Ad Fraud Scheme Drained Users’ Batteries By Running Hidden Video Ads In Android
buzzfeednews.com
buzzfeednews.com
This fingerpointing points to one of the core problems of the ad industry: They created a system where nobody knows who's responsible for anything, so malware and fraud has an easy time.
But this mode of thinking makes no sense. If you put ads in your app YOU are responsible. If you use an ad service from a shady company that outsources to other shady companies then you're still responsible.
It may be the manufacturers fault, but the person who sold it to you (the provider) is liable.
Should be the same here
Imagine you are a shop selling cola in can.
If coca cola company put some unhealthy stuff in, you are not liable just for selling it. But if you made the stuff unhealthy because you stored it in direct sunlight long time, you are liable.
I bought "child's toy" and sold you "child's today", you expect seller to check every toy if there is "secret camera" ?
Now in the particular case of ads in applications, I think there are surely many developers who fail to do their due diligence when picking advertisement partners, but without a doubt there are also advertisement companies who excel at duping the developers they work with.
Excessive trust is negligent. Let the market decide how to mitigate risk, but eliminating the risk creates opportunity for profiting from malfeasance.
In situations like this perhaps it would be more productive if we had a system that focused more getting everyone to clean up and prevent this from happening again first, and then look at the liability part.
I do believe that this is the innate human response, the desire to "do the right thing". Most of us have the right mixture of nature/nurture to want to do that. But if the system doesn't enable that behavior or punishes that, that behavior will get suppressed and we end up in a miserable situation for everybody.
I dunno, it's not exactly an easy question or it would be solved already, and bad faith actors will exploit the goodwill of others too.
I don't think that's true unless they knew it had this behavior or were negligent in some way.
I'm not sure what to call allowing any old shit to run in your app under the guise of ads other than negligent. The fact that it's so common should not be an excuse.
- You invited me to dinner, went to shopping, bought some stuff to cook, one ingredient was bad, I got poisoned.
In my opinion, here you don't have responsibility, because you acted with your best knowledge and good expectations from shop.
This kind of stuff is happening on google a lot too, this is not totally about some small shady company, working with another shady company.
The difference is due diligence. In picking ingredients and preparing them the host of this dinner has most likely taken care to use what they have good reason to believe a reputable sources and methods.
People placing add on sites and in apps are doing no such thing for the most part - beyond concerns of outrageously illegal adverts or those that might otherwise offend their audience directly, they are simply picking the provider that is likely to pay them the most. This is insufficient due diligence so they shouldn't be able to pass the buck, but they can because there are so many levels of indirection in the industry it becomes difficult to prove who failed most.
There is commonality with your food example: the recent meat source problems in Europe when cheap horse meat was unexpectedly found in many places it shouldn't have been. This highlighted how little due diligence was happening at various points in that industry and the fact that the many levels of supplier supplying supplier supplying supplier made it easy for problems to go unnoticed as no one thought it was them that needed to check.
Unless the user taps the ad, no JS or HTML is involved, which eliminates the possibility of such tricks.
I looked for such a library a while back, but didn't find any.
Advertisers will give you double click (by google), atlas (Facebook), mediamind, etc tags m, to deliver as the ad. They will load in god knows what JS into their little space and (I cannot stress this enough), advertisers love their gimmicky little iteractable/expandable, engagement-filled ads.
To boot, they’re all laden with code to detect what publishers/sites/apps you’re displaying on, how much of the ad is viewable on screen and for how long, every scrap of code they can possibly fit in there to identify the user down to the finest grain they can manage.
You would think that things needn’t be this complex, but ad-tech companies have done a wonderful job of convincing advertisers that “targeted advertising is definitely better, and you definitely invest the extra cost in it, and definitely do all these other things because if you don’t then you’re totally falling behind your competitors, who are totally scraping every bit of data from their users, so you’d be a loser not to do the exact same thing and ~give all that dats to us.~ Sorry, make “valuable use” of all that data”.
But if you ask them, it's not their fault, but the ad company (Google), which in turn will point to a different company, etc
And in the end, people are scammed and Google gets a bit richer, but it's nobody's fault or responsibility
https://www.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/b0n57e/its_embarrass...
Man, yesterday I read a New York Times article in a view without ad blocking... I was actually embarrassed for them as a company. It's difficult to read an article when there are so many ads that there's doubt as to if there is more article below the next raft of ads.
Scummy AdSense ads are harder to pin down, of course, because of the live bidding and personalization.
EDIT: There's another one at the bottom of the page too. And they're randomized, some make it clear you aren't downloading Paint.net (such as the "Free Mac PDF Reader") but others aren't at all.
