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I feel like there's a simpler explanation that's still not 'good intentions':

1. Lots of people are using adblockers to block all ads, including Google's, and they don't like that.

2. People mostly install adblockers to block really annoying ads.*

3. By building in an adblocker that blocks annoying ads, people will stop installing full adblockers that also block Google's ads.

*There are real issues with non-annoying ads, like tracking, but I don't think most people know or care very much about that.

> People mostly install adblockers to block really annoying ads.*

Many people use ad blockers because they want to block all ads. There are many reasons to block them, including malware, privacy, and brainwashing.

If ads works to manipulate behavior (and they do, otherwise people wouldn't buy them), and you don't want to be manipulated, you shouldn't let professionals attempt to hijack your brain (whether those attempts are done via ads, Facebook-style feeds, or other ways).

I can't be sure, but I think a non-trivial reason why I block them is because they are frankly unspeakably ugly. :)

This is very true. If ads were less repetitive and original, I would even choose to view them.

I use an ad blocker solely to block popups that interfere with my reading. So many sites popup to ask for your email once you scroll far enough to move the mouse to leave, and I simply don't want to be on email lists. I'm totally fine with other ads and I'm not concerned I've been brainwashed.

This is a very pessimistic view of the world. Not all ads are attempts to hijack your brain. For example, if you were already thinking about buying a specific keyboard and then saw an ad for that same keyboard with a 10% discount, that ad would have actually provided positive value to you. You save money for the thing that you already want. Not all ads are like that, but the example goes to show that there is a spectrum and that its not black and white.

Assuming the premises of your scenario (that the ad didn't change anything about you to make you more likely to buy the keyboard, or adversely influence you in any other way), the display of this ad is a disaster for the advertiser. Advertisers will work as hard as they can to make that not happen.

This is true. However, I do think that there are a few (possibly rare) cases where advertisements can cause a mutual benefit.

If I intend to purchase a product of a certain category, and would like to choose one with a particular property, but am under the assumption that no such product exists, and I see an ad for such a product, correcting my impression, I may, as a result, purchase that product instead of competitors which don't have the property that I desire, which satisfies both my own wants, and the wants of the company advertising the product.

This has happened to me at least once.

However, most ads that I see do not provide me with any new information, and the strategy of having ads follow users around after the first time they see it seems somewhat contrary to this type of benefit, and I don't totally understand why it is understood to be effective.

Saving 10% on a keyboard on a very rare occasion isn't worth the dangers of advertising (privacy, malware, brainwashing).

I wasn't really talking about the 10% savings thing, so I'm not sure how this is relevant to what I said?

I do agree that the malware risk that current ad systems cause is bad, and it would probably be good if consumers behaved in such a way that the sort of ad systems that are a malware risk were no longer more financially viable.

However, I don't think I have any substantial objection to the style of ads on project wonderful, which do not allow embedding any extra JavaScript or anything like that, only permitting an image, a link, and a hovertext value, iirc. No tracking or malware risk there I think. Or, at least negligible risk.

If you have a proposed improvement on how to lead people who desire a product to discover that said product is available, I'd be interested in hearing it?

I think that most ads aren't leading people who desire a product to that product -- they are creating desire for products that people don't really need.

Most of the ads I see at the moment are on YouTube/Gmail and they are for things like junk food, "make money online" scam artists, and other garbage. Sometimes there are unblockable content ads on news sites that pretend to be news, but are really just paid content.

It certainly seems true that the vast majority of times that some person sees some ad, that that impression is not connecting a person who desires some product to that product, and furthermore, I quite doubt that that could plausibly be otherwise, at least assuming any substantial amount of people seeing advertisements.

However, I don't think that by itself is sufficient for a condemnation of advertisement in general.

If the cost to the viewer (and the advertiser) of the ad impressions which [do not connect a consumer desiring a product to that product] is sufficiently low, then it could be possible for both consumers and advertisers to benefit on average. (Not to say that it is currently the case that they do.)

This is true even if the advertisers were to only benefit from the ad impressions which connected a consumer desiring a product desiring a product to said product.

So, I guess the question would be, whether or not the costs to consumers (and advertisers) when [not connecting people desiring a product to the product] can be made sufficiently small to make it a mutual benefit.

Of course, if that by itself was enough to lead to a mutual benefit, one could wonder why it would be included as part of something else that the consumer wishes to look at, rather than just being something that consumers might look at separately from other content. One possible reason could be that seeing it as part of other desirable content decreases the cost to the consumer when the product is not one that they desire. I'm not sure how much credence to assign to that reason.

