Publishers Are Rethinking Those ‘Around the Web’ Ads | Hacker News Reader

Publishers Are Rethinking Those ‘Around the Web’ Ads

nytimes.com

88 pointsgk192 comments

These ads specifically were the ads that drove me to ad blockers. I resisted for years, as I took the stance I simply didn't visit sites that had overly obnoxious ads. I've had flash turned off for years so that likely cut down on a lot of that garbage anyway.

Then these fake "Other things you might like" ads started appearing around many sites. Occasionally somewhat relevant, but always click-bait headlines. I was even tricked once or twice early on, since I hadn't yet recognized those as ads.

Then they started becoming outright obnoxious, and everywhere, and one day I just lost it and installed an adblocker. Now I can't imagine how I'd ever go back.

U-Block Origins. Always.

Yup. And I blocked Taboola and Outbrain in my hosts file years ago after some particularly unpleasant ads of rotting teeth. To me they're a symbol of low-quality misleading advertising.

I think there might be a place for good cross-advertising of articles, but that seems to not be what the public clicks on.

It has less to do with what the public clicks and more to do with the level of quality competition amongst advertisers. As more and more brands get smart about native, the networks will push out the arbitrage sites and other bad actors.

Bad advertisers is a sign that an ad network actually works but hasnt matured yet.

Even without these types of ads, mere performance compels me to use an ad blocker.

I've recently been playing around with different Linux distros, and so installed Firefox multiple times if it wasn't already there. I'm the type of person who queues up a number of tabs for reading.

At the NYT, at about four or five tabs open, the laptop becomes unusable, because of all the ad downloading.

And now, the absolute first thing I do after opening FF the first time is to install ublock origin. The web is all but unusable for me without it.

I'm not one of those people that actively does much about ads or online privacy. I have friends that obsess over the stuff and probably spend as much time as I do online just adjusting custom uBlock/whatever else lists.

But I finally switched off of Chrome on Android and over to Firefox where I could install uBlock because of these fucking Taboola ads. Trying to read sites and the entire page would be jumping around as my phone slowly struggled its way into loading and displaying them.

Sorry, ad industry, I'm not going to take the time to weed out the bad actors. As soon as you annoy me enough that I feel I need to do something I'm taking the nuclear option and blocking everything - it's just easier.

Surprised it took this long. These things are incredibly jarring and low-quality, and actively try to redirect users away from the publishers sites into a rabbithole of even more links.

If they supposedly pay so well, I wonder where the money for that comes from. Just high ad-density?

>If they supposedly pay so well, I wonder where the money for that comes from. Just high ad-density?

Probably because ad-networks pay per click, and if you have something SO clickbaity like these ads there's a lot of ad clicks. For example if google ads and Outbrain both pay $7 per thousand clicks (I have never used either so this is just a random number) and google ads bring in 1000 clicks while outbrain brings in 3000, you're making 3 times as much money.

Some ad networks pay per click, some pay per thousand impressions. The numbers I've seen tend to be several dollars per thousand impressions, or a significant fraction of a dollar to several dollars per click.

Random blog post I just found talking about rates: https://www.hochmanconsultants.com/cost-of-ppc-advertising/

From someone I know who advertised on Outbrain, he said the CTR was way higher on Outbrain than it was on AdWords...so while we may all sit here and talk about how crappy those ads are for general use, they do in fact drive traffic.

That doesn't surprise me at all. Hell, I've clicked on them before and I could tell exactly what they were. I'd imagine that the average user probably clicks on them significantly more than they click on any other type of ad.

It is mostly just an arbitrage, the site advertising their click bait content just needs to get more money from the numerous ads on their page than they spent on the outbrain click.

Doesn't surprise me at all. Every time I've clicked on one it's been because I've been under the impression it's another story on the Independent or whoever. Of course those clicks generated 100% bounce rate.

That's because they aren't immediately recognizable as ads. More deception, in this case leading to a site with a lot more deception.

Ad networks need to die, and about 70% of news organizations also need to die. Then I think we'll be in a good market balance to where journalism can actually be profitable again.

Ultimately the money comes from a mark further down the line. For example some poor sucker desperate to fix their health problem spends hundreds on a flakey high margin product, be it physical or digital.

Sure there are legit ads too but I'd guess the greyhat stuff will give higher EPC.

Google ads takes the long term view and doesn't tolerate shit like that. They are very strict and would rather not take that money and destroy their brand. Result? People still use Google to search for stuff.

