Google Unveils Flash Ads 225
Gailin writes "Google has announced and given some examples of their new Flash based ads. They seem to vary from average size to full screen-width Flash advertisements, with some interactive abilities. 'Gadget ads can incorporate real-time data feeds, images, video and much more in a single creative unit and can be developed using Flash, HTML or a combination of both. Designed to act more like content than a typical ad, they run on the Google(TM) content network, competing alongside text, image and video ads for placement. They support both cost-per-click and cost-per-impression pricing models, and offer a variety of contextual, site, geographic and demographic targeting options to ensure the ads reach relevant users with precision and scale.'"
Target Market (Score:5, Interesting)
And all that's apparently missing is ensuring the surfer has Flash installed.
Personally I detest Flash ads and for this reason keep renaming the NPSWF32.dll file as NPSWF32.dllfsdfsd (while I don't have an instance of Firefox open, lest it track the bastid) when I have no intention of viewing Flash content. Too many pages are so whizzy with Flash I position the browser so the Flash bit is offscreen or simply don't visit the sites at all. I don't see many company/commercial sites since they apparently all now believe their best way to reach the customer is with some bloated object 500K or bigger (i'm still on dial-up) and all whizzy. So all this means is I'll see some more puzzle pieces, unless they detect no-flash and throw animated (ugh) gifs at me.
I'll just have to wrassle with The Morality of Web Advertisement Blocking [slashdot.org] for a while.
Lucky for Google, I'm the exception and shouldn't make much of a dent in their stock value.
Re:Target Market (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As for this move...if Google's actually not annoying in their ads (punch the monkey) then this might get more clicks. However it's also gonna use more bandwidth (sorry dial-uppers) and be blocked more often. I went through and unblocked Google from my Adblock list (doubleclick remains safely on there thank you very much) because a lot of my favorite sites used those ads to make money and it cost me nothing to let the
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Google: Do evil if it pays? (Score:4, Interesting)
is now changed to, "We want to be like the U.S. government."
Google: Do evil if it pays more.
In my opinion, this is the beginning of the end for Google, as the founders lose touch with reality and fly around in their huge corporate jets. If you want responsibility, don't depend on a billionaire to do the work.
Eventually, there will be a new search engine with no Flash ads, and everyone will use that. Eventually, people will say, "Google? What's that?"
The new profit-making Mozilla will probably try to get the U.S. government to ban NoScript [noscript.net] and AdBlock Plus [adblockplus.org] and FlashBlock [mozilla.org].
The problem with ads is not that I don't like advertising. The problem with ads is that they are nearly always stupid in some way. Some of the ads IBM ran on Slashdot were more than stupid, they were embarassing.
Mostly, ads are written by people with absolutely NO interest in the product they are selling. I'm guessing that more than 50% of ads include at least some dishonesty. It is the ad makers that have given advertising a bad name.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, your usefulness to the world is coming to an end. Please find someone to carry on your original vision, and retire.
Re:Google: Do evil if it pays? (Score:4, Interesting)
"Eventually, there will be a new search engine with no Flash ads, and everyone will use that. Eventually, people will say, "Google? What's that?""
Do you think Google is a SEARCH ENGINE company?
"The new profit-making Mozilla will probably try to get the U.S. government to ban NoScript and AdBlock Plus and FlashBlock."
You're simply insane.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
It's not my definition. (Score:3, Interesting)
I can't remember the name of the search engine I used before Google, but it was terrible with ad abuse.
The problem is that there is a disconnection... (Score:2)
Why both? (Score:3, Informative)
If you allow with NoScript, you can block Flash. (Score:2)
However, there are times when you allow JavaScript with NoScript, and you still want to block Flash.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
For that matter, that's assuming that *.google-analytics.com isn't blocked just as heavily as Doubleclick.
Re: (Score:2)
Sheesh.
Re: (Score:2)
And all that's apparently missing is ensuring the surfer has Flash installed.
Personally I detest Flash ads and for this reason keep renaming the NPSWF32.dll file as NPSWF32.dllfsdfsd (while I don't have an instance of Firefox open
First off, you don't have to worry about Google Flash ads unless you're surfing on sites that will actually display them. My site [ajs.com] for example, does not display anything bug Google's text ads and Amazon links to specific products that I review. The fact Google they gives sites a choice of how to treat their visitors is the #1 reason that I do business with Google.