Thinking on this, I suspect that direct mutual benefit between the advertisers and consumers would not in practice be a sufficient reason by itself for (e.g.) websites to tend to have ads on them, even if ads were restricted to have many fewer problems for consumers.

So, I think that it is likely that if not for the inconvenience of removing ads from websites they view, the main reason that consumers might deign to allow the ads to display on the webpages they view would be because of the benefit it provides to the owner of the website.

So, I guess I would recommend blocking ads which create more of a cost to you than you consider worth it in order to provide the benefit to website owners get from the ads being displayed to people who reason similarly to you?

It is my opinion that for a certain fairly restricted set of types of ads, that the average cost to me is sufficiently low that I am willing to incur it.

However, don't get me wrong: I definitely support the freedom to block whatever ads you wish (unless you have made a contract to do otherwise or something like that).

I think that ideally, the only ads that should be profitable should be the ones which impose extremely low costs on the viewer, and occasionally provide some benefit to the viewer (even if this is rare enough that the only reason the viewer deigns to see them is so that the website owner benefits).

Not true. If I know you want a keyboard and that you can buy it from 100 different stores, I would probably give you a discount to buy it from me as long as it still makes me money.

I'm never thinking about buying anything that I see in an ad. I don't own much more in life other than some books, my computers, and a few clothes. I prefer to take my own initiative on what I buy, and the less I buy, the better.

Ah, you unique snowflake :)

It’s astounding when people think that advertising doesn’t affect them. And yet companies continue to pay billions for adverts...

I think people who use ad blockers, like myself, KNOW all about how advertising works. Oh yes most certainly WE KNOW. That is why some of us choose to block them.

I limit my exposure to marketing as much as I can.

There's no need to be condescending, and there's a much simpler solution to avoid being influenced by ads.

It's called making data-driven decisions.

Step 1: Find a set of products that solve your problem based on independent reviews, e.g. what Stiftung Warentest writes.

Step 2: Use several price comparison engines, e.g. idealo, Preispiraten, Hardwareschotte to find the cheapest option for the products.

Step 3: Order there.

If you methodically follow this algorithm, you are immune to making ad-based decisions.

It's a good idea, but I don't think that it will stop being influenced by ads.

Human behavior is contagious, and advertisers know that. That's why actors in commercials pretend to be just another person like the viewer while lying about performing some action or behavior that the advertisers want the viewer to copy. I don't think that it's possible to suppress that behavior-imitating instinct completely. Humans are generally not very rational creatures -- not even the self-proclaimed rational ones.

Many ads are not just about some product that one might really need, like a keyboard or other equipment that is essential for a person's work. Many ads I see are about junk food, bad lifestyle choices, and trying to convince the public that bad entities are actually good entities (example: greenwashing).

But does anyone actually follow that algorithm 100% faithfully? We are not machines, fortunately.

If you don't have enough money, and can only barely afford to buy something, then yes, very much you will follow it religiously. You will try to buy the most reliable for the cheapest price, because you can't afford the product failing, nor can you afford paying too much, and you don't want to go back to getting food from the food bank so you can spend your grocery money to replace the broken washing machine.

Of course if you're a SV programmer earning 5-10 times the average wage, you don't care about this and buy overpriced shit every day, but many people follow this to the letter.

I'd argue that we and our minds have enough weaknesses in comparison to machines, that it is not fortunate that we aren't more like machines. We'd be far less vulnerable to making the kinds of mistakes that only human minds can make.

> It’s astounding when people think that advertising doesn’t affect them.

I know that advertising affects me. That's one of the reasons why I block ads at every opportunity.

If you want to buy a keyboard, then you visit sites from where keyboards can be bought. Meanwhile, when you are doing other things, you shouldn’t be seeing advertising, least of all ads specifically targeting you. You seem to find it hard to understand that ads are aesthetically unacceptable to intelligent people. Do you see ads on the pages of a novel you are reading in a paper book?

> There are real issues with non-annoying ads, like tracking, but I don't think most people know or care very much about that.

I speak to a lot of people who find "retargeting" deeply creepy. The awareness of the problem is there. However, they don't understand what causes it, how it works or that it's even possible to stop it.

Its also just bad salesmanship.

There was an electronics store called CompUSA. I didn’t always shop there but I did buy Christmas presents there. Then one year they started using transparent shopping bags. Which means you can’t shop for anybody that is on the trip with you, or lives with you. It made it a hassle to keep a secret and I just gave up.