"Google ads takes the long term view and doesn't tolerate shit like that. They are very strict and would rather not take that money and destroy their brand. Result? People still use Google to search for stuff."

Are you sure? I've seen loads and loads of some of the trashiest ads through Google's ad network.

And at least Google iAds give you the tiny little logo in the corner for you to click so you can report the ad that tries very hard to look like a download button :(

Only they never seem to quite get it:

Google: here is x dating site,

Me: click, mark as irrelevant.

Google: here is y dating site

Me: irrelevant

Google: z dating site?

Me: nope

Google: lets try an ad for x dating site again then

Me: actually, you got my mail, all my searches for the last 10 years and still you cannot find anything more relevant for a happily married sw engineer?

Unless happily married SW engineers with your search history whom mark dating sites as irrelevant are great for dating site conversions.

You can change the google settings to specifically give you ads about topics you like

https://www.google.com/settings/ads

Ah, the "Choose your Vaselin flavor" option.

Been there, done that.

Somehow Google think dating sites fall under auto repair, gardening, computer hardware or software or a few other categories I am actually interested in.

Or more likely IMO: they don't care.

I bet they're using you to try and find differentiating factors between the different dating sites. You've already told them that you're willing to provide useful information about dating sites -- now they're just extracting as much info as possible.

They're extracting right till the moment they aren't - ever again.

I think they just have a weak pool of ads to serve. I routinely mark Twitter ads as of no interest to me, and still get virtually nothing I would ever have interest in.

The problem with that button is that whenever the ad slips past through an adblocker people like myself will click it regardless of what the ad is showing and report it.

People definitely still use Google to search for stuff!

The ad content is designed to look as though it is part of the source website, so claims made appear to be those of the originating site. Outbrain seems to be the web's answer to native content marketing.

Unfortunately NYT, Huffpo, Wapo don't realize by putting these on their legitimate articles they're allowing these third parties to siphon away some of their credibility.

This - they're bought programmatically. The buyer submits metadata (headline, URL, image, etc) to a bidding exchange and they're formatted to look like they're part of the relevant site on the fly.

Oh yes the "chumbox" https://theawl.com/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum-de0b...

This is a great way to look at these things, love the analogy.

That's funny, I got through the first paragraph and thought "wow, that was a short article". To my brain, chumboxes are what mark the end of an article.

What a great summary of the utter baseness of this type of advertising: a stomach-turning body horror image I never wanted to see, some article calling strangers "morons" based on some stupid superficiality, and gossip about the private lives of strangers that is, quite frankly, none of my business.

That being said, if these companies vanished tomorrow it wouldn't be a complete positive either, since the fine sociopaths of the advertising industry would simply use the resultant vacuum to come up with something even more contemptible. Fuck that industry.

It is surprising to me how little people seem to know about native/ content amplification ads.

Here is a brief primer: First, as far as quality goes, there are different networks with different quality policies. In general, Outbrain is very strict, Taboola is also, but less so, and RevContent, Content.ad, and the 50 or so other native networks (including mantis targeting marijuana publishers and jewish content network targeting orthodox jewish publishers), Like all channels, there are good actors and bad actors.

Native ads - defined as ,turning the atomic consumption unit into an ad unit, work really well because they dont require switching context. (i.e. adwords, Facebook newsfeed ads, indeed job postings, etc...)

These ads work really well when done properly. (High contrast images, compelling but very descriptive headline that qualifies the visitor, and constant freshness in both images and headlines... pointing to a high quality advertorial that presells a product or service, with links to purchase within the content and as banners on the side of the page.)

Any new channel that is very effective will attract affiliate marketers and some bad actors, but eventually, the networks police themselves, and they become very effective ad networks for everyone (i.e. Facebook newsfeed ads are basically as main stream now as Adwords is, but 5 years ago, it was full of shady affiliates. It still is, but much less so.)

In general, There are five types of native advertisers.

1. Advertising arbitrage sites - These are the the celebrity articles, etc... the folks who do this right are making bank, but for every person who succeeds at this, hundreds try and fail. It is a real skill. It also requires a large bankroll since you get paid net 30-45 for the ads you place.

2. Affiliate marketers primarily promoting info products and digital products - These are the health ads (i.e. secret fruit loses belly fat or nail fungus home remedy ads) and the software security ads. One thing you can be sure of... when it comes to rampant affiliate marketers, if it wasn't driving sales, they would move on to another channel.

