Seems like you haven't read the better ad coalition standard, because it doesn't say anything about creative content – it's just about formats.
And, honestly, that site is basically a south african blog; as much as I love picking a fight when it's due, I don't think Google is to blame here, but the advertisers targeting their core demographics.
Yup. I'm a big supporter of ad blockers, but this is a conflict of interest the size of Everest.
If Google is really interested in ensuring good user experiences, they should work with the EFF to set up a fund of some kind to support this work, and then have EFF manage it.
I'm not sure offering prime position to a relatively random tech foundation that Google donates to will play better than relying on an independent advertising industry group. Given. A choice between indiscriminate regulation by a foundation of my industry, and an independent organization of an industry choosing to self-regulate, companies should prefer the second.
My cynical side can't help but think they will do this first, then later disable uBlock / other ad blockers (or the APIs they rely on) and claim that "we can do it better." I can't imagine that this isn't a violation of some kind of law (RICO, antitrust, or otherwise), but I don't imagine this would ever be prosecuted.
My cynical side agrees with your cynical side, while my optimistic side thinks that a move like this would significantly boost market share for alternative browsers, myself included.
Why would end users opt for alternative browsers in this case? For end users this situation is a win: no more 'intrusive' ads. It only ends up being a loss for competing advertising platforms and possibly advertisers.
I actually love Firefox on mobile. It allows me to use ublock. Given I'm constantly on my mobile browser (why download an app if I can access it via the web), the ad block feature is awesome.
Edit: This actually pushed me back to Firefox after using chromium for years.
The EU prosecuted Microsoft for bundling Internet Explorer with Windows, with seems much more benign than Google using their market leading browser to block out competitor's ads.
I think they realize the issues that could cause. But by including an adblocker out of the box many users may less inclined to install a third party plugin when one is already provided, especially less advanced users.
If they try they'll see a lot of people move to Firefox. Like I'm game with Google's ideas here honestly and I'd be willing to try it but I would drop it like it's hot if it disables other blockers.
My cynical side can't help but think that accusing Google of RICO violations is pretty silly if you don't have reason to believe that they will commit one of the specific set of crimes (which are illegal in their own right) you need to to even have a snowball's chance in hell of a RICO charge/civil suit. I'm confident that Google wouldn't need to murder or assault anyone, or commit wire fraud, or steal cars, or forge a passport, or pretty much anything on that list to use this to get rid of uBlock.
There's really no way to disable all ad-blocking in a browser, even if the browser-vendor wanted desperately to do so, because—whether ad-stripping browser extensions exist or not—ad-stripping HTTP proxies (e.g. Privoxy) will always exist.
And if you think users couldn't handle using one of those, there's nothing stopping someone from making an e.g. "Privoxy configurator + blocklist updater" browser extension that just serves as a client GUI to your ad-stripping proxy's control channel. (Or giving the daemon a system-tray icon that launches an Electron GUI or something.)
The development of ad-blockers outside of the browser kind of stalled ~5 years ago, but only because everyone has been pretty satisfied with the browser extension solution to the problem. Take it away, and other solutions will just come back into play, with all the modern lessons learned from building the browser-extensions brought in.
Of course there is. They can make it so annoying that the ads doesn't look that bad. They own the browser. They can make it so bad that even flash ads will look like a good alternative to all the work required.
All what work required? Proxying is an OS-level concern, not a browser-level concern. You set it up in your OS's control panel. The browser doesn't get to be a part of that workflow, so it can't make it annoying.
You are ignoring having a proxy in the first place.
Compare adblocking today: step 1, search for extension. Step 2, install extension. Step 3, there is no step 3.
Now convince your parents to install a proxy, then proceed to explain they can have it on each machine (don't forget phones and tablets!) or centrally on the network (now don't forget to explain about local network while at home versus 4g when they are away)... yada yada yada.
You're trying to make it sound more complicated by bringing up complex setups that novice users wouldn't need anyway.
The simple workflow:
Step 1. search for "ad-blocker" on your OS's app store/package manager;
Step 2. choose one [that happens to be a proxy daemon]; hit install.
Step 3. Enter your password when the app asks for admin permission to finish installing (i.e. to install the proxy daemon as a background service, and autoconfigure your OS proxy settings. But you don't need to be aware of that.)
The only issue with that is HTTPS, which Privoxy currently can't handle ( https://www.privoxy.org/faq/misc.html ) and will become even more of a problem with the current "encrypt everything" trend. Certificate pinning and all the other stuff aimed at making TLS harder to MITM also gets in the way of effective adblocking proxies. The only one I know of which can MITM SSL on Windows is Proxomitron, and you still have to patch the browser(s).
HTTPS proxying is perfectly possible, though. IMHO it's one of those bizarre cases where the code to implement it isn't even that hard necessarily. The challenge is all in the fact that A: more people think they understand the HTTPS security model than actually understand the HTTPS security model and B: it's really easy to write code that "works" in the sense that it allows you to proxy pages, but allows you to proxy too many pages too easily. Programmers generally acquire a deep and generally-mostly-justified belief that getting code to do the thing they want it to do is the hard part, so code that appears to work is likely more correct than broken, but this is one case where it's quite shockingly easy to write code that works far too "well" and all the challenge is actually in writing all the test cases for when it is supposed to fail to proxy the page.
That's a lot of headwinds on a bit of code, but they are possible to overcome, if the motivation, and perhaps even more importantly, the humility is there.
It'd be nice to lift out Chromium's own network stack into a library (as a continuously-rebased-from-upstream derivative fork), and then build a proxy that made requests using said network stack. Then you'd get all the HSTS/cert-pinning logic, the CORS and only-N-requests-per-host-at-a-time policies, and a very good LRU cache implementation, "for free", for your proxy daemon.
Heck, if you don't mind an extra 100MB of memory consumption, you could probably throw a "correct" proxy-daemon together in Javascript by relying on the browser network stack of a [headless] Electron instance.
Lucky for us (in this case) certificate pinning is considered to risky to actually deploy in production, it is to easy to make the page completely unacceptable with single mistake.
Apparently Google does not allow Chrome extensions that let you download YouTube videos, seems like a nice precedence.
Looking at popularvideo downloaders gets you things like Video Downloader professional: "Caution:
The download of YouTube videos to hard drive is locked because of restrictions of the Chrome Store."
Another reason to do so is to make sure users will not be forced to install ad-block manually therefore make sure more users see google ads. Because obviously "Google AdBlocker" will show ads from Google and partners.
