Google, Facebook Upset By Ad-Injecting Apps 282
An anonymous reader writes "Emily Steel at the Wall Street Journal writes about an unexpected twist for Google and Facebook, two companies that make their money selling ads next to content created by others. New companies like Sambreel Holdings are writing slick browser interfaces for popular sites like Facebook or Google and supporting themselves by injecting their own ads into the mix. Naturally, the original ad sellers aren't so happy about other ad sellers inserting themselves farther down the chain. Are we in the middle of an ad war where every company tries to inject their ads over the others? Will only the last 'ad supported' software in the chain win?"
A new browser interface for a website? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why is this necessary? Both already have native apps on mobile devices. Users can browse with IE, Firefox, Chrome, etc. What does the browser do that a normal browser doesn't?
Live by the sword, die by the sword (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Said it before and I'll say it again ... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not (so much) the ads... (Score:5, Insightful)
Interstitials (Score:4, Insightful)
If Adblock becomes common, interstitials are going to win. They are the only form of ad that could be coded such that they cannot be blocked (e.g. make the interstitial send a message to the site at the beginning and end of the ad, and/or require the user to enter some content from the ad before the site sends the actual content of the website to the user).
If they win, adding more ads will only make the user not want to use your interface since it means a further delay until the website's content can be viewed.
Re:Said it before and I'll say it again ... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not that I want to hide the ads. What I want is to hide the annoyance of the ads. Keep the ads subtle and out of the flow of what I'm on a site for, and I won't want to block them.
What the marketers don't understand is that the more annoying they get, the less eyeballs they receive because of more and more people use ad-ons like Adblock to avoid the annoyance. All they seem to understand is the lazy approach. Be loud! Be garish! Be anything but smart and honest!
Re:Said it before and I'll say it again ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Enough is enough! (Score:3, Insightful)
This whole business about making money just by slipping an ad in front of an eyeball is stupid, and I wish it would stop altogether.
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Re:It's not (so much) the ads... (Score:5, Insightful)
Facebook is terrible for for. The have have hundreds of millions of people browsing their site everyday, and it's filled to ads for scammers, porn, dubious websites and other junk. They could make a serious amount of money if they would just only take serious advertisers. You don't see ads for fake Rolex watches on NBC, but you do on Facebook, even though Facebook has a much bigger audience. They need a real advertising department that goes after big companies getting real advertisements for legitimate products. If the ads were for real products, people would be much more likely to click on them, and advertisers would pay much more for the ads. Right now, no serious company will advertise on Facebook because they don't want their product showing up next to ads for Russian Brides and get rich quick schemes.
Re:Live by the sword, die by the sword (Score:2, Insightful)
As a webmaster I am not happy that Google sometimes shows its users my pages before they visit. So get the info they want and don't visit my site for real and get the ad I serve.
As a webmaster, I would never subject visitors to my site to advertisements of any sort.
Re:A new browser interface for a website? (Score:1, Insightful)
Unfortunately, everyone has now been trained that they need "an app for that".
Yes, they're trained. Like dogs. They don't evaluate their own needs and seek their own best-fit solutions like proper human beings. They're sheeple.
Yeah, sheeple. I see the way some of you react strongly to that term, like you can't stand it. You don't react that way to ordinary insults. You react to it because a) you're reactionary and don't have the grace to overlook the use of a word you wouldn't use yourself, so you launch ad-hominems against the one using it and b) you know it's true and you don't want to be reminded.
Corporations just LOVE sheeple. It means people thoughtlessly do things in large patterns (trends) that can be led, manipulated, and predicted. Marketing works best on people who need to be told what they want and accept this as normal. Real individuals might not fit the statistical pattern and won't line up in droves for the latest sale. Governments just LOVE sheeple too. They are easy to frighten and beg to be protected from whatever the big scary of the day is: Communism, drugs, terrorism, whatever.
You know who doesn't love sheeple? People who want to live and let live who aren't looking for ways to exploit and have power over the masses. People like that see the masses of sheeple as the single biggest threat to the kind of society they would rather live in, one based on freedom (political and social) and merit and respect for the individual. People like that are rounding errors when it comes to voting both at the polls and with one's wallet.
Re:"Will only the last ad in the chain win?" (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, we may get a bad result of all this: if ads beside the content become entirely useless, the upstream providers will start putting the ads IN the content. Witness what happened to the bottom third of your screen after Tivo came out. When Adblock learns to block those, they'll just make it more subtle.
Product placements pioneered in-band advertising, but the first generation was pretty awkward. Diamonds are a notable exception. Those guys were brilliant. Instead of making a big deal of the rocks, they wrote a subtle preconception into the plots: that offering a girl a diamond is the universal standard when getting engaged. The girl is thrilled by the surprise proposal, but never surprised that he's offering a diamond. And thus the audience learns: she might be overjoyed by an unusually expensive one, but no diamond at all is NOT ACCEPTABLE. A hundred years ago, that wasn't even fiction; now it's reality.
Realize that this is still going on, and try to spot it. Don't just look for blatant logos smeared everywhere, and cumbersome shoehorning of brands into dialog... Those exist too, but that's just because not everyone can afford the genius advertising guys, even if there were enough of them to go around. But the subtle tricks of old are well known, and still in use. Look for the subtle stuff the cast takes completely for granted that you thought was just something the trendy conformist crowd was into... they are just the first to fall for it. Especially look for it in the news.
Now tell me how the hell you're going to slice that out of the content. Adblock isn't going to cut it.
Re:Said it before and I'll say it again ... (Score:5, Insightful)
That is CURRENTLY how they work. but if the advertisers change their tactics then the ad-blockers likely will as well.
This seems like the same paradigm that piracy/anti-piracy follows. The pirates will, by definition, always be one step ahead because anti-piracy is reactionary. Translating this to the current discussion, advertisers will always be one step ahead because anti-ad software is reactionary. Just $0.02.
Re:Said it before and I'll say it again ... (Score:5, Insightful)
"What the marketers don't understand is that the more annoying they get, the less eyeballs they receive"
Skeptical: Citation needed.
Advertisers will NEVER win. (Score:5, Insightful)
They will never win. Look at it this way. You've essentially said that advertising gets dirtier the less people respond, and if everyone used Adblock, advertising would get so dirty we couldn't win.
Yet, spam is probably the dirtiest advertising there is. There is likely no trick the spammers have not tried. Send from any host, embed stuff in reasonble-looking text, etc. Yet spam detection is very, very good, to the extent that spam is on the decline.
Advertisers will never win, because you can write better software that detects ads. Adblock's simple host and XPATH detection is all that's there because it's all that's necessary right now. It would however probably not be that hard to write image detection software that can process images and assign a AD-PROBABILITY value to them. Use the cloud against the advertisers ... just set up software that learns by user submission on a cluster and click on an ad to submit it. Consult the "cloud" for any new images.
But, until most people care about ads the way they care about spam, it's not going to be necessary. Unfortunately we're so culturally inundated with advertisement that it's just not a thing. Though while this may look like a win for advertisers, it does make ad removal trivial for those of us who care.
Re:Advertisers will NEVER win. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Advertisers will NEVER win. (Score:5, Insightful)