Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker
theintercept.com
theintercept.com
I can see it coming - "Host on AMP, and your ads will get through". "Use Google Ads, and your ads will get through." "Pay dues to the Acceptable Ad Consortium, and your ads will get through."
Look what happened with TrustE and their ratings. It started out as a good idea, and ended up as a cover for scumbags. Today, a TrustE seal has negative value.[1]
Even if you ignore Google's Funding Choices and its potential to increase adoption of view-ads-or-pay (a lose/lose for privacy, btw) you are very vulnerable if you use Chrome and/or a Google controlled OS. The Coalition for Better Ads won't be helping you by keeping Google in check. It is more or less the same companies you are fighting right now (check membership and note NAI, IAB, DMA, and other trade associations).
- non-technical users with safer and better experience
- better revenue models / more innovative businesses that are based on actual sales
- better uBlock experience because ads are not incentivized to be horrible
Also, the problem is less adverts than tracking which is fed by this. Obviously companies like FB and Google still will but hopefully tracking relaxes either by the awareness this causes driving a change in user behavior AND defunds some of the tracking as businesses shift to dif Models.
I won't stop filtering and blocking, but I would love the experience to be better, safer, and faster. If the main advert company, Google, does something about this we will be better off. Nontech users will definitely be.
Not being able to install noscript/adblock at work means that every time I go to bloomberg it does the garbage autoplay shit. So frustrating.
Why when I come to read an article would you think I'd want to hear someone talking??
Given that many forms of visible business failure literally cause brands to cease to exist, it seems indisputable that at least some of the time they're harmed.
"Some of the times they're not" does not exclude a potential correlation.
For example: "Some of the time, going to the hospital will not make me better, therefore there is no correlation between going to a hospital and getting better"
We may just have to disagree on the value of Google. It seems obvious to me that it is a critical asset to Alphabet that must not lose search/product share before another Alphabet subsidiary pays off. I believe the purpose of spinning companies out of Google is more about improving capital allocation than protecting either brand, with the possible exception of Waymo if there is a huge backlash against autonomous vehicles.
That sounds like an interesting study, where can I read it?
Maybe, but it's a popular belief in business anyway; moreover, however true or false it is in general, I think it's pretty clear that Google, specifically, has a problem (whether rational or not) in some potential customer sectors with service/product discontinuations reflecting negatively on perception of other services/products under the Google brand, even if that is a sui generis effect rather than a reflection of a generally-applicable effect of product failure on brand image.
I really don't think so. Even Microsoft is not there yet for most people.
Citation needed.
Or they could disable Chrome ad blocking and install their ad blocker of choice.
If I'm reading this correctly then no portion of the user population is hurt by this. Power with religious objections to advertising are free to continue using them. Typical users who don't care don't have to deal with awful and broken stuff. People who feel charitable enough to pay for advertising get to do so.
But doesn't it hurt the advertisers? That's not a given either. This article makes it sound like all non-Google advertisers will be shut out. But that's clearly not true: plenty of non-Google advertisers are represented in the decision making process, to the point where one can be convinced that a variety of views were considered.
Ad blockers are a response to the absolutely worst of ads, to the detriment of better-behaved networks like Google, Facebook, and friends. While I agree it's a little creepy that an advertising company shoulda put out an ad blocker, Google is in a unique place to tackle the problem of poor advertising by filtering truly bad experiences, and doing so hurts no one except truly abusive networks.
Additionally, having a Google/Facebook oligopoly hurts incumbents when Google uses its overwhelming advertising market power to give itself exclusive advertising deals in order to promote some product. Advertising monopolies can be used to prop up and establish other monopolies. The most obvious example of Google doing this is advertising Chrome on the front page of google.com.
Maybe, but do they need to do that or do they just sit there and reap the profits of being an ever expanding proportion of the market (which is now thriving again because they killed other ad blockers). Regulators will just ignore them that way.
I actually installed an ad-blocker because I could not stand video ads (I would call it TV-cation of the Internet) and that was the easiest way to eliminate them.
You argue that people can install another browser and use an ad-blocker with that.
This is true for now (given reasonably motivated and knowledgeable users), but Google is also pushing DRM into web browsers.
This opens a possibility to restrict access to a website to all browsers but Google one. Given their market dominance they can do this.
More realistically, I think Google hurts other ad blockers and expands their oligarchic position in the ads space (especially on mobile).