Second, you don't have to play games with your plugins. Just grab a copy of Flashblock. It will place a Flash logo over the area of the page that
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Please hand in your slashdot membership, and exit the building.
Ads are not content. (Score:4, Insightful)
My feeling on ads is nicely summed up by banksy [banksy.co.uk]:
whether you see it or not is yours. It belongs to you.
It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use.
Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
Interactive? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Flashblock is great (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Flashblock is great (Score:5, Informative)
And SafariPlus (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Flashblock is great (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Flashblock is great (Score:5, Funny)
I've tried Google on your recommendation, and it's awesome. It works great on my browser, even though the browser won't support frames until the next version. And Google's search results are so much better than Webcrawler's, I think I might switch permanently.
Re: (Score:2)
What about dogpile? (Score:2)
Konqueror... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not installing the fucking flash plugin is grea (Score:2)
hmm (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
And they'll suggest other people who can also be offed at the same time, perhaps for a discount.
They can make it profitable on both ends, just like with AdWords: not only can you do in the people who need to be done, you can also make a few extra bucks to keep your web site going by taking contract jobs. They provide you with a list of the web sites the inhumee has been browsing lately so you can t
Re: (Score:2)
Re:hmm (Score:4, Insightful)
Google has forgotten its roots. Sure it might look good in the short term..a new product for more revenue.. But Google will lose in the long term as others offer a clean alternative to Google.
People want uncluttered.
Re:hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Google made its mark by good search results WITH a CLEAN Interface Design.
I hear ya brother, on /. you're preaching to the choir. I have a Yahoo account I use for when I visit a site that I'm sure will sell my email and I can barely force myself to load the page, virtually unusable in my opinion. Of course, I believe that if I want news I go to a news website, and if I want stock quotes or celebrity gossip I would have a bookmark and so on. Unfortunately, the masses don't see it that way. I believe that I saw an article on /. about this a few weeks ago. I'm too lazy to look
Re: (Score:2)
Bandwidth & The Beginning of the End (Score:5, Insightful)
So tell me, when I'm trying to use MySpace to reply to a distant friend & my browser slows to a crawl because there's five flash video advertisements of a lonely girl on a webcam waiting to talk to me--that's the kind of experience you want to proliferate through to every site using Google Ads?
How will this affect people on slow connections like out in the boonies operating on a 56k phone line connection? I'm kind of afraid those users are just going to be squished & that Google will leave it to the sites themselves to figure that out while the sites themselves will expect Google to take care of it.
Wait, did you hear that? I believe that was the sound of every single router and switch crying out in anguish.
Ads that are designed to appeal to my eye & take up obnoxious amounts of bandwidth? It must be
In all seriousness, this is all very bad news to me. A bloated delivery system (by definition it must be since it provides 'content rich' functionality) being forced to a large percent of the internet in the name of delivery unsolicited advertisement. And it's all legal and--get this--is unveiled like it's a new great feature.
The simple concept of character based content delivery system is dead.
Re:Bandwidth & The Beginning of the End (Score:4, Insightful)
The simple answer is that a lot of people are going to end up installing browser extensions that do the "click to run flash object" thing. And if they can't figure that out, I'm having a hard time feeling such pity if they are "squished".
Re: (Score:2)
The simple answer is that a lot of people are going to end up installing browser extensions that do the "click to run flash object" thing. And if they can't figure that out, I'm having a hard time feeling such pity if they are "squished".
Remember, in order to use the internet, you must be completely knowledgeable & proficient at all underlying technologies. If you aren't, you're a moron and you deserve to have an IE javascript exploit install that virus on your machine.
Unfortunately, 98% of the population doesn't want to have to deal with extensions in order to surf the internet. I mean, you can barely get everyone to keep updating IE, how will you get them to use a Firefox extension? These are the mentalities that cause you to
Re: (Score:2)
Amazingly, many people look at and even click on ads.
While the advanced user / geekset seem to abhor them, this doesn't seem to be a problem for a significant amount of surfing population.
Good: Firefox has extensions, but IE doesn't. (Score:2)
Yea! More people to use Firefox!
Re:Bandwidth & The Beginning of the End (Score:5, Informative)
Maximum of 50k per ad, at least until the user starts interacting with it. Some other things in there that, at the least, count as Don't Be Really Evil.
I haven't decided how I feel about this yet, but at least this quantifies things somewhat.
