Techdirt Is Now Without Any Google Ads or Tracking Code
techdirt.com
techdirt.com
Their "self-hosted" Plausible content is pulled from tics.techdirect.com, which resolves to 46.101.161.209 and shares a reverse DNS with custom.plausible.io. Can't tell who runs the web server on the other end of this, so it may well be self-hosted.
The site also dropped a first-party one-year cookie, and let a third party drop a week-long cookie.
My browser is set to send Do Not Track requests, so my explicit wishes are still being flagrantly ignored.
There is still a lot of third-party tracking going on here, as well as execution of remote code under the control of third parties. It's remains a privacy and security clusterfuck but it's better than it was.
Wait, they're still serving things via rawgit? They started shutting down in 2018! That service has been deprecated for three years. That sounds like an attack that is just waiting to happen.
> GitHub repositories that served content through RawGit within the last month will continue to be served until at least October of 2019. URLs for other repositories are no longer being served.
> If you're currently using RawGit, please stop using it as soon as you can.
Until that's fixed, things like this will keep being commonplace.
I have a dollar that says most websites you visit do not respect this setting unless they don’t use trackers at all.
That looks like it's Plausible's "they host it" system.
I'm myself in that category, I know that my blog has enough visitors to break even at least the running cost with Ads but I could not pull myself to do it when I personally hate Ads, Feel its disrespectful to attention and go all the way to ensure I don't see one(Pi-Hole, UBlock etc.).
My content are distributed randomly across several interests and I don't have regular schedule due to health reasons so a patreon wouldn't work. Paypal donations are blocked for my country. So the best bet is 'Buy Me a Coffee' but then I have to pay both Stripe + BMaC commissions, I have to register a business to be able to get International payments on Stripe anyways.
So a direct stripe payment or similar PG is the only option to monetize open content for this scenario and since tax id is involved due to Intl. payments it's not a donation.
Affiliate links when the content isn't exactly a review of the said product/book (to avoid conflict of interest) do work in this context to some extent. But the current referral system is a mess with each product/service tying up with different middlemen or having their own system, arbitrary approval, payment issues, publishers gaming the system etc.
I have started to track the need-gap for 'Single referral system for all services' on my problem validation platform[1].
[1] https://needgap.com/problems/274-single-referral-system-for-...
> are now using both Plausible and Matomo (self-hosted),
Is it possible they only meant self hosted Matomo, not Plausible?
That behaviour is certainly not software making their wishes clear in the matter.
Setting DNT to true by default is certainly more in line with user's wishes than the previous assumption by the tech industry to just grab whatever info they can.
That's not tracking right?
Personally I proxy Gravatar requests through my web service's backend to get rid of the first type of tracking.
For example, I buy hot rod magazines to get the advertisements selling hot rod parts in those magazines. I don't buy them to read toothpaste ads. I even pay money to get those ads.
But if I was visiting a site about dental hygiene, I'd be interest in the toothpaste ads.
I've tried to configure context-sensitive ads from Amazon on my web site to be books on programming. But Amazon would insist on showing:
1. batman movie ads
2. the same ad for a C++ course over and over and over and over
So I wound up removing those from the site. Instead, I created a list of good programming books myself, and would randomly cycle through that list to show an ad.
It would be so much better if I could enable:
"Only show books from this category."
as my aim is to only show advertisements that would be of interest to the people reading the site.
Google has context sensitive ads, and one would think this would work. But it doesn't. For example, I have a page on the American Revolution. Google's context sensitive ads are usually for travel agencies, presumably based on the place names on the page. Actually relevant ads would be for history books. I tried meta keywords, etc., nothing worked. I gave up. Google's context algorithms are worthless and the site owner should be able to provide guidance.
This post reminds me we need to write up a full blog post on how it works, and how we're seeing great results from it. We're trying to prove the model works, so always happy to have folks support us!
Also, some "negative" requirements, like "no batman, no toys, no games, no movies".
As you noted even Amazon was showing the same C++ ad. This might be because it was all they had that was relevant (plus high spend out-competing others) and there wasn't enough other publishers paying to advertise books/products in other related categories.
Just something to consider.
The affiliate money from them is not enough to interest me. What does interest me is providing ads that my readers would like to see.
Maybe I'm a unique snowflake, but relentlessly showing me the same ad makes me hate it. I don't listen to internet radio because each station runs the same 3 ads all day. I just can't stand it.
The second was car radios with a USB plug so I could plug in a stick of my music instead of ads-for-that-wretched-jewelry-store that I shall not name nor ever buy from. 40 years of those ads. barf.
