We plan to have Chrome hide ads that do not comply with the Better Ads Standards
blog.google
blog.google
The ad networks that aren't Google aren't going to be happy. They may admit that this could reduce the use of full ad blockers but they're going to loathe that they had no say. Plus, these experiences were shitty for the user but they must have worked.
From a publisher point of view, on the one hand, this is likely to bring reduced revenue from the folks who don't use ad blockers, that will be bad for the publishers. On the other hand, there's the hope that users will stop installing ad blockers and revenue should finally stabilise somewhat. Like the ad networks, I think many publishers will be upset about not having a choice.
And finally, from a user perspective, this doesn't go far enough. Many users will install ad blockers to get rid of the ads on YouTube alone and there are a ton of other unacceptable ad formats that the "Better Ads Standards" don't cover (like animated ads, small sticky ads, ads that look like download buttons).
It seems to me like Google's desperately trying to plug the leak on a sinking boat with a straw. It might mitigate things for a while but it won't do anything to solve the actual problem.
They had a say. They could have responded to the race to the bottom state of ad display tech. They could have recognized that they were in a tragedy of the commons and formed a coalition for better ads.
They didn't. They continued the race to the bottom.
Each day they continued to push awful ads that harmed the user they were voicing their opinion.
I agree with the rest of your comments, though...
My guess is that the Internet will be just fine.
There were many years when adblockers were readily available but not extremely widespread. The typical user has to hit a fairly high irritation threshold before seeking a technical solution to this kind of thing; I think the rise of adblockers is a direct response to ads getting catastrophically worse. If that can be dialed back a bit and stop the race to the bottom, it may help at least a bit.
Personally, I'd much rather have no advertising at all, but until recently I tried to only block problematic sites, use ABP's Acceptable Ads, and so forth, because I want to support the sites I use regularly even at the cost of very minor irritation. I switched to a scorched-earth policy when it got so bad that many sites were suffering major performance degradation, and many others were plastered with bottom-feeding ads that were actively offensive to me. If things actually improve by some miracle, I'd consider throttling it back a bit.
I spent years as a data scientist in the online display advertising space, and I was shocked at how much of a disconnect there was between advertiser ROI and clicks/impressions/whatever metric is being sold to the advertiser. There are very few parties whose best interests involved clearing up that connection. I heard one story of an ad executive getting fired for introducing A/B testing to their advertisers and proving the negative ROI.
Big flashy ads certainly improve clicks, but it's not clear if they make a customer want to buy a product.
Me: "...and of course the advertisers will want to minimize the price they pay per ad..."
PM: "You'd be surprised"
Apparently marketing departments are often in situations where spending their entire budget is more important than getting views or conversions (so they can request a bigger budget next quarter), and they'll be annoyed if an ad broker spends less than they wanted even if they got more and better impressions.
This. #1 reason for adblocking? Security. Fewer ads does mean fewer chances of malware... but it's still an attack vector.
Obligatory: Forbes proves the need for adblockers by blocking the ad blocker and serving pop under adware.
http://www.networkworld.com/article/3021113/security/forbes-...
However, is security the #1 reason that users choose to install them? Nah, they get installed because ads are annoying.
I say this as a cautionary tale, the most dangerous thing ad networks could do is clean up their act. If ads start being unobtrusive or native users wont be driven to install ad blockers while the rampant tracking and invasion of privacy continues in the background.
https://github.com/reek/anti-adblock-killer
If you use UblockOrigin this is already an option in settings under "3rd-party filters."
This is the interesting part to me. I'm not completely sold that Google's idea of what ads are "the worst" is really true.
Without an ad blocker, I can dismiss irritating popups in a second. But I have to wait for YouTube ads.
I also suspect many people are unaware which things in a Google search result are ads. While the ads Google is calling out are irritating, they are at least obviously ads, and thus...less misleading.
Advertising is not bad or evil per se, it's the "quality" of the advertisement that matters.
Does it matter at all to Google if other ad networks are happy? I don't see any way this could not "go down well" for Google, I don't know about the other folks though, who knows.