Well fuck (Score:5, Insightful)
Adblock+ & NoScript for the win.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Don't! Be Evil.
(captcha is 'unhappy')
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
that, in itself, is pretty much evil.
now, for your 'reward' of being a paid eyeball, we'll serve you some content. or let you think you're getting content.
(anyone notice the google websearch - the thing that made them famous - is mostly taken over by commercial BUY/SELL vendors no matter what the search term is?)
advertising companies are always evil. we just are slowly seeing the devil for what it really is. slowly, but surely.
X86-64 (Score:3, Funny)
then again, maybe not
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
nspluginwrapper, if you're talking about AMD64. See here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=476924 [ubuntuforums.org]
Re: (Score:2)
some pages don't work at all, and when opening multiple tabs, only the first one using flash works correctly, all consecutive tabs are broken.
Re: (Score:2)
Works perfectly on my amd64 Gentoo box.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Flash on 64bit hardware running Linux or FreeBSD would be something else entirely.
Re: (Score:2)
Don't Be Evil! (Score:2)
... or in this case, annoying.
One thing I've always liked about AdWords is that it's always relevant (well, the vast majority of the time), and it's non-obtrusive. Now I get to stare a million punch-the-monkey ads, or if Google is halfway competent in knowing my patterns, a million flashing "you won X tech gadget!" ads.
Delete your cookies (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I actually have a script called cookie_eater. It runs each time before I start Mozilla and: 1) removes all cookies matching a small but very powerful black-list of regexps; 2) preserves all cookies matching white-list of regexps; 3) removes all known nasty cookies not recognised so far using a second site-based black-list; 4) reports all cookies that it does not know what to do about to me. The very first step in this process is a recent addition and very sweet: I used it to quickly kill all Google Analytic
Re: (Score:2)
Ads like that spurred me to block Google Ads.
How are these different than any other site's ads? (Score:2, Insightful)
These are the same busy, annoying ads that other sites have plastered all over...putting them next to a paragraph where the ad's designers justify their use of "artistic" flashing/blinking colors makes them no better than the aforementioned "Punch the monkey, win a ringtone" ads found elsewhere.
My hope is that Google bigshots will see what an ugly, terrible effect these have on what their former, critically-acclaimed, clean, simple interface, and will do an about-face.
I do realize how slim the odds of tha
hmm..that's cool + it's fighting back @ MS (Score:2, Interesting)
That's good (ok, if you find it bad, use your flashblock/content blocker) because the widgets (aka Google Gadgets) are interactive, and they add some 'colours' to pages and make them cooler. Those are like the widgets one uses in wordpress for e.g, just in advert form.
Plus, it's optional - one can still go for the usual word tag based adverts
What's really interesting - Google went for Flash ads. MS. which had been touting its Silverlight since long, has not yet started giving the silverlight adverts. I do
Do no evil? (Score:2, Interesting)
Thank god for Adblock...
Re: (Score:2)
In terms of "evil" what will determine if Google's lost track is if they maintain control over the ads or if they'll be come the malware crap that so many shady flash ad distribution networks use.
Open adblock, new filter, add *. gmodules.com.... (Score:5, Informative)
Google, you probably have, sorry, had, one of the only set of ad servers I never blocked. Until now.
Sorry, but anything that moves without my propmpting it is a distraction and will be blocked.
And to kill them all... (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.flashswitch.com// [flashswitch.com]
Sites heavily dependent on flash are faster with it off, and of course flash only sites will not work when you have flash turned off.
Well, duh (Score:2, Interesting)
And then people at DoubleCrap start having funny ideas, management at G accepts it and now we have DoubleCrap ads as GAds.
Remember, people at Google, what GAds was all about and why it was so successful.
Flashblock caught all of them (Score:2)
Flashblock caught all of them, so we're OK for now.
Thank you, Google (Score:5, Insightful)
A large, clear, well-defined target is always appreciated.
Hey, look, Google is evil! (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyway, life is good with Adblock and Filterset-G. They can use full-screen Flash ads for all I care.
How does this violate the do no evil credo? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
They are in the ripping-off publisher business you mean...
Even if you think that, it's all for the purpose of pushing ads. And maybe they are guilty of profiting off of the works of others. I'm not saying Google isn't evil, they may do questionable things. I was just saying that I don't see how offering flash ads makes them evil.