As someone who uses ublock origin and has been blocking ads for many years, I will consider turning it off if this is effective. My problem is not with ads themselves, it's with terrible ads.
some terrible ads don't look terrible, but instead behave terribly. Violating your privacy, Consuming your bandwidth, ect. How would you recognize these except to audit them yourself? If you read the criteria from the coalition for better ads:
...the following types of ad experiences fell beneath the initial
Better Ads Standard: pop-up ads, prestitial ads, ads with density
greater than 30%, flashing animated ads, auto-play video ads with
sound, poststitial ads with countdown, full-screen scrollover ads, and
large sticky ads.
In other words, privacy compromising is not considered bad behavior. Nor is exorbitant use of bandwidth, It seems their focus is merely on what the average consumer would consider toxic.
This is where it will fail (if indeed it is true).
Privacy is not a massive concern for people, but it is a concern. It's enough of a concern for people to mistrust the brand serving the adverts - google.
Considering how much google relies on its brand, trust is a big part of the reason why people entrust google with their often very private searches.
People don't like advertising for lot of reasons, that's why they use ad blockers and not ad filters.
This is why googles attempt to introduce a block on advertising is like a salesman attempting to stop people from cold calling.
You won't have the choice of turning ublock origin off when Google implements this feature. They'll remove it themselves under the guise of "replicating the functionality of the base product".
"How is it not" seems like a bad way to start a legal question, since everything is legal by default until someone passes a law prohibiting it. So there's usually no special reason at all for something to be legal.
A small percentage of users click ads that I assume make up for the users who don't.
And for the record, I click ads sometimes. Mainly on Facebook, because they're impressively relevant. I've discovered quite a few apps and products that I like through ads.
It should be telling that generally most advertising is paid per impression, not per click (even when the advertiser pays per click, their cost per click is generally calculated from CTR and thus really a cost per impression)
You might not click on the ads, but (if you're not blocking them) you're probably seeing them, and remembering some of them, and they influence you.
Most people don't even recognize the ads. They don't understand what "sponsored" means for example (and it's implications; what?! people are paying money?). This is not because they are sd. They work in totally different domains and just like we don't know the latest things in those domains, they don't know the latest in ours.
Often things that don't make sense, don't make sense for a reason. There are some ads that influence people indirectly (e.g. the trailer of one movie coming before a review of a movie on youtube). But click-through ads at this point may be a total fake business for washing drug money or something.
Not even my parents or grand parents click ads. I wouldn't believe anybody who claims there might be an unknown group of people who really do click ads.
"In one possible application Google is considering, it may choose to block all advertising that appears on sites with offending ads, instead of the individual offending ads themselves. In other words, site owners may be required to ensure all of their ads meet the standards, or could see all advertising across their sites blocked in Chrome."
I like this approach. It punishes site owners for running malicious or badly-behaved ads. I think this is a step forward. I hate blocking ads across the board - I just want to stop the intrusive and dangerous variety. I can tolerate the rest.
I like this approach as well. But sadly it will be fought by many who believe all ads to be "offending", and will declare Google as even more "evil" because of it.
But I think this is a great step to stop the "race to the bottom".
Right now there is no incentive for an ad network to make "well behaved" ads. Most of the "ad blocking crowd" will block them regardless of how nice they are, and advertisers will pay less for them, and site owners don't care because the money gets better the scummier the ads are.
By auto-blocking sites with the worst offenders at the browser level they can start to push all sides toward wanting "better" ads. It gives networks, advertisers, and site owners all incentive to make sure their ads are unobtrusive and safe.
Or it will be seen as another power grab by google. I'm not saying it's a move that hurts consumers, I'm saying I see it as a power grab and yet more control over the web being handed over. I'm unconvinced that relying on a coalition to set standards is enough of a gap.
That's a fair thing to be worried about, and I think if this were to move forward I'd really like to see at least one other browser implement it to the same standard, or perhaps some agreement on what constitutes "bad" ads from a few other networks.
But I don't think that's a good reason to fight it from the start.
The opposite, I would say. Google has strict guidelines for ad creative content and polices its ads as well; they're almost certainly above their own bar. So this is essentially threatening to block everyone else, or at least those behaving poorly.
That is the conflict of interest. It's hard to see how this isn't going to strengthen their position in the ad serving market. Google being able to define where the bar for "badly behaving" is set means that only their competitors will be hurt by this.
I wonder if the motivation isn't a bit more subtle than that. My guess would be they're hoping to improve ads across the web so that people turn off ad blockers in general.
Perhaps it is, but if there were the case why wouldn't they start by cleaning up their own platforms?
There are several angles to be wary of. Locking out competitors, replacing competitor ads with their own, forcing sites to migrate to, or back to, Google ad networks, etc.
Working with Google ads for over seven years as a publisher, they have one of the cleanest ad networks in the game. On top of that, you can preview every single ad that is shown with your account and block accordingly.
I agree, they need to thread carefully, but things need to change, and that change needs to come from two angles: publishers whoring out their users and ad networks not taking responsibility for what they let on their networks.
> you can preview every single ad that is shown with your account and block accordingly.
Really? I've never used Google ads, so for all I know you're right, but why would none of the ~600 comments in the previous discussion [1] mention that?
I'm on the Adx platform, which was invite only a few years back. It has some differences to Adsense, but I believe ad review and transparency with what creatives are displayed is part of both cores.
If I were to guess, there were 600 people in the thread who were not actually publishers using Google ads.
This is very likely the reason this has suddenly appeared in Chrome. Google's revenue relies on ads. Too many internet users blocking too many ads directly threatens Google's revenue stream. The recent sudden upsurge in ad-blocking would, from a Google perspective, look like an existential threat to their very existence.
And what would be one reasonable response that a company reliant on ads for income who also happens to produce a browser used by a huge number of users look like when they realize this existential threat exists? Well, one reasonable response would be exactly this, a "kill the misbehaving ones" addition to that browser in hopes of heading off the threat before it becomes a true, company killing, result.
Only time will tell if this change in mindset on their part actually results in heading off the eventual outcome.
What we need is a Sarbanes-Oxley for the Internet. If you track users and store their data, you have to be Internet-SOX compliant to prove you're handling it in a responsible way. Especially with the anti-fraud protections on credit cards these days, storing PII and browsing history is a lot more dangerous than a credit card breach.
Adsense has its more than fair share of low quality ads. Of course, you can't compare it to popups/sound-ads etc. but compared to the past, it's certainly way lower. (Keep in mind the experience varies wildly based on your profile. Geo etc.)
As a publisher with a significant number of ad requests monthly this would be a godsend. I just spent the last week tracking down ads that were maliciously redirecting my mobile traffic off my site.
