Google Says Ad Blockers Will Save Online Ads 419
azoblue writes "Google — the world's largest online ad broker — sees no reason to worry about the addition of ad-blocking extensions to its Chrome browser. Online advertisers will ensure their ads aren't too annoying, the company says, and netizens will ultimately realize that online advertising is a good thing."
Ads? What ads? (Score:2, Funny)
There are *ads* on the web? I haven't seen one in years!
Re:Ads? What ads? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Easy solution: FlashBlock (now available for Chrome)
Blocks all the worst offenders, and leaves static images, plain text and the occasional GIF.
Re:Ads? What ads? (Score:5, Insightful)
I already pay my ISP for my browsing experience - I have a bunch of websites that I can maintain advert free because I work for a living. If others have to rely on their advertising models to stay afloat, that's not my problem. The internet will still be here adverts or not.
Says the guy on ad funded slashdot.
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Re:Ads? What ads? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ads? What ads? (Score:4, Interesting)
OK, ABP has 11 million users. That's great. Can we compare to another open source project? VLC has a few more downloads than that. [videolan.org] (I know I can't compare downloads to users, so I won't).
Let's try this instead: 1.7 billion people [internetworldstats.com] running web browsers, 47% [w3schools.com] running Firefox (815 million FF users), and only 11 million people choose to install ABP? That's 1.35%. Most of those are tech savvy people who are harder to brainwash with ads anyway. It's noise.
Re:Ads? What ads? (Score:5, Interesting)
With that said, I see such a low impact from ad-blockers (around 5% or so), that I really don't mind. I keep the ads unobtrusive, and haven't heard a single complaint (yet). It's the few bad apples that overload their sites with ads that spoil it for the rest of us who are just looking to have an expense neutral side project (or make a little bit of beer money for the time invested)...
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That depends on the answer to the following question:
Will the general public be fine with subscription fees to their favourite free online services?
If the answer is no, then the internet won't be be here without adverts. At least not in any meaningful, useful form.
Re:Ads? What ads? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is such a weird, one-sided view of the Internet. I'm already paying for my connection. Why should I pay the costs of the sites I visit, too
This is such a stupid comment.
I already paid for my house, now I need pay for furniture?
I already paid for my car, now I need pay for parking?
I already paid for my phone, now I need pay for for every call I make?
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All the options for Chrome/Chromium/Iron don't really block ads. They only prevent them from rendering after they are downloaded. The amount of time downloading the ads takes more than negates Chrome's speed advantage over Firefox. it's worth noting the "AdBlockPlus" for Chrome is not made by the guy who develops AdBlockPlus for FF.
I was eager for this feature, but it is extremely disappointing so far. I won't be moving off Firefox just yet.
A good thing (Score:4, Insightful)
I think most people can understand how ads are good in keeping sites free, but I don't think we'll have the pleasure of non-intrusive ads ever. So we'll all be stuck using ad-blockers.
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Re:A good thing (Score:5, Interesting)
The solution is an ad-blocker with level-based blocklist like this:
- Allow only text ads (this is where google wins)
- Allow simple image ads (not larger than
- Allow animated image ads
- Allow movie and interactive ads (flash ads)
- Allow all terrible ads (never use this ad)
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That's my opinion too. Google's text ads I don't care about one bit. Banner ads - I don't mind them as long as they are "safe for work". I DON'T want to be browsing MSNBC's news section and have some woman in a bikini advertising "Hydroxicut" or some other weight loss pill flashing on my screen.
The really annoying ones though are indeed the ones that the GP mentioned. Those ads that pop up when you scroll and cover the page until you find the (usually well hidden) close button for the ad. Or on online
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Most people are OK with Ad's on some level.
Yes, the ad's that don't work.
The entire point of an unsolicited ad is to grab a person's attention. If it doesn't do that then it's not working. And a person's attention is valuable to them.
If an ad "pays" for the attention in some way (e.g. entertaining or actual useful information and not spam) then it might be okay but almost no advertising does that.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses exce
Re:A good thing (Score:4, Interesting)
The entire point of an unsolicited ad is to grab a person's attention. If it doesn't do that then it's not working. And a person's attention is valuable to them.
The ads you are talking about are the type that try to grab your attention and convince you that their product is something you want.
Google ads always try to be relevant to something you're already looking for.
It's the difference between ads in a trade journal and pharmaceutical ads in Time Magazine.
