Google Says Ad Blockers Will Save Online Ads 419
azoblue writes "Google — the world's largest online ad broker — sees no reason to worry about the addition of ad-blocking extensions to its Chrome browser. Online advertisers will ensure their ads aren't too annoying, the company says, and netizens will ultimately realize that online advertising is a good thing."
Firefox users with Adblock: 12% (Score:4, Informative)
Flash is evil (Score:3, Informative)
Flash is just evil (for that matter, so is Silverlight). I understand why designers like it, but it breaks the very paradigms that make the Internet great.
Example: I recently ran across the web-site of a very nice little company in my neighborhood. Whoever they hired to do their website put the whole thing into Flash: the menus, the content, even the contact information. Result: you can't find their sitein Google, not even under their company name and address. Accessibility to the blind: none. But the website looks pretty...
Flash: just say "no"!
Re:And allow them to collect demographic data... (Score:3, Informative)
Google is a fan of producing relevant, non-intrusive ads. I also understand that websites need ads. I would be ok if their adblocker removed the annoying ads and kept the decent ads. From Google's '10 things' (http://www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.html)
6. You can make money without doing evil.
Google is a business. The revenue we generate is derived from offering search technology to companies and from the sale of advertising displayed on our site and on other sites across the web. Hundreds of thousands of advertisers worldwide use AdWords to promote their products; hundreds of thousands of publishers take advantage of our AdSense program to deliver ads relevant to their site content. To ensure that we're ultimately serving all our users (whether they are advertisers or not), we have a set of guiding principles for our advertising programs and practices:
* We don't allow ads to be displayed on our results pages unless they are relevant where they are shown. And we firmly believe that ads can provide useful information if, and only if, they are relevant to what you wish to find – so it's possible that certain searches won't lead to any ads at all.
* We believe that advertising can be effective without being flashy. We don't accept pop-up advertising, which interferes with your ability to see the content you've requested. We've found that text ads that are relevant to the person reading them draw much higher clickthrough rates than ads appearing randomly. Any advertiser, whether small or large, can take advantage of this highly targeted medium.
* Advertising on Google is always clearly identified as a "Sponsored Link," so it does not compromise the integrity of our search results. We never manipulate rankings to put our partners higher in our search results and no one can buy better PageRank. Our users trust our objectivity and no short-term gain could ever justify breaching that trust.
Re:And to them I say (Score:5, Informative)
If that's true, then those advertisers will shrink their market until they go out of business.
The surviving advertisers will be the ones who learned how to make ads that aren't blocked.
Re:And to them I say (Score:3, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Ads? What ads? (Score:3, Informative)
All the options for Chrome/Chromium/Iron don't really block ads. They only prevent them from rendering after they are downloaded. The amount of time downloading the ads takes more than negates Chrome's speed advantage over Firefox. it's worth noting the "AdBlockPlus" for Chrome is not made by the guy who develops AdBlockPlus for FF.
I was eager for this feature, but it is extremely disappointing so far. I won't be moving off Firefox just yet.
Re:wrong assumption (Score:3, Informative)
Excellent point.
Yes, it was a tricky decision. As an indy with zero advertising budget, it's one of the few ways to get word out, and get to Google where you can find me, if you care. And yes, I'm aware that it doesn't merge well with my words.
Because real life is in shades of grey. There actually is some advertisement that I find acceptable. But you can't say that to the ad people or what the hear is that you love ads, or at least their ads.