Google Will Help Publishers Prepare for a Chrome Ad Blocker Coming Next Year
wsj.com
wsj.com
An open web means I can host whatever (legal content) I want on my website and people are free to view it or not view it if they find it undesirable. Current ad blockers play well into this scheme because they protect the end user's right to view content in the way that they want.
This move by Google on the other hand is telling websites that they have to play by Google's content rules or have their website broken by default.
I'm not sure that's the web that I want to live in.
Right. Once Google gets this deployed, watch them remove ad-blocking add-ons from the Google Store.
And here's some more history: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/12/firebug-lives-on-in-firefo...
I'm definitely in the same boat. That makes me wonder if it would be a bad long-term move for Chrome. Just guessing here based on personal anecdata, developers are more likely to use ad blockers, which could alienate the developer community. If that's true, I wonder if we would see a resurgence in Firefox and other browsers.
Of course not. Google makes their money through ads; they wouldn't do anything that would hurt their money-making abilities.
Browsers fixing their own UI mistakes and browsers setting and enforcing rules for content are two entirely different things.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/coaltion-for-better-ads-launc...
https://www.betterads.org/members/
edit: I see you stealth edited your post.
Same thing on a nightlife website I worked on. Ads hosted by others were blocked but our own hosted ads were never a problem.
Granted our own ads also had zero chance of being hijacked by a bad actor since they were simple <a><img></a> ads.
If only everyone did this we wouldn't be having this arms race.
But when a modal pops up or I get redirected, or your ad floats over your content and tries to follow my scrolling not only are you not going to sell to me, but I'm going to leave your website.
I had to watch youtube without an adblocker recently for the first time pretty much ever.
The ads were not only extremely irrelevant. They were extremely sexist, strongly offensive and discriminating. Without exception (note I'm not in the US, so these probably aren't the same you're seeing!). I was incredibly surprised that most of the population watching youtube was exposed to this daily but not completely outrage.
You would have no way of knowing if the image was an ad or part of the article content since they were all served through the same thing. No silly subdomains like ad.domain.com either.
Still quite feasible to detect by size and styling.
I wish web developers had more respect for their audience. If I say, "No ads," I really mean "No ads." Your site is not a special snowflake where I suddenly don't mind seeing advertisements.
I'm also not sure what you mean by "respect for their audience". If I put an ad on a website I didn't ask your opinion and frankly I don't care what you think. Unless you wanna pay my bills. If what you're saying is I should detect the existence of ad block and actually proactively stop writing the code for said ad into the website.....well... that's just silly.
But that only defeats simple adblocks that blacklist domains. It's theoretically possible to make an adblock that detects ads through machine learning and removes them. Doesn't matter where they are hosted.
But advertisers can run scripts to detect modifying the web page and stop it. So adblock would have to move to having a headless browser that renders the page, and then copies it and removes the ads.
Then the advertisers would have to try to trick the machine learning itself. Adversarial machine learning is a thing, with neural networks trained to fool other neural networks. And images that are highly optimized to exploit subtle defects in other neural networks.
As ML ad detection improves, the only way for ads to get past it will be to make ads that look more and more like real content, even to the human eye. Perhaps in the limit, ads and content will become completely indistinguishable.
This is already happening. Further, embedding paid for content in the middle of original content at the server side is also already happening.
> As ML ad detection improves, the only way for ads to get past it will be to make ads that look more and more like real content, even to the human eye. Perhaps in the limit, ads and content will become completely indistinguishable.
This is also already happening. Brand placement deals are nothing new to advertising and they are basically table stakes to most content purveyors.
The real question isn't if those things are going to happen, its how those sorts of deals will handle the analytics side of the equation. How will you prove that your instagram feed is the best place for the yoga pants provider to spend their marketing budget?
I don't know whether this is a deliberate reference, but there is South Park episode playing with this idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sponsored_Content_%28South_Par...
They are already doing it: Google AMP, Facebook Instant Pages.
IMO, if Google's goal is to improve the web experience, it would be much better if Chrome was spun off into a non-profit of its own, and not controlled directly by Google.
A non-profit not directly controlled by Google would eliminate the major conflict of interest that is:
1) Google is the biggest ad publisher/network in the world. 2) Google controls the majority of web browsers today. 3) Google will control how ad blocking is implemented, managed, corrected, adjusted, etc., as they see fit.
