Am I so very cynical, that I assume that Google Ads will be assumed by default to comply with these standards? And that therefore, those using Google Ads to advertise will have their ads shown 100% of the time, while the exact same ad served on the same page, but via a different ad network, might not be shown?
>In dialogue with the Coalition and other industry groups, we plan to have Chrome stop showing ads (including those owned or served by Google) on websites that are not compliant with the Better Ads Standards starting in early 2018.
If this follows the trend of what happened to YouTube advertising (TV 2.0) in that certain websites will be targeted for demonetization without any transparency or consistency, this will open a giant hole for competitors to eat one of Alphabet's core businesses. Perhaps leveraging this use of control over Chrome to effectively cripple competing ad networks with perfectly reasonable ads on websites that don't want to provide profit to Google will open them to litigation as well.
Does this begin to count as anticompetitive behavior in the form of Tying? especially if you're correct and Google Ads are by default complaint. If google were to, say, change what compliance means regularly enough (which would be a pretty low bar,) ad buyers have no choice but to rely on Google Ads.
Because of experience with large companies. Why would you think they wouldn't do this when this sort of "self policing" has pretty much always ended the way the OP suggests?
Curious to see mention of SeaMonkey! Do you have personal experience with it, and if so how does it stack up?
Was checking to see how often it appears on HN and it seems to have shown up a handful of times with the recent discussions of the browser wars, along with another Firefox-derivative/alternative I've never heard of before: PaleMoon.
SeaMonkey's pretty good -- it's Firefox oriented towards developers. I almost feel like it's a bit faster than Firefox proper, even though I'd expect it to be slower from extra developer tools; regardless, it can run all the same plugins, and it's a good choice of browser for software-related jobs.
I'd rather someone implement a tipping API where I can allocate money per website per minute (or hour spent). When the money runs out, depending on the configuration, the website can choose to serve me the page or ask me to reload (on money for the website)
They get small amounts of micro transactions (I'm talking less than a cent) and I change my behavior to stop going to useless sites.
everyone wins!
personally, I believe ads are a disease. if your website isn't worth paying a penny to go to for an hour, then just shut down. a penny an hour could be very sustainable for plenty of sites. take some random forum: 15,000 thousand users per month, let's say the average user goes on for an hour a day, or 30 hours a month. 450,000 cents is about 5 thousand a month. not too shabby. if your website is that awesome up the price to 10 cents and increase your money an order of magnitude.
the problem is the culture of "free", unfortunately.
That is "pay to block ads" and doesn't cover the OP's use case of "pay to use this site" (afaik, I could be wrong). That use case is important for sites that don't want to use ads in the first place.
It goes through Google, and the whole point of ad blockers (for me) is to block Google's tracking/surveillance crap.
So, it is dead on arrival for me and all the other privacy-minded people that run ad blockers, which is a large and increasing percentage of the population.
The entire advertising market worldwide is $600 billion, which works out to roughly $600 per man, woman, and child among the 1 billion inhabitants of the US, EU, Japan, CA, AU, and NZ. (Or OECD states, if you prefer, or G-7.)
Total media spend (print) is on the order of $200/year. Cable + broadband on the order of $1500 - $3000 per year (content and connectivity).
Seems to me there's some streamlining potential possible.
Not the grandparent poster, but I would have preferred if you'd either ommitted this part or provided some justification for why you feel it isn't a ~~public~~ non-rivalrous good.
I defined public information as having the property of: free access. I don't believe information inherently is public for the same reason I believe in privacy.
is there public information? sure. there's also private information.
We prototyped a JS version of that during a hack day, with the intent being that people could elect to donate some mining time to charity while using a client's website.
It worked, technically, but the return was basically zero.
That's too bad. It was always something I wanted to prototype but I had a feeling it just wouldn't be worth it. Do you have any statistics like average BTC produced per 8 hours of browsing or something?
I don't remember off-hand; it wasn't my team. I can dig them up if you'd like though, fire me an email at duncan@bayne.id.au. IIRC it worked out something like a few cents for our entire (sizable) user base.
Assume that one person works full time on it. $5,000 a month is $60,000 a year. Subtract hosting costs and it's a relatively low income for one person who has the skills necessary to build and administer such a web site.
hosting 15,000 users a month is trivial for a forum use case. building a forum is also trivial. you can literally do the entire thing in 15 minutes (buy a domain, use cPanel, install phpBB, done). I think 5K a month is more than appropriate.
you're greatly overestimating the difficulty of setting up a forum and the costs to have 15,000 active accounts with 1 hour viewing time.
> hosting 15,000 users a month is trivial for a forum use case. building a forum is also trivial. you can literally do the entire thing in 15 minutes (buy a domain, use cPanel, install phpBB, done).
Given the above is true, I have a proposition for you: I will pay you whatever you consider fair payment for fifteen minutes of your time to set me up a web site with an income of $5,000 dollars a month.
What an idiotic response. He didn't say if you spend 15 minutes setting up the site you will make $5,000 per month. He said if you have content that 15,000 people a month find valuable, and if you could charge them 1 cent per hour on the site, you could make $5,000/month and that the setup costs were negligible. You're actively being ignorant. Just stop it.
