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Advertising Google Graphics Media

Google Now Automatically Converts Flash Ads To HTML5 188

Posted by samzenpus from the have-some-ads dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Google today began automatically converting Adobe Flash ads to HTML5. As a result, it's now even easier for advertisers to target users on the Google Display Network without a device or browser that supports Flash. Back in September, Google began offering interactive HTML5 backups when Flash wasn't supported. The Flash-to-HTML5 conversion tools for the Google Display Network and DoubleClick Campaign Manager created an HTML5 version of Flash ads, showing an actual ad rather than a static image backup. Now, Google will automatically convert eligible Flash campaigns, both existing and new, to HTML5."
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Google Now Automatically Converts Flash Ads To HTML5 More

Google Now Automatically Converts Flash Ads To HTML5

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  • No wonder. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by roc97007 ( 608802 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2015 @03:34PM (#49130223) Journal

    I have flash turned off (who doesn't?) but lately I've noticed that ads have begun to autoplay again.

    So, how do you make html5 "always ask first"?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I use block.

      It's like adblock, but much faster, much lighter, and makes it easy to manage a custom black/white list on top of the normal lists if you're into that.

    • Re:No wonder. (Score:4, Informative)

      by wiredlogic ( 135348 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2015 @07:32PM (#49132717)

      Noscript.

  • Great Scott! It appears I've been leading a sheltered life thanks to AdBlock, Ghostery and the like. I did not expect that level of douchebaggery from them, though. Well, hope AdBlock is ready for this.

    • The assets are still loaded from the same place, so AdBlock should still catch most of them with no tweaking.

      I've been noticing less granular visibility in my HTML5 assets than I used to have in Flash though; Safari is the only browser that has shown me each individual asset being loaded. Adding this functionality into AdBlock/Ghostery/NoScript et al would be a great help.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by afidel ( 530433 )

        In Chrome Menu -> More Tools -> Developer Tools -> click on Resources tab and you can get the individual URL for each image, script, or style sheet for each frame.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by WCMI92 ( 592436 )

      Great Scott! It appears I've been leading a sheltered life thanks to AdBlock, Ghostery and the like. I did not expect that level of douchebaggery from them, though. Well, hope AdBlock is ready for this.

      Yeah, it's like the HORROR the web looks like when you are working on an end user's PC and they only have Internet Exploder.

      I guess there will be HTML5 blocker extensions soon.
      And I'll use them. Why? I hate ads. To me there is NO SUCH THING as an acceptable ad. I will never surf without ad blocker

      • Re:Google had Flash ads? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by mjwx ( 966435 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2015 @10:50PM (#49133817)

        Great Scott! It appears I've been leading a sheltered life thanks to AdBlock, Ghostery and the like. I did not expect that level of douchebaggery from them, though. Well, hope AdBlock is ready for this.

        Yeah, it's like the HORROR the web looks like when you are working on an end user's PC and they only have Internet Exploder.

        I guess there will be HTML5 blocker extensions soon.
        And I'll use them. Why? I hate ads. To me there is NO SUCH THING as an acceptable ad. I will never surf without ad blockers running. And if you don't like it, take your site offline.

        And now that its happened, I'm going to blow my own trumpet.

        For all the people who bashed Flash and said HTML5 is our lord Geezus and Saviour, I hope you enjoy it because now that you've more or less killed flash all the things flash was being used for (I.E. annoying the living shit out of you with ads) is now in HTML5. The problem is, Flash was a plugin, you cold block it completely at that level and easily select the bits you wanted to play. Now with HTML5 the ads and annoying videos are part of the code so in order to block them you need to parse the code. This means advertisers can get even trickier in hiding ads as part of the content and ad blockers are going to have to wrestle with a higher number of false positives.

        If you thought adwords was annoying, wait until you have adword videos in HTML5 (and if I've thought of it, you can bet that someone with less scruples has too). So you've killed flash and all the evil that was in flash is not moving to HTML 5 where it'll be easier to hide and harder to block. There's your victory, drink it in.