So now if I am looking at jewelry for my partner, ads for the exact things I looked at will follow me around for the next several weeks. Dumber still, it will show me ads for an expensive item I already bought. Telegraphing my purchase history.

If someone just bought a new TV, then showing then TV ads is pretty much the dumbest move you can make. The target is at an all time low for probability of purchasing that item. And worse, you risk triggering buyer’s remorse. Repeatedly.

But this is Amazons engineering culture. Don’t reason about anything. Just try it and see. It’s amoral most of the time (but refusing to address ethics is itself immoral).

They are basically a giant factory for throwing spaghetti against a wall to see what sticks. I think all they can do is get more parasitic until people say no.

Wait. What does retargeting have to do with Amazon’s Engineering culture? Seems like a large leap in logic. Couldn’t it just as easily say “well, that’s Facebook’s caching layer not updating fast enough to remove finished campaigns?”

Its a casualty of their philosophy on code. If the numbers look good it doesn’t matter whose idea it was or how crazy it sounded. They tell you this pretty much at the top of the indoctrination material.

It certainly keeps them out of analysis paralysis, no question. But any armchair psychologist can tell you this is essentially numbing. Not listening to your fears or emotions can be as unhealthy as dwelling on them. Zero is not the only alternative to Too Much. These things take balance.

I just don't think this is true. There's plenty of shady and scummy stuff that Amazon can do (and other online retailers do) which Amazon doesn't do. It's far more straightforward at building customer loyalty by getting them stuff more cheaply than other retails, much faster, with free shipping by squeezing their own margins.

I haven't even interviewed with Amazon, but I'm still curious: outside of "office politics" bullshit, why should an idea ever be judged by who made it or its _a priori_ "apparent craziness", let alone given that it has been tested?

(regardless of the test results; if they were negative then any other concerns are redundant)

The behaviour you described is a bug. The "throw everything at the wall" advertising technique - also known as the contextual multi-armed bandit problem - should adapt to changes in the context, such as when an expensive TV set has been bought. It's part of the reinforcement learning subfield, which is the spearhead of AI.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit#Contextual_...

> If someone just bought a new TV, then showing then TV ads is pretty much the dumbest move you can make. The target is at an all time low for probability of purchasing that item. And worse, you risk triggering buyer’s remorse. Repeatedly.

While I agree with your subjective experience -- right after buying product X I'm done, I wanna look at other stuff -- from a marketing/advertising perspective repeated ad exposures right after purchase actually do a lot to eliminate buyers remorse and reinforce our decision making. We're creatures of emotion first, logic second.

Seeing car ads after buying a car, unless it's the same model for less money, make you feel better about your purchase. I don't think that's why it happens online, but that's no small part of it in print and TV.

> 2. People mostly install adblockers to block really annoying ads.*

I don't really think there's any other kind of ad. For the majority of us, there's absolutely no value in ads; so there's no reason I'd want them displayed.

> For the majority of us, there's absolutely no value in ads

They do give value, they allow sites to operate without some subscription or entrance fee.

I think the actual plan may be one step once their own blocker is released:

1. Declare all ad blockers in the Chrome Web Store now obsolete, and ban them.

If people no longer feel the need to install a stronger ad blocker why is that bad?

Because there's still the privacy problem that many don't fully understand.

That's why Mozilla's approach is tracking protection which also happens to block annoying ads.

But yes, if the concern is only bringing in line what people "feel" with the product you want to sell, then Google's strategy makes perfect sense.

I would be surprised if the chrome ad blocker will block Ads for Google's own properties like Youtube, and while most ads probably adhere to the advertising standards they have still be caught accidentally serving crypto-mining ads (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/01/now-e...).

So to me it's bad because it's opening up people's computers to exploitation that even Google can't control.

Because those people are still being manipulated into making less than optimal choices. Ads are just there to make society worse.

They're doing it, not to block ads, but to make sure ads reach you. So the question gets philosophical in a hurry. What is the "goodness" of an otherwise generous act done for self-serving reasons?

Is it good or bad to write a check to an orphanage for the publicity?

Is it good or bad to save someone's life because they owe you money?

Is it good or bad to block certain ads to make sure other ads still reach you?

> Is it good or bad to block certain ads to make sure other ads still reach you?

If there is a growing product that works better, and fully blocks ads and your goal is only to quickly take over the market and do a worse job then I say 'no' that's not being altruistic...

If they put up a big banner saying "only works half as well at blocking ads as the competition" then maybe it's a little better.

