can't do anything about it as they have no other way to make money or to improve the quality of the ads. But I think there is a huge opportunity for ad publishers (Google) to accept their responsibility in making the internet better by fixing the reliability and performance of the ads they serve.

There is one type of ad my ad blocker regularly fails to block: original, vetted content put in place by the site owner, that does not come from a third party. "Sponsored" posts on blogs, recommendations in youtube videos, even textual links at the bottom of some blog articles. This content comes from the website, is organic and difficult to detect (because it is not served in some mass campaign) and is usually far more relevant than any rotating ad space I've ever seen.

I think my distaste for internet advertising mostly is a distaste for intrusive things that dance and distract, trying to steal my focus from the content I arrived on the page to consume. But the reason I run an ad blocker is because I do not trust third-party embedded content on my pages, and there have been way to many cases of malware being distributed via the advertising networks for me to ever really trust them again.

People used to do that for free because they cared about the content they were writing, rather than because it was making their daily bread.

I distinctly remember the quality of writing during this time being much higher than it is today.

Regarding point 1:

>They are also working for the Advertiser better now than they did 10 years ago, as we are able to track and measure much better. What people haven't noticed is the fact that they have become more native, less intrusive and more relevant altogether. I am not talking about your flashy ads that you encounter on your various pirating sites and other places that Adsense blocks to begin with.

What is the benefit to the end-user though?

I guess I've seen the opposite as an end-user. Non-pirate websites, common blogs, news papers, etc, push through video ads, pop-over ads, and in the mobile space, positioning ads deliberately close to navigation controls on iOS or with the dismissal moving or being difficult to accurately tap even with a precision tool.

While I know there are "good ads", there is also a huge prevalence of bad ads, and the damage of the bad is far more impactful to the end user than the benefit of the good. I can't really comment on ad relevancy since I use ad-blockers on personal content, but similar systems (amazon's recs, youtube's recs) have an abyssmal "hit" rate for me, in that I rarely find the content worth pursuing.

Re point 2, I've felt for some time that other payment venues would need to be pursued by content creators as I've heard frequently from streamers or vBloggers I've followed that the ad payout is very low, even with high subscription numbers. Most decline to get into actual details, but several game streamers on Twitch have commented that a one time donation of a few $$$ overwhelmingly makes up for adblocking on their stream. Realistically, are the payouts from ads enough for "small" operations with low viewership? It just seems like supplementary income at best, rather than something that a newcomer or casual creator can rely on for support. In fact, it's a frequent occurrence for many vLoggers and web comics for when the creators need to decide are they ready to commit to the project as a job or continue it in their spare time, and often it'd dependent on how popular they're getting.

In other words, I don't think that anyone is denying that adblocking small operations lowers the payout, but are there that many operations that bank soley on ad revenue without other sources of income? It just seems like there's a point, once the viewership increases, that suddenly the project lives or dies by the revenue, instead of the project relying on the revenue from the beginning.

Finally, just a general question, why not use more ad-walls if adblockers are a problem?

I know for whatever reason people are against them, but to a degree I appreciate ad walls - the website is actively putting forth what the arrangement is, they're not trying to sneak an ad past me (native advertising, fake download links, etc), and I have to make a decision on how badly I want to read the content. Often I'll unblock briefly to read something from an unfamiliar site, and if I like the quality of the site, it goes on the whitelist. If not, AB goes back on and it's a reminder to me each time that I did not trust the website. Everyone's wishes get respected.

My first visit to a website is always with the adblocker disabled. The second visit depends on what ads I see the first time. Unsurprisingly I turn on the adblocker 95% of the time.

It's not the users fault that they don't want their browser playing music or redirecting them or trying to get them to take a survey. (Seriously look at my local newspaper website http://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/ - try using that on mobile, you will never want to go on the site again).

If adverts were relevant and unobtrusive I would have no problem using my local news site, but at the moment I avoid it completely or use AdBlock

I regularly read uncrate.com and everything on there is pretty much a paid advert.

Just my 2 pennies.

If it were only smaller, unobtrusive banners/inline separate ads it'd be tolerable, but it isn't. The ad industry has done this to itself. I'd compare it to the Tea Party rather than piracy.

I urge everyone to turn on ad-blockers and stop this security madness stop. Additionally I urge people to write to their congressman/woman (or whatever means you have) and demand that the add-serving people should be held liable for security issues they cause, hefty fines prefered (similar to the tobacco industry being held liable for cancer they cause)

Everything I read on the internet about advertising it's massively swinging to social. So either my anecdotes suck and I'm reading terrible articles or there is something to it and I believe there is (especially SnapChat is HUGE with it but you have to do content production not just pay for a shitty ad).

First, ad growth is fueled entirely by mobile at this point; non-mobile ad revenue has flatlined despite continued growth in non-mobile content consumption.

Second, while we can "track and measure [consumers] much better," this is based on a combination of walled-garden ad networks (GOOG and FB, specifically) plus a series of ever-more-intrusive tracking technologies that essentially subvert consumers' own applications, and many of which are susceptible to better endpoint privacy and security technologies and practices. (And there's a non-negligible regulatory and statutory risk to a lot of tracking practices inherent to modern DMPs, too.)

Third, while the loss of revenue for content producers is a critical issue, ad exchanges are themselves responsible as a first-order cause of ad blockers. Publishers' ever-increasing need for demand and the need for AXs to hit fill rate targets means that all sorts of demand-side crap -- not just spam, but phishing and malware vectors -- makes advertising actively dangerous to consumers. (Remember when Forbes forced users to turn off their adblockers, then immediately started serving malware?) Unless AXs figure out how to deal with the quality issue on the demand side, adblockers are a security, not a convenience, issue.

One can be concerned by the potential conflict of interest in adblockers' whitelisting, but at least they generally seem to have fairly objective standards. The fact that those standards are antithetical to current adtech practices is, for them, a feature, not a bug.

More generally, the lack of transparency in terms of what data is collected on consumers, and how it's being collected, will continue to be a concern until meaningful and transparent standards are devised, enforced, and communicated. Until that happens, adtech will continue to be a watchword for anti-consumer, anti-privacy practices.

Would that really be so bad?

It's not like you couldn't still hook into an ad network and all that, in fact if I were building something AdSense-like I would love to get API calls from the server instead of worrying about the browser. Things like WordPress could bake that into the server side and nontechnical publishers wouldn't have to even know the difference.

Of course, Google would still "need" to get its Orwellian Cookie somehow, but even that could be trivially done without loading the ads themselves from another origin.

https://www.google.com/work/

Yes, they're all paid services and some require you to explicitly purchase support on top, but in exchange, you get access to engineers who can go down to the source code and actually fix issues.

(Disclaimer: I'm one of these engineers.)