What? I didn't say finding 15K users and getting them to pay a cent an hour was easy. I said setting up a website that can easily support 15K users is.
I've already provided instructions on how you can trivially setup a phpBB forum using cPanel.
> I change my behavior to stop going to useless sites.
But how would you know if a site is useless or not unless you visit it and read its content? So you will be paying to view a site that you have never seen before, this will limit discoverability of new sites imo
under this scheme any smart website owner would allow certain amounts of usage to be for free, and optimize discoverability for things that are of high value, a win for both them and the viewer.
> But how would you know if a site is useless or not unless you visit it and read its content?
Noscript identifies all the useless sites for me when nothing renders and I see that they're pulling in scripts from 20+ trackers, CDNs, and ad networks. I avoid violating any social contract by never having seen their dreck.
Charging money isn't a great solution as it's too complicated and fee-ridden to be of value to low income users.
P2P CDNs are one solution, but they aren't perfect either. They may be a lot easier to adopt than monetary roadblocks though.
In the future, a combination of mandatory P2P CDN participation and a monetary P2P CDN opt-out fee may be the best compromise. No ads, and everyone is actually helping host the website (be it through their own personal bandwidth and storage or through monetary means).
I don't see how charging money is any more complicated than serving ads. Couldn't you trivially implement this with a NEED_TIP header and some javascript on the website that makes sure the user has paid (there are plenty of ways to implement that).
For some types of site, hosting is a big portion of the cost. For others, content production is. For example, I doubt hosting fees are the real cost for most news organizations. It's likely a huge percentage of the cost for something like imgur.
If you pay a small amount for each page load, then you start censoring many of your clicks. Also, websites would do any shady thing to keep you longer. Money are a large influence on everyone's behavior.
This is sad. When you follow the link they provide for the Better Ads Standard there is a link to the coalition's privacy policy at the bottom of the page which says clear as day that third parties such as social networks are monitoring your use of the site to facilitate "interest based advertising". That says it all, they want ads to be more palatable so them and their accomplices can track your every digital move. This will make Creepy Google tons of money by selling out their most precious resource while they continue to build skynet.
"Don't Be Evil" was basic PR: figure out what you're most hated for, and loudly, repeatedly insist that you're the opposite of it. Delta promises comfort and ease in coach, which should only remind you of how hellish that experience can be; Google bragging that they weren't evil should've been an instant red flag.
I don't know ... I fly Delta coach twice a week and it's pretty comfy, and I'm a big guy. Also 'don't be evil' was around before anyone really hated Google for anything. I think they actually meant it at the time. I like a good dose of cynicism as much as the next guy but we should give credit where it's due.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if that was true, particularly given Google's incredibly close relationship and revolving door with the government. I haven't read The Silicon Jungle, but I might have to do that now.
I wasn't going to give-up uBlock origin just because Google introduced "better ads", and the reason for that is tracking. Where's the "better tracking" policy (by which I mean less tracking)? But as you say, tracking is only going to get worse with Google's "better" ads.
As for don't be evil, I think that was completely lost right around the time they started using their algorithms to favor their services in the "neutral" Google search, and when they started influencing search results to help certain political candidates.
The context in which "Don't be evil" was coined was one where the dominant tech company was being sued by multiple nations for rampant abuse of its monopoly position to do things like push competitors out of business and force business partners into ridiculously bad positions.
By contrast, tracking people who by and large don't care enough to try and stop it is not particularly evil. You and I might see it as a great evil, but it seems unfair to accuse Google of hypocrisy for not valuing the same things as I do.
Good point, but I would argue that people who don't care today might start to care tomorrow when the intelligence they unwittingly provided is used against them. Taking advantage of people's ignorance is not the same as allowing for real informed consent.
This is an exact example of Google abusing its monopoly position to push competitors out of business, and Google is currently under antitrust investigation in several countries (including three separate antitrust charges in the EU).
Are you aware of how the Open Handset Alliance works? It's a 'partnership' where Google decides if you get to be in it, you have to sign a contract with Google, and Google can threaten to kick you out.
Suffice to say, Google claiming to listen to industry standard agencies Google was part of founding doesn't mean much to me.
Right. I hate the idea of being manipulated at least as much as I hate being distracted by ads. I would happily pay for ad-free content, at the same rates that ad networks pay to insert ads. But otherwise, I will do whatever it takes to block tracking and ads.
I was angry when I posted this yesterday. My anger has dissipated a bit, but I haven't been able to stop thinking about this issue.
I think what might actually help this situation is a simple new regulation giving people the right to be notified when data about them is bought or sold including the name of both buyers and sellers and the data in question. If Google had to inform you when they sold your data we could at least be aware when we are being tracked and by whom. The current system where we blindly click "I agree" is broken. people do not want to wade through all the legalese and shouldn't have to. What they would be more likely to read is a simple csv containing every datapoint which was collected about them and to whom it was sold.
The whole "Don't be evil" thing, I believe, led to an expectation of Google to act in at least a responsible manner. Given the control they have over our lives it is time to start enabling us to verify the veracity of their claims.
If this was enacted, then I don't think people would mind ditching the ad blockers as much.