  • Oh great ... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gstoddart ( 321705 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2015 @03:37PM (#49130253) Homepage

    Thanks, assholes, now we're going to have to figure out how to block this crap in HTML 5.

    Will someone please kick the Google CEO in the crotch?

    I'm tired of the internet being shat upon by asshole marketers.

    • Complain to the sites that you like that only have an ad-supported model. THEY choose to fund their sites through ads.

      • It's not necessarily the ads, (hell, I've clicked on a small static ad once or twice) it's the way they're implemented.

        Let's take for example a company that will remain nameless but their initials are Seattle Post-Intelligencer. It's not that their website contains ads. It's that the pages take so long to load even with fiber to the house, and the ads autoplay, or pop over full page with hidden "dismiss" buttons, or pop under and autoplay (yes, I know I already said "autoplay") to an extent that it resemb

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by itzly ( 3699663 )

        How about I just don't come back to that site ?

        • That works too... However depending on the quality of their market research. They may just think that their content is driving people away. If you let them know that you like the site, except for the fact that they are too many add and you choose not to use them. Then you make sure they get the message.

          There was a site, that I was visiting for a long time. Then they had an audio add. I complained to the site owner, they quickly fixed the problem.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Misagon ( 1135 )

        It is not about having ads, but the nature of the ads. Ads that blink, flash, have lots of moving objects .. and worse of all: play sound.

        There is a reason why some browsers have had the feature to disable GIF animation for many years. Until recently, the majority of animated ads were made in Adobe Flash, which you could have configured as click-to-play.
        With HTML5 and the most popular browsers, there is no click-to-play.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        Don't complain about those sites, script and cookie block them and never return, also if you have a free moment, target the advertising agency and their scripts and cookie block them and if you have a moment more to spare, go to the product or service site and script and cookie block them. You know sending out a passive aggressive email to all in those in the firing line probably would not hurt either, the web site, the advertising agency and the seller, let them all know that you loathe them and will be d

    • Thanks, assholes, now we're going to have to figure out how to block this crap in HTML 5.

      did you seriously think that the decline of flash would equate to fewer ads? at least with flash you had a "click to run plugin" option.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      Ditto. I miss the old days. Yes, what are some good HTML5 blockers?

  • Thank you! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by darkain ( 749283 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2015 @03:42PM (#49130321) Homepage

    While everyone else is bitching about ads being displayed (hey, adblock targets the CONTAINER, not the AD itself, so it is still blocked, just like static images were before!)...

    I'm extremely THANKFUL for this! Seriously, can we not count the number of end-user exploits that have been transmitted through Flash advertising on some of the worlds largest and most visited web sites!? Adobe and the Flash platform have a horrendously bad reputation in the security market. As someone who has to constantly fix other people's computers, this is a much MUCH welcomed change!!

    oh wait, shit, what am I saying... less broken computers = less paychecks for me... FUCK. NNNOOOO, BRING THE FLASH BACK!!! :-O

    • Bitching about Adobe only accounts for the last 10 years of Flash vulnerabilities. But, don't forget Flash was created by Macromedia, which was far more evil than Adobe. Macromedia used to not have an uninstaller for Flash, because they didn't want you to be able to uninstall it!

      (this is where my reply meant to go, but I screwed it up and added it as a separate comment below)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by CODiNE ( 27417 )

      I hope you're joking, I've known enough IT guys who intentionally used bad software for job security. Or allowed things known to be broken to catastrophicly fail so they could swoop in and be the "hero".

      For those who seriously think that way....

      http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window [wikipedia.org]

      The same amount of $$ and work would be much better off making things better.

      • First up, breaking things in order to bill for fixing them is horribly unethical and unacceptable.
        That said, in the Parable of the Broken Window, the glazier still benefits. If you're the kind of person to try this you probably don't care about the opportunity cost to the rest of society or the one you're billing since you now have the money in your hot little hands...

  • Just Remember (Score:5, Insightful)

    by American AC in Paris ( 230456 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2015 @03:55PM (#49130461) Homepage

    I cannot even begin to count the number of commenters here who pushed HTML5 as the best way to end, once and for all, those incredibly invasive and annoying Flash ads.