3. Direct advertisers (most notably LendingClub & bankrate - I think)Don't be surprised to start seeing Proctor and Gamble to be running detergent native ads and typical Ecommerce sites running ads to their content.

4. Publishers growing their audience. - This is the most natural usage of native ads, but lends itself to arbitrage like the first type of advertiser. I worked with a few very large publishers buying ads on Taboola and Facebook news feed and arbitraging it by serving up Taboola native ads successfully.

5. Remarketing - These networks let you remarket you visitors and I think criteo (for sure some do) run remarketing through taboola, etc... You can also do it natively in the network by using their remarketing pixel.

If you do go this route, expect CPCs in the US on solid publishers to run you over $1.00 and smaller publishers in the $0.30-$0.60 range.

You can still get the junk traffic for about $0.10 a click, but not much cheaper.

All in All, I think native ads will find their place and be a net positive for the internet...but clearly we aren't there yet. One thing is for sure. Affiliate marketers who are spending $10-$20k/day on Native ads, are not losing money. It works and it works well... and not just for arbitrage or info products.

I've run successful Ecommerce product ads via native successfully.

Edit: Spelling

Good and bad agents? This stuff is pure evil.

> I think native ads will find their place and be a net positive for the internet...

I am curious how you see this happening. To me these ads are an embarrassment to the human species. The language you use suggests that you and I may live in entirely different universes.

The underlying idea of promoting content natively while reading other content is a better user experience than other advertising and can democratize smaller publishers (with laser targeted relevancy placement opportunities) and brands reaching consumers in a very engaging and relevant way for consumers.

Whats missing today are two ingredients.

1. better policing of the advertisers/quality and relevancy scores like Gooogle and Facebook have.

2. Relevancy targeting that actually works. If we ever reach a point where the native ads are supplemental content that add to the story you just finished reading, It will be a net positive.

If you are part of the world that believes all advertising is a nuisance and bad, no matter how relevant, than we do live in different universes, if not, than anytime an ad unit fits natively into an experience to the point of removing friction (and not requiring switching context) it will go through growing pains but eventually will be a net win for the user (because actually providing value to users will maximize revenues.)

I think advertising has some good and necessary uses in alerting consumers to legitimate value propositions. It also can encourage people to do things that are not in their best interest, for example to drink either Pepsi or Coke, or to use tobacco products before their advertising was widely banned.

So I would separate advertisements into good (new restaurant near you that you would like to know about) and bad (preying on human weaknesses). Which one is this kind of ad best suited for?

> providing value to users will maximize revenues.

I'm not so sure.

The "chumbox" ads seem to be literally all bad, selling things with net negative utility.

What are the socially valuable uses for this that are going to outcompete miracle pills and snake oil?

In our experience the vast majority of the money into the system is from arbitrageurs. We've been fighting these guys for a long time.

Here's a better solution, now in private beta: http://pubsub.publir.com/

Technically, all advertising is arbitrage between the value of the eyeballs and the cost to reach those eyeballs...Adwords and Facebook were swamped with arbitrage advertisers until they got better at relevancy.

Arbitrage by definition will stop working eventually. you are exploiting information assymetry and a market inefficiency.

Once better targeting is in place and mainstream advertisers crack the native cookie youll see the arbitrage die out like it did with Shopping comparison engines in adwords.

Totally fair. I meant ad arbitrage. I.e., the advertisers are themselves running ad-supported sites.

Even ad arbitrage can be a net win. If Foxnews buys a native ad on drudge report for a timely article, thats probably a net win for users... but technically, since Fox is supported by ads, its ad arbitrage.

The "viral" and "slideshow forced pageview" sites will never be a net win in my opinion...

but a quality publishers who is ad supported running arbitrage with native can be a net win. (Although, I would quicker call that audience building than straight arbitrage.)

but, I agree. These single click ad arbitrage sites are pure evil and should be kicked off the native networks.

I wrote in a different thread about Cointent that I believe the "pay for ad free" model is addressing the problem in the wrong way. First, the pain of annoying ads already has a solution. We are already bombarded by content that its not very painful to just switch to another publisher and read a different article that is less annoying (unless its breaking news.)

Also,Your solution doesnt address the problem at the moment I am experiencing the pain. You need to win on intellectual grounds without the emotional drivers. Youll probably get some traction and users but never mainstream scale. its too disconnected from the pain point.