Ten years ago I thought that the level of tracking and corporate surveillance we see today was a nightmare scenario. I was clearly an optimist. Don't be me.
I think that is the main problem of the mainstream thinking - inability to see how multiple independent trends can interact and create new realities.
I believe that blindness, even the forced one, to such realities is one of the greatest dangers that allows these realities to develop and take almost everyone by surprise - oh, we did not see it coming.
>The reason being is that they just don't go that far and it's suddenly seems okay in comparison to what "could" happen.
Perhaps two scenarios should be presented: a catastrophic one and a one single step in the wrong direction.
Just because they are seeking input from others doesn't mean they are the good guys. Google's opinion can change very quickly, and plenty of smaller shops can be hurt by that, even if they are offering a superior product.
This just reeks of too much potential for abuse.
Easy scenario, I come up with a new ad style that works pretty well (worth loads). Google (et al) say no, that violates some standard we set, blocked. They just cost me a bunch of money.
> Google is in a unique place to tackle the problem of poor advertising by filtering truly bad experiences
By leveraging a leading (at least) position in search, browsers, and advertising.
If they want to drop out completely from their "Coalition for Better Ads", make it a consumer group instead, then maybe I'll trust them on this. Right now this is the type of move that really makes me agree with the author, Alphabet should be broken up.
I also wonder if they are going to punish ads that look like page content (google search) or before youtube videos.
I think you could make the case that the current idea actually makes it pretty much impossible not to screw over new companies in favour of the entrenched group (google, facebook, etc...). If you are going to be restricted to the ads google already does extremely well, why wouldn't you just go with Google?
oh, and we have the issue of Android. The vast majority of mobile users just use the browser already on the phone. That would be chrome, which will have only the ad blocker provided by Google unless they change things.
Note a similar FUD argument can be made about Google's own advertising network: "if we unilaterally decide we don't like your ads or your websites we'll cut you off." Similarly for search results. Yet Google's implementation and guidelines are generally seen as reasonable, economically satisfactory, and not stifling innovation.
Also, what would be the point of dropping out of this coalition? The online ads industry is largely self-regulating, there's no federal regulator setting the rules. Instead coalitions like this one are formed which set guidelines and make standards. What point would it serve to pull out of a coalition and subject yourself to the control of your competitors for a one-time show of goodwill at the expense of long-term influence?
Maybe you don't trust self-regulation, and that's fine. Appropriate even, given how often it breaks down. But keep in mind the alternatives are either government regulation or no regulation. The advertising industry is presented with an existential challenge in the form of bad advertising and ad blockers. The closer you look at it, the more you realize this move is actually a pretty good one, all things considered.
It would remove the obvious conflict of interest. To be clear, I'm talking about dissolving the coalition of advertisers and instead having the group agree to regulation from an outside group.
> But keep in mind the alternatives are either government regulation
and I've stated outright that I'm in favour of breaking up Google over this.
Not just this, but partly.
Here's a thing: as a user, I'd much prefer them to implement it as a whitelist. We really don't need more "innovation" in ad space - because it always means more dishonesty, more annoyance and more tracking. Ads have already maxed-out their primary feature - informing consumers about things available on the market. Everything on top of that is malicious in purpose. And I think it would be better for everyone if companies would spend money and innovation effort on improving their actual product instead.
Put simply, if nobody stops using other adblockers because of this, then nothing is directly a problem. The problems come when Google uses their power to do things like block adblockers in Chrome (as they already do on Android!) and other ramifications of their power.
Anyway, adblockers aren't just about obnoxious ads. They are also about the simple fact that if I want to search for some product, I would prefer a neutral result and don't want any amount of my results to be biased toward whoever spends the most money for the privilege, and further issues with advertising in general.
This is exclusionary detailing, wouldn't you say? Chrome on Android doesn't have an extensions platform.
That being said there are other browsers on android that either support extensions (like firefox) or have an adblocker built in.
[0]: https://adblockplus.org/blog/adblock-plus-for-android-remove...
We have a similar problem in the "ad blocking" space. Naive users don't appreciate that there is a big difference between ad-blockers that only block "annoying" ads and ad-blockers that provide more comprehensive blocking (annoying ads and related security threats and related privacy threats). Many who want/need the stronger solution opt for the weaker solution and they are harmed by doing so. The lower efficacy "annoying ad blockers" need black box warnings.
So, it's officially a cartel.