Turns out it was coming from a network called Sovrn, which is ironically a member of betterads.org and apparently "recently added an extra layer of protection from malware and redirects, all of [their] creatives are pre-scanned before they are served."
Google is an ad network, not an ad agency. All ads should meet the Initial Better Ads Standards at the very least, we're not talking about creative quality here, we're talking about reducing user pain that things like fullscreen ads, autoplays, popups... create.
It's a good start, but consumers deserve a better ad experience for approved formats too.
It will meet their "standards", which in the past have not prevented Google ads from being used for a lot of different types of nasty, malicious activity.
> It seems to me that it could be considered to be monopoly abuse and it also seems to be pro-consumer.
The move only is pro-consumer where it benefits Google's bottom line: Blocking competitors ads, using a standard that Google easily meets. It's similar to when countries block agricultural imports that don't meet a standard that is unique to their domestic industry, in the name of "safety".
For example, I don't expect Google to block ads that violate users' privacy by tracking them. But I hope they surprise me!
> The move only is pro-consumer where it benefits Google's bottom line: Blocking competitors ads, using a standard that Google easily meets. It's similar to when countries block agricultural imports that don't meet a standard that is unique to their domestic industry, in the name of "safety".
I never thought of this implementation but I imagine this is one of the few ways Google can bundle in ad blocking in Chrome. As long as third party blockers (specifically uBlock Origin https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode for me) I don't mind. I go back and forth to using Mozilla Firefox mostly because I use it on Android but I appreciate all that Google has done to move the web forward.
Not such a strange combination in my view. As i see it, Google's customers are (for a large part) advertisers, and their product is the ability to get ads in front of people (and to get people to click on them). In the economical sense you could even argue that Google users are 'suppliers' (of eyeballs and clicks)
Monopoly abuse can of course impact both suppliers as well as customers, but in this case it's probably more likely to only impact advertisers.
- As individuals we can switch to other search engines and browsers, so it's difficult to abuse a monopoly that way.
- However, as long as we keep using Google, advertisers might have no other option to get a reach this valuable. So Google could possibly exploit its position towards advertisers. (e.g. Favor its own ads over other ad networks).
I think you are missing the point. In my opinion it's a valid concern that this policy could be perceived as Google effectively pushing advertisers onto AdWords over other competing platforms
Forgive me another probably dumb question, but I don't mean to be obtuse or sarcastic at all, this is straight up:
Even working on projects where we wanted to see online adverts, all ad networks were null routed at our border. We saw too much variety of risks in letting adverts traverse the lan.
I'm (very) out of touch, but is it expected to view pages complete with advertising - unadulterated - in modern corporate setting?
If so, is there good reason for this?
Or am I missing relevant firewall tech?
How is it pro-consumer? Ad blocking is mainstream so Google wants people to consider this new built in "ad blocker" to be good enough, then they won't install one that blocks Google ads.
How so? If the ad does not abide by the Coalition for Better Ads standards then it's not displayed. And if your ad doesn't meet those standards then you probably shouldn't be advertising with Google.
> It punishes site owners for running malicious or badly-behaved ads.
There's no way that Google can effectively be police, judge, jury, and executioner all at the same time, given their own massive conflicts of interest.
>I just want to stop the intrusive and dangerous variety
One of the problem is the definition of "intrusive and dangerous" varies wildly from person to person. Ad blockers have generally handled this by blocking everything while giving the ability to whitelist exceptions. I imagine it would be much more difficult to get good user satisfaction by attacking this from the opposite approach.
> I imagine it would be much more difficult to get good user satisfaction by attacking this from the opposite approach.
Except if you're Google and have near-infinite ML resources at your disposal and 50% of the browser market. An algo could be trained by a thumbs up / thumbs down to spot good and bad ads / vendors within six months.
This is not a problem you can just throw resources at to solve. The problem is that some people will only categorized ads as "intrusive" if they play sound or take over control of the whole page. Others will categorize every ad as intrusive. Some people will categorize only ads that inject malware as "dangerous". Other will categorize all ads that have any form of tracking as "dangerous". The most straightforward way to serve both of these audiences is to block all ads. Few people are really going to complain that they see too few ads. Google is unlikely to do that for obvious reasons. So how do you satisfy people all both extremes of those definitions?
It may be laudable to try and lead an "industry-wide" effort to clean up ads but it stinks of hypocrisy when Google repeatedly allows all shades of garbage to permeate its' own Adsense network.
I hope this comes as an extension that can be turned off. E.g having flash pre-installed in chrome but having ability to turn it off. I expect reasonable defaults but some knobs to control the ads I want.
If chrome team who thinks about the world and ads team who thinks about $$$ are total separate entities who don't influence each other for special interests then I applaud the effort.
I hope this is done in the open in chromium source code. Basically the current way extensions work is by injecting massive amounts of CSS and js in the page. This makes a lot of optimizations in chrome useless for fast page renders. Doing an optimized ad block engine would make chrome feel faster
Chrome doesn't even allow you to control if a single click in the URL bar highlights the entire URL or just drops a cursor even though the behavior in the same application is inconsistent between different platforms. I have my doubts they'd allow you to fiddle with knobs about advertising preferences.
the ny times maybe has the staff to do that (or used to). Joe's blog does not.
back in print media each ad had to be placed by hand. it also had the aquired though manual labor. those things seriously limited the number of people publishing since the majority of your time was spent not making content for your zine but instead chasing down ads.
the internet changed that. here's a spot on my page . fill it with ads please. make those ads geographically specific and or user specific . write me a check for $$$.
it seems pretty obvious that history. if I decided the put ads on my sites I certainly would not have the time to find relevant ads for the world or even just my country. that's not something I want to deal with.
that said, if there was a good ad company that currated their ads well, did not share info with 3rd parties and track users I'd certainly consider signing up to that over others
I started ad sales using numerical techniques on the turn of the nineties. Our first hurdle was to bat off vexatious law suits brought by agencies, for copyright materials theft every time a major sent us the separations. All digital imposition - the layout of pages in final form to the n-up web offset affines that creates the cut pages in sequence from a running roller fold, indeed could require no manual intervention. (copy dot scanners captured and re digitized the pre stochastic screens of adverts)
But I think you mean addressing the spots, or paginating what goes where.
This is still actually manual for a ad network, if you mean deciding advert a never runs nearer than n pages to advert b, or ad y never runs in section k. Just the scale is inverted. And with it, pricing power, which is almost entirely buy side.
I could easily flip a galley proof of the magazine pages laid out as they will run, in under a minute for all but the bulk ad titles like PCWorld..