I don't know if Google is evil or not, but its looking scary as hell from over here.
IMO, this is begging for an anti-trust lawsuit. Google, the largest advertiser on the web, building web browsers that block other networks ads. I believe they're going through with it now partially because they don't expect an active anti-trust presence from the trump admin.
> But other ad companies don't get to set those rules.
Strictly, neither does Google, as long as they are following the industry group's standard. Sure, Google is a member of that group and may be able to influence the standard, but so are a lot of other companies, from Facebook to the Washington Post. I doubt any one company can run away with the standard without the others having a say, or at least making a big stink.
This is dumb. Even if I admit a lot of these ads annoy me.
Back in the day Google would just lower the ranking of sites with banner ads. That sort of makes sense. They're a worse result, so show them lower. Fine. We should still decide this with traffic, but hey we can debate that.
To give Google/Chrome broad authorization to block people from seeing content that Google doesn't like scares the hell out of me, even if it's under a thoughtful banner.
Random made up example- what if next time Google picks a consumer advocacy group that says PayPal is a bad service, and blocks ads on sites that use PayPal? (Google offers Wallet)
I would grant them blocking ads that activate Android vibration- I consider that borderline malware. I grant pop-up ads, opening a new tab I didn't ask for is also arguably malware. I do not grant them blocking a wide variety of types of content just because marketers are abusing it. That's bad precedent. Rank them down, warn the user, heck put a "click to play Flash" lock on it. But don't take control away.
Google also hints at services that would let a website lock down when it detects ad blocking and force people to pay or otherwise engage to get access to the site. I think that's already one trojan horse. Google can stop you from trying to generate revenue off users, oh by the way we sell a new system where you can pay to get that back.
I don't like anything about this, even though I agree that screw those ads.
A few years ago, Chrome decided not to add a "mute tab" option, explaining, "After much debate, we decided not to proceed with a tab mute control, as this crosses a very important line: If we provide Chrome controls for content, we’re implying that Chrome should take on a responsibility to police content."[1]
It appears their opinion has changed. Of course, it's likely due to financial reasons[2].
That said, Chrome has blocked pop-ups forever... and I think I agree with this decision, as it will help both Google and content owners. I don't think most people won't install ad blockers if ads aren't obnoxious.
Despite the overwhelming negative reaction in that discussion thread, Google decided to go ahead with it. What does that really say about Google and friends?
> Despite the overwhelming negative reaction in that discussion thread, Google decided to go ahead with it. What does that really say about Google and friends?
It says "Google is a very large corporation employing tens of thousands of people which does not make decisions based on discussions by a few individuals posting anonymously on a web forum".
Good point, I do fall for the reinforcing echos of like-minded people. It's good to be reminded once in a while, but I do still find Google's, Facebook's and more recently Microsoft's business model really creepy.
Way ahead of you: "With Funding Choices, now in beta, publishers can show a customized message to visitors using an ad blocker, inviting them to either enable ads on their site, or pay for a pass that removes all ads on that site through the new Google Contributor."
The ad networks that aren't Google aren't going to be happy. They may admit that this could reduce the use of full ad blockers but they're going to loathe that they had no say. Plus, these experiences were shitty for the user but they must have worked.
From a publisher point of view, on the one hand, this is likely to bring reduced revenue from the folks who don't use ad blockers, that will be bad for the publishers. On the other hand, there's the hope that users will stop installing ad blockers and revenue should finally stabilise somewhat. Like the ad networks, I think many publishers will be upset about not having a choice.
And finally, from a user perspective, this doesn't go far enough. Many users will install ad blockers to get rid of the ads on YouTube alone and there are a ton of other unacceptable ad formats that the "Better Ads Standards" don't cover (like animated ads, small sticky ads, ads that look like download buttons).
It seems to me like Google's desperately trying to plug the leak on a sinking boat with a straw. It might mitigate things for a while but it won't do anything to solve the actual problem.
> but they're going to loathe that they had no say.
They had a say. They could have responded to the race to the bottom state of ad display tech. They could have recognized that they were in a tragedy of the commons and formed a coalition for better ads.
They didn't. They continued the race to the bottom.
Each day they continued to push awful ads that harmed the user they were voicing their opinion.
Mobile really is far worse than desktop web without a blocker, especially on Chrome on Android compared to my previous iOS or Windows Phones. I'd never seen so many driveby attempts to install crappy software.
The desktop web is still a horrible experience, especially on slow connections or slow computers. Turn off adblock, open the inspector and you'll see ads consuming >90% of bandwidth, memory and CPU, even on mainstream sites. It really is an absurd situation.
> And finally, from a user perspective, this doesn't go far enough. Many users will install ad blockers to get rid of the ads on YouTube alone and there are a ton of other unacceptable ad formats that the "Better Ads Standards" don't cover (like animated ads, small sticky ads, ads that look like download buttons).
There were many years when adblockers were readily available but not extremely widespread. The typical user has to hit a fairly high irritation threshold before seeking a technical solution to this kind of thing; I think the rise of adblockers is a direct response to ads getting catastrophically worse. If that can be dialed back a bit and stop the race to the bottom, it may help at least a bit.