Strictly, neither does Google, as long as they are following the industry group's standard. Sure, Google is a member of that group and may be able to influence the standard, but so are a lot of other companies, from Facebook to the Washington Post. I doubt any one company can run away with the standard without the others having a say, or at least making a big stink.
Totally different than bundling it with the OS.
Except wait, they do that too.
it is not in /data, so it takes up no extra space
Microsoft tried to tie it in as much as they could to leverage it being the default and justify it being bundled, but the other vendors share at least an equal share of the blame for completely dropping the ball.
How long did Netscape Navigator/Communicator 4 linger? How many wasted resources were poured into things like the integrated page builder in Communicator instead of features? Do you remember trying to use Netscape 6 Beta or whatever it was called before it became Mozilla?
IE 5 and 6 were initially just that much better. Heck, IE was even the best browser on Mac for a while circa 2000-2002ish.
MS deserves a ton of extra blame for letting IE6 stagnate for five freaking years until Phoenix->Firebird->Firefox got them off their asses again, but don't blame them for having the better product when that initial war was won.
But, another key difference here is that Google has much more incentive to keep improving Chrome and web standards even if they get more and more market share, since their user-facing products are web properties, and Microsoft's were not at the time.
Did we read the same article, because that's not an accurate representation of what I read. Google is implementing an industry group standard. Sure, Google is part of that industry group, but so are Facebook and The Washington Post. I doubt Google can run away with the standard without other making a big stink out of it.
As long as Chrome actually follows the standard, characterizing this as "Google dictating what is and isn't acceptable for an ad" is not accurate.
I decided to check this. A simple google query and the first result[1] show you to be very wrong. Google does have a majority (with the top three spots being google properties totaling just under 72% of the market), but 7 out of 10 is by no means all.
1: https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/advertising-networks/
You stated as a publisher you better do what Google wants because they are the only guys with inventory. That's obviously false and undercuts whatever point it was supporting. That it isn't changed by a pithy response.
They get small amounts of micro transactions (I'm talking less than a cent) and I change my behavior to stop going to useless sites.
everyone wins!
personally, I believe ads are a disease. if your website isn't worth paying a penny to go to for an hour, then just shut down. a penny an hour could be very sustainable for plenty of sites. take some random forum: 15,000 thousand users per month, let's say the average user goes on for an hour a day, or 30 hours a month. 450,000 cents is about 5 thousand a month. not too shabby. if your website is that awesome up the price to 10 cents and increase your money an order of magnitude.
the problem is the culture of "free", unfortunately.
https://contributor.google.com
Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14467702
So, it is dead on arrival for me and all the other privacy-minded people that run ad blockers, which is a large and increasing percentage of the population.
Pay those who create it.
Allow free access to public information.
The entire advertising market worldwide is $600 billion, which works out to roughly $600 per man, woman, and child among the 1 billion inhabitants of the US, EU, Japan, CA, AU, and NZ. (Or OECD states, if you prefer, or G-7.)
Total media spend (print) is on the order of $200/year. Cable + broadband on the order of $1500 - $3000 per year (content and connectivity).
Seems to me there's some streamlining potential possible.
Piecework is actually a tremendous distraction.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes...
Not the grandparent poster, but I would have preferred if you'd either ommitted this part or provided some justification for why you feel it isn't a ~~public~~ non-rivalrous good.
Quite this.
is there public information? sure. there's also private information.
The definition you are using is not that.
It worked, technically, but the return was basically zero.
Assume that one person works full time on it. $5,000 a month is $60,000 a year. Subtract hosting costs and it's a relatively low income for one person who has the skills necessary to build and administer such a web site.
> not too shabby
It is actually a little shabby.
Perhaps in many parts of the US, but plenty of places elsewhere in the world, this is a really attractive salary.
you're greatly overestimating the difficulty of setting up a forum and the costs to have 15,000 active accounts with 1 hour viewing time.
Given the above is true, I have a proposition for you: I will pay you whatever you consider fair payment for fifteen minutes of your time to set me up a web site with an income of $5,000 dollars a month.