That was the scrutiny I meant.
Are there no tools to assist pre screening ad network proposed flows? I imagine, also, offensive adverts rarely have budget for impressions. I bet cutting the bottom 20% would solve most problems...
If Joe doesn't have time or staff to make sure his only means of generating income is not offensive or hostile to his customers, he doesn't have time or staff to run a business.
Imagine if a store said they didn't have enough staff to QA the products they sell, so they shouldn't be blamed for injuries related to their crappy products. It's 2017, you can't say you didn't known lawn darts were dangerous and you really shouldn't admit you didn't know your store was even selling lawn darts.
Ad blocking strikes so deeply at the heart of Google's success, it's simply not credible to believe there is no more to the strategy than the simple defense mentioned in the article.
To speculate on just one possible strategy:
- First order of business, crush Ad Block plus' pay to play business. Possibly just by entering the market with resources, IP, and channel that would overwhelm them.
- Continue on this path until Google is the leader and standard setter, beating everyone on price
- Start to innovate around adding higher value pay to play features, prioritization, options, etc, until it becomes a business with a decent margin.
- Decide whether to wage all out ware with blockers that don't participate in a revenue share program. The war would be multi-pronged with technical, political, and PR fronts. A large team would work 24/7 to instantly defeat blocker updates in an effort to wear them down. Lobbyists would press hard to legislate and control ad-blocking to "protect" content creators. PR would enlist high profile loved content creators, show how much we love their work, and that now, they are forced to live in a cardboard box due to your ad-blocking.
If 60 Billion in revenue is threatened, how does it play out any nicer than this?
While this is a possibility, the wrench in the works is the Firefox browser. How is Google going to get them to play along and prevent 3rd-party blockers like UBlock Origin from working? I don't see it happening.
They can certainly put ABP out of business, which honestly is fine with me. But UO isn't a business AFAIK, it's a Free open-source project. That's like trying to put vim out of business; you just can't, because there's no business there. Google can certainly change Chrome to prevent UO from working, but they can't do the same for Firefox, nor can they really for Chromium (though their actions can make it difficult, but that could also mean that many other non-blocker extensions won't work if they're too restrictive).
Finally, these aren't the only browsers out there. Apple's Safari might also refuse to go along, and even go directly against Google somehow (including their own Google-ad-blocker, or helping UO work on their browser). Apple doesn't live on ads like Google does.
Finally, as for legislation, that doesn't make much sense either. First, I have a hard time seeing any Federal US laws actually succeed that force users to view ads, and even if such a law passed, there's no way to enforce it. How would they? Are websites going to sue users whose browsers don't actually download all their ads? That'll be great for PR. Or are they going to block users who don't download the ads (they're already doing this on some sites). If it gets that bad, it wouldn't be hard for ad-blockers to switch to simply downloading all the ads, and then sending them to /dev/null instead of displaying them.
You "kill" vim by preinstalling a friendly text editor by default, like TextEdit or Notepad. Many of my technical friends (myself included) use vim, but vim will never be used by everybody, everywhere. When most people first get a new computer and want to edit text, they use TextEdit instead of vim.
The end game of ad blocking is that everybody installs one. That would be devastating to Google. Instead, they would rather preinstall theirs. If theirs is the default adblocker even on just Chrome, they'll have substantial market share. Most people won't bother installing a browser extension if it the default is good enough, just like how most people don't use vim if TextEdit is good enough.
Most of my nontechnical friends don't use adblockers. In 10 years most people might. Google is preventing that from destroying them by shipping their own as a default instead.
Some operating systems (macOS, most linux) do install vim by default. The problem is that vim has a very high learning curve, and most people don't want to spend time learning to edit text. Microsoft has tried doing what you described, by installing ie/edge by default, and making it good enough for most people. Admittedly it's working to some degree, but there are still plenty of people who choose firefox/chrome over edge.
>You "kill" vim by preinstalling a friendly text editor by default, like TextEdit or Notepad. Many of my technical friends (myself included) use vim, but vim will never be used by everybody, everywhere. When most people first get a new computer and want to edit text, they use TextEdit instead of vim.
This is just plain wrong. You're not understanding the meaning of "kill": that means that it's dead, gone, unable to be used.
Many, many people (millions?) use vim every day. I do, and others I know do too. People who use vim don't care about what editors other people use; it's just as irrelevant as what cars other people drive. I can go buy a Honda, a Tesla, or some 50-year-old antique, and drive it if I want, legally. Other people buying Fords has no effect on that. No one cares about everyone, everywhere using vim, only that it's available and it works. That's not changing, and there's no indication it will ever change.
>The end game of ad blocking is that everybody installs one.
No, because there are technical ways of getting around them. Look at all the sites that have anti-ad-blockers installed, and force you to turn off your ad-blocker to see the site. Of course, the ad-blockers have been working on ways of defeating those, so it's an arms race.
>If theirs is the default adblocker even on just Chrome, they'll have substantial market share. Most people won't bother installing a browser extension if it the default is good enough, just like how most people don't use vim if TextEdit is good enough.
Who cares about "most people"? I don't. My whole assertion is: how will they prevent other blockers, like UBlock Origin, from being used? If they're not going to bother, then great, but that's not what the OP claimed: he claimed they'd find ways of actively preventing 3rd-party blockers from being used, either technically or legislatively.
>Google is preventing that from destroying them by shipping their own as a default instead.
Wrong. Google isn't preventing anything, as long as they don't actively prevent you from installing a 3rd-party blocker. The message I replied to alleged that this would happen.
> While this is a possibility, the wrench in the works is the Firefox browser. How is Google going to get them to play along and prevent 3rd-party blockers like UBlock Origin from working? I don't see it happening.
As power and money become more centralized in fewer hands, the ability to abuse DRM and standards, and to coerce partners and content providers into falling in line, becomes cheaper. Google declares legal and technical war on ad blockers while offering a "better" solution laden with incentives; Firefox gets bought off or coerced to be compliant. The barrier to disruption becomes not only a high technical bar, but a legal one as well.
I don't think there's a clear path to this that I can see right now, but we're a LONG way from Microsoft's defeat in the browser wars (both in terms of time and political environment) and a lot of shit I didn't think I'd see over the last two decades has happened after all. The broader interpretation of Gilmore's notable quote ("The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it") is less applicable today than it's ever been--in part because to a large degree, "censorship" has been replaced by "loss of profit".
If Firefox joined in in preventing 3rd-party ad-blockers, they'd lose what few users they still have left. The whole point of using Firefox is that it isn't corporate-controlled, and is the FOSS alternative that gives you more freedom. Take away the freedom, and you take away the primary reason to even use the browser; might as well just use Chrome at that point.