I'm not sure if these ads specifically target Android devices but it wouldn't surprise me.
And people ask me why I block ads.
The problem being discussed here was adverts being run in the background of locally installed apps, not adverts in pages displayed by a browser.
They know.
Then it comes back to the Play Store. They like having all those free apps. It makes users feel like their Andriod phone has whatever they need. Google needs to make apps searchable based on privacy settings. They need to encourage people to pay for user respecting apps. I'd happily pay a buck or two for lots of apps if only they didn't have add or try to get me to buy add-ons. Just give me upfront honesty about what I'm getting and I'll pay you for it. Stop hosting crapware in the app store!
How much do you pay for your email?
Why pay more for a worse product?
No other webmail service I've ever used has given me the lag issues Gmail has.
$50 year because I actually decided to put my money where my mouth is and actually pay for a service I use. I don’t regret it one bit.
This sounds like a lot of industries...
Take that line of thinking one more step. If a user installs a "free" app that is ad-supported, the USER is responsible.
I tell my kids this when they bitch about needing a new phone because theirs is too slow and the battery drains too fast. I say look at all the crap you installed on it. Clean it up don't be so dumb.
> If you use an ad service from a shady company
And what if they aren't shady? Something large from a well known, non-shady company, like Twitter? Because that's who is mentioned in the article: Twitter's MoPub.
And is the reverse true? If you use these shady companies (Twitter and MoPub) are you contributing to the success of shady companies?
Bad advertisers are real, and they really exist. But trying to say that the person who relies on that software equally responsible as everyone down the pipe is a bit of a stretch. Otherwise, I could make the same extreme arguments about pretty much every tech company, big and small, and all the people that use them.
Even you.
The problem is that there are no serious consequences in this industry. Ad fraud isn't a technical problem, it's a business problem, one that most companies are not incentivized to solve or prevent.
Is the CFAA only for fleshers? Why so?
The "why" is because it's a 12-figure global industry including two of the most valuable companies in the world with unlimited resources and lobbying power, combined with highly technical mechanics and a complex network of business relationships that no politicians have any real understanding of.
I must add that there's also a (sometimes irrationally) strong reaction by those politicians and many others to working with anyone in adtech to even attempt to solve these problems which clearly doesn't help.
So you're saying the standard practice is to let the malicious ad buyers from your network run arbitrary javascript on our sites...
"Yes that's what our publishers do..."
The main issue today is because advertisers want viewability tracking (which safeframe has a minimal but poor API for) and they want it with their own independent providers. Also prebid.js used for header bidding does not support safe frames.
Things will improve though because IntersectionObserver is now built into modern browsers and even works in cross-domain iframes. There's also the Open Measurement SDK[1] from the IAB to standardize viewability finally, and Prebid.js is also working on using SafeFrames.
Several of the ad tech companies have pressed law enforcement to prosecute some of these people, but mostly unsuccessfully. They're often in places that are difficult to extradite from like Russia, hiding behind some botnet: https://adexchanger.com/online-advertising/why-the-doj-final...
Your 2nd statement is what I'm saying: no consequences refers to the lack of oversight, regulation and enforcement in the industry. That's why there's barely any prosecution. For example, Buzzfeed did an expose last year about Newsweek/IBTimes committing ad fraud, except it was already well known by everyone in adtech. People like getting paid and they're not going to stop on their own.
Btw, I personally know the founders of all those companies. If fraud was eliminated then they would go out of business. They're not interested in solving the problem even if they could.
To me, if an ad network allows crap through, we have to take onwership and penalize the ad network and move on. But there is no accountability. It's everyone fighting for that next penny.
No one in the supply chain takes responsibility for this. That's how I, someone who works for a company that has ad-supported products, runs an ad blocker at the router level in my home. If people are going to actively try to harm me and my family by hunting for pennies, I am going to seek protection.
And because no one takes responsibility for this whole mess, the whole house of cards will fall. More and more devices are coming with ad-blocking built in. If we can't responsibly create ad-supported businesses, how can we honestly expect people to want to see those ads?
Digital advertising is so divorced from making users happy.
Think about the number in that article for a minute, $20 BILLION dollars "stolen" last YEAR.
How many places are there in the world where you can steal over a billion dollars from them, and they won't hunt you down and kill your family? A nation-state? Nope they will send their intelligence service after you. A drug cartel? Don't even get me started, this is the same scale of numbers that drug cartels earn[1]
And since there is no "War on Ad Fraudsters", no departments dedicated to hunting down and arresting 'kingpin' Ad hackers, why would you sell drugs when you can make about the same amount, so much more safely? When you figure all the expenses you don't need, the bribes, the security forces, the underground tunnels, even going out and acquiring product. This is so much better way to stealing money.