Text ads can be abused, but Google has policies as to what types of ads are acceptable
Likewise, flash ads aren't evil in themselves, it all depends what kind of behavior they allow. If they allow ads that look like windows dialogs sa
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes! Oh God YES! (Score:3, Funny)
Flowers (Score:2)
What about AdSense users? (Score:2)
Oh noes, now I CAN'T see them (Score:2)
No flash here, what am I going to doooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!
Will sound be allowed? (Score:2)
And they must stay in their little box unless I click on them; no expanding on just a mouseover.
Full screen huh? (Score:2)
Google flash cookie? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
I also noticed that Firefox has made cookie management a little harder as well. You used to be able to set the number of days to keep cookies in Edit: Preferences: Privacy, but now it looks like you have to go to about:config and modify network.cookie.lifetime.days.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Browser cookies also work this way in most cases. Remember that option saying "Only accept cookies from originating server"? Flash "cookies" work like that. They are not better, as
Much as I like Google (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That's the very definition of "evil"
evil /ivl/
1. morally wrong or bad; immoral; wicked: evil deeds; an evil life.
2. harmful; injurious: evil laws.
3. characterized or accompanied by misfortune or suffering; unfortunate; disastrous: to be fallen on evil days.
4. due to actual or imputed bad conduct or character: an evil reputation.
5. marked by anger, irritability, irascibility, etc.: He is known for his evil disposition.
6. the act of serving flash-based advertisements on the internet.
Well, I'll be damned.
Using Flash? (Score:2)
Wait... (Score:2, Funny)
Fine with me (Score:2)
I'm enthusiastically in favor of advertising, because something to has to pay the bills, and if a bit of screen real estate (within reason) that doesn't cost me anything buys the cornacopia of free content that's out there, then I like it.
I actually prefer Flash ads, because they seem to be smaller and faster loading than gifs or jpgs.
I only really get annoyed when some ad starts blasting sound at me. Those people should definitely be brought out in the public square and beaten.
This could be the first and last straw (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
svg (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Everything svg does for a web-ad can be done with gif, too (nobody cares about scalability).
They want ads with flash because they want to make blinking, interactive (fear the mouse-over)
And seriously, 90% of all web users dont know what "flash" is.
Great! (Score:2)
More Flash ads means less ads I have to see!
p.s. It used to be that the Linux community derided Flash and sites that used Flash for navigation or content. Then they got their very own proprietary Flash plugin, and mos
Not as bad as it looks (Score:5, Informative)
First off, it looks like these will be ads on other peoples' sites, not on your search results. It can be used in addition to that "AdWords" thing, or "AdSense", whichever one it is... You decide to advertise on YOUR site, and you get banners from Google, the same way you would get embedded keyword links.
In addition, they're making some nice, strict rules. Here are some of their restrictions:
* No more than 50k in size unless the user interacts with it (Then it can load more)
* No more than 15 seconds of animation
* No popups or javascript alerts
* No cookie usage (Not even Flash's version of local storage)
* Must clearly show the company/product being advertised, not just some random crap
* No sound or fancy cursors unless the user interacts with it
(Hopefully that entails clicking on it, and not just accidentally moving your cursor over it on the way to the link you want)
I would hope they're enforcing these rules by requiring the source file instead of just the compiled SWF, or at least have some kind of checks for stuff like this... But I don't see how this is any worse than the banners we have now. Granted, I'd prefer less banners and more text ads, but if the market has determined that animated banners are necessary, then at least Google is keeping a close eye on theirs.
Re:Not as bad as it looks (Score:4, Interesting)
"Half bad" is not the same as "not bad". Stop pretending it is.
And what on earth makes you think this isn't going to get worse in future? This change is itself worse than previous when flash wasn't used. Despite what you claim.
Google, like most large scale marketers, is just boiling the frog. They are going slower than many but they're still doing it.
This is not particularly ethical behavior, whatever marketers might claim.
---
Advertising pays for nothing. "Advertising supported" just means you're paying twice over, once in time to watch/avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
This is the way the Internet ends... (Score:2, Interesting)
I can't be the only one who thought that Konfabulator (now something Yahoo) widgets and their ilk were a terrible waste of system resources, and I certainly can't be the only one who rolls their eyes when a Facebook acquaintance turns out to be a vampire, zombie, ninja or viral marketer who wants to bite/fuck/sell you something so that you can bite/fuck/sell things to all of your other friends. This is just taking shit to an all new, cynical level of manipulation.
Whil
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)