It may not be good, but it's not being done on the pretence of being good. The question is, how is it bad?

Unless they block YouTube ads, I think a lot of people are still going to use an ad blocker.

Yup, the most annoying ads I encounter on a daily basis are youtube ads. If they don't block them, I don't know what's the point of a adblocker.

This is the explanation they give in the post.

>*There are real issues with non-annoying ads, like tracking,

99% of online tracking comes from Google Analytics, not ads.

> ...but I don't think most people know or care very much about that.

Indeed...

There's another step here: Google encouraging paywalls for people who do have an adblocker installed. Paywalls that they themselves will service. See https://support.google.com/fundingchoices/answer/7362965?hl=... and its explicit mention in https://www.blog.google/topics/journalism-news/building-bett...

i read the link only in part, but this look reasonable. if you exclude ads and paywall how should they make money?

moreover when mozzilla made attempt to "non-tracking privacy-respectful ads" in the mr robot scandal everyone was at their throat.

how should site make money then?

I use uBlock Origin, but it's pretty easy to bypass: host ads on your own site. That's how ads worked in other forms of media for ages.

How about providing a meaningful service and request adequate compensation? Paywalls work fine for quality content. There's tons of proof that people are willing to pay for books, games, movies, and music. But by having a paywall, you lose out on search indexing. You can't have your cake and eat it.

Hosting ads on your site isn't actually enough. uBlock Origin can and does block by CSS selector (and that's the default behavior if you use right-click -> Block Element).

It _does_ get pretty hard to block if your ads are bespoke native advertisements, though.

If you don't see the issue with Google enabling putting up paywalls, but only on sites that are showing ads that belong to them or to companies that made a deal with them, while blocking ads on sites that don't do Google's bidding, I'm not sure what to tell you.

Note that they are not being public with their list of sites that they will block ads on and reason why; nothing prevents them from putting sites on that list for any arbitrary reason they want.

I personally find the ads on Google search really annoying.

I'd never use Google if Ublock didn't hide them.

Without adblock, google died a decade ago.

So those are two reasons because 1 and 3 are the same: google wants themselves unblocked.

So the intention is to give people a way to remove annoying ads.

I'd say that's obviously a good intention.

The fact that Google also can gain from it doesn't change that to me, but I realize others have different moral philosophies.

Bingo.

That's a valid concern, but it's also a very obvious one, and Google already being in the crosshairs of regulators will certainly be aware of it.

They are clearly prepared to counter any such allegation in two ways.

1) It's not Google alone setting the standard. The "coalition for better ads" also includes Facebook, Microsoft and many others: https://www.betterads.org/members/

2) The rules are few and reasonably simple: https://www.betterads.org/standards/

The combination of these two facts doesn't make it easy to pursue a strategy like the one you laid out. So I think this is sincere and can work to some degree.

BUT, the rules are insufficient! They don't ban animations. For me, anything that moves is a huge distraction especially next to or right in the middle of longer text.

Another extremely annoying thing is never ending layout changes. Pages keep jumping up and down because ads are being inserted and moved around all the time.

In other words, what this standard doesn't mandate is to keep the page still. That's why I like the reader mode in browsers that have one, such as Firefox and Safari.

The coalition of marketing giants. I'm sure they're only thinking of us and what's best for us when setting their "standards".

It's like the coalition of tobacco companies thinking about how to stop kids smoking.

The point is that they are Google's major competitors.

Totally agree. I need uBlock just to remove elements or more often entire sidebars from websites that insist on having animated gifs right next to text that I'm trying to read.

I really can't concentrate with animation going on in in the corner.

The worst part about all of this is the conflation of advertising with tracking. They are very different beasts.

Google "protects" us from visibly annoying ads while ignoring the much more troubling intrusive and problematic tracking.

The indirect effect of this, I believe, will be for fewer people to protect themselves from problematic cross-site tracking.

I'm thinking that's not an indirect effect, but a goal of the initiative.

Google is absolutely going down the wrong path here. They could blow Amazon away with one simple move that would benefit users AND, especially, advertisers.

The problem with online ads and the reason that things are getting scummier and scummier is that they simply don't work very well for the advertiser. Most clicks are bogus; most prospects are unqualified. That's how Amazon wins: when you click Amazon, you are a buyer wanting to buy. That's why I would far more readily pay for an Amazon ad than a Google ad.