[1] the estimate, from the Justice Department, that Colombian and Mexican cartels reap $18 billion to $39 billion from drug sales in the United States each year. --- https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/magazine/how-a-mexican-dr...
As such, the inventory of “genuine” publishers is devalued as well.
Note that in this sense, a publisher can be both a powerhouse like FB or Google, or also smaller outlets.
"Well this ad campaign is profitable when we spend $100 on highly targeted Facebook ads, let's spend $10000... Oh they don't have that many impressions to sell us..."
"Where are we going to get all those ad impressions from?"
"Shady Bob's affiliate network has millions of impressions to sell us!"
"Great. That should work. The sky's the limit on this ad campaign! We're going to be rich!"
Facebook has untold millions and millions of fake accounts that they are not trying in the least to shutdown. Because they make just as much for an ad served to a bot as they do for a real user.
Smooth talking and flashy slide decks about how great their advertising service is can blind business owners to poor results.
How is it possible that a banner ad can open hidden off-screen views, and play video ads using a different (fraudulent) publisher ID? Can’t banners be sandboxed in order to prevent such activity, or at least detect it?
Everything else screams of abuse and unnecessary tracking.
The ad companies aren't trying to find the limit of annoyance vsc effectiveness, they're trying to maximise their profit. They don't care about annoyance, in fact annoyance can actually be positive for brand advertising.
Because of exactly situations like this! Say you're an advertiser and you make an image banner. You make a deal with an ad network to show your ad on some pages. Some site makes a deal with the same ad network to show ads on its pages. Your ad is on the publisher page, users are seeing it, everything is good.
Now a scummy publisher signs up with this ad network, and sets the ads to display underneath something else. If the ads are just simple images and nothing more, there isn't a way for the advertiser or the ad network to tell that they're being scammed.
(Disclosure: I work at Google on making ads declarative so they don't get to do this sort of thing. Speaking for myself and not the company.)
NoRoot Firewall for android devices. You make a Global Filter (aka firewall rule) that writes: asterisk.XYZ.com:asterisk and you are done with that specific tracker/advertiser. Sometimes they don't use URLs but IPs, in which case I take the extra 30 seconds to check who does the IP belong to on www.ipaddress.com and if it is a CDN, I allow it (only for the app), if it is MoPub, Adjust, etc. they get a royal block on 123.123.asterisk.asterisk:asterisk to get done with it.
NoRoot firewall also has a "Access Log" tab which shows which connections have gone through and which are rejected, so you can fine tune further.
Edit: replaced asterisks with the word "asterisk"
I'm currently working on making ads declarative [1] so they don't get to do this anymore.
[1] Specifically, AMP Inabox, which is AMP ads on non-AMP pages: https://www.ampproject.org/docs/ads/amphtml_ads
Streisand Effect. Archived version of their "Team" page: https://web.archive.org/web/20171004134601/http://www.anivie...
Yeah, fuck that.
But a less tech savvy person might just go "well this is fine, I guess that's just how it is", and live with it.
https://fossbytes.com/peel-remote-use-remove-smart-remote/
https://www.androidpolice.com/2017/03/29/peel-remote-app-ups...
Worse yet, check out the permissions it demands: Calendar (!), Contacts (!!), Camera, precise Location, microphone, Bluetooth... even body sensors!
But I don't support using ad networks in the products that are not big enough to sell them themselves. Firstly, because it makes those products completely dependent on third-parties for their own existence. And secondly, because these products often become proxies for third-party user tracking.
Just let me pay for your product, if I like it enough. Otherwise, I will just rely on Blokada[1] to protect me from your unwillingness to find a sustainable business model.
I don't even make heavy use of my phone for social media apps, yet have close to 300K ad-related requests blocked since I installed it.
Do you have any basis for that claim? Because my impression is that historically there have been and are plenty of other businesses at their scale that did/do not need this at all.
Have we ever had an internet company with over 1 billion active users not using advertising as its main source of income?
Maybe the real answer is that Shitbook is just not worth paying for?
These are physical businesses, not internet companies.
Bing has ads. Twitter has ads. Reddit has ads.
Yahoo! has had ads since 1990s.
> Yahoo! had ads since 1990s. Twitter has ads. Reddit has ads.
And yet seems like Reddit is the only one doing somewhat good (and even then the community is pissed off and rightfully so, and without the community they'd suffer the same fate as the two former ones).