You'd only have to request the ads not actually download them. Then the sites in question can check the DOM for ads and black out if it doesn't find them. It's an endless arms race.
1) It's illegal to sell cars from Telsa in many states because...I can't even stand to repeat it.
2) It's illegal to give your child pot, even when it's a pharmaceutical grade product shown to be the only cure for her epileptic seizures, and even if done with 100% physician oversight. I would so enjoy a morality debate with a congressman in a state choosing to stand by and do nothing while a small child shakes violently on the ground.
I'd like to agree with you, but Firefox has already buckled under to support DRM, so I don't know how much you can count on them to be a bulwark against industry pressure.
They likely buckled under largely because the users wanted to be able to watch Netflix, and there was no way that Mozilla was going to convince Netflix to adopt a different solution. So they had a choice of either being the 1 browser that doesn't work with Netflix (and other streaming services like that), or joining the crowd. Most users don't care about DRM for things like Netflix; if you don't like it, you don't have to use it. No one's forcing you to subscribe to Netflix, and it's not representative of the rest of the web. (It is totally unlike, for instance, sites like this, or news sites with articles, or blogs, etc.) It was a pragmatic choice: either work with popular sites that people like, or become irrelevant because of some extremists. Those chose to remain relevant.
Ad-blocking is not the same. Ad-blocking doesn't prevent you from seeing most sites (and for those that it does, you can selectively turn off the ad-blocker; you don't have to ditch your browser). What incentive would Firefox have to prevent people from installing an ad-blocker? If they did that, they'd lose whatever relevance they still had, because people would just switch to Chrome.
> it's simply not credible to believe there is no more to the strategy than the simple defense mentioned in the article
It would be more fair if Google implemented a micropayments system that would be distributed to the websites a user is using most / where the user wants to tip. Google already has payments integrated through the app store. If they created a new kind of "micropayments sponsored" content category, it would help content producers to earn an income. The monthly amount to be tipped should be capped in total, say, $1/person, not much. Google can still make money by taking a small fee from the micropayments.
"Disable ads and support websites for $1/month". Something like that. It's like getting access to music from a subscription service, but the upside is that surfers get to support their favorite sources.
Regarding Google setting policy, it reminds me of a story about a floating advertisement of ours that accompanied the customer as they scrolled down the page reading an article.
An AdSense robot flagged us two times for violating policies regarding "calling attention" to advertising because of this "sticky" ad unit. I appealed, didn't work, and had to roll back AdSense lest our company get banned.
In a later conversation, a Google rep reached out to wonder why we weren't showing Google ads. I explained the policy violations and that we were more interested in our floating ad unit then AdSense. A few emails later and poof! I was assured there would be no more policy violations issued over this ad unit, and we were able to roll back onto AdSense inventory.
Would Google partners get blocked at the same rates as non-Google partners? Perhaps not.
With such seemingly capricious decisions by Google, and so little customer service resources outside of robot policy automation and appeals, I worry about the company playing this role.
This is a pretty well known fact. The rules are there for all sites except those that make Google a lot of money. The tipping point coincides with the time when Google sees it fitting to assign your site a rep.
The "3 ads max" rule goes out the window as well.
I don't have a problem with this approach. I see it as a given that they would strike different deals with the breadwinners.
I used to have a rep as well, and he also made some problems I had magically disappear.
Will this become a moving target? As ads become progressively "better" will the standards move up in terms of what is considered objectionable? Also this could be a huge antitrust issue. Google could start blacklisting sites or ad networks based off of their arbitrary standards and force publishers into using Google products with the guarantee they will never be blocked.
Wow that seems like playing with fire for Google. Maybe they figure that Trump's lax antitrust enforcement will give them free rein to screw with competitors for the next 4-8 years.
My first instinct is that this feature will involve google contributor, where users can block ads and still send revenue to sites they frequent. https://contributor.google.com/
I went to check on the status of that program and got this message:
We’re launching a new and improved Contributor in early 2017!
It'd be a neat middle option: display safe ads in Chrome with Google providing assurances that impressions/clicks aren't bots without the crazy messes of JavaScript currently used for that, and put a “Pay this site directly and never see ads” button next to it so people who really don't like ads can opt-out.
Whoa. A company where 85%+ of its revenue comes from ads and over that owns a really popular browser is going to block ads? Could be a power play to give Google even more control over advertisers
G and FB also control over 85% of new online advertising spend. If it starts to choke advertisers, they don't have many other options but to get in line.
This isn't about controlling advertiser spend at all. It's about controlling publisher supply.
Publishers have other choices for ad supply, Google is not the most lucrative, but it's the best for high volume so it's everywhere, because people need to get their fill rates.
If a major browser like Chrome starts punishing publishers for not policing their supply, it'll only benefit the big networks.
(I'm actually very skeptical of this article's claims...)
Thats just mutually assured destruction - all IE/edge browsers would start blocking all google ads, firefox would block everyone, chrome would black all not google ads, and half the internet economy collapses
Or better ad creators start behaving nicely. Remember zombie cookies in flash, or shitty animations that chew 100% battery, or IE toolbar spam, or ActiveX ad scripts that could read local files.
Blocking ads is not an easy job. Especially with things like native ads. Blocking shitty ads should be easier though.
My guess is any such collapse (if it could even happen, sans some pretty serious privacy-protecting regulation) would be very temporary. Free ad- and spying-supported services make all sorts of other business models very difficult or untenable (see, for example, private, local voice recognition—why offer that product when you'll surely fail because the spytastic Google/Amazon/Apple/Microsoft offerings are free?) and even weaken the motivation for community-driven and Free, open source competition. Those other things would fill the void left by the death (please oh please) of the spy/ad economy. Hell, traditional non-spying ads might even make a comeback.
You forgot the steps were all the other adblock businesses get disabled by default, then they get impossible to implement/update. Step 1 can already be profitable in itself if done "right".
I can only hope they are also developing a micropayment system to allow easy payment for web content. This shouldn't be too hard - they have a billing system (Google Play) already
No, reading should be free. it's not a movie, if you want learn you need to do it freely. Brave will only work for some people.
Also what about my comment? If I publish something even on Facebook why I'm not paid too? Where is the limit? If there's "nothing free" principe why people help each others on forum? (it's start to become less and less) people don't want more to do free things, but this is bad, bad because it's was about helping, information, not about payment to read crap. or steal content from other (pinterest)
I wonder how this will impact their competitors (Facebook?). I assume these features will be opt-in instead of enabled-by-default. it could be pretty catastrophic if it is enabled by default. For an optin feature, it is not much different from today, where a user can install adblocker extension. Very few consumers opt to do so.