As for Chrome, it's likely worth many 10's of billions of dollars. It would be absolutely indefensible to throw it away, especially when there are so many yet unexplored avenues to improve the web without requiring such massive and unneeded sacrifices.
Chrome is already 'non profit' because it does not cost money to the end user.
Ad companies are all for profit.
Browsers tend to not be a profit center for the companies that make them (Microsoft, Mozilla (a non profit), Google and Apple being the main ones).
a) non-profit is a clearly defined term [1] which doesnt apply to google, nor any of its products
b) by your definition, any website which utilizes ad revenue is a non profit, because the end user doesn't have to pay money for its use. i'm pretty sure this was the point the parent was trying to convey.
Mozilla is a non-profit, they make a browser.
> by your definition, any website which utilizes ad revenue is a non profit, because the end user doesn't have to pay money for its use
That's nonsense and you are well aware of it.
The customers there are the advertisers, not the users of the product but that does not mean there is no payment.
And if you put a value on data then you could argue that there is a payment of sort from those end users as well.
I'm not sure what you are trying to achieve with all this flak you're throwing up, it is pretty clear that no large browser manufacturer is selling browsers, that a large chunk of the web is at present ad supported and that it would be possible for Google to move Chrome into a non-profit.
> Mozilla is a non-profit
Ya. They don't run an ad network or search engine. This doesn't make any sense. Basically:
Is MacOS a non-profit because Linux is free? Apple does not charge for it but it's the bloody platform
MacOS is a product, not a company, and I don't think you can even buy it if you wanted, it just happens to come with the hardware you buy from the for-profit Apple company. MacOS also has nothing to do with Linux, except that they're both POSIX-y.
I guess Google will have to block ads on Youtube as well, not only does it have auto-playing ads with sound, but they block the display of content (prestitial/pre-roll).
Oh wait, Google standards never affect Google.
Users have been OK with commercials in their TV shows for like six decades now. So my non-expert eyes would expect an ad embedded with video content to be broadly acceptable.
Advertising is a good model, it works, but the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. Ad blockers, by being selective, can actually act as an agent of change by forcing the market to move towards the formats people actually prefer.
Ad Block Plus attempted to do this with their pay-per-play whitelist approach but that obviously has major issues since it didnt have realistic goals, wasn't transparent, and clearly let crap through anyway.
I wish the ad standards also included outstream video (the autoplaying video ads inside of an article) but this is a good start.
Today my stomach turns when the internet communicates with me (ads, messages, pretend news). The original idea is lost. Newbies never get a glimps of what I saw, back in the day. I wonder if it's lost forever.
I blame Google. They solved big data. Made it queryable. And then implemented a business idea very far from "not evil".
Edit: spelling
I get it, I was there, I remember how it felt to see the internet in the first blush of its commercial blooming. Also, I can be pretty biased against where we are today, but to act like it was all lollipops and gumdrops in 1995 and its terrible today ignores a bunch of the improvements.
Yes, the world was both worse and better than today. I agree. Today is different. Compared to 1995, not worse or better. That's depressing because as a planet, back in 1995, we really needed to improve, as a species.
I don't know how to make an influence in world politics other than to create a business built upon my values. That's what I'm looking for right now. A technical leader. I have given up on politics.
That technical leader is not Google. I personaly share none of the ideas behind ad networks. I like how they solved big data back in the day. And since they have great people they started to solve other problems as well, like mail. And maps. That's not evil.
Sucking the air out of the browser market the same way they did with the web search industry and then standardizing an ad-blocking mechanism is not just evil, it's vicious.
Edit: This and my previous posts are very toxic towards Google. I shall try to be more positive. Maybe they really are doing good for the world. I mean, how will we have selfdriving googlecars if we don't have ads?
Before ad-driven internet business, remember what we had? I do very well. It was called non-profitable business. Are we that plain and narrow-minded that we therefore cannot have non-ad driven business on the web today?
The information you leak when you use ad-driven services, that's the product. I know of tons and tons of other type of products that could be driving an internet business where the product was something else entirely. But I don't see them around so much. Most buy in to the Google ad circus.
You might want to go back to plain-text message boards but the world has moved on and there is an immense amount of commerce and utility conducted over the internet. If you have a job today, it is with almost absolute certainty that the company you work for is successful because of advertising in some form.