A lot of its income comes from licensing Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office, which are physical products.
And where Microsoft competes with Google directly, it often shows ads just like Google does[1].
Advertising as a business model is perfectly valid and has allowed billions of people to access things they otherwise wouldn't get.
Simple explanation is that people on the other side of adfraud war are the ones getting incomparably bigger money than any ad-fraud specialist hired by ad companies (and they both hire pretty much the same people...)
Imagine, the more Google cracks down on it, the bigger is the monetary reward for cracking the protection. I remember reading mid-naughties era Russian computer journals with pics of "advertising specialists" racing off their new Ferraris in Moscow right at the moment it was said a big crackdown was going on.
Or you can wake up and smell the coffee.
It has nothing to do with the OS but everything to do with how HTML works on in app browsers.
Web standards are introducing resource limits that can be used to prevent this abuse in the future, but that is not platform specific.
I imagine Google might even employ risk assessors to figure out the cost impact and decide if it's worthwhile spending time fixing it.
Directing angre towards the advertising is a little weird too, if there was less fraud, then maybe the ad buyers be more critical in regards to which ads they buy and how many they run.
The advertiser who's paying for fraudulent impressions, the user who's battery life is drained, and the app developer who might be getting reports/bad reviews about the app draining battery life
https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2019/03/12/ad-fraud-eng...
Most of our advertisers require at least %90 of viewability, big brands. But a still significant amount of them use VAST and don't care about any other measurement. When we ask them to if they have VPAID tags many times they just say no, we only have VAST.
VPAID adds a overhead compared to the possibility of a native implemented VAST player. If there was a way to verify & build trust with pubs/networks to run vast tags natively, no JS, I would buy that inventory. Newer vast also has a viewable event, but again is on the pub to specify legitimately hence the verifiable trust. There's a reason FB gets a lot of my $$
I've been browsing without an adblocker for a while. I really recommend it. You will see scam after scam after scam ...
And most people, the 99% who don't use adblockers are falling for all these things.
Edit: OK, you can. But not with other apps from the official stores.
Edit: OK, I see. Adguard, for example.
We need more of that attitude in the world. So many companies try to make a buck doing things that ultimately damage their reputation. Once that's gone it's all down hill.
O&O means that the app/site where, in this case, the ad is shown is owned and operated by Google. That is absolutely not true for AdMob.
Anyways, the fact that I have to explain all these things tells me you are pretty new to this and don't understand things deeply enough to have this debate. I will sign off.
There is no reason a banner ad should have this capability. Twitter's MoPub is showing their negligent greed.
That being said, draining video ads budgets is probably a pro-social 'Robin Hood' kind of theft.
The Bucket has to stop somewhere...
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I understand where you're coming from, but that's painting with a pretty broad brush. Advertising covers everything from the signage stating the name of the mom-and-pop shop on the corner (which is why cities often limit the size of logos/names on building) to billboards on the side of the freeway. It covers movie trailers I seek out ant watch to see what's coming soon to commercials interspaced within a video that interrupts the flow.
I hate some of those, but i actively like, or at least value the utility of some of the others. A specific type of advertising has grown outsized that last couple of decades, and it's causing real problems. But let's not paint with too broad a brush just because we're fed up. That's how stupid laws get passed.
As those things became more common and more extreme, people stopped noticing. Now we don't really talk about it at all anymore.
Does that mean non-violent movies and video games are on their way out? (No it does not.)
When I checked my Facebook the other day, at least half of the posts made by my friends were in some way expressing how much they like a movie, TV show or game. I mean on the one side that's fine, it's sharing and talking about what they enjoy, but on the other it's a form of marketing / advertising, and I'd rather they talk about themselves or politics or something that matters more.
When what's left is overwhelmingly truthful and simply informative, the balance and magnitude of punishment and fines are about right.
Either way, avoiding television only to listen to the radio more is absurd. Like an alcoholic who's trying to quite booze so he starts chain smoking to cope.
You should not begin listening to more radio to compensate. Reading more newspapers and books would be more appropriate. Something movie trailers, television, and radio all have in common is the coercive use of music to manipulate how you feel, particularly when trying to persuade you to buy something or vote for somebody.
Try this simple exercise: instead of watching CNN on television, go to CNN.com and read the stories they have there in text. I assure you, anything important they have to say on television will be written down. And in text form, it will have less flashy graphics to daze you, the emotion in the television personality's voice will be neutralized, there will be far less repetition and typically more details organized in a more coherent manner. And perhaps best of all, the advertisements will be much easier to filter out.