Private entities shouldn't be regulating markets. And the biggest internet advertiser shouldn't be in the ad-blocking market.
There's already a strong push from the security community to use Chrome over other browsers, because it's more secure. This puts Google in a very powerful position of setting the terms of the debate over web standards, web advertising, and tracking. But Google's interests are not necessary aligned with those of their users, who are also NOT their customers. I don't see why the same dynamic wouldn't play out for a Google ad-blocker.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish
Pay for use ad-blocking is exactly what I want. Did you hear me? Exactly. I don't want to manage a zillion news subscriptions at $15+ a pop. I don't want to get nagged to turn off my ad blocker.
I want a reasonable amount of money to to spent towards the people making the content that I'm vaguely interested in because other people on Hacker News are interested in it too. I've already solved the problem of content I really care about, I just buy a darned subscription.
This is a huge market opportunity and I'm just absolutely silly with glee that Google finally decided to jump on it. Because only Google has the scale to make something like this work. Finally I'm going to see the end of mob rule and the establishment of law and order in web advertising. Couldn't have happened fast enough for me.
Please please, just charge me for the content I consume. Why did it take the industry so long to figure this out?
Its a hopelessly google-myopic idea.
There is no "finally" here - this isn't new. Google Contributor is from 2014 [1].
Google and other companies have tried this idea many times already. It's true that people like you exist, but there haven't been enough to make this viable.
It needs to be universal to be of any use to the end user. Otherwise it's only of slight use to Google, marginal use to content creators, and no use at all to consumers. That's what I'm hoping for from the new content blockers. A way to force a new order on the content world.
The content in this article, is, for the most part, good content. What annoys me is that The Intercept seems fit to act like a heroic good guy insofar as being completely biased against Google from start to finish in what could have been a mostly informational article. An opening lead like this serves no purpose other than making this bias known.
Are we really beyond "just the facts" journalism, even by new journalism companies?
Are you complaining about the "sells personal information" part?
In this case they call it a data mining company, which is both meaningless due to how vague the term is, but also slightly menacing sounding.
Does Google do things that would fall under a reasonable interpretation of data mining? Definitely. Is it their primary activity? Not by a long shot. Even the people who want to label Google an advertising company have more of a point on a revenue basis. But these characterisations are needlessly reductive and lead you to believe false conclusions like "Google wants all of your data"
As it should be. They are aggressively capturing and selling people data from phones and browsers, as proven by large amounts of evidence. This is pretty factual, please don't call it "bias".
I'm interested, where can I go and buy some user data from Google?
Anything else Google does is either a route to more data mining and extraction, or a fun side project they do with money made off data mining and extraction.
IMHO The Intercept has been pretty up-front about their POV: they're supposed to be the publication that speaks truth to power, meaning that they're opposed to basically all big institutions (Google, Facebook, big corporations, establishment media, both political parties, the government, all governments, etc.) If you share their POV, of course they're the heroic good guy. If you don't, they can be kinda annoying.
Even if you don't fully share their POV, though, it can be good to read them to get a diverse array of POVs. I'm an ex-Googler, so of course I found their anti-Google bias a bit grating. Nevertheless, I'm glad I read it, because it was informative and offers a perspective that other mainstream news sources are not reporting on.
I mean, consider how would you handle any kind of factual investigation that actually matters to you. Say your production server suddenly overloaded and died, and everyone in your company is trying to figure out what happened.
Would the search involve interviewing engineers and management, and then writing biased stories about their life and decisions? Would you treat "investigators inherently choose which facts to report" as an acceptable standard for their work?
No. You'd start with a fact database, you'd go on collecting every bit of related information, making it available to see and analyze, you'd gather conclusions and add things, mark some entries as "dead ends", etc. until the real cause reveals itself. Suddenly it's entirely possible to reach unbiased facts. I wish we created our news the same way.
While one could certainly attempt to create a "fact database" about a busted server, trying to do the same about an event involving humans, each with their own undiscernable motivations and varying degrees of willful duplicity, is often impossible.
Instead you get stories about the life decisions and bias of the actors involved, because that's what a person who's been trained to tease out the facts from a myriad of fallible sources, any of whom may or may not be lying or trying to advance an unstated agenda, does.
For pretty much any newsworthy event there are lots of facts that are concrete and objective, and frankly, that's what matters most of the time. Life decisions and motivations and biases make for a fun reading, but are otherwise irrelevant.