Everything is manipulation, that is the action of the world against your thoughts and wishes. Have you never recommended anything to your friends? That's advertising, whether you like it or not, so I don't see what's unethical about it specifically. There are certainly dishonest campaigns and we have some (but do need more) regulation around that, however people do have free will and the final choice, regardless of the ads they see.
Not sure about this value. For instance, Wikipedia, the 5th website in Alexa rank, does not use advertising. Besides, there is an argument to be said that if advertising really became unsustainable, then the services who would disappear would not necessarily be the ones that we miss most.
The idea that "creating content costs money so the reader must pay for it" is simplistic. Many people put quality content on the Web because they enjoy doing so, and don't ask for payment, they even pay for hosting out of their own pockets. That's how it started, and it hasn't disappeared, just became less visible when for-profit content arrived.
> If you have a job today, it is with almost absolute certainty that the company you work for [...]
This statement is far too general to be accurate. I have a job, but I don't work for a company; I doubt that my university significantly relies on ads to be successful.
All of them manageable and skippable through various means. For instance I know/knew many people who would record TV to video, just so they could skip past the ads.
The difference is that this new medium puts the receiver in control, not the transmitter. And that means people will gravitate towards what they consider the best experience, the experience with no ads.
If that doesn't work for whatever publisher or site-owner, they'll have to ask for direct payments, and the market will get to decide which web-sites the internet eventually ends up with.
It's not advertising, because you don't profit from it. Advertising is fundamentally dishonest, because I (as the viewer) cannot know if you're recommending a product because it's good, or because you get paid for it. On the other hand, recommendations are more likely to be honest, because the person making them doesn't profit from making them (and in fact stands to loose something, if the recommendation turns out to be bad).
That's only speciously correct in the sense that the technology had to be there before the economy could use it. Online advertisements and email spam predate HTML by quite a bit, and ad-funded sites (c.f. Yahoo) were some of the very first successful businesses to be built on the platform.
A- Ads do not manipulate people into buying things against their own interests. Businesses who sell great products that people want don't just magically find their customers. They find customers with ads.
B- You're free to use an ad-blocker, and websites are free to block your use of the site.
C- I assume you enjoy the web, and that a lot of effort is put into the sites that you enjoy. Do you expect all of this for free?
Say I know that I want a new refrigerator. Is it in my interest to see carefully crafted ads promoting whichever products have the highest ad budget? No, I want to see objective information in order to choose the best product. And that's just one of the most benign examples, whereas ads often promote things nobody needs at all.
You think cartoon characters connected with sugary cereals are giving kids useful information about the food‽
B - yup, and bye
C - yup
"Content" of any type is just not worth much anymore. It's plentiful and cheap. What's worth something is eyeballs.
As the price of content, of all sorts, approaches zero, the work is taken over by amateurs. Old timers have seen an amateur web and are absolutely not afraid of its coming back.
This is exceedingly rare and anyone at a major company will tell you that marketing and sales is usually more important for success than the actual product and it's qualities.
But where things get murky is when the primary value of a site is the content generated by its users. Why should I look at ads when I'm going to the effort of creating the content?
True, except for the various ways that advertising is typically unethical in manipulative design, the unjust and problematic imbalance of power between platform owners and the communities who use the platforms, the fact that ads are usually tied to privacy-invading tracking… besides those sorts of things, nothing's wrong.
> You are absolutely free to not contribute anything or even visit
This rhetoric needs to die. You are free to not go to the grocery store and buy food, unless of course you want food besides that you can grow on your own as a subsistence farmer. I suppose the fact that grocers operate at scale with very organized corporate models in order to consolidate their economic power while consumers are divided into being individual shoppers is totally irrelevant to the market factors here‽
If the supply side were divided into individual programmers etc. while consumers were all organized into powerful consumers' unions with near-monopsony, it would then be equally ridiculous and insulting to say "hey, you individual programmer — if you don't want to make the specific product the consumers' union wants to use, you don't have to; you are free to choose what you make".
And I'm paying for that too with my ISP charges. Why should I pay for the data usage incurred by viewing an ad?
Well, they're free to try. It's not completely trivial. (The resulting cat-and-mouse game would probably be won by publishers in principle, but an unbeatable solution would require significant changes in ad distribution.)
I think that's a pretty rosy description of things. Advertisements are an effective way to influence peoples' choices. Sometimes good products get advertised, sure; and sometimes when you jump out of an airplane without a parachute, you get lucky and land in a pile of snow.