Emphatic yes, should adblocking on the web become infeasible. As I said, "Reading more newspapers and books would be more appropriate."
As it stands currently, it's possible to see fewer advertisements on the web of any sort than advertisements in newspapers. Web adblockers are currently very effective. Should that change, then I will change my reading habits and so should you.
(Of course websites that do not contain advertisements would still be perfectly fine.)
> ...They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers...
> ...You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
Full quote here: https://trickygirl.wordpress.com/2012/03/01/quote-of-the-day...
No. Fuck that, I block annoyances in my life if I can. And I still buy crap don't worry.
Shops are similar to this, I don't enter a shop unless I've decided to purchase something I believe they might have. One difference is the amount of signage outside the shop, which assaults me whether or not I've decided to enter the shop. (The cover of a catalogue arguably does the same, but is much smaller and that's an important difference.) Thankfully many municipalities have taken a stand against this and have begun regulating commercial signage, if only to preserve the local aesthetic / property values.
Consider the difference between Victoria and Vegas. Both have no shortage of commercial zoning. One is delightful, the other is an blight. A monument to just how bad things can be when we allow commercial interests to run rampant. Cynical, exploitative, and ugly.
"Attention is currency in the marketplace of ideas" as they say. If everyone is supposed to vote with their dollar, you need to make them vote for you. The easiest way to do that is by fighting for your attention.
Also, culture matters.
Capitalism does however spread inequality, which in turn creates an opportunity for charity that wouldn't otherwise be necessary.
I don't know if it's viable to separate good brand advertise (our soda tastes good, our bags last forever) from the bad kind (use our product and get all the pretty woman). Some regulation over emotional tone (and, of course, false info) may be much more successful than focusing on brands vs. unitary products.
The problem is with actual ads. The ones that distract, cajole and coerce people to do things against their best interest.
Most apps offer the option to make an in app purchase and turn off ads. Why don't you do that vs. giving your unqualified opinions on what is good and bad for society?
1) If you don't tell people about your product, they won't know about it and probably won't use it. Word of mouth is ok, but it is surprising how many people are left uncertain and in the dark about what their options are if they aren't directly told what their options are.
2) Without advertising, the internet collapses. Google, in particular, collapses. And takes a lot of unprofitable-without-advertising services with it. Facebook probably goes as well. Most media companies too. Once you lose all those companies I'm not sure how many normal people would agree that the internet still existed.
A lot of garbage like Facebook would fall and real social networks would take place with real interactions not algorithms trying to drive fake engagement.
I'm sad a lot of the top tier newspapers in America are starting to enforce their paywalls now because we are back to the state where only richer people can afford high quality news.
Advertising has been around for centuries, perhaps even millennia.
I mean, I think you mean "before online advertising", but that's not true either! Online advertising predates the web and even the Internet by decades; We had ads in the BBS days, and people didn't hate it. So what's going on?
China does a lot of "social" advertising and doesn't have the problems with ad fraud that the western world does: The trick is that "publishers" are responsible for what they serve. That's it.
> People still desire instant communication and they would pay for it if a free option did not exist.
People do pay for it. That's why we have slack and Cisco, and they aren't alone! The paid ones predate the "free" ones by decades too, but even the "paid" chat systems needed advertising to get those sales– we have throughout history always relied heavily on some form of sponsorship to bring products to market, so there will always be a channel for advertising.
Not really, unless you stretch the definition so much that it does not make sense anymore. The problem here is the advertising industry, not the small sign on a local business, when you stretch definitions, of course the reasoning does not work anymore.
The discussion of the origin of advertising is a different issue. But I'd say that "advertising" as normally understood didn't really exist before mass-produced newspapers at the very least, so that's less than four centuries and nowhere near millennia.
We got Netscape Navigator, Yahoo! and the famous AT&T banner ad all in the same year. Even still, we had irc, email and newsgroup spam in the preceding decades (even if you can still call that "the Internet"). I would see advertising prior to this on commercial online platforms (like AOL and compuserve) -- but I can accept that this might not have been considered "the Internet".
I was thinking maybe you define the few years between "the WWW" was invented (1991, if you believe some accounts) to when it became popular (1993, maybe) as some kind of "golden era" of Internet when there weren't any banner ads, despite the fact early websites were directly advertising for eachother (a kind of "sign on the local business" perhaps?). This interpretation seems unkind though.
So I'm left thinking you and these couple other people are just wrong.
I simply can't imagine the Internet before advertising, and I doubt most people could. I have been online since the 1980s and I have in that entire time seen ads, so if you actually meant something by this statement, I'll need some help unpacking it.