I've already provided instructions on how you can trivially setup a phpBB forum using cPanel.
This statement is incorrect. You haven't provided instructions on how one can trivially set up a phpBB forum using cPanel.
But how would you know if a site is useless or not unless you visit it and read its content? So you will be paying to view a site that you have never seen before, this will limit discoverability of new sites imo
Yeah, you might risk your five bucks on that first purchase of Time, but you'll know soon enough if you ever want to spend it again.
Noscript identifies all the useless sites for me when nothing renders and I see that they're pulling in scripts from 20+ trackers, CDNs, and ad networks. I avoid violating any social contract by never having seen their dreck.
P2P CDNs are one solution, but they aren't perfect either. They may be a lot easier to adopt than monetary roadblocks though.
In the future, a combination of mandatory P2P CDN participation and a monetary P2P CDN opt-out fee may be the best compromise. No ads, and everyone is actually helping host the website (be it through their own personal bandwidth and storage or through monetary means).
Whatever happened to "Don't be evil"?
"Shumeet Baluja, Ph.D., is currently a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google..."
As for don't be evil, I think that was completely lost right around the time they started using their algorithms to favor their services in the "neutral" Google search, and when they started influencing search results to help certain political candidates.
By contrast, tracking people who by and large don't care enough to try and stop it is not particularly evil. You and I might see it as a great evil, but it seems unfair to accuse Google of hypocrisy for not valuing the same things as I do.
Suffice to say, Google claiming to listen to industry standard agencies Google was part of founding doesn't mean much to me.
> Whatever happened to "Don't be evil"?
Greed killed it.
I think what might actually help this situation is a simple new regulation giving people the right to be notified when data about them is bought or sold including the name of both buyers and sellers and the data in question. If Google had to inform you when they sold your data we could at least be aware when we are being tracked and by whom. The current system where we blindly click "I agree" is broken. people do not want to wade through all the legalese and shouldn't have to. What they would be more likely to read is a simple csv containing every datapoint which was collected about them and to whom it was sold.
The whole "Don't be evil" thing, I believe, led to an expectation of Google to act in at least a responsible manner. Given the control they have over our lives it is time to start enabling us to verify the veracity of their claims.
If this was enacted, then I don't think people would mind ditching the ad blockers as much.
I don't know if Google is evil or not, but its looking scary as hell from over here.
>In dialogue with the Coalition and other industry groups, we plan to have Chrome stop showing ads (including those owned or served by Google) on websites that are not compliant with the Better Ads Standards starting in early 2018.
This will be interesting.
Search advertising revenue is #1 by far.
Google can make a lot of mistakes in every other vertical. As long as they don't screw up search they can fail as much as they want.
It appears their opinion has changed. Of course, it's likely due to financial reasons[2].
That said, Chrome has blocked pop-ups forever... and I think I agree with this decision, as it will help both Google and content owners. I don't think most people won't install ad blockers if ads aren't obnoxious.
[1]https://thenextweb.com/google/2014/02/11/google-explains-won...
[2]http://www.businessinsider.com/pagefair-2017-ad-blocking-rep...
EDIT: Found an article: https://venturebeat.com/2015/10/20/you-can-now-mute-tabs-in-...
Was checking to see how often it appears on HN and it seems to have shown up a handful of times with the recent discussions of the browser wars, along with another Firefox-derivative/alternative I've never heard of before: PaleMoon.
Don't get me wrong; this is an improvement, and a welcome one in my opinion. Pre-stitials in particular were never anything more than a slimy way to get around pop-up blockers. But ultimately the internet needs a new way to make money. I don't claim to know what that is, unfortunately, but I think the problem is clear.
This would be the point where I advocate for snowdrift.coop, if I were not exhausted and on mobile. wiki.snowdrift.coop has more info than the main site right now.
That would seem to categorise these adverts as deceptive, right? So, when will Google be blocking these adverts?
I assume it was also attempting to deliver some kind of payload as well, because the browser crashed on that page.
There is no way an advertising standard in which google was a part of laying the ground rules could be considered a "Better Ad".
