Fast Ads Matter
web.dev
web.dev
> Since fast ads result in improved user experience metrics, a focus on improving ad speed may decrease the incentive for users to install ad blockers.
I think making this conclusion from the data in the linked adblock report is a bizarre interpretation of that data.
How so? One of the big pros every ad blocker advertises is "faster page loads". Slow page loads is very much an incentive to get an ad blocker. It's just how Google working with betterads.org to implement an Ad Blocker for outrageous ads in Chrome.
> How so? One of the big pros every ad blocker advertises is "faster page loads"
Without getting too much into how questionable I find the copy of the source site (pagefair):
There's no dose-response here. It's not like ads getting 50ms faster, there's some percentage of ad-block users that convert to non-ad-block.
The activation energy to go from non-ad-block to ad-block is so much lower than it is to go the other way around. How often do you turn off your ad-blocker just to check how fast the web is without it? And would it convince you to keep it that way, knowing that it's still slower anyway - other reasons to use an adblocker aside?
Now, to be fair to the study - it's talking about reduced incentive to install an ad-blocker. But I don't really think that's quantifiable, since there is such a stark and objectively better difference in browsing the web with an ad-blocker in pretty much every metric, speed notwithstanding. I mean, it's just baffling to me that given the choices "really shitty (ads), pretty shitty (slightly faster ads), and not shitty at all (ad-blocker)", someone would choose "pretty shitty" when they can have "not shitty at all."
So, I've made some scientifically-questionable arguments, but I don't feel like it takes any serious analysis to doubt the value of this study.
Advertising exists. You can't make it go away. You can make it less bothersome to most people.
And I'm having trouble understanding how you say their conclusion (which simply said it "may" decrease the incentive) is so bizarre. Are you assuming that everyone out there views ads the way you do?
If that's the only alternative that the brilliant minds at the Big G can come up with, then that sounds fine to me. I'm sure they can think of something more creative though, like "make a product and sell it."
Without the snark, what I mean specifically is that I will never browse the web without an adblocker, no matter how "fast", "clean from malware", "acceptable", or "organic and free-range" Google claims their ads are. It's just out of the question. They take up my bandwidth, use my device battery power, execute code on my machine that I don't need, jeopardize my privacy, and put my operational security at risk. I personally also think advertising is distasteful and manipulative. So, I empower myself to prevent this unwanted interference to my mental and digital autonomy to the greatest possible extent.
I don't really sympathize with sites that "rely" on ad revenue either. The Web existed before them, the Web will exist after them.
> And I'm having trouble understanding how you say their conclusion (which simply said it "may" decrease the incentive) is so bizarre. Are you assuming that everyone out there views ads the way you do?
I made a different comment about why the conclusion is bizarre to me: I don't think ad-block users are sensitive to changes in ad speed, that they wouldn't be able to notice in the first place on account of using an ad-blocker. Non-ad-block users probably don't care in the first place, and if they do, they install an ad-blocker for the myriad other reasons that happen to include speed.
That's a bit more black and white that my view. I don't care if the web "exists" per se, I don't think I'd use if very much if it was still like it was in 1995.
>I don't think ad-block users are sensitive to changes in ad speed, that they wouldn't be able to notice in the first place on account of using an ad-blocker.
Wait, so you are only considering in the equation people who are currently already using ad blockers? Ummm, ok.
It seems weird that I have to say this, but I think the idea is that every person who uses an ad blocker was once a person who didn't use an ad blocker, and that there is some threshold of annoyance that must be surpassed before they typically install an ad blocker.
I don't think Google's attempt to speed up ads is intended to improve the experience for those who are already using ad blockers. Is this not obvious, or am I missing something?
So put journalism behind a paywall? That was suggested yesterday and was highly downvoted. People on HN hate the idea of paywalls.
That sounds like a challenge. :)
FWIW I agree with OP, I block all ads, where ever I can. On web pages, and even when streaming live TV.
I have never agreed to view ads in exchange for viewing content. Advertisers and site masters may think there is a self evident implied agreement, but I do not.
Advertising, no matter how or why it is served, always tries to steal your attention and force a mental context switch.
Filtering this out using your mind is just tiresome and frustrating.
I don't use adblockers, but I can't blame people who do. I'm not convinced the world would be better if everyone did.
I do wish that there was legislation that required all ad supported web sites to have reasonably priced plans where people could pay to bypass the ads. Or something. But right now ads support a lot of services that I am glad are here.
If we can train neural networks to recognize things, then I don't see why those things can't be ads.
Carl Sagan hypothesized a little about this in his 1985 novel Contact.
Years before, he had invented a module that, when a television
commercial appeared, automatically muted the sound. It wasn't at
first a context-recognition device. Instead, it simply monitored
the amplitude of the carrier wave... Before there could be any
coordinated response from the television advertising industry,
Adnix had become wildly popular.
Not everyone will choose to use ad blockers. Also, if you do that effectively enough, you end up with people sneaking the ads into the content, as opposed to clear delineations between ads and content. Do you prefer that?
Regardless, ads are here and a big part of the economy of the web. If I were Google, I would simply ignore the people who are so extreme that they can't see value in their attempts to reduce the annoyance factor of web advertising.