It would, but it would be much harder to find content, because the major search engines pretty much only show corporate content marketing pieces that are written specifically to rank well in search results.
The other day, I was looking for some essays or blog posts about a particular TV show. The first 5 pages on Google were all variations of "10 things you didn't know", "this moment made our jaws drop", "How working in an office is like [completely dissimilar situation in the show]".
The only way I was able to actually find a human-written post (completely different style from a conversion-focused copy writer's post) was when I was searching for a screencap from the show on Google images. It's easy to distinguish user-captured images from corporate, licensed images, so clicking on the source link showed me a beautifully written, hilariously annotated season review on a cheap blogspot domain. That reminded me of the early Internet, when the writing felt much more personal and relatable.
There are also plenty of corporate sites offering some SaaS product that will put out semi-technical blog posts that rank high but don't give you the full picture and end with a CTA like "Want to learn more? Sign up for our webinar".
The goal is for you to arrive on their blog page, and "convert" into a customer, or fill out a contact form. The content is a means to an end, which hurts content quality.
What a weird way to start off. You should probably elaborate on that for it to make any sense outside of a high school economics class.
Regarding number 1: like what? I’ve never met anyone who looked really happy about seeing an ad for hot singles in their area, that they should feel insecure about how they look in lingerie, that they should go gamble.. would more than 1% of advertising be good? If an extremely large proportion of a thing is bad, then I can agree with someone calling it a scourge.
Regarding number 2: okay
The point I'm trying to get across is that something can be critical to a functioning system even if on its own it doesn't look very impressive. Voters are the scourge of every democracy, they push for all sorts of stupid policies and usually get them.
> Regarding number 1: like what?
Literally everything? You've identified 3 product categories for products that border on scams, but literally _every_ product category advertises. I just flicked through my open tabs, and the first ad I see is for forex (www.icmarkets.com). There is no way I'd ever have heard of them without that ad; in fact thanks to this HN thread I know know how easy it is for me to get involved in forex trading :P. The 2nd is for a retail energy supplier offering me new deals. Honestly I think your 99% figure just suggests you are browsing the wrong websites. Maybe visit parts of the internet that are less sketchy.
I'd love if you could expand how this applies to advertising. Voters are critical to democracy. Advertising isn't critical to society, it's mostly a way for a lot of people to waste a lot of time, man-hours and natural resources on zero-sum game, while polluting the physical and mental space around us. If it were to suddenly disappear (a wide ban, perhaps), it wouldn't make much difference to anyone except people working in ad/adtech space. Sure, the Internet would get leaner, but I strongly believe that what would disappear is mostly just garbage that's just contributing to information noise.
I go further than the OP: to me, advertising is - quite literally - a cancer on society.
Advertising is absolutely critical to society. Without advertising we can't figure out what companies are selling, because they can't tell us. That puts a real crimp of having a functioning economy.
I don't have statistics handy, but I assure you that if advertising were generally banned there would be a lot less, say, smartphone owners. If you think the average person is capable of figuring out what is available from word of mouth you are grossly overestimating what a normal person is capable of.
> Advertising isn't critical to society, it's mostly a way for a lot of people to waste a lot of time, man-hours and natural resources on zero-sum game
It isn't a zero sum game. It is value add. People can't exchange money for goods and services they want if they can't find a vendor selling said goods and services.
That would certainly be a net benefit to societies mental health.
> It isn't a zero sum game. It is value add. People can't exchange money for goods and services they want if they can't find a vendor selling said goods and services.
It is. People can trivially find any goods and services they find through catalogs, phone books, trade shows, and Internet search engines. Advertising spending is mostly about shouting loud enough to get heard over shouting of your competitors - which is a zero-sum game of ever amplifying noise.
Well, if you have evidence of that then my interest would be piqued. But I must admit I suspect you're just being cynical. By far and away most of the ads I see are honest but with an agenda.
Manipulative is a debatable term. Advertisers are manipulating you in the same way I'm manipulating you right now - I have an opinion and I want you to agree with me. I don't really see how you can justify getting unhappy about that. It seems pretty reasonable given that they are ultimately funding whatever it is you are looking at at the time.
> catalogs, phone books, trade shows, and Internet search engines
Those are literally compendiums of ads, except search engines. But in this instance, the consumer is proactively searching for ads. Clearly the ad is providing some value to consumers. And the idea that consumers should attend trade shows to work out what their options are is patently absurd.
And working out exactly what search engines would look like if they were not ad supported is beyond me. I assume you'd be paying some sort of subscription free for the pleasure of basically googling ads. Seems a bit backwards.