Nah. I don't want any asshole with a few cents trying to program my consciousness to buy their shit, regardless of whether or not the programming is animated or garish.
I dunno, I mean I wouldn't be surprised if you are right, but I also think the definition of "acceptable" advertising tends towards the "no advertising at all" side of the spectrum.
Like I just said, browser ad blockers have been around for well over a decade, but their installed base has been a pretty small proportion of users until the past few years. A lot of people don't seem to be hugely bothered by a certain level of advertising, at least not enough to go to the effort of installing an adblocker.
Personally, I'd much rather have no advertising at all, but until recently I tried to only block problematic sites, use ABP's Acceptable Ads, and so forth, because I want to support the sites I use regularly even at the cost of very minor irritation. I switched to a scorched-earth policy when it got so bad that many sites were suffering major performance degradation, and many others were plastered with bottom-feeding ads that were actively offensive to me. If things actually improve by some miracle, I'd consider throttling it back a bit.
I'm not talking about you. Or me, for that matter. I'm talking about the mass of people whose ad impressions pay for pretty much the entire internet right now. Like it or not, the kind of ads they will and won't put up with have a large impact on the sites you and I use every day.
You're implying the internet wouldn't exist without advertising, with is laughably false and exactly what the people with loud, shitty, privacy-invading ads want you to think.
Most of the sites that most people use are ad-supported to some extent. For better or worse, remove the ads and those sites go away. If you don't believe that's true, please provide a counterargument.
>Plus, these experiences were shitty for the user but they must have worked
I spent years as a data scientist in the online display advertising space, and I was shocked at how much of a disconnect there was between advertiser ROI and clicks/impressions/whatever metric is being sold to the advertiser. There are very few parties whose best interests involved clearing up that connection. I heard one story of an ad executive getting fired for introducing A/B testing to their advertisers and proving the negative ROI.
Big flashy ads certainly improve clicks, but it's not clear if they make a customer want to buy a product.
Discussion at my office a few years ago about the economics of an ad-related service:
Me: "...and of course the advertisers will want to minimize the price they pay per ad..."
PM: "You'd be surprised"
Apparently marketing departments are often in situations where spending their entire budget is more important than getting views or conversions (so they can request a bigger budget next quarter), and they'll be annoyed if an ad broker spends less than they wanted even if they got more and better impressions.
I agree that it's the number #1 reason that a person should use ad blocking. Not only are ads delivering malware but given how much of our lives and personal information pass through a browser the ads should be considered malware themselves.
However, is security the #1 reason that users choose to install them? Nah, they get installed because ads are annoying.
I say this as a cautionary tale, the most dangerous thing ad networks could do is clean up their act. If ads start being unobtrusive or native users wont be driven to install ad blockers while the rampant tracking and invasion of privacy continues in the background.
>Many users will install ad blockers to get rid of the ads on YouTube alone
This is the interesting part to me. I'm not completely sold that Google's idea of what ads are "the worst" is really true.
Without an ad blocker, I can dismiss irritating popups in a second. But I have to wait for YouTube ads.
I also suspect many people are unaware which things in a Google search result are ads. While the ads Google is calling out are irritating, they are at least obviously ads, and thus...less misleading.
So I don't think that less ad blockers means higher revenue. Do you believe that the people who go through the effort of installing ad blockers would actually click on ads if the ad blockers were disabled?
A single data point, but: I have a few white listed sites where I allow ads because they are not terrible and I wish to support the site, and have occasionally clicked them.
Advertising is not bad or evil per se, it's the "quality" of the advertisement that matters.
> The ad networks that aren't Google aren't going to be happy.
Does it matter at all to Google if other ad networks are happy? I don't see any way this could not "go down well" for Google, I don't know about the other folks though, who knows.
The biggest ad company in the world gets to decide what is and isn't acceptable for an ad and actively censor it in the most popular browser in the world? It's funny how some things turn out in the long run. I don't see the situation getting better anytime soon. At this point, Chrome is the new IE6: whatever they choose becomes standard because of their huge market share. Ho well, at least it doesn't break all of my sites.
At least there's new versions of Chrome and it has automatic updates. The real bear with IE6 wasn't the state of the tech when it was released, it was that enterprises were stuck with it for ages.
Not IE: not bundled, not integrated, easily uninstalled. If people don't like this move, there are a myriad of other browsers available for them to choose from.
Microsoft tried to tie it in as much as they could to leverage it being the default and justify it being bundled, but the other vendors share at least an equal share of the blame for completely dropping the ball.
How long did Netscape Navigator/Communicator 4 linger? How many wasted resources were poured into things like the integrated page builder in Communicator instead of features? Do you remember trying to use Netscape 6 Beta or whatever it was called before it became Mozilla?
IE 5 and 6 were initially just that much better. Heck, IE was even the best browser on Mac for a while circa 2000-2002ish.
MS deserves a ton of extra blame for letting IE6 stagnate for five freaking years until Phoenix->Firebird->Firefox got them off their asses again, but don't blame them for having the better product when that initial war was won.
But, another key difference here is that Google has much more incentive to keep improving Chrome and web standards even if they get more and more market share, since their user-facing products are web properties, and Microsoft's were not at the time.