My idea/opinion, "charge a donation for sharing content." When someone feels compelled to share, they are seeking emotional validation, thats worth paying for.

Wow. I understood very little of what you wrote above. It's like you're speaking a foreign language. I can write a TCP/IP stack in assembler, but thinking about ad networks hurts my brain.

TL;DR dont throw out the ad networks with the bad advertisers. Its often a precursor to a better solution for everyone involved.

All you really need to know is that when ad networks work, the first people to exploit are bad actors taking advantage of little competition. The networks need these guys to survive, so they tolerate it until they can afford to kick them out.

As the network matures, it kicks out the bad actors amd it becomes a healthy and effective medium for brands to communicate with consumers in a win-win-win way.

Honest question: How many people are left without some form of ad-blocking? It seems to have become incredibly ubiquitous, and when malicious ads aren't teaching people to go and get it, loud and obnoxious ads are.

Mobile users. There just aren't any pleasant ad free browser experiences for stock mobile phone users. Firefox for Android is quite poor and fixing through chrome requires root, something most users are not going to be doing

I pipe all my reading into Pocket, which does a great job of stripping the ads out.

I have heard good things about block-this, which creates a VPN connection that just strips out ads, but it seems (unscientifically, because Android doesn't track VPN battery usage) a battery suck.

yeah and it collects those ad avoiding users' data easier than any conent network could. way to go. I mean, that's what I'd suspect.

Uh. It's open source. I built it from source myself.

wat. that wasn't obvious from the comment.

Google "block-this". First result: "Block This - Open Source Ad Blocker".

Yes, sure, I am going to search something on the off chance of it being an open source project, because someone on the internet said it, who doesn't even go with the good practice of including a link. Or, you know, I could express myself, inform you of the impression you've left on me, and provoke the answer to read for anyone, instead of finding it for myself. I'll admit in hindsight, either approach seems somewhat improvable.

Firefox for Android works quite nicely, in my experience -- better as a browser than mobile Chrome, which surprised me as I had little faith in Mozilla's products before trying it. And installing uBlock Origin was a trivial matter of downloading it from the app store. It really couldn't have been easier unless it came from the factory already installed that way.

My guess is that you have a higher end phone. I have a Moto-G and tried to use Firefox, but it was noticeably slower than Chrome, annoyingly so. Had to switch back.

Do you have Marshmallow? Firefox was almost unusable with the number of crashes I had on Lollipop. I upgraded recently and haven't had a crash since. Performance is much smoother as well.

I couldn't give up background video/music, reader mode and the extensibility I get with firefox over Chrome now.

I see, and that makes sense. Thanks for the reply.

I use Focus by Mozilla with iOS Safari. It does a decent enough job. Not sure if there's an Android analogue.

Does Focus actually block ads? All of the settings seem to concern trackers, not ads.

I found Focus did a poor job. I switched to Adguard[1] and have found it quite a bit better.

[1]: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/adguard-adblock-privacy-prot...

Seconded for Adguard. I've tried several others blockers, such as Blockr (which don't update their filters often enough), to something more all encompassing like Weblock (which creates a proxy link and filters at the system level); ended up breaking a lot of things like App store downloads and updates.

Theres Adguard for Android, which installs itself as a local VPN:

https://adguard.com/en/adguard-android/install.html#howToIns...

It seems to be reasonably low on the scum scale as far as Android apps and ad blockers in general go.

I use AdBlock on my iPhone with Safari and it's seamless (even though it's AdBlock and I'd much prefer uBlock)

AdBlock didn't block enough ads for me. Currently I use Eluo, but I'm not 100% satisfied with it: it tends to block more ads, but it can be trickier to whitelist sites and the UI isn't quite polished and full-featured.

Edit: All content blockers either end up breaking sites or not blocking enough ads or both, it seems. Be prepared to long-press the refresh button on iOS to reload the page without Content Blockers if something breaks and you need quick access. See also, a list of iOS content blockers reviewed late last year at https://brooksreview.net/2015/12/content-blockers/

AdBlock currently blocks enough ads for me, although I keep my mobile browsing pretty restrained to forums and utilities. No broken sites and nothing I can recall in terms of ads either.

I was finding Google ads and ads on The Verge, particularly at the bottom of articles, weren't getting blocked. YMMV, of course, and this was about 8 months ago. Oh -- I think I may have found the relevant setting: "Allow some nonintrusive ads" I don't think I discovered that checkbox months ago.

I've found Firefox for Android quite excellent, especially because of Firefox Sync between it and laptops.