> People can trivially...
No they can't, decisions about things outside a person't domain of expertise aren't as easy as you want to pretend they are. What the consumers really want is (a) cheap and (b) one of what everyone else has. Advertising isn't going to help with (a) but it is fantastically good at (b).
Figuring out what everyone else is doing is hard work. That is one of a couple of value-adding opportunities for an ad.
Back in the day, many better mail order catalogs cost money to receive. Mostly to offset the cost of mailing them out, but partially as a form of filter, on the theory that someone sufficiently interested in a catalog to pay to get it would be more likely to actually order something.
Take away advertising and the only way someone could find out about a product is word of mouth, or walking into a shop. Functionally everything would originate in shops. That means looking at the available options would be very time consuming, involve a lot of travel and be dominated by very powerful gatekeepers who would control you access to goods and information. It would revitalise the high street, that's for sure, but in a very controlling, rent-seeking way.
Also, regarding "pull not push", people sometimes don't know there is a solution to their "problem" (where "problem" might not be a real problem, per se, but maybe simply not even knowing that a given option exists).
Of the ads I see, if we exclude the drug ads that really should not be allowed, I'd say that an extremely small fraction are telling me about solutions I didn't already know existed. The "useful" case should not be so rare.
You make it sound like ads are purely informational and designed to help us make an informed decision. Remember the iPhone ads touting "fastest iPhone ever" with the bottom text "sequences shortened"?
Did you buy your last computer with no research, just the ad? Do you go to McDonald's because the burgers look exactly like the ones in the commercial?
Your thought experiment isn't very useful for picturing a world that only lacks advertising.
Those are the kinds of things I see mentioned on Twitter. I use iPhone, so I don't see why I would see internet ads myself. Obviously as I am someone who doesn't like ads, I'm one to block them.
There's adblocking in mobile Safari since 2015? So there's very few ads that I see since then (the digital ads in the last month I've come across: "powered by x", "powered by y", and "you can subscribe to z at url" - I'm happy with those). Comparing life before mobile adblocking and after, I don't see that since then I've missed out on anything. People, without an interest in the success of ads, who come across an ad on their devices seem to find it irritating; haven't found anyone who didn't seem happy and kept using uBlock after showing how.
> The point I'm trying to get across is that something can be critical to a functioning system even if on its own it doesn't look very impressive. Voters are the scourge of every democracy, they push for all sorts of stupid policies and usually get them.
Eh.. am I living in some kind of singular utopia then?
This is not true and I'm gonna provide some evidence:
I am a conservative christian[0].
I get those ads as well.
My browsing habits:
- stuff linked from hn
- local news
- one mainstream newspaper
- fringe political papers from the left and right (mostly don't agree with any of them but it makes for interesting reading, a better understanding of why people are mad etc)
- christian podcast
- technical stuff (both related to work and to my technical hobbies)
- repair videos, childrens videos (when they get to borrow one of my devices)
And still I get ads for singles in my area. Extremely stupid ads. E.g.:
- when I'm at work in the middle of nowhere and I get ads with a picture of someone who is supposedly desperately looking for someone like me, supposedly living in the valley next to nowhere where there are nobody except old farmers. That kind of stupid.
For a while I tried to hit that micro x in the corner of those ads and mark them as irrelevant. Only got equally stupid ads for other equally irrelevant sites.
I don't want to remove ad income for honest writers but I've given up now and I'm ad blocking like many others here.
I've also come to the conclusion that tracking doesn't work, it is just a thing they do to scam marketers.
And I've concluded that if I were to place ads for a product I would place them based on the content of the website, -like Google used to do. If anyone wants a proven business opportunity here it is :-]
[0]: No, not embarrased by it, but I do not want to discuss that here, this is a technical forum. Just pointing out I don't visit what I consider sketchy web sites at all.
Yeah, everyone does. Are you suggesting you see almost literally 100 such ads for every ad advertising something legit? Because for me they are the 20% dross for 80% potentially useful ads I see.
Honestly, the businesses in your region of the woods are truly woeful at advertising, and should probably spend more money on it. Realistically, if what you suggest is true, something has probably gone wrong and your demographic has been caught in a bubble where no-one serious is advertising to you. Because those ads should be in the minority.
Lucky you. For me it seems way below 50% useful.
The closest I get to relevant ads are if I search for something like x hosting, then I'll maybe see ads for that for a while.
Im not against ads:
In fact I'd like if local shops informed online whenever their deal of the week came out (they sometimes do and that is a click from me if for some reason the ad isn't blocked).