I'm not sure that's entirely fair to Netscape and Mozilla. Early versions of IE had absolutely horrible standards compliance, so there was a substantial lock-in effect. Other browser developers had to expend considerable resources to emulate IE's rendering, bug for bug. Even Microsoft had to bend over backwards to maintain compatibility, via the once notorious quirks mode.
> The biggest ad company in the world gets to decide what is and isn't acceptable for an ad
Did we read the same article, because that's not an accurate representation of what I read. Google is implementing an industry group standard. Sure, Google is part of that industry group, but so are Facebook and The Washington Post. I doubt Google can run away with the standard without other making a big stink out of it.
As long as Chrome actually follows the standard, characterizing this as "Google dictating what is and isn't acceptable for an ad" is not accurate.
"Google is implementing an industry group standard." There are two ways to buy ads on the internet: Google or Facebook. I don't think facebook sells ads on publisher sites. So if you are a publisher, you better do what google wants - they are only guys with inventory.
> There are two ways to buy ads on the internet: Google or Facebook.
I decided to check this. A simple google query and the first result[1] show you to be very wrong. Google does have a majority (with the top three spots being google properties totaling just under 72% of the market), but 7 out of 10 is by no means all.
I'm not making a case Google isn't dominant, but it's plain that it's easy to use a different ad company if you want. 28% is not some minuscule number, it's over one in four. And that's not including Facebook, because they only sell on their own platform, but that means the total impressions Google serves are far below the numbers given.
You stated as a publisher you better do what Google wants because they are the only guys with inventory. That's obviously false and undercuts whatever point it was supporting. That it isn't changed by a pithy response.
When the Washington Post has a Browser with 70%+ of the market and Facebook is the biggest advertiser on the web (they currently only advertise on their properties) then it will be balanced. As it stands, Google has a very unbalanced influence on implementation and the standards themselves.
My parents don't realise that when they click on the top link of a google search result, they are clicking on an ad. I'd guess that many many other people don't realise this either.
That would seem to categorise these adverts as deceptive, right? So, when will Google be blocking these adverts?
Eh, I'm using adblockers forever. There is zero content that I absolutely can't live without. I miss the "old" days when folks were publishing sites for the love of what they were doing.
None of this solves the fundamental problem with ad-centered revenue models, which is that advertising has driven down the quality of content by forcing sites to optimize for cheap clicks. Even if you're blocking ads, you're still being affected by them, because they're driving the strategies of the sites you visit and defining the metrics by which they judge their own success.
Don't get me wrong; this is an improvement, and a welcome one in my opinion. Pre-stitials in particular were never anything more than a slimy way to get around pop-up blockers. But ultimately the internet needs a new way to make money. I don't claim to know what that is, unfortunately, but I think the problem is clear.
> ultimately the internet needs a new way to make money
This would be the point where I advocate for snowdrift.coop, if I were not exhausted and on mobile. wiki.snowdrift.coop has more info than the main site right now.
Compromise: an agreement or a settlement of a dispute that is reached by each side making concessions.
If any one side were perfectly happy with this solution, it would probably mean it's not a very good solution. Of course the ad networks don't want to have to follow any standards. Of course the content producers that are making good money with ads that may fall foul of this don't want anything to change that might reduce their revenue. Of course users would rather get rid of all ads. None of that is realistic or sustainable. If advertising doesn't get its act together, ad blocking will increase even more over the large year-over-year increases it's already seeing[1], and at some point content producers will find they aren't making enough money anymore to sustain that advertising model because nobody is seeing their ads, and it will all come crashing down.
Would another model rise up in its place? Sure. Would that be any comfort to the people that ended up having to get a different job because what they were doing was no longer sustainable and no new model can take over instantaneously? Doubtful.
Whatever you want the eventual model to be, the only way forward that doesn't strangle the market while it's happening includes everyone involved taking responsibility for their part. And this definitely includes the consumers. Your "I can do whatever I want to bits delivered to me / I have no responsibility to watch the advertising expected to fund the content I'm consuming" arguments never really held up anyway, and they definitely don't if the other side gets its act together.
Privacy concerns are still valid, but ad blockers never actually fixed that, they just added an extra level of complexity to the equation. Use facebook? Guess what facebook probably knows about every site you've visited that has a like button while your facebook session is still active. Your only hope is legislation, and you'll be lucky not to get a raw deal out of that, and your only hope of a good outcome there is awareness and activism. Acting like your ad-blocker actually helps all that much is just sticking your head in the sand when that's the next real fight for online rights.
What they mean here is actually "We plan to have Chrome hide ads that do not comply with Google's standards" and I challenge anyone to show that this isn't Google trying to silo advertising even more than they already do.
This really gives legitimacy to all ad-blockers; although I guess that ship has mostly sailed anyway. Still, you can't say it's inherently wrong if you implement some version of it yourself.
It's buried a bit, but the most noticeable change is arguably that Google is productizing blocking ad blockers. From the release:
"As part of our efforts to maintain a sustainable web for everyone, we want to help publishers with good ad experiences get paid for their work. With Funding Choices, now in beta, publishers can show a customized message to visitors using an ad blocker, inviting them to either enable ads on their site, or pay for a pass that removes all ads on that site through the new Google Contributor."