> B- You're free to use an ad-blocker, and websites are free to block your use of the site. > > C- I assume you enjoy the web, and that a lot of effort is put into the sites that you enjoy. Do you expect all of this for free?
Absolutely! I don't think many reasonable people would object to anything here. I personally don't block ads on most of the sites I enjoy, and I have to problem with websites paywall-ing me if I use adblock.
The real question is whether Chrome will get more draconian and start preventing competing ad blockers in the browser.
On the other hand, I feel like we've been here with Google before, and they've generally done The Right Thing[tm]. How do we generally feel about people using this? Has Google done enough right that we might feel comfortable with them doing this? The general sense of other comments looks fairly bleak.
One of the most important pillar of that is varied, but high-quality media. These, however, have been squeezed relentlessly over the last years, with no end in sight. People think reporting isn't worth anything (an almost literal quote in many of these threads), just because they can read the same stories at different outlet–ignoring that somebody still had to be there. Or they're legitimising their use of aggressive ad blockers with the tired the-media-is-so-bad cliché (...then why are you reading it?).
There are two paths that I believe print media can get back on track: First, such an ad blocker that allows reasonable ads, i.e. not moving, obscuring, or for low-quality products.
Second: a netflix-style subscription that gives access to many publications. Because as it is now, I can't justify paying for any single subscription (except for the rather cheap New Yorker). But I'm willing to pay something like $30-$50 dollars/month for the written words I consume. There's just nobody to take the money.
I don't actually have much of a problem with Google. They have always been really excellent in such regards, especially considering how much potential for scandals they have. But I'd prefer more diversity, if at all possible.
I guess this will hurt other adblockers quite badly, and I'm wondering if they didn't create this problem by not creating a product that fairly accounts for publishers' interests.
The DOJ has clearly given up the ghost of even attempting to regulate US companies, and the current political news is just more evidence in that direction.
Google can draw out these lawsuits for decades while continuing their practices with impunity. They already have two incredibly well studied playbooks to draw from: Microsoft v DOJ and SCO v IBM.
However, as you say, it's a very small % of people. I think most people don't even know Chromium exists, let alone what the differences are between it and Chrome. That might change though if Google starts abusing their position and doesn't get this ad blocker right.
I've been around long enough to know that no browser dominates forever, especially if companies start taking their users for granted. It happened to Netscape, IE, and Firefox. It could happen to Chrome too. If they screw this up I'm going to a Chromium fork + uBlock Origin. :)
On my mobile android device I use Firefox, since it allows you to install extensions. Running uBlock Origin makes mobile web a vastly superior experience. I also use Firefox on Ubuntu and Windows, since it has the least invasive defaults and it lets you easily sync content across devices.
I think browsers are actually in a great state. People have lots of incredibly high quality options to chose from! Although I'll admit I'm a bit worried that there appears to be a bit of a Chrome monoculture growing.
We all know how much they're willing to do to please advertisers after the YouTube demonetization apocalypse.
Otherwise, this would give a huge boost to Firefox.
Chrome's own adblocker would only reduce the incentive to install another adblocker. Especially if it's natively implemented as part of the browser.
Chrome was, and has always been about giving Google full control over content from their servers to the users. They've spent the past decade relentlessly removing middle-men out of their way (most obviously Adobe, but also other advertisers, and now the search engine is even extracting information from sites so you don't even need to click on links anymore, see AMP and their various "search enhancements") - they aren't about to stop at removing "misbehaving" apps. You already can't get AdBlock on Android without rooting - it's an easy equivalence for them to make and base their rules around, however false it may be.
[0] https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.jak_linux.dn...
I would be highly surprised if this will not incur a swath of class action lawsuits and another anti-Trust investigation by the European Union and possibly the US.
Again, ad blocking is good and important, but the people who build the ad blockers should not run an ad business on the side.
Ad-supported company employees: Uh-oh.
Ad-supported tech company employee#2: We can use this as an opportunity to block our competitors ads!
Ad-supported tech company employee#3: We might win some goodwill with users, too!
Example tech companies: Apple Brave Google etc.
Naive user: Oh well, I guess we just have to accept whatever the tech companies give us.
Real answer: No, users are actually the ones in control. That is why ad blocking is causing these companies to take action.
It is one of the most clear examples that the only way to remediate the differences between Google and a law abiding corporation is to break it up.
