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Comment by runn1ng | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, many supposedly legit websites (even large media companies) run these very scammy "man from YOUR LOCATION got rich in 20 days!" "one weird trick to get younger" ads that ultimately lead to some scam

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

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FWIW the companies responsible for those ads are Taboola, Outbrain, and Revcontent. I posted one especially egregious example last week on r/adops:

https://www.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/b0n57e/its_embarrass...

those are why I use ad blocking (hadn't heard of revcontent but def taboola and outbrain)

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.

Huh, you are right. Those scummy links at Washington Post are all Outbrain. I was mistaken then (because they use BOTH Google and Outbrain)

Google often has scummy ads as well. Haven't checked recently, but the ads on http://getpaint.net are often designed to look like download buttons to download the popular paint application.

Scummy AdSense ads are harder to pin down, of course, because of the live bidding and personalization.

Just check (3/22/19) and yup sure enough https://i.imgur.com/6SMBjDa.png . I find this is pretty common with many software websites that have ads, I'm really surprised paint.net doesn't switch to carbon or something.

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.

Why don't developers put a thick border with 'Advertisement' in bold around the ad space so that ads displayed doesn't look like they are native elements?

Because then they make less money.

It's fairly common for large media sites to use multiple ad vendors. WaPo isn't unique here.

Even responsible journalistic websites like Der Spiegel (insert comment about Relotius here) run ads like these, where the ads appear like "related articles" underneath serious articles...

And people ask me why I block ads.

I block, but some still get through. Ive got them blocked by a firewall and dns but parts go out of date. What do you use?

ublock origin + privacy badger has been virtually flawless for me.

Thank you

Even worse, I've seen several large media companies and news sites run ads on mobile that completely hijack the (Android, i.e. Chrome) browser and redirect to a third party landing page. They usually seem to get killed off eventually but every now and then they pop up again.

I'm not sure if these ads specifically target Android devices but it wouldn't surprise me.

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