Keywords tend to have multiple meanings, and advertisers won't really know what keywords to use to represent a particular category. For example, I'd like to specify
"books and programming"
Good luck to you and your endeavours ;-)
Don't rely on your algorithms. Let the page owner ultimately decide what gets advertised.
My hand-curated list of well-regarded programming books that my programming site cycles through has been a success. Not a single person has ever complained about those ads.
I view a proper set of ads that are relevant to the site content as a service to the user, not an annoyance.
I (and presumably my viewers) would appreciate a way of specifying this to your ad servers. I would also appreciate a way of restricting ads to being text/picture/link and nothing more.
For instance, if you were browsing high-end networking hardware and you decided to go browse chicken recipes, it's still better to show you network device ads simply because even if you have a 1/1000th chance of converting on them, you'll be worth more than buying chicken.
But there's no advertisement broker that provides such a service to web sites. They all follow the google/amazon model of serving irrelevant and annoying batman and travel agency ads, which motivate people to install ad blockers.
Note that (before the intertoobs) there were other products where people were willing to buy ads to browse:
1. the yellow pages
2. newspaper classified ads
3. JC Whitney catalogs
4. Hemmings Motor News
5. all the computer/electronics/hobby magazines
Another method is exemplified by the "Detroit Muscle" car show. It is ostensibly about how to soup up your car. But it's actually an ad platform, as they use various tools and supplies to do the work, and show how to use them. That's what pays for the show and it's why I watch the show. I like ones about how to bend metal and here's the tool that does it. There are shows on how to weld and here's the welder for the job.
It just seems like conversion rates would improve no matter what you are selling if you just spend a little bit more time thinking about advertizing in relevant areas vs the firehose approach that is done now, banking on the large numbers of it all to overcome the small conversion rate. If Scott wants to sell more paper towels to me, they could almost guarentee my business if they stopped advertising via irrelevant ads, and advertised in relevant spaces such as if they included a coupon for their paper towels with my weekly grocery store mailer that made their offering cheaper than their competitors.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/targeted-ads-offer-little-...
One solid strategy is to review which companies are advertising on the site via Google Ads and approach them directly. Because of Google’s hefty margin, it can be a win-win for both the publisher and advertiser.
Or just for kicks?
Sign up a few major brands that market to everybody, such as Ford and Pepsi. You tend to not see those on Google. Offer 4-second GIFs.
Get acquired by IAC.
2. Go to Ford.com and build a Mach-E configuration
3. wait a few days
4. load some Google Ads
Ford is definitely an advertisers on Google Ads. I get them every time I go back to check out the Mach-E or other upcoming EVs from them.
Here's the Show HN that never picked up steam: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27175347
I’d look into who sets the rules on your content blocker. I can’t think of any reason why Techdirt might be blocked beyond the common tracking that we are discussing here and which they are trying to get rid of.
I search for Product A on Google or Amazon and am immediately inundated with ads for the same product on every page I go that has Google ads
What is worse is that the ads continue even after I purchase the product / service. So I get ads for a mobile phone I searched for and bought in Amazon (and all its accessories) for months after I have already purchased it.
My mind automatically ignores every ad.
It's a “Free software alternative to Google Analytics” “which can easily be configured to respect your visitors' privacy”[0] (emphasis mine). But can it be configured in a way so you can claim “without any tracking code”? I wonder whether the claim in the headline was supposed to be merely “no third-party tracking”. [Edited to add:] Waiiit a moment, is the intended meaning simply “no Google tracking code”? (I don't think the article addresses this anywhere; hope I didn't just miss something.)
Or maybe I'm supposed to know that “no tracking” is jargon for something like ”attempts to not store PII” in this industry? I doubt that it can be configured such that, for example, unique visitors are statistically estimated instead of counting unique IDs from tracking cookies — but I'm too lazy to research that in detail, so it would be interesting to hear from someone who knows more.
To my knowledge, Google's basic nature has been known for quite a while, and people who care have lined up on different sides depending on their ideologies and self-interests. What has changed in the last 6 months that makes so many companies change their opinions about working with them? Is it just that public opinion has crossed some tipping point where it makes sense to gamble on a temporary revenue hit in order to be on the "right side"? That seems unlikely, just because I don't know a lot of people who weren't skeptical of Google a year ago who are now.
Is it related to FLoC? That seems like a wonky issue that's under most people's radar. Is it the EU antitrust hearings? Also seems unlikely.
Honest question: why now?