Same goes for other interesting ads if I see them, which means max twice a year.
You say this as if it’s a bad thing. In my personal opinion, both of these companies have ultimately done more harm than good. Maybe Facebook more so than Google, and some Google products have pushed various tech forward, but at the expense of being tracked and watched and having garbage we don’t want or need constantly punch us in the face for our attention. More people seem to be suffering from anxiety and depression and I personally think these companies are a major part of the cause. If they were to collapse, good riddance I say.
> Most media companies too.
Most media companies are garbage peddling clickbait or misinformation, or at least empty-calorie/low substance content. I read a lot of stuff online because I’m just as addicted as everyone else, but the amount that is a truly insightful, actionable or entertaining in an any way memorable way is tiny. Good riddance to these too.
That trend pre-dates Google or Facebook. Before them and Snapchat and instagram, it was text messaging. The basic ability to send messages to your friends in real-time is the problem. Individual services can make it incrementally better or worse, but it's the behaviour that's the actual problem and even very trivial modern technology enables that behaviour just fine.
Back in the early 2000's, I did spend a lot of time with text messaging and I did spend a lot of time on messenger applications/irc etc. The way I communicate with others hasn't changed that much: I use different apps or websites, sure, but ultimately its very similar. What has changed, though, is how much content I consume idly, just to pass the time, because my internet-addicted brain tells me I should, not because I get anything out of it. I'm slowly working on reducing it, at least.
> but it's the behaviour that's the actual problem
Sure, but what we put out there encourages certain types of behaviour and the current norms of internet use encourage an, in my opinion, unhealthy addiction to low quality content consumption.
I don't think that is the problem. Sending messages to your friends still has a social contract, and abusing that privilege has repercussions.
Sending messages anonymously to unknown people is much more of a problem (e.g. robocalling).
I just can't wait for it. There are just few steps left:
1. Ads are served from same domain as content (this is now in progress)
2. YT integrates ads with main video stream, sites experiment with server side "render to canvas".
3. Adblock is using ML/AI
4. Laws are made against undisclosed sponsored content.
5. Online advertising is dead, clickbait is dead, free (now ad supported) content is dead. There are only subscription services left.
Introduce ad viewing apps where people voluntarily sign up, provide information about themselves, and use attention-tracking etc. to reward them with some money based on how many adverts they watch or surveys they answer.
Maybe go further and ban all other forms of advertisement that takes up space anywhere, classifying them as vandalism.
Everybody wins (unless this idea is fundamentally flawed):
• People only see ads they want to see, when they want to see them.
• Companies know exactly who is watching and what they’re interested in, instead of going through third-parties and overly roundabout, sometimes illegal, ways to acquire that information.
• And the world becomes less uglier and noisier.
One of the "problems" with that it is that it would reveal just how little money these things make. A page full of busy ads that annoy the heck out of you may still make well under a penny, only breaking a penny if you actually click on something and possibly even then only if you buy something.
Facebook's approximate revenue in 2018 is about 34 billion, it seems [1]. Facebook's user count in 2018 [2], call it two billion for math convenience and a fudge factor for fake & dead accounts. Simple math shows that even if 100% of their revenues are from ads, they're making $17 dollars a year from their average user. Revenue, not profit. And they're one of the big money makers in the ad industry!
Converted to daily terms, that's about 4.7 cents per day. That's what they're trashing your feed for, rearranging it so you see more ads and less of your family, rearranging it to drive "engagement" by putting more rage- and stress-inducing controversial content into your feed, and carefully managing your experience for. 5 cents a day, average.
Advertisers aren't just crashing our society, driving our news industries into death spirals, invading our privacy at scales that would make the Stasi blush, and annoying the hell out of us on almost every web page we visit, they're doing it for almost no money. They can't afford to pay you to view advertising. Even someone making minimum wage would find the offer they could make laughable, because your offer would be coming out of their profits, not revenue, so if Facebook wanted to pay you to view ads they'd be slicing up something like a $1/year with you.
(This is why I've proposed as one solution something like a 1cent/impression advertising tax. It would annihilate everything but the absolutely most profitable portions of the industry. Even a 0.01cent/impression tax would probably kill 90% of it. And I think there's a perfectly justifiable case to be made that such a tax would simply be internalizing externalities and perfectly justified under both left and right wing theories of economics.)
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/544001/facebooks-adverti...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
New technologies behind ads, tracking users wherever they go and hounding them relentlessly and using their personal communications to harvest more data - that's the scourge. I'm fine with ads, but I block them on every website because I'm not fine with tracking.