A politician said something, or did not. A company is going forward with a project, or is not. The proposed law implies a consequence X, or does not. Those are ground facts. I'm not saying they're always easy to establish, but the media sources are not even trying.
I recently stumbled upon an interesting site that tries to run Bayesian analysis on various pieces of information and media reports, to piece out the actual reality. See e.g.: https://www.rootclaim.com/claims/what-caused-the-chemical-ca... What I want to point out there is not their analysis in particular. Just how it's structured. It seems that establishing some objectively verifiable summary of a "messy" real-world story is not impossible.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/anti-google-rese...
They are more of a think-tank or advocacy group than a newspaper.
By selling the service of targeting and delivering ads, not by selling personal information.
Unless Google really sells personal information somewhere, in which case I'd like to know the price tag on the file about me that's supposedly for sale. My understanding is that such a product doesn't exist.
(Disclosure: I work at Google but on Chrome OS, ie. client hardware. No idea what the servers are doing except that I've heard that there must be lots of them.)
Either way, at the end of the day, Google is still selling our data.
Part of the article was a bit confusing, though: "According to the Financial Times, Google will allow publishers what it’s calling 'Funding Choices.' The publisher could charge the consumer a set price per page view to use third-party sites that block all advertising. Google would do the tracking of how many pages users view, and then charge them. Users could then 'white list' particular sites, allowing ads to be shown on them and removing the charge. If users decided to pay to block ads, Google would receive a portion of that payment, sharing it with the publisher."
Third-party sites that block all advertising? I think the author has this confused with third-party ad blockers. And the part where Google does the tracking means that now is certainly the time to switch to Firefox and keep ajax.googleapis.com, google-syndication.com, google-analytics.com, and all the rest of them firmly on the banned list.
At times I almost feel nostalgic for the bad old days of Internet Explorer 6... (But then I remember what IE6 was actually like, and the feeling passes.)
Because just saying that one can always disable it and use something like uBlock Origin is missing the point that most of the people will not bother to do that except a tiny minority and that would essentially mean this coalition, which by all measures comes across more of a sham, will succeed in monopolizing ads completely.
I think the least they could do to even look impartial is keeping it disabled by default rather than making it opt-in.
"Brave Browser Will Reward Users with Ethereum-Based Tokens for Switching on Ads":
https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/brave-announces-blockchain-d...
Also, that's just part of the Brave strategy. It's going to block a lot more ads than Chrome by default. That has the potential for general appeal, not just for tech people.
Eich ran Mozilla, guy is smart. Google won because it was the best. I can see Brave being the best. Search is being encroached on, adverts are being killed Brave could win for simplicity and privacy which people are valuing more & more...I hope.
I think the opportunity window is still open, and can't for the life of me understand why Mozilla is not doing the right thing.
Or switch to an open source browser like Chromium/Firefox and go on using the ad-blocker of choice and avoid the pages that charge you.
I do occasionally see that kind of sponsorship, but only on websites that take very little time/money to maintain.
Adding a layer on top of that, people generally have a target audience, so if you want them as a customer, you might have to inject some more Javascript to determine if the user is part of the target audience.
And pretty soon the site is full of tracking beacons and blobs of JS.
1) not trackable by client for pvs 2) not easily rotated, or if so requires home grown ad server or integration with web app
John Gruber's ad model for over a decade is to post one RSS sponsorship on Monday and a thank you on Friday. He charged $8000 a week it.
I've been using adblockers for about ten years now, but blocking that just seems over the top and I understand Troy's frustration. I want a blocker to prevent trackers from being loaded and for removing annoying crap from webpages. That includes most ads, newsletter popups, interstitials, maybe social widgets and cookie notices, but certainly not "Sponsored by [Company Name]: [A sentence about the company]".
It took way too many steps for me to get to see the sponsor message.
The question, of course, is whether Google can/will abuse this in anti-consumer ways. Some people have said that Google's criteria for "good" ads aren't that great. The article implies that Google can somehow force adblocker users to either pay per pageview or turn off their adblockers, which is awful if true, though I'm not clear how it's supposed to work.
And that's when you download a different browser...
This seems highly unlikely, since most of the annoying ads already come from google. Try watching a dailymotion video and you'll see. Even with a brand new Macbook Pro, it starts to stutter after a while because of all the fucking video adverts around the content. Same with some forum sites that have google ads beside each post.