EDIT: I think the strong feedback from everyone I've seen when this was first rumored was that this idea was concerning and likely illegal, and yet Google is proceeding anyways. I feel that should dismiss any notion that Google or the industry as a whole has the ability to self-regulate.
To detail, I think Android and Chrome need to both be legally/forcibly detached from Google. Android could easily operate on funding from the OEMs that use the platform and the Play Store, which would go with it, and Chrome could use Mozilla's model, including letting companies like Google and Yahoo bid for the default search. (And obviously, would be prohibited from picking Google Search if it isn't the highest bidder.)
Dominant platforms being tied to dominant services is just too large a conflict of interest.
A good case study is AMP, which allows embedding ads and was, from the beginning, made to be integrated with competing ad networks.
The potential for anti-competitive behaviour is so obvious, that Google probably takes a lot of care to crossdot all its legal i's and t's.
Bear in mind, ads are like over 95% of Google's business, they would not be doing this if they thought it would impact their own ads at all.
And since, by design, the standards will never go after Google ads, as a site owner, your best bet to not have your ads blocked will be to 'just' go with Google as your ad provider.
What I want to really see is blocking those popup "sign up for newsletter" modal.
chrome://settings/content#notifications-section
So maybe in the future internet companies will rely more on customer's subscription fee + ads that are more transparent (sponsored content).
> While blocking pesky ads is appealing to consumers,
> it also threatens a vital source of revenue for publishers
I believe that if anything, depeskifying ads will bring advertisers more success. I have always believed that intrusive ads were a lose-lose proposition. Not only do readers lose by being bothered, but advertisers lose because such ads make people just look away. Furthermore it makes people hate your website, tarnishing the brand. I, for one, am starting to remember at least some websites that are especially rude with ads, and I won't click the link if there is a choice (like on Google News).
I remember many years ago when Google first insisted on text-only ads, relegated to the right side of the page so they were clearly advertising. Everyone thought Google was crazy. Billions of dollars later, people think Google is on to something. It was the most tempted I've ever been to click an ad (I still don't think I did, though). Because they weren't flashing, I didn't immediately ignore that whole area, an automatic response that most of us have developed. And so some of them I actually read. And because they were narrowly targeted ads, based on the words in my search, they were more interesting.
In other words, if publishers switched to text-only ads, I bet their click-rate would go up. Maybe a tasteful still picture would be okay. I'm thinking of what is in newspapers and magazines. I actually used to look at some of their ads (back in the ol' paper days). I even enjoyed some of the more artistic or clever ones. The only times they annoyed me is if there were too many of them or it was those loose-leaf subscriptions cards in the middle of a magazine (pre-internet pesky ads).
There are maybe some publishers who found success with running ads only very selectively, but those are usually very small (The Deck, i. e. daring fireball comes to mind). Large, high-quality publications such as the new York Times are somewhere in the middle: ads that include animation, but don't obscure content, and not spam or fraud. For the mass of publishers without a famous brand name, the low-quality ads they're running are probably the best they can do.
And ads do bring in significant revenue, although it's too little to offset the losses in print.
All these autoplaying videos have more video starts, completion rates and more time in view - which is obvious since it's forced and not voluntary - but add in layers of agencies and clueless CMOs and you have the situation today where this kind of format takes over the market.
Also not every or even most advertising is about sales or direct response. There are billions spent on general awareness and top-of-funnel product consideration so clicks and other actions beyond viewing the ad are not necessary.
Annoying advertising shows up great in metrics because it gets so much attention (which is what makes it annoying in the first place). It's a self fulfilling prophecy for advertisers and agencies and a result of a major lack of proper oversight, incentives or regulation in this industry.
I'm curious, do you really think this is the case? Like, do you really, honestly think that no advertising company has had this thought before?
https://www.betterads.org/standards/
It weird language... they say things like "Included ad experiences tested: Auto-playing in-line video with sound" and "The Better Ads Methodology has not yet tested video ads that appear before (“pre-roll”) or during (“mid-roll”) video content that is relevant to the content of the page itself."
I think that means pre-roll is OK if it fits into the content, but auto-playing inline video with sound is not.
It would be nice if they could just say explicitly what the rules are. Instead I guess you are supposed to use the Ad Experience Report tools: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ad-experience-deskto...