Re:A good thing (Score:5, Interesting)
I use an ad blocker to stop:
Video ads that automatically play
Animated ads
Blinking ads
Ads that automatically talk
Ads that automatically popup
Large multimedia ads on a wireless link
I don't want my web pages to move or make noise unless I tell them to. Telling them to means clicking - not mouse over.
Unfortunately the ads blockers catch all of the other ads too. I don't mind ads that behave but the moving/talking ones are so annoying that I will block everything to get rid of them.
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Re:A good thing (Score:4, Funny)
Viruses... viruses... I'm not finding that. What do I apt-get to install that?
Re:A good thing (Score:5, Funny)
Good theory, but disproved by reality. (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately the ads blockers catch all of the other ads too. I don't mind ads that behave but the moving/talking ones are so annoying that I will block everything to get rid of them.
I agree 100%. I feel bad about blocking huge swaths of ads (e.g., everything from doubleclick) just for one or two bad apples -- but I tried playing whack-a-mole by blocking only the annoying ones for a while. It simply didn't work. The hyperactive flashing, jumping, talking ads simply are created too quickly to block each of them as a one-off. So I have rules that, for example, block all of doubleclick.net. And anything with /ads/ in the URL. And 245 similar other rules.
I've even had to block the small, boutique ad providers -- like projectwonderful.com -- that I'd really like to see succeed. But they end up serving up too many animated and/or risqué ads, so I had to block them as well.
So, as much as I'd like to believe what Upson has to say about adblockers destroying the market for annoying ads, I just haven't seen it happen. And I've been watching for well over a decade now.
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Really? I always wonder about people who say this...you find ads annoying, and you don't actually engage them in the intended way (i.e., convert to an actual sale), but you feel some obligation to sit through a mini-pitch?
Have we forgotten that advertising is not an end unto itself? Advertisers are not trying to get appreciation for their beautiful work, and they don't really care about views that don't convert. So, if you're not interested in buying anything, do
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I think most people can understand how ads are good in keeping sites free, but I don't think we'll have the pleasure of non-intrusive ads ever.
I think most people don't understand that they can block the ads using easy to install software. It never ceases to amaze me the number of people still using IE6 (with no quick and easy adblocking abilities) or some outdated version of Firefox without running ABP.
I use ads to pay for the work I do on my own website but I, as a publisher of content, do what I can to e
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But.. why are you encouraging this behavior by using the websites? I know there are for example news sites that I refuse to visit because of the ugly ads, but there are dozens or hundreds of alternatives (at least here in Sweden..) that carry pretty much the same information sans obnoxious ads. Of course there are ads there, but discreet enough.
So don't be indiscriminate... (Score:2)
One of the solutions would not blocking ads from those providers which play perfectly nice (as Google does). This could actually promote them.
And allow them to collect demographic data... (Score:5, Insightful)
And, presumably, if there are ad-blocking extensions to Chrome, they will send their information back to Google, and give Google information about precisely which ads are being blocked.
So, when company X comes to Google and says, "Your prices are far too high, most of our ads aren't making impressions anyhow, they're being blocked by clever browser extensions!", Google can come back and say, "Well, we've actually got some data on that, and..."
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I think it's a bit more nefarious than that. Allow me to finish that thought for you:
Google can come back and say, "Well, we've actually got some data on that, and...it appears that without the add blocker, your ad will be seen by 275 billion more people a day. We can add your adds to our "safe list" to allow them to get through our add blocker, but it will raise your rates by 35% in order to cover the administrative costs of maintaining your position on that list".
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I think it's a bit more nefarious than that. Allow me to finish that thought for you:
Google can come back and say, "Well, we've actually got some data on that, and...it appears that without the add blocker, your ad will be seen by 275 billion more people a day. We can add your adds to our "safe list" to allow them to get through our add blocker, but it will raise your rates by 35% in order to cover the administrative costs of maintaining your position on that list".
At which point people will just start using 3rd party adblocking software again to block all ads, and the cycle continues. Either:
Either way, we've nothing to worry about.
Re:And allow them to collect demographic data... (Score:5, Insightful)
Either:
That's exactly right. The problem with people who try to come up with nightmare scenarios for how Google could screw you over is that 90% of them begin with the assumption that Google is populated by people who can't quite figure out that actions have consequences (and probably can't find their way out of their house in the morning).
Realistically, Google's single largest asset as an advertiser is their relationship with the millions of users that take advantage of their products. The moment they start abusing that relationship for short-term profits, they end their position as the premier ad vendor, and they know it.