    You got exactly what you were asking for.

    So long as business is on the web, there will never, ever, ever be a technological "solution" to online advertising. There's simply too much money at stake for that to happen.

    • +1

      That is all.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Lennie ( 16154 )

      The only other solution I can think of is some kind of micropayments system, like with a cryptocurrency.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by SeaFox ( 739806 )

      I cannot even begin to count the number of commenters here who pushed HTML5 as the best way to end, once and for all, those incredibly invasive and annoying Flash ads.

      I remember what they were doing is pushing HTML5 as a way to deliver rich content that oftentimes was not supported on $favoriteOSSplatform due to reliance on proprietary plugins. HTML was supposed to help maintain the (original) spirit of the Internet as a platform-agnostic information source.

      They forgot that once they get access to the content, those same companies now also have a way of delivering marketing content to the audience.

    • Re:Just Remember (Score:4, Informative)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 ) <slashdot.worf@net> on Wednesday February 25, 2015 @05:45PM (#49131715)

      I cannot even begin to count the number of commenters here who pushed HTML5 as the best way to end, once and for all, those incredibly invasive and annoying Flash ads.

      You got exactly what you were asking for.

      So long as business is on the web, there will never, ever, ever be a technological "solution" to online advertising. There's simply too much money at stake for that to happen.

      Except things are different now.

      With HTML5, you have a LOT more control over everything. With Flash, it was all or nothing. An HTML5 ad is still an ad, and it still can be blocked in the same way other ads are blocked.

      But your browser can do a lot of things you can't do if it was flash - e.g., your browser can easily block popups (something a lot harder to do on a flash ad). If a flash ad takes too many CPU cycles, you're SOL, but the browser can easily go and limit the CPU cycles an HTML5 ad uses.

    • Well, I didn't want HTML5, because I didn't see any benefit (to me). Instead, it was obviously about ads and SaaS.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by zr ( 19885 )

      this isn't a solution against advertising, its a solution to forced flash which is a common attack vector for malware.

      kudos google.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rsborg ( 111459 )

      I cannot even begin to count the number of commenters here who pushed HTML5 as the best way to end, once and for all, those incredibly invasive and annoying Flash ads.

      You got exactly what you were asking for.

      So long as business is on the web, there will never, ever, ever be a technological "solution" to online advertising. There's simply too much money at stake for that to happen.

      Flashblock does to HTML5 and Silverlight what it does to Flash. It blocks it.

      The only difference between today and 2 years ago is that nowadays some browsers (Firefox, Safari for sure) block Flash by default (assuming you're not on the latest version plugin - which resembles 90% of people I know). This must be impacting the bottom line of online advertisers.

      We're back to not relying on the browser to auto block ads and to use plugins like block and Flashblock (I go one step further and use facebookblocke

  • The way to block ads, is to black list certain third party sources for web pages. That way regardless of the technology used behind the ads, it's never requested for.

  • Is this supposed to be good or bad news? (Score:3)

    by Chelloveck ( 14643 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2015 @04:02PM (#49130535)

    On the one hand, I know flash is bad and HTML5 is good. And even though advertising is bad it follows that advertising in HTML5 must be less bad than advertising in flash.

    So, um... yay?

  • Too CPU hungry (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Blaskowicz ( 634489 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2015 @04:09PM (#49130615)

    Single thread CPU performance stopped improving a good while ago - or more strictly speaking it goes up very slowly. Please.. these ads will only make everyone's life worse.
    End result, everyone will have to block ads. I'm not buying a new motherboard, CPU and RAM to have the PC not struggle under the load of ads.

    • Re:Too CPU hungry (Score:5, Funny)

      by itzly ( 3699663 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2015 @04:22PM (#49130751)

      Maybe Intel can make a special core dedicated for ads ?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by afidel ( 530433 )

      Most rendering engines aren't single threaded, and most browsers use GPU acceleration. However, on mobile adding a bunch of animations will surely lower battery life, so I just switched from Chrome to Firefox on my Android device as animated and sound filled ads are evil and Chrome mobile lacks extension support.