I can't help but point out the irony that sound-playing, (mostly) unskippable ads precisely describes Youtube, before you can see the (video) content.
Only Google could put something that forces all websites to A) use this tool and B) comply with this tool, or else, as a "helpful tool for publishers".
When you have a 70%+ market share (Chrome Desktop and Android browsers) you leave websites with ads no choice but to do what you want, how you want, and hope for the best.
If you've looked at the tool, you realize it's going to work just like Mobility reporting and Safe Browsing. Google will tell you there's a problem and take action. In this case, the action is to cut your revenue. I'm sure there will be a hotline to call if it makes a mistake though.... (that's a joke)
Shame on you Google.
"As part of our efforts to maintain a sustainable web for everyone, we want to help publishers with good ad experiences get paid for their work. With Funding Choices, now in beta, publishers can show a customized message to visitors using an ad blocker, inviting them to either enable ads on their site, or pay for a pass that removes all ads on that site through the new Google Contributor."
If any one side were perfectly happy with this solution, it would probably mean it's not a very good solution. Of course the ad networks don't want to have to follow any standards. Of course the content producers that are making good money with ads that may fall foul of this don't want anything to change that might reduce their revenue. Of course users would rather get rid of all ads. None of that is realistic or sustainable. If advertising doesn't get its act together, ad blocking will increase even more over the large year-over-year increases it's already seeing[1], and at some point content producers will find they aren't making enough money anymore to sustain that advertising model because nobody is seeing their ads, and it will all come crashing down.
Would another model rise up in its place? Sure. Would that be any comfort to the people that ended up having to get a different job because what they were doing was no longer sustainable and no new model can take over instantaneously? Doubtful.
Whatever you want the eventual model to be, the only way forward that doesn't strangle the market while it's happening includes everyone involved taking responsibility for their part. And this definitely includes the consumers. Your "I can do whatever I want to bits delivered to me / I have no responsibility to watch the advertising expected to fund the content I'm consuming" arguments never really held up anyway, and they definitely don't if the other side gets its act together.
Privacy concerns are still valid, but ad blockers never actually fixed that, they just added an extra level of complexity to the equation. Use facebook? Guess what facebook probably knows about every site you've visited that has a like button while your facebook session is still active. Your only hope is legislation, and you'll be lucky not to get a raw deal out of that, and your only hope of a good outcome there is awareness and activism. Acting like your ad-blocker actually helps all that much is just sticking your head in the sand when that's the next real fight for online rights.
1: http://www.businessinsider.com/pagefair-2017-ad-blocking-rep...
It will only work partially.
As other commenters have said -- this doesn't go far enough though, which is understandable, they won't pull the rug under their own feet.
And no, users won't start uninstalling adblockers with happy smiles.
I guess for the huge scale Google operates in there will be slightly increased revenue for a while though.
It says "Google is a very large corporation employing tens of thousands of people which does not make decisions based on discussions by a few individuals posting anonymously on a web forum".
Back in the day Google would just lower the ranking of sites with banner ads. That sort of makes sense. They're a worse result, so show them lower. Fine. We should still decide this with traffic, but hey we can debate that.
To give Google/Chrome broad authorization to block people from seeing content that Google doesn't like scares the hell out of me, even if it's under a thoughtful banner.
Random made up example- what if next time Google picks a consumer advocacy group that says PayPal is a bad service, and blocks ads on sites that use PayPal? (Google offers Wallet)
I would grant them blocking ads that activate Android vibration- I consider that borderline malware. I grant pop-up ads, opening a new tab I didn't ask for is also arguably malware. I do not grant them blocking a wide variety of types of content just because marketers are abusing it. That's bad precedent. Rank them down, warn the user, heck put a "click to play Flash" lock on it. But don't take control away.
Google also hints at services that would let a website lock down when it detects ad blocking and force people to pay or otherwise engage to get access to the site. I think that's already one trojan horse. Google can stop you from trying to generate revenue off users, oh by the way we sell a new system where you can pay to get that back.
I don't like anything about this, even though I agree that screw those ads.