Google Now Automatically Converts Flash Ads To HTML5 188
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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These are all great opinions, but before I can take frequent contributor *apk* seriously, I need to know what opinion on 'hosts' is held by Frequent Contributor (TM) BENNET HASELTON!?!
There are good contributors, there are bad contributors, there are plenty of truly horrendous contributors: but there can be only one Frequent Contributor.
No wonder. (Score:5, Interesting)
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"?
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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.
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Thanks, will look for that.
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Link?
ublock [github.com]
Re:No wonder. (Score:4)
It's not through fear of some diabolical use of flash, it's entirely annoyance with animated ads. Ads should just sit there unless and until I click on them.
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I agree; ads should portray a product or service in a tasteful, non-distracting manner. Unfortunately, those standards were thrown out the window entirely about 10 to 15 years ago, with an ever-escalating arms race:
- Popup ads
- Java ads (yes, remember those? The "Punch the monkey and win $20" banner ad from 2000 was one of the most notorious instances of this.)
- Flash ads (vector-based)
- Flash video ads (made more prevalent with the increasing consumer bandwidth)
- And now, HTML5 ads.
Most of these types of
Re: No wonder. (Score:1)
I use flash block, mostly for cpu reasons.
It's easy enough to click and activate a specific applet.
Re:No wonder. (Score:4, Informative)
Noscript.
Google had Flash ads? (Score:2)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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)
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)
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.
Re:Oh great ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd rather go to a "Autoplay site owners should be beaten into comas" model, myself.
Re:Oh great ... (Score:5, Funny)
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or the customized penis ensmallment ads I get.
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I've only seen penis reduction ads claming that I could get laid more often if my penis wasn't so scary huge. go figure. :)
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Remember this?
http://www.devin.com/penisspam... [devin.com]
Re:Oh great ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Would you rather go to a pay model?
False dichotomy. "No ads" and "ads that pop-up or auto-play without permission" are not the only alternatives. I have no problem with text ads, and I don't mind non-flashing banner ads. Not all marketers are assholes.
Re:Oh great ... (Score:5, Funny)
Would you rather go to a pay model?
False dichotomy. "No ads" and "ads that pop-up or auto-play without permission" are not the only alternatives. I have no problem with text ads, and I don't mind non-flashing banner ads. Not all marketers are assholes.
Yeah, the 99% give the other 1% a bad name.
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Tell you what.
First, we'll kill all of the people who run analytics companies, and destroy all of their data.
Then we'll pass sane consumer protection laws which limit what they can collect about you, and what they can do with it.
Then we might start to talk about how to pay for the internet.
Right now on Slashdot as I type this, Google, Ooyala, Rpxnow, Scorecard research, Janrain, Double Click, Comscore ... all of these entities would be tracking me if I wasn't blocking them
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I find it interesting that you have no vitriol for the people who run this site... they are the ones who make the decision to employ an ad network in the first place... why no hate for them?
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I'm not funding someone's website with my personal information.
Exactly. Now just enter in your name, where you live, and a creditcard number.
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There's a world of difference between "serving ads" (which I don't mind if they're not animated), and "tracking me". The latter should carry the death penalty. People will still pay for online ads tailored to the content of the site instead of the browsing history of the user.
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Yes. I'm ready to subscribe to a paid website with good content but no ads. As a matter of fact I have subscribed to a couple and didn't regret it a bit.
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Example: There's one website which streams Senate and Lower Chamber political debates and meetings in my country. It's subscription-only. You gain access to full HD audio-video streaming plus a large archive stretching 10+ years back. No ads, no delays, available 24/7.
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Don't complain about 'the Intenet' (Score:2)
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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
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How about I just don't come back to that site ?
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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Ditto. I miss the old days. Yes, what are some good HTML5 blockers?
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Re:flash blockers (Score:5, Informative)
The FlashBlock [mozilla.org] extension for Firefox has an option for "Block HTML5 video as well." Silverlight, too.
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The FlashBlock [mozilla.org] extension for Firefox has an option for "Block HTML5 video as well." Silverlight, too.
I actually didn't know that.
Thanks for the info!
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Re:flash blockers (Score:5, Informative)
Try out Flash Control [mozilla.org], which does block both Flash and HTML5 videos, and not just on YouTube.
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Thank you! (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Macromedia was evil first (Score:2)
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)
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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.
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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...
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I love this rant, because it's so true, but it immediately struck me: Why is it that the same company that makes the darlings-of-the-industry Photoshop and Illustrator also makes the pariah-of-the-industry Flash? I vaguely remember that Adobe bought flash from Macromedia, but still, they reached a point where they said "Push forward on the stick and let's auger this baby in..."
I love a good train wreck.
Re:Flash was NOT cool in the begining (Score:4, Insightful)
Scalar vector graphics and sound are cool, but Flash was not wonderful technology. Adobe was not to blame; they just bought the existing monster.
Flash was foremost a huge CPU waster. And an easy to use vector for all sorts of security exploits (because the original code from Macromedia was an abomination).
And don't forget, Flash was so important you shouldn't even be able to uninstall it.
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Scalar vector graphics and sound are cool, but Flash was not wonderful technology.
There was a lot of great stuff in it. ActionScript was WAY ahead of javascript for a long time, implementing fairly cutting edge ECMAScript.
The old interface was very simple and very easy to use with keyframes and animation and sound syncing etc etc... if that's what you wanted to make, it was pretty great.
Flash was foremost a huge CPU waster.
It grew into that, and really only once it was abused in awful ways. Simple stuff used very little CPU, and by that I mean P133 level CPU could handle it just fine.
IMO, the single biggest factor / thing t
Just Remember (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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The trouble is, when it works, it works.
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+1
That is all.
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The only other solution I can think of is some kind of micropayments system, like with a cryptocurrency.
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Or Google Contributor [google.com]?
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Yes, that is similar. Thanks, I had forgotten the name of it.
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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)
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.
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Well, I didn't want HTML5, because I didn't see any benefit (to me). Instead, it was obviously about ads and SaaS.
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this isn't a solution against advertising, its a solution to forced flash which is a common attack vector for malware.
kudos google.
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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
Tracking Protection (Score:2)
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Oh for mod points. That would be a +1 funny.
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var posts = document.querySelectorAll('.commentBody');
var pattern =
Array.prototype.forEach.call(posts, function(el, i){
if(pattern.test(el.innerHTML)==true) {
e
Is this supposed to be good or bad news? (Score:3)
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)
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)
Maybe Intel can make a special core dedicated for ads ?
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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.
Firefox for Android FTW (Score:2)
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.
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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
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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
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Wouldn't the HTML5 version be less CPU-hungry than the flash app-container-plugin version?
Macromedia was evil first (Score:2)
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!
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Oops... this reply was meant to be in response to "Thank you" above.
Flurry.com (Score:1)
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
All I need to know: Faster or Slower? (Score:2)
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)?
Flash & JAVA exploits .. (Score:2)
I was enjoying the web being quiet... (Score:2)
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)
I remember when Slashdot said they would *NEVER*.. (Score:2)
...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)
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)
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?
How I see it. (Score:1)