Funny that they would have a special rule for this kind of ads, that's exactly what Youtube does ... (Except that for me it usually is completely irrelevant, like ads for cosmetics or video games in the middle of a chemistry video.) I'm not expecting them to include this type of ads in the methodology any time soon except to find that they are totally fine.
On one hand I applaud Google's decision[1] to put its weight against autoplay videos, prestitial ads, and huge above-the-fold ads that are the main driving factor for me and many others to install an ad blocker in the first place.
I would love to live in a world in which ad blockers are not necessary, everyone displays tasteful ads and every party involved gains something in the end.
On the other hand advertising companies are still hell-bent on tracking and profiling people by whatever means necessary to target them better with ads. They amass huge amounts of information that, if put in the wrong hands, could lead to a disaster.
This is what still makes (and will still make) blanket ad-blocking a necessity, IMO.
---
[1] I'm ignoring the huge conflict of interest for the sake of argument here.
It might be useful to detect and block clickfraud sites.
Imo it will be very hard to sell it as pro user change. I would not be surprised if few would even go further and call it insulting to think people are that gullible.
For reference, the companies that make up the Better Ads Coalition https://www.betterads.org/members/
Not that I'm against it! This is a big move from the biggest browser that will push its competitors to do the same and change the web, likely for the better. Brave is pushing a similar agenda from behind the front lines.
Not to mention spoofing your user agent is very easy! It's built into the devtools of most desktop browsers (including Edge), or can be modified by a proxy like Fiddler.
I wouldn't ever want to rely on useragent to identify a browser if the idea was to completely block that software from accessing your site.
If you only spoof the advert's own properties, you can infer state from other inline elements.
If you block domains you can check for their response on the client.
If you proxy the incoming asset before it hits the browser and replace it's content is harder to detect client side but the ad provider will be able to see what happened and would most likely not display your modified content, taking you back to the conventional detection strategies.
Pretty much.
Not to mention Safari and IE user agents have included strings like "Mozilla/5.0" and "like Gecko" for years now to 'demonstrate compatibility' with those browsers.
User, estate and recruitment agents are all equally untrustworthy!
Once while visiting my family I happened to be at the dinner table with my parents when my mom mumbled something about a message prompting her to update. Just out of curiosity I walked over and saw her about to click on a completely fake Java update message that would have almost certainly installed malware... served by Google.
It's counterproductive to live in denial of this massive problem. The original commenter has posted evidence; if you want to deny this claim, you ought to be prepared to supply some of your own.
As for the images you posted, I checked out EasyPhotoEdit and thetop10antivirus.com and neither site appears actively harmful (the former looks like an online photo editor and the latter an antivirus comparison page), so while the ads may be distasteful I'm not sure they should be called malicious ads since that's usually reserved for actual malware.
If true, that would be pretty radical - but I'm unsure if you're just being hyperbolic or just re-hashing something you read somewhere.
(Disclaimer: Work for Google, but not in ads).
...That's the Chrome team. But fake download buttons are alive and well at Google AdWords. (Most of them you'll find on sites like paint.net are from Google.) As far as I understand, they aren't even against Google AdWords' policy. Google allows malicious ads which Google says are bad.
And as a computer technician, most malware I remove, I check web history to figure out where they got it. Almost always it's a malicious Google ad at the top of search, which Google has progressively made look more and more like real search results over the years. Great for Google's bottom line, but terrible for everyone else.
Did you perhaps mean getpaint.net? That's the download site for Paint.NET, a Windows-only paint program.
I did see an ad there at the top for "FileSendSuite" which does have a download button:
http://i.imgur.com/ed3CKGb.png
To me, it was reasonably clear the link was for FileSendSuite - but perhaps some other people could get mistaken?
If you hit the "x" in the top-right of any ad, you can report an ad (e.g. for being misleading/spammy), or simply say you never want to see that ad again (it gets filtered).
I absolutely disagree with your suggestion it's "obvious" FileSendSuite is what that download button is for. Notice how the text for the actual name is drastically smaller than the Download command, which is at the top of the ad, so it appears to directly follow the page content above. Notice how it also lacks a border or background so it is more easily mistaken for page content.
I am not inclined to go into the detail here, but I have spoken with Google employees on this issue before. And reporting an ad Google doesn't think violates it's policies is pointless.
From the recent HN discussion on this topic, site owners have confirmed that even if they ban these malicious providers, they're rapidly replaced by other accounts doing the same thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14336695