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Google is a fan of producing relevant, non-intrusive ads. I also understand that websites need ads. I would be ok if their adblocker removed the annoying ads and kept the decent ads. From Google's '10 things' (http://www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.html)
6. You can make money without doing evil.
Google is a business. The revenue we generate is derived from offering search technology to companies and from the sale of advertising displayed on our site and on other sites across the web. Hundreds of thousands of advertisers worldwide use AdWords to promote their products; hundreds of thousands of publishers take advantage of our AdSense program to deliver ads relevant to their site content. To ensure that we're ultimately serving all our users (whether they are advertisers or not), we have a set of guiding principles for our advertising programs and practices:
* We don't allow ads to be displayed on our results pages unless they are relevant where they are shown. And we firmly believe that ads can provide useful information if, and only if, they are relevant to what you wish to find – so it's possible that certain searches won't lead to any ads at all.
* We believe that advertising can be effective without being flashy. We don't accept pop-up advertising, which interferes with your ability to see the content you've requested. We've found that text ads that are relevant to the person reading them draw much higher clickthrough rates than ads appearing randomly. Any advertiser, whether small or large, can take advantage of this highly targeted medium.
* Advertising on Google is always clearly identified as a "Sponsored Link," so it does not compromise the integrity of our search results. We never manipulate rankings to put our partners higher in our search results and no one can buy better PageRank. Our users trust our objectivity and no short-term gain could ever justify breaching that trust.
Re:And allow them to collect demographic data... (Score:4, Insightful)
great news everybody! (Score:2)
I've invented an ad-blocking technology that is entirely funded by proceeds garnered from companies who will pay us to put small marketing statements, catch phrases, and logos on the visible interface of the software while the software is running.
it's genius!
If you're as good at it as Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Not even google (Score:2)
The ads might be text-only, but they are rendered with reams and reams of Javascript, which I have blocked.
However targeted an ad is, it's by definition not what I'm looking for because it's an ad.
Under my ad-blocker, all are equal.
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I'm using AdBlockPlus. It's great.
But reading this article I recalled that some time ago I actually disabled ABP specifically for Google.com. This as I was searching for something to buy or so, and I missed the ads. When searching for commercial services I very often click those ads: they often offer exactly what I am looking for. The ad-results sometimes suit me better than the normal search results - the normal results are more non-commercial in nature. That's not good if you are looking for commercial s
Umm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Umm... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm going to go out on a limb and say they're talking about me. In 2004, I installed a bunch of ad blockers, and I saw next to no ads. That lasted for a few years until I got a new computer. With the new computer, the ads were far less intrusive, and generally not worth going through all the ad blocking hassle (which isn't much, so obviously a threshold was crossed). The stupid monkey was gone, all the blue/red flashing background was missing, etc. I'll still keep FlashBlock on until the day the machines rise up against their masters, though. A line was irrevocably crossed when an ad started making noise and wouldn't shut up. Flash is great for games, but for so much of what's done, a simple JPG would suffice at a fraction of the development and delivery cost.
Old behavioral experiment (Score:5, Insightful)
To train a horse to lift one of its front legs whenever a bell rings, you start out with a piece floor that can be partially electrified to deliver a mild shock. You ring the bell, you deliver the shock. After a while the horse learns that to avoid discomfort it needs to raise its leg. It lifts the leg - no pain.
Now comes the tricky part: after a while you remove the shocking floor. Now the horse will still lift its leg whenever the bell sounds; and what's more, this behavior will even become stronger and stronger ingrained, since there is no more punishment and the "correct" behavior is re-inforced.
Now assume that instead of a horse there is a user, replace the electric shock with annoyance inflicted by ads and the act of lifting the front leg with using adblocking software. This means that in order to overcome the strong aversion of adblock users you have to offer a very, very high incentive and strong proof that reverting to the old browsing habits will not be punished by more annoying ads.
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Google Mind Trick (Score:5, Funny)
yes, ads are a good thing.
I like ads.
They make me happy.
I want to click.
[snapping out of it]
What? Damned Jedi^H^H^H^HGoogle Mind Trick®
Google can survive them (Score:5, Interesting)
Kick the Pig to Win an iPOD * FLASH * FLASH * (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd love to see sites implement an ad protocol such as this:
1. No flash-based or animated ads.
2. No ads bigger than 300 x 100 pixels.
3. No ads with bright contrasting colours such as orange when the entire site is white and green.
4. All ads can be turned on or off at the user's preference. This site implements an honour system.
5. Users can select what categories of ads they would or would not like to be served.
If websites and companies were just more sane about their ad policies, I think a lot less people would resort to ad-blockers.