In the end I created a simple blacklist in /etc/hosts, which completely resolves the problem and gets rid of virtually all adverts. Note that I don't have any philosophical objection to ads, and some of them are actually useful, but I draw the line when they make it impossible to actually see the content on the site.
127.0.0.1 adserver.adtech.de content.tomyvid.com adserver.adtechus.com gce-or.bidswitch.net tpc.googlesyndication.com s.apxtarget.com nym1-ib.adnxs.com googleads.g.doubleclick.net p.algovid.com serve-east.acuityplatform.com cas.ny.us.criteo.com cat.ny.us.criteo.com
Assuming the price is reasonable this doesn't sound horrible (but it doesn't sound too great either). How much would a publisher charge for an article view? $0.01? Or something like $0.50+ ? If the price is too high then I'd have to ditch Chrome for Firefox or Safari; I do not like ads.
That is hilarious. Talk about self-serving. How can they do this with a straight face?
I guess "Don't be evil" doesn't imply "Don't be slimy".
In practice, who knows?
EU has already tried to make similar arguments to "break up Google" (lol, it's an American company, glwt) by basically blaming them for having a fair ToS and enforces it like no tommorow, thus producing services that attracts users.
Thus, having an ad service that bans shitty publishers and advertisers both makes publishers and advertisers (sometimes exclusively) do business with Google.
So, Google making Chrome ban shitty publishers and ad networks that harbor shitty publishers and advertisers ... makes Google look like they're not attacking themselves: which, well, they aren't, because they simply don't engage in that behavior on their ad network.
There's probably a shorter way of explaining this.
The ads on YouTube are extremely frustrating.
And, the ads on a search results page aren't exactly frustrating, but they do seem very deliberately designed to not look like ads.
The advertising model of revenue seems to be extremely difficult to pull off in practice.
It seems to work well enough for Google. Not so much for everyone else.
- Google creates built-in adblocker that allows google ads
- Google removes the adblockers from Google Store due to some reason
- You don't have an adblocker anymore
> So this is a way for Google to crush its few remaining competitors by pre-installing an ad zapper that it controls to the most common web browser. That’s a great way for a monopoly to remain a monopoly.
It seems like the author is really trying to paint Google in an unflattering light. Maybe that's how it is, but the facts should speak for themselves.
I am hopeful that Brandon Eich's brave browser[1] will make the ads economy less vulnerable to Google's dominance.
My router just refuses to route to ad servers, and my DNS resolver refuses to resolve their domains.
I'm on Firefox all the time and it's a RAM saver ;)
Full disclosure: I'm not related to Mozilla in any way but definitely a fanboy.
AdblockPlus already does most of this anyway (showing ads they get paid for).
Ads aren't really a problem for me (and I am guessing a lot of others), it's bad/misleading ads like pop-ups, auto-play video ads, etc. I think the idea to block ads that do not follow an established industry standard is definitely a step in the right direction.
Savvy users will continue to use 3rd party ad blockers- no change there.
Also the biggest source of pre-roll auto-play video ads, youtube.
I get super pissed by auto-play ads on non-video websites, but when it's in front of a video such as on youtube I find it only a minor annoyance.
[EDIT: I don't know if there are auto-play ads in the sidebar on desktop, I use adblock on desktop so I only see those video ads on the mobile version, which doesn't have anywhere else to put ads]
Right off the bat this person couldn't even get his facts right. Google doesn't sell personal information to advertisers.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/anti-google-rese...
"Monopoly" isn't a buzz word that you throw around randomly. It doesn't even have to do necessarily with market share or control or the market.
There is no monopoly on the ad space, not by very, very far.
Google controls the majority of ads on extended networks, it controls almost all publisher ads (even Microsoft network sites run Google ads.) If publishers have no where to go but Google, how is that not a monopoly? Ignore search, ignore Facebook and Twitter, those are first party. Google has 0 competition on extended network sites, and this ensures it never will.
You're not getting the point: extended network sites is not an isolated product. It exists as a part of a large sub-segment (online ads) which part of an even larger market (ads).
You can take a single sub-sub-segment and call it a monopoly. Its doesn't matter if Coke had 95% of the colas market (it does in several countries), it isn't a monopoly, because it competes with thousands of other drinks.
And you can't just look at market share, you need to look at prices. CPMs are falling dramatically across the board, which is completely incompatible with a monopoly.
There is the economical definition of a monopoly, and then there's the layman definition, which means whatever you want to mean.