But Google could get back in the game and dominate it with one simple step. If, in their search page, they had a button that said "I am looking to buy" or something along those lines; in other words, if they helped prequalify the prospect, then their ads would become super valuable and they would effectively become the meta-Amazon. Everybody would start using Google again for shopping. Right now, it's mostly Google = Research, Amazon = Shopping, which is why Google search ads are fairly worthless.

I actually witnessed this flow one time: User has car from Budget rent-a-car. User things goole = internet, so goes to google, types "budget rental car" into search bar. Ad for Budget rent-a-car comes up. She clicks it to go to the page to check on her rental. So, Budget had to pay for a click from a user that was already trying to get to their page. From an advertiser's perspective that is not a good use of funds. It's almost as if Google has set up a gate that you have to pay to let your customers get through even after you've earned their business.

> If, in their search page, they had a button that said "I am looking to buy" or something along those lines

It seems that you are describing Google Shopping.

Relevant video on the trustworthiness of Google Shopping: https://youtu.be/46bqxNv8S1w

Really? Never heard of it.

It is, alas paid listings only.

However it is decent.

I don't use Amazon, and find I use Google Shopping to find suppliers a lot.

Its former product name was Froogle.

They do this already, albeit with the second click, not the first. https://imgur.com/a/M1SbG

They should put it here:

https://imgur.com/a/SfdGr

Google's intent is to protect their advertising revenue stream. That's not good or bad, it's just business.

Definitely agree with you on the long term capability. There's just so much risk having your web interface owned by someone with a vested interest in what you see.

In the meantime expect 3rd party attempts at gaming this functionality.

> That's not good or bad, it's just business.

I think I missed some nuance. Is doing business is beyond reproach these days?

seems to be if you listen to some of the corporate appologists around HN, where if it isnt explicitly against the law, people have nothing to complain about (and often not even then..)

There are definitely some for whom the pursuit of profit justifies the means, regardless of how immoral (or morally grey) it is, and any relevant laws are there to be dodged (bonus points for writing said actions off as "being disruptive").

It's bad for anyone who doesn't want to be stalked by powerful corporations.

The entire exercise is then predicated on the assumption that adverts actually solve some problems that users have.

That is not my experience.

Why should Google have "good intentions"? It's a company, a publicly traded one at that. Their intentions are profit maximization. Abiding the law and maintaining somewhat of a reputation tend to be non-optional for that, but it's not their primary goal.

It’s still run by people. There is a possibility that they have good intentions.

I believe Google already does that with video ads. Part of Google's rules are that there be no autoplay video ads. But on YouTube annoying autoplay video ads are their bread and butter

Step 2, if taken anti-competetively would end up in tens of billions of dollars in fines and possibly the break-up of the company. I don't find it that unlikely, all things considered, but it should be the nail in the coffin.

I think you are overly optimistic in the willingness and ability of our governments to protect us from privacy invasion. They seem much more willing to protected us from seeing naked people.

I am EU-based and I guess you are US-based? That would count for some difference in perspective. IIRC Microsoft was fighting both US and EU competition cases and it pretty much handed them a lost decade. Not sure about the current US climate with regards to anti competitive behaviour, but if there are US-competitors in the ad market that are hit by step 2, I guess even some Republicans would see that as a bridge too far for Google?

You're correct that I'm in the US. Microsoft repeatedly bested the US prosecutors- it took the EU to stop them. Is the EU aggressive about stopping trackers?

I'd say yes when considering the existing and new privacy laws being passed. Some of the identification and data reselling that is typical in the US is not done for European customers because it's not allowed.

They just want people to watch the ads man. That's their only intention.

>That said, let's talk about the worst-case scenario, the thing that Google could actually do that is entirely anti-competitive.

How exactly is this anti-competitive? The rules for ad guidelines are set by the Coalition for Better Ads and not Google. So any change in the rules that determine what an acceptable ad is must be approved by the coalition. The only scenario in which your hypothetical argument makes any sense is if Google controlled the coalition which they clearly do not and never will especially when you consider the caliber of companies in the coalition.

Exactly. Leave the adblocking to the third party extensions. Hopefully there will an option to opt-out.

If there were good intentions by Google here, it would block all ads, including Google’s.

Chrome will block all ads, including Google's, on sites that are deemed to be serving "bad ads".

Seems like they would find themselves in court over it if they played it like that.

> I think there's good intentions by Google here.

There isn't "good intentions". It's almost pointless to talk in that terms when it comes to multinational companies. Corporations don't work that way. They aren't charities. Google is acting in its own best interests - what's good for the shareholders. There is no other consideration.