      • Amen to that. I finally had to make the switch, too. The ads and Javascript everywhere were just too much to bear on my tiny screen. There's even a version of NoScript [noscript.net] for mobile Firefox .
        I tried AdBlock Plus [f-droid.org] but it broke updates for MedScape and a couple other apps that I need. The Firefox addon version works like a charm, though.

        • Try AdFree, AdAway, or minminguard (an Xposed module).

          I believe the first two require full root, the module works with either temproot or full root.

          Minminguard blocks the API calls in apps directly, so they can't even call for the ad download (thus no ads get downloaded period).

          AdFree and AdAway work with the HOSTs file, so it is also recommended to have a HOSTs editor of some sort if you need to manually make adjustments.

          I use AdFree and see very minimal amount of adverts - on the mobile version of Slashdo

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by hojo ( 94118 )

      I was getting so pissed with my Acer Aspire netbook I was going to buy a new ultrabook, mostly because I would hit rlslog and the browser (Chrome) would hang for about 3-4 seconds before I could start to scroll down the page. I assumed this was because the processor was underpowered. It's a 64 bit AMD chip running at 1.3 GHz, though, and I have it upgraded to its maximum capacity of 8 GB of RAM and I'm running with an SSD.

      This was making me crazy--no other pages were causing issues as routinely. I did so

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by phorm ( 591458 )

      Wouldn't the HTML5 version be less CPU-hungry than the flash app-container-plugin version?

  • Bitching about Adobe only accounts for the last 10 years of Flash vulnerabilities. But, don't forget Flash was created by Macromedia, which was far more evil than Adobe. Macromedia used to not have an uninstaller for Flash, because they didn't want you to be able to uninstall it!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jlv ( 5619 )

      Oops... this reply was meant to be in response to "Thank you" above.

  • I do read ToS's and Privacy Policies of programs and services (Samsung there's not enough time to claim what's wrong, you need to read on your own and there are many different ones).

    Angry Birds (Rovio.com) at the time had a very informative Privacy Policy, and where I came across Flurry.com the first time. Rovio collects your data, sells it to Flurry.com (Google) which in turn sells data to those who target ads as only Google can.

    I was able to block Flurry.com with a HOSTS file, they then moved the site to

  • So what does this mean for me?

    Ads and privacy concerns aside, does this mean that if I unblock ads for a site to help their revenue, will these HTML5 adds be less CPU-intensive than the Flash ads? Will they decrease in size (bandwidth concerns on smartphone)?

  • What I want to know is, how all these technological innovators managed to make PDFs, Flash and JAVA allow security exploits on our 'computers'. I thought the 'sandbox' was supposed to provide protection.

  • Dammit. As a flash refusenick for years I've gotten used to the quietness of the modern flash-free web. Now I have to investigate ad-block technology again.

  • Which is worse? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by JRV31 ( 2962911 )
    Flash or HTML5,if HTML5 is crapware and Digital Restrictions Malware rolled into one.

  • ...have flash ads. That promise lasted less than a year. Now the site is full of crappy flash ads. I called the owners out on it and they tried to pass the blame onto the ad network. There was a very easy fix for that...

    Too many times crappy flash ads have crashed the flash plugin or spread malware/viruses.

  • Intrusive (Score:3)

    by Anne Thwacks ( 531696 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2015 @06:25PM (#49132153)
    Google ads on Slashdot have become so intrusive on Android mobiles it is not actually possible to use the web site any more!

    Nothing to do with Flash, the popup covers most of the screen on my Note3, and there is no obvious way to get rid of it other than leave the site. I thought it was a varus, til I found I did not have the problem on other sites.

    This is a major achievement in the foot shooting league.

    Posted from my PDP8 using an ASR33.

  • DMCA? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I would make the assumption that a company that creates a flash ad owns that content. Isn't it a violation of the DMCA for Google to use their content in a way not approved by them?

  • All you ad-base are belong to us!

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