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I completely agree with this- I actually enjoy ads that are for things I am interested in- further I like when a site I trust won't allow ads from companies that they deam are less than reputable (they do some weeding out for me)-
I really do think that the ability to turn ads on or off would be the best solution-
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Until a few months ago, my brother was using a 12 year old 333mhz PC. His page load times were painfully slow. CNN literally took over a minute to load. Simply as an experiment, I asked him to install Firefox then ABP.
His response:
"What the FUCK!? And I thought my ISP sucked!"
Turns out his machine was so slow that the ads alone were killing it. He never looked back, and probably never will.
Another issue that causes many people to use ABP?
Bandwidth Caps.
You will NEVER get someone to watch ads if they have to
Firefox users with Adblock: 12% (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Firefox users with Adblock: 12% (Score:5, Insightful)
wrong assumption (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course the core assumption here is that people block ads because the ad content is a problem.
What they don't realize (and what people in marketing can not realize, or they would have to admit that their whole professions is being a parasite and a PITA) is that it is the advertisement itself that is the problem.
I don't give a heck about what you're advertising for, nor what style, images, words, whatever you use. I don't want to see your crap. If I need "product information", I will find it - ironically - on Google. The difference is that I'll be looking for it, instead of getting it shoved down my throat, willingly or otherwise.
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Re:wrong assumption (Score:4, Insightful)
Some ads can be informative and can remind you of an issue you needed to solve last week and still have not.
That is a minute fraction of all unsolicited ad's. The cost benefit is not even remotely there.
There is a very real cognitive cost associated with every single unsolicited, unneeded, unwanted ad. And that cost over time adds up to a huge loss.
The entire marketing industry is in denial about that. A real shame that so many trillions of hours of people's lives and attention are being wasted on such dross.
---
An unobtrusive ad is a non-functional ad. It is a non-sustainable business model.
Re:wrong assumption (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:wrong assumption (Score:5, Insightful)
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Excellent point.
Yes, it was a tricky decision. As an indy with zero advertising budget, it's one of the few ways to get word out, and get to Google where you can find me, if you care. And yes, I'm aware that it doesn't merge well with my words.
Because real life is in shades of grey. There actually is some advertisement that I find acceptable. But you can't say that to the ad people or what the hear is that you love ads, or at least their ads.
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>> it is the advertisement itself that is the problem.
I think it's taxes that are the problem! If I want to be paying money to someone else I'll go give to a charity, not have my money taken from me by force by the government!
Ads support the free internet, there's no ifs, ands or buts about it. If you are so opposed to ads that you refuse to have even non-intrusive ones on your page, then you're nothing but a leech. A worse "parasite" than you describe the marketing people to be.
Hosting content co
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and when you do go looking for it, those little ad boxes on the right come in real handy...
Re:wrong assumption (Score:5, Interesting)
If I need "product information", I will find it - ironically - on Google. The difference is that I'll be looking for it, instead of getting it shoved down my throat, willingly or otherwise.
Even from an advertiser perspective, Google's system sucks. On the forums for "search engine optimization", one discovers that ad clicks from Google search results tend to result in sales, while ad clicks from Google ads on non-Google sites (what Google euphemistically calls the "Google Content Network") don't. 50% of ad clicks come from 10% of the user base, and that 10% doesn't buy anything.
Google ads on non-search pages aren't that valuable to advertisers. So why are there so many of them? Because they're opt-out for the advertiser. Many Google advertisers have ads on the "content network" only because they haven't found the hidden button on Google's screens for opting out [google.com], as an unhappy Google advertiser reports: "I am running many Google ads and their CTR is around 10%-15% for search page impressions; However the CTR on the content network is 0.02%! I can exclude my ads appearing on certain sites however at the bottom of the URL list it states "Other Domains" which have a total CTR of 0.01% with well over 300,000 impressions in a month! This is driving my overall CTR down massively! If I can not view these sites and choose to exclude them...I need to opt out of all content based placements immediately. How can I do this?"
Also see "Good Reasons to Avoid Content Targeting: [wilsonweb.com] "The AdWords user interface misleads new advertisers. Industry consensus suggests that content targeting ought to be used selectively and one should bid lower on content than on search inventory. This is because ads on content inventory tend to convert at a lower rate than ads on search inventory. But when you walk through Google's campaign setup, you find that you've been automatically opted into the content network at the same high bid as your search campaigns."
Much of the "bottom feeder" problem on the Web comes from this one trick of Google's.