• https://www.stefanjudis.com/notes/say-goodbye-to-resource-ca...
I would have guessed it would be most of their readers blocking easy-to-block ads, and the low payout, but it seems capricious policy enforcement is happening across Google and Youtube especially.
You know, the sort of thing that could potentially kick off a frenzy… as unlikely as that seems.
More cynical dynamic is virtue signaling, which can pretend to be the former.
The way advertising companies used to treat online advertising a decade ago was that it didn't matter where your ads were placed, as long as they were going in front of people who were interested in them. That's why you had large ad exchanges with third-party tracking tools to build up behavioral profiles, because it was the best approach for linking advertisers and publishers. Publishers generally didn't care about who was advertising on their pages and advertisers generally didn't care about what pages their ads wound up on. This is, of course, a generality; there's always been picky advertisers and/or publishers, but the core point remains: the business worked because inventory was fungible.
And then advertisers realized that their ads were showing up on videos of Klu Klux Klan rallies and other far-right nonsense.
Well, they didn't so much realize, as much as they were publicly embarrassed when journalists started writing news stories about it. Consequently, you saw multiple waves of brands making a show of pulling all their advertising until exchanges implemented better controls for brand association and advertiser safety. Of course, this means that exchanges wound up over-enforcing ad safety, constantly harassing publishers that might be on the line. Journalistic outfits were unusually impacted, because their content is rarely advertiser friendly, even though they're not the right-wing nutters that started this mess.
This problem isn't related to trying to keep right-wingers out of ad money, though. There's a sort of converse Adpocalypse that happened to publishers, called malvertising. This can take many forms - from fake popups for scam tech support companies, to just outright dropping a zero-day exploit on your victim. This causes reputational problems for publishers, since safe-browing services will flag your site (basically making it unusable without lots of scary warnings, and heavily punishing it in search engines) if it starts dropping drive-by downloads on users.
So, advertisers are unhappy because of bad publishers, and publishers are unhappy because of bad advertisers. What about the users? Well, they're installing ad blockers in record numbers because they don't want to get hacked by malicious ads. Also, many of them aren't actual users; the online advertising business has had click fraud problems way before malvertising or brands getting cold feet over what content they're paired with. That's actually part and parcel of why online advertising is so tracking-heavy; it lets them detect the difference between an actual reader and someone just clicking on their own ads all day to defraud advertisers. Guess what? Users don't like ad tracking all that much either (especially when exchanges are so directly in-your-face about it.)
In any fungible market, the presence of "bad" commodities drives out "good" ones. What you have now is a toxic market, one that Google more or less owns outright because everyone else has been driven out of business or acquired. Google isn't the cause of the toxicity, but they benefit from it regardless, since Search display advertising will remain brand- and user-safe in ways publisher advertising isn't. In this new market of TV-like, non-fungible advertising; Google is no longer a business partner. They are a hostile, dogged competitor paying them ever-shrinking table scraps.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210726/09441047251/techd...
Same here, with Adguard.
The problem is with the title part of the url, since the title contains the word "ads".
I did an experiment: If you remove the words after "-google" in the url, it still works. You could probably remove the entire title of the url and it will still work by article id... So here's a link that will work with Adguard enabled:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210726/09441047251/techd...
This may be a set in the right direction but.....
The same page on which they posted this is running CSS from fonts.googleapis.com, as well as embedded frames from soundcloud.com & w.soundcloud.com which I also believe is google owned.
So, count me a little skeptical
> So, count me a little skeptical
Be as skeptical as you want, they are transparent about what's going on. A decent background piece specific to the Google piece of this madness explains part of it here:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200810/11335745081/why-a...
(I've met with Mike a couple times, but otherwise have no connection to them, other than being a long-time reader.)
Also, Google does not own Soundcloud.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=google+owns+soundcloud&t=brave&ia=...
This is erroneous, as soundcloud is not google owned.
But now they seem to have only original content.
1. techdirt.com
2. cloudflare.com
3. fontawesome.com
4. s3.amazonaws.com
5. soundcloud.com
Now, I don't know what kind of scripts are being loaded from these sources but things are looking refreshingly spartan, considering techdirt is an online publication
For comparison, arstechnica usually has like 18 sources, 10 of which are trackers
Regardless of ownership, you’ll run into same problems almost everywhere if you publish articles critical of your advertisers. That’s nothing to do with Google and just the market working as intended/expected.
the correct complaint, IMHO, is that the ad networks themselves, regardless of who powers it... are shady. singling out google is not entirely fair.