182 comments
[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 227 ms ] thread>In dialogue with the Coalition and other industry groups, we plan to have Chrome stop showing ads (including those owned or served by Google) on websites that are not compliant with the Better Ads Standards starting in early 2018.
This will be interesting.
Search advertising revenue is #1 by far.
Google can make a lot of mistakes in every other vertical. As long as they don't screw up search they can fail as much as they want.
Was checking to see how often it appears on HN and it seems to have shown up a handful of times with the recent discussions of the browser wars, along with another Firefox-derivative/alternative I've never heard of before: PaleMoon.
They get small amounts of micro transactions (I'm talking less than a cent) and I change my behavior to stop going to useless sites.
everyone wins!
personally, I believe ads are a disease. if your website isn't worth paying a penny to go to for an hour, then just shut down. a penny an hour could be very sustainable for plenty of sites. take some random forum: 15,000 thousand users per month, let's say the average user goes on for an hour a day, or 30 hours a month. 450,000 cents is about 5 thousand a month. not too shabby. if your website is that awesome up the price to 10 cents and increase your money an order of magnitude.
the problem is the culture of "free", unfortunately.
https://brave.com/publishers.html
https://contributor.google.com
Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14467702
So, it is dead on arrival for me and all the other privacy-minded people that run ad blockers, which is a large and increasing percentage of the population.
Pay those who create it.
Allow free access to public information.
The entire advertising market worldwide is $600 billion, which works out to roughly $600 per man, woman, and child among the 1 billion inhabitants of the US, EU, Japan, CA, AU, and NZ. (Or OECD states, if you prefer, or G-7.)
Total media spend (print) is on the order of $200/year. Cable + broadband on the order of $1500 - $3000 per year (content and connectivity).
Seems to me there's some streamlining potential possible.
Piecework is actually a tremendous distraction.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes...
http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343...
J. Stiglitz's essay on p. 308.
Not the grandparent poster, but I would have preferred if you'd either ommitted this part or provided some justification for why you feel it isn't a ~~public~~ non-rivalrous good.
Quite this.
is there public information? sure. there's also private information.
The definition you are using is not that.
It worked, technically, but the return was basically zero.
Assume that one person works full time on it. $5,000 a month is $60,000 a year. Subtract hosting costs and it's a relatively low income for one person who has the skills necessary to build and administer such a web site.
> not too shabby
It is actually a little shabby.
Perhaps in many parts of the US, but plenty of places elsewhere in the world, this is a really attractive salary.
you're greatly overestimating the difficulty of setting up a forum and the costs to have 15,000 active accounts with 1 hour viewing time.
Given the above is true, I have a proposition for you: I will pay you whatever you consider fair payment for fifteen minutes of your time to set me up a web site with an income of $5,000 dollars a month.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I've already provided instructions on how you can trivially setup a phpBB forum using cPanel.
This statement is incorrect. You haven't provided instructions on how one can trivially set up a phpBB forum using cPanel.
But how would you know if a site is useless or not unless you visit it and read its content? So you will be paying to view a site that you have never seen before, this will limit discoverability of new sites imo
Yeah, you might risk your five bucks on that first purchase of Time, but you'll know soon enough if you ever want to spend it again.
Noscript identifies all the useless sites for me when nothing renders and I see that they're pulling in scripts from 20+ trackers, CDNs, and ad networks. I avoid violating any social contract by never having seen their dreck.
P2P CDNs are one solution, but they aren't perfect either. They may be a lot easier to adopt than monetary roadblocks though.
In the future, a combination of mandatory P2P CDN participation and a monetary P2P CDN opt-out fee may be the best compromise. No ads, and everyone is actually helping host the website (be it through their own personal bandwidth and storage or through monetary means).
Whatever happened to "Don't be evil"?
"Shumeet Baluja, Ph.D., is currently a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google..."
https://research.google.com/pubs/author35.html
As for don't be evil, I think that was completely lost right around the time they started using their algorithms to favor their services in the "neutral" Google search, and when they started influencing search results to help certain political candidates.
By contrast, tracking people who by and large don't care enough to try and stop it is not particularly evil. You and I might see it as a great evil, but it seems unfair to accuse Google of hypocrisy for not valuing the same things as I do.
Suffice to say, Google claiming to listen to industry standard agencies Google was part of founding doesn't mean much to me.
> Whatever happened to "Don't be evil"?
Greed killed it.
I think what might actually help this situation is a simple new regulation giving people the right to be notified when data about them is bought or sold including the name of both buyers and sellers and the data in question. If Google had to inform you when they sold your data we could at least be aware when we are being tracked and by whom. The current system where we blindly click "I agree" is broken. people do not want to wade through all the legalese and shouldn't have to. What they would be more likely to read is a simple csv containing every datapoint which was collected about them and to whom it was sold.
The whole "Don't be evil" thing, I believe, led to an expectation of Google to act in at least a responsible manner. Given the control they have over our lives it is time to start enabling us to verify the veracity of their claims.
If this was enacted, then I don't think people would mind ditching the ad blockers as much.