A while ago, Apple added ad blocking features to iOS 9, however users had to explicitly enable them by installing an adblocker apps. I have not seen significant impact by this move (G and FB are still growing).
Facebook runs the tightest ship when it comes to ad formats. They don't allow rich media ads at all either, so malvertising is almost non-existent on Facebook.
They wouldn't be impacted by this at all, in my opinion who this hurts most is publishers.
While video ads with sound on and popups are pretty irritating, I think interstitial ads with a timer are more in the grey area. I mostly use the Epic Privacy Browser which already by default blocks all ads.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadSeems like a safe bet they wouldn't serve ads that would get blocked.
http://www.groundup.org.za/article/why-were-dropping-google-...
And, honestly, that site is basically a south african blog; as much as I love picking a fight when it's due, I don't think Google is to blame here, but the advertisers targeting their core demographics.
If Google is really interested in ensuring good user experiences, they should work with the EFF to set up a fund of some kind to support this work, and then have EFF manage it.
Edit: This actually pushed me back to Firefox after using chromium for years.
https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/14/lawsplainer-its-not-rico-...
They are trying to be both the player and the judge at the same time.
And if you think users couldn't handle using one of those, there's nothing stopping someone from making an e.g. "Privoxy configurator + blocklist updater" browser extension that just serves as a client GUI to your ad-stripping proxy's control channel. (Or giving the daemon a system-tray icon that launches an Electron GUI or something.)
The development of ad-blockers outside of the browser kind of stalled ~5 years ago, but only because everyone has been pretty satisfied with the browser extension solution to the problem. Take it away, and other solutions will just come back into play, with all the modern lessons learned from building the browser-extensions brought in.
Compare adblocking today: step 1, search for extension. Step 2, install extension. Step 3, there is no step 3.
Now convince your parents to install a proxy, then proceed to explain they can have it on each machine (don't forget phones and tablets!) or centrally on the network (now don't forget to explain about local network while at home versus 4g when they are away)... yada yada yada.
The simple workflow:
Step 1. search for "ad-blocker" on your OS's app store/package manager;
Step 2. choose one [that happens to be a proxy daemon]; hit install.
Step 3. Enter your password when the app asks for admin permission to finish installing (i.e. to install the proxy daemon as a background service, and autoconfigure your OS proxy settings. But you don't need to be aware of that.)
That's a lot of headwinds on a bit of code, but they are possible to overcome, if the motivation, and perhaps even more importantly, the humility is there.
Heck, if you don't mind an extra 100MB of memory consumption, you could probably throw a "correct" proxy-daemon together in Javascript by relying on the browser network stack of a [headless] Electron instance.
Also it looks like Chrome actually ignores pinning for proxies as a feature: http://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/security-faq#...
Looking at popularvideo downloaders gets you things like Video Downloader professional: "Caution: The download of YouTube videos to hard drive is locked because of restrictions of the Chrome Store."
Another reason to do so is to make sure users will not be forced to install ad-block manually therefore make sure more users see google ads. Because obviously "Google AdBlocker" will show ads from Google and partners.
<plug>
So I created a minimal blocklist for the worst clickbait (mostly Outbrain and Taboola). The list is compatible with uBlock Origin and Adblock Plus.
https://github.com/cpeterso/clickbait-blocklist/
</plug>
same source as the story: https://www.betterads.org/coalition-for-better-ads-releases-...
Privacy is not a massive concern for people, but it is a concern. It's enough of a concern for people to mistrust the brand serving the adverts - google.
Considering how much google relies on its brand, trust is a big part of the reason why people entrust google with their often very private searches.
People don't like advertising for lot of reasons, that's why they use ad blockers and not ad filters.
This is why googles attempt to introduce a block on advertising is like a salesman attempting to stop people from cold calling.
And for the record, I click ads sometimes. Mainly on Facebook, because they're impressively relevant. I've discovered quite a few apps and products that I like through ads.
Most people don't. Enough do that make the practice profitable enough to fill our mailboxes with spam.
The same applies to scummy web ads.
You might not click on the ads, but (if you're not blocking them) you're probably seeing them, and remembering some of them, and they influence you.
Not even my parents or grand parents click ads. I wouldn't believe anybody who claims there might be an unknown group of people who really do click ads.
I like this approach. It punishes site owners for running malicious or badly-behaved ads. I think this is a step forward. I hate blocking ads across the board - I just want to stop the intrusive and dangerous variety. I can tolerate the rest.
But I think this is a great step to stop the "race to the bottom".
Right now there is no incentive for an ad network to make "well behaved" ads. Most of the "ad blocking crowd" will block them regardless of how nice they are, and advertisers will pay less for them, and site owners don't care because the money gets better the scummier the ads are.
By auto-blocking sites with the worst offenders at the browser level they can start to push all sides toward wanting "better" ads. It gives networks, advertisers, and site owners all incentive to make sure their ads are unobtrusive and safe.
But I don't think that's a good reason to fight it from the start.
There are several angles to be wary of. Locking out competitors, replacing competitor ads with their own, forcing sites to migrate to, or back to, Google ad networks, etc.
I agree, they need to thread carefully, but things need to change, and that change needs to come from two angles: publishers whoring out their users and ad networks not taking responsibility for what they let on their networks.
Really? I've never used Google ads, so for all I know you're right, but why would none of the ~600 comments in the previous discussion [1] mention that?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14094083
I'm on the Adx platform, which was invite only a few years back. It has some differences to Adsense, but I believe ad review and transparency with what creatives are displayed is part of both cores.
If I were to guess, there were 600 people in the thread who were not actually publishers using Google ads.
And what would be one reasonable response that a company reliant on ads for income who also happens to produce a browser used by a huge number of users look like when they realize this existential threat exists? Well, one reasonable response would be exactly this, a "kill the misbehaving ones" addition to that browser in hopes of heading off the threat before it becomes a true, company killing, result.
Only time will tell if this change in mindset on their part actually results in heading off the eventual outcome.
https://www.betterads.org/standards/
I think this is what he meant by conflict of interest
They've also hosted fake download ads for e.g. Skype.
Adsense has its more than fair share of low quality ads. Of course, you can't compare it to popups/sound-ads etc. but compared to the past, it's certainly way lower. (Keep in mind the experience varies wildly based on your profile. Geo etc.)
Turns out it was coming from a network called Sovrn, which is ironically a member of betterads.org and apparently "recently added an extra layer of protection from malware and redirects, all of [their] creatives are pre-scanned before they are served."