This is also brings weird bias to page visits. For a number of technical keywords in my ads, virtually all clicks are from mobile devices, but from organic search only around 10%.

I don't have any data beyond what a web search would get you, but from past reports I have seen, somewhere between 20% and 40% of web users block ads.

I use an ad blocker on my desktop but not on mobile.

I don't use an ad blocker. I just avoid using websites that are covered in ads unless I really need to.

The web must be hell to people without multiple levels of adblocking extensions.

Meanwhile, I'm confused the NYT is now citing random people from Twitter:

One Twitter user asked The Guardian in April: “Don’t these @Outbrain articles kind of undermine the integrity of news outlets?”

That must be Outbrain inside.

Heh, these ads were so bad to the point of being ridiculous. I had fun reading them because they seemed so self aware and like a parody of ads.

I've always enjoyed some of the juxtapositions, like some article about sexism with one of those things suggesting readers might also like "Top 10 smoking hot celebrities who got UGLY!"

And they I have to wonder, do those things even pay enough to be worth it?

I've not seen those in some time. Thank you uBlock Origin. On Android I use Firefix with Javascript disabled and in desktop mode. And if it's unreadable, I prefix url with

about:reader?url=

One of my least-favourite parts of video game news outlet Rock Paper Shotgun is the box of Taboola links at the end of the article. They never have anything to do with video games.

The sad part it, I'm sure RPS gets a lot of money from that box of links, meaning if they ditched it, I'd get less content from them. I would greenlight their site in my adblocker but it's just not worth the crap fiesta of ads.

I removed RPS from my whitelist when they added that box.

I agree it's crap, even compared to the other ads.

Weirdly, "subscribing"/"supporting" RPS doesn't seem to remove the ads, or if it does then that's not indicated on the page about it.

OK, great, but let us see what is going to replace them.

My guesses:

a) more aggressive retargeting - "Customers also bought" suggestions from Amazon will now follow you around the web even when you complete a purchase

b) sign in using Amazon account to read articles

c) retargeting with social proof (you didn't buy X from company Y, but here is a testimonial from a friend of a friend who thinks X is great)

d) revival of popup ads, only a little more beautifully designed - with large clickable area and small, nearly invisible, too far above the fold close buttons

Fascinating watching this go down. It's like capitalism vs religion but the iteration cycle is months/years not decades/millennium.

I wonder how Taboola and Outbrain keep coming back even when i manually blocked them on Adblock and Adblock Plus.

Do you have acceptable ads on? They somehow managed to get whitelisted.

It's interesting to compare Outbrain to Google.

Google has all my search history, a list of all the AdSense websites I visit, my YouTube history, my location history, ten years of my email history, my Android app history, my Play Store purchase history. They have a large number of PhD engineers working to develop the best internet advertising algorithms.

And yet when Time or Forbes want to display an ad that will generate the most money, Google is beaten by a company that is simply focused on catchy ads.

I realise that Google's higher standards (and perhaps higher commission) put their ads at a disadvantage in terms of publisher revenue, but I thought that their huge advantage in targeting ads would more than compensate.

I spend a lot of money on advertising. Google's non search stuff is not nearly as good as FB for targeting.

I keep asking: if you're a serious publisher, shouldn't it be your job to create/curate the right content for your readership? Isn't it your job to know your readers? Leaving screen real-estate (and really substantial amount) to random third party algorithms who most likely than not will be spamming my eyes with unrelated and sensationalist content is disrespectful.

Can't wait for the ad industry to die. I'll do what I can to help that process along.

One of the stunning things to me was discovering that Edge uses Outbrain and Taboola type links on the browser's New Tab page... And you could get malicious fake virus pages right off the home screen of Windows 10's default browser.

If only advertising networks had the same disdain that perceived ponzi schemes had

everyone throws money at the click through rate casino, anyone doing studies on their ROI, or do we hand waive it away by saying they were targeting wrong

Thank goodness that the publishers are finally starting to catch on. Outbrain, Taboola, and their ilk have always been utter trash and the sooner they die the better off we'll all be.

It astounds me the number of so-called quality news outlets that seem happy use these providers. Do they even know what kind of NSFW trash is appearing on their readers' browsers?

These ad networks tend to distribute redirect JavaScript. I know of at least one newsroom that has editors all getting redirected to spam sites. From their own publication!

The link just shows me a login form. Mirror:

https://archive.fo/zu1Wp

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