We measure some of this at SiteTruth, and some of the results are here. [sitetruth.net]
No Problem (Score:2)
Until advertisers start delivering those ads, I'll keep using adblock.
Why I block some ads (Score:2, Insightful)
While I don't use adblock per se, I do use a combination of Firefox's advanced option to disable animated gifs (actually, to have them animate only once) as well as flashblock so I don't have to see animated flash ads.
The reason I do this is because I'm used to reading books; books do not have anything that animates in them, and anything that animates or continuously moves is very distracting for me when I am reading something. I don't mind ads with bright, flashy colors; magazines have had those since t
Flash is evil (Score:3, Informative)
Flash is just evil (for that matter, so is Silverlight). I understand why designers like it, but it breaks the very paradigms that make the Internet great.
Example: I recently ran across the web-site of a very nice little company in my neighborhood. Whoever they hired to do their website put the whole thing into Flash: the menus, the content, even the contact information. Result: you can't find their sitein Google, not even under their company name and address. Accessibility to the blind: none. But the web
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Believe me, you're not the only one. That's one of the reason that I browse with the plug-ins disabled. All that's left is animated GIFs and those are less frequent these days, being replaced by Flash ads instead.
Good luck with that (Score:2)
I started out just blocking Flash ads and obnoxious (= animated) image ads. I've since graduated to blocking all the ads I can, and using Greasemonkey to remove parts of sites I find objectionable (an iframe here, a div there...).
There will always be a group of us who have discovered the ability to control and customise our web browsing and will not give it up.
Besides, I don't know anyone who actually *likes* ads; at best they tolerate and ignore them.
They're a response to a problem. (Score:2)
I don't use Adblock Plus (Score:5, Interesting)
Really, I don't. I use NoScript instead, and will add defenses as I see fit.
It isn't so much that I like ads as that I don't mind them as long as they aren't dangerous or obnoxious. (This means that I'm never going to give an ad site clearance in NoScript, for example.) As long as advertisers don't bother me overmuch, I won't worry about them.
Fundamentally, Google's got an idea here. The only question I have is whether the advertisers will, indeed, learn to control themselves and live within this contract. About a third of television shows is ads, and there's plenty of obnoxious ads on the web. Heck, there's plenty of billboards along highways that try to get your attention, and that's potentially lethal. So, I'd bet that there will continue to be a need for ad blockers.
Ads not acceptable if we pay for bandwidth (Score:2)
With the ISP's pushing to get us to pay for every bit of data there is no way I am going to let any page I visit load every element without me giving it permission.
Page text 2k.
Page images 4 x 50k = 200k
Ad to text ratio 100:1. Sorry not a good idea.
Also page rendering time is a function of the size of the page elements. A snappy page usually has very few ad images.
If they can make the ads low bandwidth and not add a load to the page rendering and not annoying people might accept them. The odds of that are
When are ads a good thing? (Score:2)
In what other medium are the ads actually useful and value added to your experience? Now that I have a DVR that can easily remove the ads actually watching commercial TV is brutally painful. The ads in magazines don't augment the stories at all, they are just the filler that makes the magazine 100 pages instead of 12.
Ads may be a necessary evil for a medium's survival, but that doesn't mean we as consumers like them or appreciate them as Google is asserting. In this day of internet product researching, a
The very next useful ad I see... (Score:5, Insightful)
No Flash (Score:2)
A Brewster's Millions Option! None of the above! (Score:2)
Online advertisers will ensure their ads aren't too annoying
Yeah. Because this has worked REAL well so far.
Never mind the war going on between the crapvertisers and the adblockers.
Never mind the annoying fucking pop-overs.
Never mind the stupid in-video adverts now being used that cover over 1/3 of the content being displayed and don't go away until you click them away.
the company says, and netizens will ultimately realize that online advertising is a good thing.
And I say "Stick to search. When
Sounds right to me (Score:2)
I don't get why the tags "hahahaha", "whenpigsfly" and "yeahright" are on there.
They're mostly correct.
It's basically an arms race between ad blockers and advertisers. And AdBlockPlus, for one, is faster. So they only option they really have is to make ads that aren't so obnoxious they'll be blocked. ad blockers were created primarily because the ads got incredibly annoying and they're here to stay, so it's either tame the ads or have all ads blocked.
I mean, who bothers to block Google ads? They're usua
Multiplyers and their Motivation (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a multiplyer. I set up my PC, my gf's PC, my parents' PC, my steppatrnts PCs... whatever I do will affect a number of people.