If something else on the page doesn't, presumably Chrome will block Google's ads too.
It's a good start, but consumers deserve a better ad experience for approved formats too.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising
YouTube doesn’t have auto-playing video ads with sound?
YouTube doesn’t have countdown based ads blocking the content?
Google.com always has less than 3 ads?
The move only is pro-consumer where it benefits Google's bottom line: Blocking competitors ads, using a standard that Google easily meets. It's similar to when countries block agricultural imports that don't meet a standard that is unique to their domestic industry, in the name of "safety".
For example, I don't expect Google to block ads that violate users' privacy by tracking them. But I hope they surprise me!
I never thought of this implementation but I imagine this is one of the few ways Google can bundle in ad blocking in Chrome. As long as third party blockers (specifically uBlock Origin https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode for me) I don't mind. I go back and forth to using Mozilla Firefox mostly because I use it on Android but I appreciate all that Google has done to move the web forward.
Monopoly abuse can of course impact both suppliers as well as customers, but in this case it's probably more likely to only impact advertisers.
- As individuals we can switch to other search engines and browsers, so it's difficult to abuse a monopoly that way.
- However, as long as we keep using Google, advertisers might have no other option to get a reach this valuable. So Google could possibly exploit its position towards advertisers. (e.g. Favor its own ads over other ad networks).
Still looks like a net win for end users.
Even working on projects where we wanted to see online adverts, all ad networks were null routed at our border. We saw too much variety of risks in letting adverts traverse the lan.
I'm (very) out of touch, but is it expected to view pages complete with advertising - unadulterated - in modern corporate setting?
If so, is there good reason for this? Or am I missing relevant firewall tech?
There's no way that Google can effectively be police, judge, jury, and executioner all at the same time, given their own massive conflicts of interest.
One of the problem is the definition of "intrusive and dangerous" varies wildly from person to person. Ad blockers have generally handled this by blocking everything while giving the ability to whitelist exceptions. I imagine it would be much more difficult to get good user satisfaction by attacking this from the opposite approach.
Except if you're Google and have near-infinite ML resources at your disposal and 50% of the browser market. An algo could be trained by a thumbs up / thumbs down to spot good and bad ads / vendors within six months.
https://www.extremetech.com/internet/220696-forbes-forces-re...
We talked about this only a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14094083
If chrome team who thinks about the world and ads team who thinks about $$$ are total separate entities who don't influence each other for special interests then I applaud the effort.
I hope this is done in the open in chromium source code. Basically the current way extensions work is by injecting massive amounts of CSS and js in the page. This makes a lot of optimizations in chrome useless for fast page renders. Doing an optimized ad block engine would make chrome feel faster
I still cannot wrap my head around publishers apparently disinterested in manually clearing ad copy for press approval.
Can anyone delineate a non obvious history to this complete laissez faire?
back in print media each ad had to be placed by hand. it also had the aquired though manual labor. those things seriously limited the number of people publishing since the majority of your time was spent not making content for your zine but instead chasing down ads.
the internet changed that. here's a spot on my page . fill it with ads please. make those ads geographically specific and or user specific . write me a check for $$$.
it seems pretty obvious that history. if I decided the put ads on my sites I certainly would not have the time to find relevant ads for the world or even just my country. that's not something I want to deal with.
that said, if there was a good ad company that currated their ads well, did not share info with 3rd parties and track users I'd certainly consider signing up to that over others
I started ad sales using numerical techniques on the turn of the nineties. Our first hurdle was to bat off vexatious law suits brought by agencies, for copyright materials theft every time a major sent us the separations. All digital imposition - the layout of pages in final form to the n-up web offset affines that creates the cut pages in sequence from a running roller fold, indeed could require no manual intervention. (copy dot scanners captured and re digitized the pre stochastic screens of adverts)
But I think you mean addressing the spots, or paginating what goes where.
This is still actually manual for a ad network, if you mean deciding advert a never runs nearer than n pages to advert b, or ad y never runs in section k. Just the scale is inverted. And with it, pricing power, which is almost entirely buy side.
I could easily flip a galley proof of the magazine pages laid out as they will run, in under a minute for all but the bulk ad titles like PCWorld..
That was the scrutiny I meant.
Are there no tools to assist pre screening ad network proposed flows? I imagine, also, offensive adverts rarely have budget for impressions. I bet cutting the bottom 20% would solve most problems...
I think that's backwards? The offensive ads are generally paying more, no?
Imagine if a store said they didn't have enough staff to QA the products they sell, so they shouldn't be blamed for injuries related to their crappy products. It's 2017, you can't say you didn't known lawn darts were dangerous and you really shouldn't admit you didn't know your store was even selling lawn darts.
To speculate on just one possible strategy:
- First order of business, crush Ad Block plus' pay to play business. Possibly just by entering the market with resources, IP, and channel that would overwhelm them.
- Continue on this path until Google is the leader and standard setter, beating everyone on price
- Start to innovate around adding higher value pay to play features, prioritization, options, etc, until it becomes a business with a decent margin.
- Decide whether to wage all out ware with blockers that don't participate in a revenue share program. The war would be multi-pronged with technical, political, and PR fronts. A large team would work 24/7 to instantly defeat blocker updates in an effort to wear them down. Lobbyists would press hard to legislate and control ad-blocking to "protect" content creators. PR would enlist high profile loved content creators, show how much we love their work, and that now, they are forced to live in a cardboard box due to your ad-blocking.
If 60 Billion in revenue is threatened, how does it play out any nicer than this?
They can certainly put ABP out of business, which honestly is fine with me. But UO isn't a business AFAIK, it's a Free open-source project. That's like trying to put vim out of business; you just can't, because there's no business there. Google can certainly change Chrome to prevent UO from working, but they can't do the same for Firefox, nor can they really for Chromium (though their actions can make it difficult, but that could also mean that many other non-blocker extensions won't work if they're too restrictive).
Finally, these aren't the only browsers out there. Apple's Safari might also refuse to go along, and even go directly against Google somehow (including their own Google-ad-blocker, or helping UO work on their browser). Apple doesn't live on ads like Google does.
Finally, as for legislation, that doesn't make much sense either. First, I have a hard time seeing any Federal US laws actually succeed that force users to view ads, and even if such a law passed, there's no way to enforce it. How would they? Are websites going to sue users whose browsers don't actually download all their ads? That'll be great for PR. Or are they going to block users who don't download the ads (they're already doing this on some sites). If it gets that bad, it wouldn't be hard for ad-blockers to switch to simply downloading all the ads, and then sending them to /dev/null instead of displaying them.