I don't know if Google is evil or not, but its looking scary as hell from over here.
Strictly, neither does Google, as long as they are following the industry group's standard. Sure, Google is a member of that group and may be able to influence the standard, but so are a lot of other companies, from Facebook to the Washington Post. I doubt any one company can run away with the standard without the others having a say, or at least making a big stink.
Back in the day Google would just lower the ranking of sites with banner ads. That sort of makes sense. They're a worse result, so show them lower. Fine. We should still decide this with traffic, but hey we can debate that.
To give Google/Chrome broad authorization to block people from seeing content that Google doesn't like scares the hell out of me, even if it's under a thoughtful banner.
Random made up example- what if next time Google picks a consumer advocacy group that says PayPal is a bad service, and blocks ads on sites that use PayPal? (Google offers Wallet)
I would grant them blocking ads that activate Android vibration- I consider that borderline malware. I grant pop-up ads, opening a new tab I didn't ask for is also arguably malware. I do not grant them blocking a wide variety of types of content just because marketers are abusing it. That's bad precedent. Rank them down, warn the user, heck put a "click to play Flash" lock on it. But don't take control away.
Google also hints at services that would let a website lock down when it detects ad blocking and force people to pay or otherwise engage to get access to the site. I think that's already one trojan horse. Google can stop you from trying to generate revenue off users, oh by the way we sell a new system where you can pay to get that back.
I don't like anything about this, even though I agree that screw those ads.
It appears their opinion has changed. Of course, it's likely due to financial reasons[2].
That said, Chrome has blocked pop-ups forever... and I think I agree with this decision, as it will help both Google and content owners. I don't think most people won't install ad blockers if ads aren't obnoxious.
[1]https://thenextweb.com/google/2014/02/11/google-explains-won...
[2]http://www.businessinsider.com/pagefair-2017-ad-blocking-rep...
EDIT: Found an article: https://venturebeat.com/2015/10/20/you-can-now-mute-tabs-in-...
It says "Google is a very large corporation employing tens of thousands of people which does not make decisions based on discussions by a few individuals posting anonymously on a web forum".
The ad networks that aren't Google aren't going to be happy. They may admit that this could reduce the use of full ad blockers but they're going to loathe that they had no say. Plus, these experiences were shitty for the user but they must have worked.
From a publisher point of view, on the one hand, this is likely to bring reduced revenue from the folks who don't use ad blockers, that will be bad for the publishers. On the other hand, there's the hope that users will stop installing ad blockers and revenue should finally stabilise somewhat. Like the ad networks, I think many publishers will be upset about not having a choice.
And finally, from a user perspective, this doesn't go far enough. Many users will install ad blockers to get rid of the ads on YouTube alone and there are a ton of other unacceptable ad formats that the "Better Ads Standards" don't cover (like animated ads, small sticky ads, ads that look like download buttons).
It seems to me like Google's desperately trying to plug the leak on a sinking boat with a straw. It might mitigate things for a while but it won't do anything to solve the actual problem.
They had a say. They could have responded to the race to the bottom state of ad display tech. They could have recognized that they were in a tragedy of the commons and formed a coalition for better ads.
They didn't. They continued the race to the bottom.
Each day they continued to push awful ads that harmed the user they were voicing their opinion.
I agree with the rest of your comments, though...
My guess is that the Internet will be just fine.
There were many years when adblockers were readily available but not extremely widespread. The typical user has to hit a fairly high irritation threshold before seeking a technical solution to this kind of thing; I think the rise of adblockers is a direct response to ads getting catastrophically worse. If that can be dialed back a bit and stop the race to the bottom, it may help at least a bit.
Personally, I'd much rather have no advertising at all, but until recently I tried to only block problematic sites, use ABP's Acceptable Ads, and so forth, because I want to support the sites I use regularly even at the cost of very minor irritation. I switched to a scorched-earth policy when it got so bad that many sites were suffering major performance degradation, and many others were plastered with bottom-feeding ads that were actively offensive to me. If things actually improve by some miracle, I'd consider throttling it back a bit.
https://www.betterads.org/members/
I spent years as a data scientist in the online display advertising space, and I was shocked at how much of a disconnect there was between advertiser ROI and clicks/impressions/whatever metric is being sold to the advertiser. There are very few parties whose best interests involved clearing up that connection. I heard one story of an ad executive getting fired for introducing A/B testing to their advertisers and proving the negative ROI.
Big flashy ads certainly improve clicks, but it's not clear if they make a customer want to buy a product.
Me: "...and of course the advertisers will want to minimize the price they pay per ad..."
PM: "You'd be surprised"
Apparently marketing departments are often in situations where spending their entire budget is more important than getting views or conversions (so they can request a bigger budget next quarter), and they'll be annoyed if an ad broker spends less than they wanted even if they got more and better impressions.
This. #1 reason for adblocking? Security. Fewer ads does mean fewer chances of malware... but it's still an attack vector.
Obligatory: Forbes proves the need for adblockers by blocking the ad blocker and serving pop under adware.
http://www.networkworld.com/article/3021113/security/forbes-...
However, is security the #1 reason that users choose to install them? Nah, they get installed because ads are annoying.