Many PCs are configured by multiplyers like me. We pushed the use of firefox over that of IE in Germany. And we implement adblockers.
Now, why do we do that? It's not because we were asked for it. The people whom we help don't know that ads can be blocked before we tell them. No, we want to have less work.
How do we minimise our workload for administration of relatives' PCs? We secure them. Part of securing a PC is to make sure that only intended content is executed on it. That's why we install adblockers on so many PCs.
One or two years ago, a web-advertising company called "Falk AG" in germany got hacked. They had their banners on all sorts of resprctable sites like major newspapers. Suddenly, when you were visiting the websites of the leading German magazines, your PC would be hacked through manipulated ads served by Falk.
Again, we want to reduce the time we have to spend on those machines, therefore we want to keep them as clean as possible, therefore we make them block ads. What type of ad? Flash, animated gif, static image? I don't care. If it's not loaded into the browser, it cannot exploit a weakness.
Now for google.
If something needs to be found, it will be searched for, most likely using google. If all other ads are blocked, only the text-ads served by google on the google result-page will ever be seen. It increases their value.
Why would google care about banners on other people's sites?
And even if Chrome would not allow adblocking, what if a user actually found something in an ad he likes? He wouldn't have to google it. Google loses.
So, I'm actually surprised it's not google themselves who provide an adblocker for Chrome.
Tragedy of the commons (Score:5, Insightful)
What is advertising? (Score:3, Insightful)
Generally, an advertiser wants to accomplish a couple of things: (A) make the target demographic aware of its product or service offering, or (B) raise that existing awareness... remind people about the product or service. In both cases, they are ultimately attempting to influence people who would otherwise not spend their money, to do so.
Personally, I find that motive A, if demographically appropriate, doesn't bother me that much, and in fact, has been useful to me at times. After I've seen the motive A advertisement once, subsequent viewings fall into motive B. I usually find motive B extremely annoying. Back when I watched television, I would see the same exact advertisement multiple times a day. Before I started using Mozilla and Adblock, I would add sites to my hosts file constantly. One of the few motive B advertising methods that never got on my nerves are coupons and discount offers.
Once you've gone a while without seeing virtually any advertising, your perspective changes a bit. The times when you are exposed to an annoying advertisement (on another person's computer, somewhere with a TV playing, rent a car and turn on the radio) it's even more distasteful than you recall. I think the annoying methods are crumbling fast. As Clear Channel destroyed the value and variety of radio, MP3 players rose to fill the gap; people obtain their news from website articles, sometimes using adblockers, while newspapers lose subscribers. Between independent video content, DVD collections of shows, Tivos, and piracy, people can get their episodic video fix without seeing a single commercial.
Advertisement exposure is no longer all that mandatory. The other side of this, however, is that people still want to know about products and services that interest them. As such, a person like me, who hates annoying old-school advertising, willfully signs up for deal mailing lists from my preferred hardware vendors, actively seeks out reviews and product previews on sites that cover my interests, and constantly monitors feeds of local news / reviews concerning the sorts of local businesses I like to visit. I am empowered by features like RSS, which make that kind of monitoring possible. The companies who do their best to get their products reviewed far and wide, who publish press releases, etc... will receive my attention. If they make a good product or offer a good service, that attention may have positive results for them. If advertisers wish to stay ahead of the curve (or just plain afloat), they need to start looking at this a lot more. Potential consumers are sending a pretty clear message: Be useful, or shut up.
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the article seems to be a bit of a strike on google. I am guessing a lot was taken out of context, akin to that whole google privacy debacle which was equally taken out of context.
I'm not saying google is perfect, they do a lot of good things and plenty of bad, but I also have skepticism here.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
In case of Google it's quite justified - their ads are the only widespread ones which consistently don't seem to be annoying to vast majority of people.
When was the last time you've heard somebody being fed up with them? (vs. eye-raping GIFs or similar Flash ones? The latter often slow, loud or covering the webpage proper)
Re:And to them I say (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't worry, you aren't the intended target.
The idea seems to be - if the ads aren't too annoying, they are less likely to be blocked, and ad makes will be encouraged to make those less annoying adds.
Or more simply: Google is hoping that ad blockers will get rid of the more annoying ads that encourage people to get ad blockers. The idea is that everyone has a different point of "too much". I suspect google thinks that ad execs will end up targeting a middle ground. Probably little/no animation, no sound, and no more nudity/blood/violence than would be appropriate ofr the normal customers of the target site.