The end game of ad blocking is that everybody installs one. That would be devastating to Google. Instead, they would rather preinstall theirs. If theirs is the default adblocker even on just Chrome, they'll have substantial market share. Most people won't bother installing a browser extension if it the default is good enough, just like how most people don't use vim if TextEdit is good enough.
Most of my nontechnical friends don't use adblockers. In 10 years most people might. Google is preventing that from destroying them by shipping their own as a default instead.
This is just plain wrong. You're not understanding the meaning of "kill": that means that it's dead, gone, unable to be used.
Many, many people (millions?) use vim every day. I do, and others I know do too. People who use vim don't care about what editors other people use; it's just as irrelevant as what cars other people drive. I can go buy a Honda, a Tesla, or some 50-year-old antique, and drive it if I want, legally. Other people buying Fords has no effect on that. No one cares about everyone, everywhere using vim, only that it's available and it works. That's not changing, and there's no indication it will ever change.
>The end game of ad blocking is that everybody installs one.
No, because there are technical ways of getting around them. Look at all the sites that have anti-ad-blockers installed, and force you to turn off your ad-blocker to see the site. Of course, the ad-blockers have been working on ways of defeating those, so it's an arms race.
>If theirs is the default adblocker even on just Chrome, they'll have substantial market share. Most people won't bother installing a browser extension if it the default is good enough, just like how most people don't use vim if TextEdit is good enough.
Who cares about "most people"? I don't. My whole assertion is: how will they prevent other blockers, like UBlock Origin, from being used? If they're not going to bother, then great, but that's not what the OP claimed: he claimed they'd find ways of actively preventing 3rd-party blockers from being used, either technically or legislatively.
>Google is preventing that from destroying them by shipping their own as a default instead.
Wrong. Google isn't preventing anything, as long as they don't actively prevent you from installing a 3rd-party blocker. The message I replied to alleged that this would happen.
As power and money become more centralized in fewer hands, the ability to abuse DRM and standards, and to coerce partners and content providers into falling in line, becomes cheaper. Google declares legal and technical war on ad blockers while offering a "better" solution laden with incentives; Firefox gets bought off or coerced to be compliant. The barrier to disruption becomes not only a high technical bar, but a legal one as well.
I don't think there's a clear path to this that I can see right now, but we're a LONG way from Microsoft's defeat in the browser wars (both in terms of time and political environment) and a lot of shit I didn't think I'd see over the last two decades has happened after all. The broader interpretation of Gilmore's notable quote ("The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it") is less applicable today than it's ever been--in part because to a large degree, "censorship" has been replaced by "loss of profit".
1) It's illegal to sell cars from Telsa in many states because...I can't even stand to repeat it.
2) It's illegal to give your child pot, even when it's a pharmaceutical grade product shown to be the only cure for her epileptic seizures, and even if done with 100% physician oversight. I would so enjoy a morality debate with a congressman in a state choosing to stand by and do nothing while a small child shakes violently on the ground.
Ad-blocking is not the same. Ad-blocking doesn't prevent you from seeing most sites (and for those that it does, you can selectively turn off the ad-blocker; you don't have to ditch your browser). What incentive would Firefox have to prevent people from installing an ad-blocker? If they did that, they'd lose whatever relevance they still had, because people would just switch to Chrome.
It would be more fair if Google implemented a micropayments system that would be distributed to the websites a user is using most / where the user wants to tip. Google already has payments integrated through the app store. If they created a new kind of "micropayments sponsored" content category, it would help content producers to earn an income. The monthly amount to be tipped should be capped in total, say, $1/person, not much. Google can still make money by taking a small fee from the micropayments.
"Disable ads and support websites for $1/month". Something like that. It's like getting access to music from a subscription service, but the upside is that surfers get to support their favorite sources.
Currently the program isn't accepting new users, but it is set to relaunch this year [0].
[0]: https://contributor.google.com
An AdSense robot flagged us two times for violating policies regarding "calling attention" to advertising because of this "sticky" ad unit. I appealed, didn't work, and had to roll back AdSense lest our company get banned.
In a later conversation, a Google rep reached out to wonder why we weren't showing Google ads. I explained the policy violations and that we were more interested in our floating ad unit then AdSense. A few emails later and poof! I was assured there would be no more policy violations issued over this ad unit, and we were able to roll back onto AdSense inventory.
Would Google partners get blocked at the same rates as non-Google partners? Perhaps not.
With such seemingly capricious decisions by Google, and so little customer service resources outside of robot policy automation and appeals, I worry about the company playing this role.
The "3 ads max" rule goes out the window as well.
I don't have a problem with this approach. I see it as a given that they would strike different deals with the breadwinners.
I used to have a rep as well, and he also made some problems I had magically disappear.
Someone forgets that for a few days YouTube was serving malware in their ads.
I haven't used Opera since they changed rendering engines, so I can't comment beyond that.
I went to check on the status of that program and got this message:
We’re launching a new and improved Contributor in early 2017!
Edit: though from the article it really does seem much more benign.
Disclosure: I am working on what is, ostensibly, a competing product.
Publishers have other choices for ad supply, Google is not the most lucrative, but it's the best for high volume so it's everywhere, because people need to get their fill rates.
If a major browser like Chrome starts punishing publishers for not policing their supply, it'll only benefit the big networks.
(I'm actually very skeptical of this article's claims...)
Step 1. Surprise the world with better ad blocking tech than what currently exists.
Step 2. When trust in tech is established, start blocking ads from other ad networks by calling them foul. Do this slowly so it's not obvious.
Step 3. Wait for customers of other ad networks to notice their ads are not effective.
Step 4. Steal customers...Profit.
Blocking ads is not an easy job. Especially with things like native ads. Blocking shitty ads should be easier though.
More likely is an antitrust lawsuit.
My take: Ad wrangler attempts to quash competition by leveraging it's dominant browser share.
How on earth does an ad slinger take the moral high ground wrt ad intrusiveness or whatever is currently considered naughty by targets of ads?
Also what about my comment? If I publish something even on Facebook why I'm not paid too? Where is the limit? If there's "nothing free" principe why people help each others on forum? (it's start to become less and less) people don't want more to do free things, but this is bad, bad because it's was about helping, information, not about payment to read crap. or steal content from other (pinterest)
A while ago, Apple added ad blocking features to iOS 9, however users had to explicitly enable them by installing an adblocker apps. I have not seen significant impact by this move (G and FB are still growing).
They wouldn't be impacted by this at all, in my opinion who this hurts most is publishers.