Personally, I am ok with ads that do not significantly slow down the page, are very clear that they are ads, don't block content, and don't make me wait for content. I don't even mind if they have tracked me, although I'd prefer if I had some degree of control over that. On a web site I like, I am glad that the site owner gets a few pennies for my use of the site.
I see a lot of ads -- often from Amazon -- for things like skateboard / roller skate parts, digital pianos, and "maker" things like Dremel tools. Sometimes I ignore them, but sometimes I look at them just like I would if I walked by that sort of thing in a retail environment: they catch my eye because they are things I like.
Admittedly, sometimes I see ads for things like women's swimsuits or the like. Probably because, in a moment of weakness, I clicked on an ad to see a larger photo of a pretty woman in a swimsuit. I'd kind of like to be able to say "I'm not interested in this sort of ad," but then again, I really don't care that much.
I suspect you can't wrap your head around my attitude, but that's what it is.
Tell that to a peacock.
You could make them illegal.
I guess there’s some principle of free speech that’s in conflict with that approach. But it’s an interesting thought to play around with, how would the world change if ads were illegal...
My point in saying "you can't make it go away" was not that, if everyone in the world agreed that we should not have ads, that we as a human race couldn't get rid of them.
My point is that that is not going to happen. Or at least, it isn't going to happen suddenly.
When a big internet advertising company encourages advertisers to make their ads less bothersome, and it is met with "but we want no ads at all," I just don't see how that is helpful.
I think 99.9% of ad block users who understand what ad blocking is would agree that they would not start unblocking ads because they loaded faster.
Bonus points for being SVGs and thereby saving my bandwidth and looking nice across all resolutions.
More than often, they cause the page to jump down, or hide content, that's when I block them.
Of course, because of some websites doing this, I actively block ads on all websites.
But like I said, they have to be there on page load, not do this weird thing that causes content to jump around.
Don't bother to track ad clicks (because they can be gamed) and don't sell ads based on clicks (because then they WILL be gamed) and the problem vanishes. Click fraud is a problem the advertising industry created for itself, and other advertising mediums without invasive user-tracking seem to get on just fine without it.
Base payment scales on impartial ratings of website popularity.
I'm harshly anti-ads (for a swathe of reasons), but the problems of ad-fraud is an internet-unique problem. Advertising campaigns on TV, Radio, and paper mediums didn't track views (clicks didn't exist, my gosh!). An assumed value was given to the advertising based on the popularity of the particular TV show, radio program, magazine type, etc. AND the ads were generally targeted to the audience of the medium.
The advertising industry had this problem solved before it even became a problem. They wanted more, and are whinging about people blocking their methods to gain this 'more'.
Just don't create online dossiers on individuals, don't provide yet another vector for malware, don't invade our spaces with uninvited sound, don't slow down the sites I've chosen to view, don't waste my bandwidth.
Did that not go anywhere?
Here’s the archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20191031023005/https://web.dev/f...
There really isn't anything wrong with sidebar ads served from the same domain. Simple image/text/html, loads almost instantly, cacheable, etc.. Bonus is that ads can be based on web page content and you don't need to track your users.
a) Advertising is (and always has been), fundamentally, the application of data science to drive return-on-investment decisions. Any company that can do data science and understands RoI will eventually converge to be an advertising company. Calls for Google to "find a product to sell instead of being an advertising company" are calls for Google to throw away their data science expertise. Not gonna happen.
b) Breaking adblockers is a technically solved problem; just serve web pages as server-rendered blobs. (Think 'flash pages' of yore.) We're not doing it yet because the proportion of adblock users is still too small to make this profitable.
But if this proportion changes in the future, so will the web. So calls for more adblocking are just calls for a vastly more closed and proprietary web than today.
That is probably not what you really want.
Can you elaborate on this a little? How does this win the ad-block arms race?
Which is impossible to do without horrible false-positives. The arms race between ever-increasing heuristics complexity on the adblocker side and the webpage cloaking ads as content is a race that the adblockers cannot win.
You're right I think, it would become very difficult to create client side heuristics to identify the advertisement elements in the way it is currently done.
But who knows? Maybe machine learning based solutions will become necessary? Maybe dedicated recognition FPGAs?
The war will probably continue for some time.
The real solution is getting rid of intrusive and/or annoying ads, but that would mean sites with tightly curated audiences; no clickbait, SERP spam and other stupid audience-inflating crap.
Ultimately intrusive ads happen because publishers are in a rush to monetize traffic that advertisers view as cheap/low quality. It becomes a downwards spiral of attract low-quality eyeballs -> ad spendings plummet -> devote more screen share to annoying ads -> viewership falls -> attract more low-quality eyeballs -> etc.
Maybe at some point we'll hit rock bottom and things will start improving.
You can estimate the actual ratio of false positives by examining existing automation solutions based on image recognition. As a very rudimentary example, I have successfully used Sikuli [1] for various tasks including a program running "binary blobs". Unless you mix contents and ads altogether (and I personally think that it is fine as long as the ad is properly marked! It is at least a kind of contents, just that what I don't want generally though.) you can't ramp the false positive ratio up beyond a certain level.