The most easily annoyed 25% are probably not going to be considered - nothing will satisfy them anyway. Most people, however, don't mind non-intrusive ads.
Re: (Score:2)
This begs the question of causality. Are ad-blockers causing advertisers to put up milder (and friendlier) ads? Or is that just the general trend of the industry (after they learned that the more annoying ads don't generate steady interest)? I tend to think the latter (since once someone blocks an ad, nothing the advertiser does to that ad with the exception of changing ad serve
Re:And to them I say (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, maybe it's just me, but I have been noticing less and less flash ads lately. Less annoying and intrusive ads as well...
I think it's just you. I turned off my ad-blocker one day to see what the wild was like and I nearly threw my computer out the window.
I would say that the worst form of advertising is putting a 10 paragraph story across ten pages to up ad exposure. Nothing annoys me more than that (and ad blocker can't do anything about those).
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Costs and Wages (Score:4, Insightful)
With prices up 200-400% and wages up 50%, I have to be selective.
What country are you living in? Unless you are talking about a time span of decades it certainly isn't the USA. In fact in 2009 the CPI fell [wikipedia.org] for the first time since 1955. Wages certainly aren't up 50% on a nominal or real basis unless you are talking about a decades long trend - and on a real basis they have arguably fallen [workinglife.org].
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Not what I'm saying...
http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/70yearsofpricechange.html [thepeoplehistory.com]
Dropping the great depression...
wages ,1970 $9,400.00 , 1980 $19,500.00 , 1990 $28,960.00 , 2008 $40,523
1940 $1,725.00, 1950 $3,210.00 , 1960 $5,315.00
Note the big discontinuity start at 1990. I see a smaller increase in 1960 looking at this fresh. at my company this year,
no raises, no bonuses, but there are numerous "promotions" in the executive ranks-- no change in duties. It's just a slimy way of giving themselves raises.
ho
Re:And to them I say (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm in this boat. I have nothing against online ads if they're not intrusive, annoying, and excessive. I never go back to sites which excessive ads because they clearly care less about their own content. I'd rather see a few simple ads on a quality site than block ads on a crappy site.
It's similar to TV advertisements. People watch superbowl ads because they expect them to be entertaining. The rest of the year I flip to a different channel when the ads appear because I just find them annoying. But the occasional unobtrusive product placement within a program doesn't deter people from watching the show.
Re:And to them I say (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, if the character is going to put on shoes anyway, why not just let them be branded shoes? Would it have been better if the logo was blurred out? No. It has no affect at all on the story or how well it's told.
I Am Always Very, Very Leery... (Score:5, Insightful)
...of anyone who uses the word "netizen."
Re:And to them I say (Score:5, Insightful)
This is absolutely backward, though. When advertisers realize fewer people are responding to their ads, there reaction is to make them MORE annoying, MORE obnoxious, and hence more attention-getting. HEAD-ON!!! APPLY DIRECTLY TO YOUR IDIOT-DOME!!!
The way I see it, the only end-game is for advertisers to work closely with site owners so that ads are integrated with the content in such a way that software cannot distinguish the ads from the content.
Re:And to them I say (Score:5, Informative)
If that's true, then those advertisers will shrink their market until they go out of business.
The surviving advertisers will be the ones who learned how to make ads that aren't blocked.
Re:And to them I say (Score:5, Funny)
The way I see it, the only end-game is for advertisers to work closely with site owners so that ads are integrated with the content in such a way that software cannot distinguish the ads from the content.
We have that already. It's called CNet.
Re:And to them I say (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey - Any time you visit a site and block their ads, you're stealing the Internet! Personally, I click on all banners and buy at least one item from each advertising vendor to support wherever I visit. Otherwise, I'm afraid that this whole "Internet" thing just won't stick.
Seriously, though, some places have it right. Google's ads are fairly unobtrusive and typically (although not always) relevant. Amazon's "People who viewed this item also viewed" or "...untimately bought" links are terrifically useful. And Slashdot's ads (IIRC) are certainly nerd-oriented and can be disabled if you give them money or contribute regularly - Seems like an OK system.
All that said, most places have it absolutely wrong which is why AdblockPlus and NoScript are my first two stops when installing FireFox.
Re:And to them I say (Score:4, Interesting)
That makes Google a winner either way. If people who don't like ads, refuse to use them and most important won't click them want to block ads, Google as the biggest web advertiser can get a higher click-through rate. Conversely, the people that actually interact with helpful ads will block some annoying ones, which will probably leave the remaining ones to be a higher percent of Google ads. Win - win.