I say this as a cautionary tale, the most dangerous thing ad networks could do is clean up their act. If ads start being unobtrusive or native users wont be driven to install ad blockers while the rampant tracking and invasion of privacy continues in the background.
https://github.com/reek/anti-adblock-killer
If you use UblockOrigin this is already an option in settings under "3rd-party filters."
This is the interesting part to me. I'm not completely sold that Google's idea of what ads are "the worst" is really true.
Without an ad blocker, I can dismiss irritating popups in a second. But I have to wait for YouTube ads.
I also suspect many people are unaware which things in a Google search result are ads. While the ads Google is calling out are irritating, they are at least obviously ads, and thus...less misleading.
Advertising is not bad or evil per se, it's the "quality" of the advertisement that matters.
Does it matter at all to Google if other ad networks are happy? I don't see any way this could not "go down well" for Google, I don't know about the other folks though, who knows.
Totally different than bundling it with the OS.
Except wait, they do that too.
it is not in /data, so it takes up no extra space
Microsoft tried to tie it in as much as they could to leverage it being the default and justify it being bundled, but the other vendors share at least an equal share of the blame for completely dropping the ball.
How long did Netscape Navigator/Communicator 4 linger? How many wasted resources were poured into things like the integrated page builder in Communicator instead of features? Do you remember trying to use Netscape 6 Beta or whatever it was called before it became Mozilla?
IE 5 and 6 were initially just that much better. Heck, IE was even the best browser on Mac for a while circa 2000-2002ish.
MS deserves a ton of extra blame for letting IE6 stagnate for five freaking years until Phoenix->Firebird->Firefox got them off their asses again, but don't blame them for having the better product when that initial war was won.
But, another key difference here is that Google has much more incentive to keep improving Chrome and web standards even if they get more and more market share, since their user-facing products are web properties, and Microsoft's were not at the time.
Did we read the same article, because that's not an accurate representation of what I read. Google is implementing an industry group standard. Sure, Google is part of that industry group, but so are Facebook and The Washington Post. I doubt Google can run away with the standard without other making a big stink out of it.
As long as Chrome actually follows the standard, characterizing this as "Google dictating what is and isn't acceptable for an ad" is not accurate.
I decided to check this. A simple google query and the first result[1] show you to be very wrong. Google does have a majority (with the top three spots being google properties totaling just under 72% of the market), but 7 out of 10 is by no means all.
1: https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/advertising-networks/
You stated as a publisher you better do what Google wants because they are the only guys with inventory. That's obviously false and undercuts whatever point it was supporting. That it isn't changed by a pithy response.
That would seem to categorise these adverts as deceptive, right? So, when will Google be blocking these adverts?
I assume it was also attempting to deliver some kind of payload as well, because the browser crashed on that page.
There is no way an advertising standard in which google was a part of laying the ground rules could be considered a "Better Ad".
Don't get me wrong; this is an improvement, and a welcome one in my opinion. Pre-stitials in particular were never anything more than a slimy way to get around pop-up blockers. But ultimately the internet needs a new way to make money. I don't claim to know what that is, unfortunately, but I think the problem is clear.
This would be the point where I advocate for snowdrift.coop, if I were not exhausted and on mobile. wiki.snowdrift.coop has more info than the main site right now.
http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/search?q=Tip+jar
If any one side were perfectly happy with this solution, it would probably mean it's not a very good solution. Of course the ad networks don't want to have to follow any standards. Of course the content producers that are making good money with ads that may fall foul of this don't want anything to change that might reduce their revenue. Of course users would rather get rid of all ads. None of that is realistic or sustainable. If advertising doesn't get its act together, ad blocking will increase even more over the large year-over-year increases it's already seeing[1], and at some point content producers will find they aren't making enough money anymore to sustain that advertising model because nobody is seeing their ads, and it will all come crashing down.
Would another model rise up in its place? Sure. Would that be any comfort to the people that ended up having to get a different job because what they were doing was no longer sustainable and no new model can take over instantaneously? Doubtful.
Whatever you want the eventual model to be, the only way forward that doesn't strangle the market while it's happening includes everyone involved taking responsibility for their part. And this definitely includes the consumers. Your "I can do whatever I want to bits delivered to me / I have no responsibility to watch the advertising expected to fund the content I'm consuming" arguments never really held up anyway, and they definitely don't if the other side gets its act together.
Privacy concerns are still valid, but ad blockers never actually fixed that, they just added an extra level of complexity to the equation. Use facebook? Guess what facebook probably knows about every site you've visited that has a like button while your facebook session is still active. Your only hope is legislation, and you'll be lucky not to get a raw deal out of that, and your only hope of a good outcome there is awareness and activism. Acting like your ad-blocker actually helps all that much is just sticking your head in the sand when that's the next real fight for online rights.
1: http://www.businessinsider.com/pagefair-2017-ad-blocking-rep...
"As part of our efforts to maintain a sustainable web for everyone, we want to help publishers with good ad experiences get paid for their work. With Funding Choices, now in beta, publishers can show a customized message to visitors using an ad blocker, inviting them to either enable ads on their site, or pay for a pass that removes all ads on that site through the new Google Contributor."