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?"
Ah, capitalism (Score:2, Interesting)
It's a triumph of capitalism. Insert yourself as a parasite, move revenue from those doing the actual work towards yourself. And the obligatory "well, it's okay since the marks^Wusers agreed to it in an unreadable EULA."
Best of all, the complaints go to the web sites you're stealing from, not to yourself. Brilliant!
"Will only the last ad in the chain win?" (Score:5, Interesting)
The summary asks "Will only the last 'ad supported' software in the chain win?"
We could only wish! Unfortunately what usually happens is that each step simply adds more ads. Rarely do they remove existing ones to do that. As a result, you simply end up with more and more ads.
I'm at a point now where I am so fed up with ads in general, that I am ruthless in my ad blocking. I run adblock, and flashblock, and I run adfree on both my cell phone and my tablet. Additionally I run my own DNS server that is used by my computers, as well as my cell phone and tablet, and any time I see an ad on any device I do my best to track down where it came from and block the domain.
And it's not just the web either, I don't have commercial TV service because I can't stand the ads. Many of the networks have their shows available right on their websites, for free and without the long commercial breaks either!
Had advertisers kept things reasonable, I might have never resorted to such measures, but as it is, I'm fed up enough to just block everything.
Cable Operators (Score:5, Interesting)
Is this not what the cable operators already do? If they sell a local ad, they simply dub over the national ad of their choice and call it a day. How is this any different?
What goes around comes around: 1998 (Score:5, Interesting)
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1998/04/13/240866/index.htm [cnn.com]
I designed the client software architecture for the above. It was an "interesting" experience. My favorite "death march" project ever! ;) I got to meet David Bois...
The client was a wrapper around IE or Firefox, and attached a "PowerBar" to the top of the browser window. Due to the legal issues with EDS, they never got to dealing with any potential legal issues involving consumer privacy or publisher rights.
While I had some misgivings initially about working on this project, I found Dale very receptive about protecting consumer privacy. There were safeguards to insure that advertisers could only gain access to aggregate data, and this was a stated goal. And he went along 100% with my ideas about insuring that uploaded data was as transparent as possible - passed in the clear so that users could examine it and see just what was being sent, with only a small opaque digital signature. (Which still worried me. *I* knew there was nothing hidden in the signature, but how could the user prove it?)
Re:Said it before and I'll say it again ... (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
What users don't get is that the more people use adblock, the more marketers will have to extract every last penny they can out of the users they can. That means dirtier, high ROI ads, pop-ups, etc. Most users aren't going to install adblock no matter what they do.
The other end of it is that marketers in general are confident that they can overcome adblock if it ever becomes popular to the point where it's a problem. Adblock only works by recognizing the domain hosting the image/scripts or common path names.
Toss that banner add on the cloud, or have it hosted locally by the site owners(in a non-"banners" or "ads" subdirectory) and for the most part you've got it beat. Advertisers haven't adapted because there's not a big enough incentive to. But if push ever comes to shove, they'll win.
Imagining that AdBlock provides(or could provide) enough incentive to make anyone even think about cleaning up advertising is nothing but wishful thinking.
Re:What goes around comes around: 1998 (Score:4, Interesting)
A brief summary of PowerAgent:
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/PowerAgent+Introduces+First+Internet+'Infomediary'+to+Empower+and...-a019639599 [thefreelibrary.com]
What I called PowerBar above actually was called PowerFrames. I'd forgotten about the interstitials.... (PowerPages).
This was around the same time that Google first incorporated.
The client software worked reasonably well, given the state of embeddable browser controls at the time. Allegedly, there were serious issues with the back-end, and EDS insisted on taking that over.
I haven't really followed this area since. Has the question ever been settled as to whether software that inserts ads into content retrieved from the web violating the publisher's rights, or just acting as an agent of the user? I mean, it's legal to cut-apart a newspaper page, and paste it back together into a collage any way you want, right? (Assuming it is just for your own enjoyment...)
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/EDS+Provides+PowerAgent+With+Internet+Services+to+Support+One-To-One...-a019656177 [thefreelibrary.com]
Ad decluttering through selective ad blocking (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm approaching this from the other end. I'm working on a browser-add on which limits the number of ads that appear on a page. The user sets the limit, and we trim out ads accordingly. The ads with lower SiteTruth ratings [sitetruth.com] are deleted first.
This puts the user in control of the ad experience. The problem with on-line advertising today is that there are too many ads per page. This isn't good for advertisers or users.
I am amazed at how ads are funding the internet (Score:5, Interesting)
I am perpetually amazed at the amount of money companies spend on advertising. It's staggering---enough to support all of Google, Facebook, you name it.
Did companies always spend this much money? Does it work? Why don't more people block it? AdBlock has been around for almost a decade now and it didn't cut into this pie at all. It's just still geeks like us using it.
I don't know what's more amazing, this, or the resistance of most computer users to tweak or modify their browser setup in any way shape or form unless they absolutely have to.
Re:I am amazed at how ads are funding the internet (Score:4, Interesting)
"Did companies always spend this much money? Does it work? Why don't more people block it?"
To my understanding -- Yes. No. Because most people only get what mass-media tell them to, and AdBlock is not itself pushed in advertising.
Added notes -- I remember reading an article during the first contraction of online banner advertising, wherein companies were shocked to learn what a small turnover rate they had (online being the first time anyone could actually track turnover rates or other attention metrics). Personally, I take any ads I see as a mental marker to avoid doing business with those companies -- the more ads, the worse the company. Organizations with really great products/service are kept semi-secret and don't need advertising.
Re:Said it before and I'll say it again ... (Score:5, Interesting)
I suspect things don't escalate further because ad blocking has the nuclear option: doing everything as if the ad was showing, but without showing it.
There's nothing that makes it impossible to move ad blocking to the browser itself, where the blocking mechanism sets a "don't render" property on the element. Then it doesn't matter much what the advertiser does, the DOM is the same, as far as JS can tell it's all there, the server logs are identical.
Now how do you think advertisers will react when the advertising network can tell them "this ad was delivered on 10000 pages, but we have no clue how many of those people actually saw it"?