Re:And to them I say (Score:4, Insightful)
have always seemed intrusive [sic] and sometimes downright useful.
The whole point of an ad is to gain attention. Unless you take subliminal advertising seriously an unobtrusive ad is a non-functioning ad. It is a non-sustainable business model.
And useful? You have got to be kidding. Anybody who bases any purchasing decision at all based on unsolicited advertising is a fool.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Re:And to them I say (Score:4, Insightful)
Wrong. "Unobtrusiveness", used in this context, is not a binary trait like you're assuming it is; you're trying to make it a synonym for "invisible". In this context, we're using the term "obtrusive" (and "unobtrusive") to confer degree. So "unobtrusive" doesn't mean "invisible", it just means "not as obtrusive as really annoying and in-your-face".
Google ads are most certainly "unobtrusive", compared to any Flash ad, and even any banner ad.
And yes, basing a purchasing decision solely on advertising is stupid. But without advertising, you frequently will never learn about products and services that are available to you. For some things, you may already know of their existence, and a Google search will help you find places to buy that widget from. But for other things, unless you read some article or third-party testimonial or your friend tells you about it, you don't know that it exists unless you see an advertisement. Sure, word-of-mouth is a great way to learn about things without being unduly influenced, but unless your business is very mature and has all the customers it needs, relying on word-of-mouth for advertising is foolish.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I've always allowed ads that come from the site I'm viewing. I block on principle ads that come from remote servers. If an online company wants to invest in ads they are willing to host, I'll deal with the ads.
Re:And to them I say (Score:5, Insightful)
I dunno. I think there's something to be said for looking at the problem in economic terms. Some people tune into the Superbowl to see the advertisements, after all, so that's a kind of exchange: entertainment for eyeballs. I don't mind the advertisements in Google's search results because when I don't want them they don't intrude, but they're often useful enough that I click through before doing a new search. That's win-win for the advertisers and me.
The problem I think is with crude advertising methods from the era of old media. The extreme difficulty of getting many high value impressions by old medial techniques means that if you want to scale your business, you've got to do it with a huge pile of low value impressions. At some scale, the old media advertising game becomes about racking up sheer volume. Since there is no way of distinguishing good impressions from bad, and you *need* impressions, the guiding principle is that there is no such thing as a bad impression. Think of the difference between carpet bombing an entire city and having an agent stick a ricin tipped umbrella into your target as he strolls to work. The assassin is more effective period -- not to mention cost effective. If the only weapons you have are unguided bombs, then no death in that city would be a "bad" one.
If the marginal benefit of the next thousand impressions is greater than their marginal cost, the advertiser will go for it. What Google has done is increase the opportunity costs of going for unwanted impressions. Why do that when you can find consumers who *want* your information? If the process of giving *unwanted* impressions is harder, so much the better for me (and Google, whose business is built on a competing strategy).
Google's search result adverts are a good deal for me: information that is often useful at the price of a few square inches of monitor space for a few seconds. That's the same strategy behind the advertising supported "free phone" idea. Done in an old-media any-impression-is-a-good-one manner, it would be hideous. Done in a way that is useful to me, I might not mind it so much.
Re: (Score:2)
I run with no script active, That catches most of the annoying ads. I usually ignore the rest unless its something very specific I like, for instance RPG ads served at enWorld. Ads on the internet don't really bother me.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If the content is fantastic, there will be large scale contributors.
http://mises.org/ [mises.org] has no advertising that I've noticed. They have some million-dollar contributors.
I have a newsletter site that is free, with no ads, and I have some contributors that offer me a few hundred a year. I don't even openly ask for it (there's a link to contributing that just says "Contribute."). If the content is good, the money will still come in.
Re: (Score:2)
Negative! Some very effective ad-blockers work by modifying your computer's DNS entry to a given ad-serving domain so that it will appear as though the server does not exist. This works regardless of what sort of content is being served.
On the general topic at hand: I have found that, while ads are getting creepier as to how much they clearly know about you, they are getting to be more useful to me personally. "Got an iPhone? Like chocolate? Work in IT? Buy our combination iPhone case, chocolate bar, VPN to
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So, who do you think helps when family / friends / whoever has computer problems?
Yea, it's those geeks. What do you think they will install first when they try to find a solution in the Internet to some technical problem? AdBlocking. Mandatory 10 seconds.
And people like it. They talk about it and others follow.
General demographic is catching up to ad-blocking very fast.
Re: (Score:2)
I have zero interest in punching the monkey or shooting the duck.