They won't discriminate against all 3rd parties at first, it would be too obvious. They will quietly grow the list of blocked 3rd parties, with the intention of gradually shifting all spend to AdSense/DoubleClick platforms.
I read the article but it doesn't clarify whether or not Google will hardcode a "whitelist" that will ignore EasyList entries for AdSense, DoubleClick, GoogleAnalytics, etc.
A comparable situation would be Windows 10 ignoring users' manually edited HOSTS file that attempts to block telemetry.[1] Microsoft has hardcoded hostname-to-ip resolution inside the networking stack (inside dnsapi.dll).
If Google decides that Chrome will ignore some entries in EasyList, it means EasyList is more of a "suggestions" filter rather than a "user's final authority" filter.
> A comparable situation would be Windows 10 ignoring users manually edited HOSTS file that attempts to block telemetry.[1] Microsoft has hardcoded ip to DNS resolution inside the networking stack (inside dnsapi.dll).
It's funny how Microsoft under Satya Nadella is heralded for opening up (embracing[0] open source, open standards, recognizing other platforms).
[0] I only noticed the irony a few seconds after writing that.
That article's sentence that you're pointing to does not explicitly address the specific whitelist scenario I laid out.
The article's sentence: "Google appears to be shipping the entirety of EasyList and EasyPrivacy; which includes blocking rules for Google’s own AdSense and DoubleClick advertisement platforms as well as Google Analytics,"
... is only talking about the existence of AdSense on EasyList -- because the entirety of EasyList entries is shipped. It does not talk about (or even speculate) whether Chrome will have a programming code that implements a whitelist to ignore certain entries.
There are only ~1000 words in that article. Is this the sentence you're referring to?
>The Better Ads Standards are a set of rules, one set for desktop and one for mobile, that define unacceptably intrusive, distracting, and annoying advertisement formats.
If so, "Better Ad Standards" is orthogonal to "AdSense standards".
Or put another way, "unacceptably intrusive, distracting, and annoying" is orthogonal to blocking "AdSense" url _domains_. E.g. See layout rules from AdSense guidelines.[2]
Why are we parsing the text differently? Are we talking about 2 different abstraction levels? I'm talking about EasyList as a network traffic filter. Maybe others are talking about EasyList as a rule source for _rendering_ DOM elements. (E.g. if AdSense is rendered in an intrusive popup overlay which already violates Google's rules and wil get AdSense accounts banned even before "Better Ads Standards" was adopted.) These are 2 different concepts.
Let's not over-read things in the article that are not actually there.
> Starting on February 15, in line with the Coalition's guidelines, Chrome will remove all ads from sites that have a "failing" status in the Ad Experience Report for more than 30 days. All of this information can be found in the Ad Experience Report Help Center, and our product forums are available to help address any questions or feedback.
It could not be more clear all ads will be removed from failing sites.
Again, I wasn't talking about "failing _websites_". I was talking about ad serving _domains_.
You've lost track of what the conversation was about and the substance of what I was responding to. Please re-read the previous post to reset.[1]
That post by d2wa was claiming a direct cause-&-effect blocking based purely on entries in EasyList.
I replied that the article makes no such irrefutable claim and that he was over-reading something that wasn't there.
You, on the other hand, are talking about "Better Ad Standards"[2] which is orthogonal to my reply to d2wa. Your repeated citation of it actually muddles the topic because the Google's longstanding approved rules for the correct layout of AdSense already adheres to "Better Ad Standards".
To restate the different conversations in pseudo-code...
Also see comment subtree[3] from Raymond Hill (uBlock maintainer that uses EasyList). Based on that, the pseudo-code would be:
if (BetterAdStandardsViolation) {
if (EasyList_entry_exists)
block(); // this line of code unreachable by correct use of AdSense
}
In summary...
EasyList is not the final authority on blocking AdSense. Since Google's existing guidelines for proper AdSense layout already complies with "Coalition for Better Ads", the existence of AdSense in EasyList is not relevant because the EasyList filter is selectively applied to failing websites. In other words, Chrome's ad blocker will not block AdSense the same way as uBlock.
So are we in agreement then? Google’s ad sense ads will be removed from sites that violate the better ad standard guidelines per google’s official documentation on this feature.
If so, the question here that you originally posed would be answered in the negative:
“I read the article but it doesn't clarify whether or not Google will hardcode a "whitelist" that will ignore EasyList entries for AdSense, DoubleClick, GoogleAnalytics, etc.”
>If so, the question here that you originally posed would be answered in the negative:
No. the answer is "positive" in the context of my reply to d2wa of how EasyList is not obeyed. The "whitelist" is achieved by correct use of AdSense. (See pseudo-code example #3 of how EasyList filter code is never reached for AdSense.) It does not work like uBlock.
"Google Chrome web browser will block every ad on websites that are not compliant with the Better Ads Standards [...] created by [...] companies like Microsoft and Google.".
"The standards ban ad formats like auto-playing video ads, large ads that stick to the screen when you scroll, and interstitial ads".
I agree. It seems like adblockers and intrusive and unethical advertising are creating almost a negative feedback loop on the internet: the more intrusive and annoying the ads, the more people use adblockers, and the more people use adblockers, the more intrusive and annoying the ads become, because they have to make up the revenue.
The only ones in a position to break this cycle is the browsers, and I welcome any attempt to try and create a more healthy environment for ads to exist in. It would be a great service for both users and the industry.
Funny that newspapers compromised by putting all the ads in a separate section. So serious shoppers could read that part when they wanted to, without ruining the paper for everybody. I of course just throw that section in the trash on my way out of the bodega.
Google's incentives here are still antithetical to my own, so I'm going to stick with uBlock. For example, on Google search, ads masquerade as legitimate search results. These used to be highlighted in light yellow, clearly marking them as different from organic search results. Now, they only have the word "Ad" in light grey text. This notice is on the right, intentionally where it will be overlooked when reading through the titles of each result.
I can't imagine that Google would start blocking their own ad network, let alone their own ads. Therefore, I'm sticking with an ad blocker that I control.
> These used to be highlighted in light yellow, clearly marking them as different from organic search results.
The specific shade of yellow was indiscernible from background white on a cheap laptop at almost any angle. I wish I'd taken a photo when I noticed. I knew people who had never even noticed the yellow, at all, let alone understood it was ads.
I know, Never Attribute To Malice and all that, but hot damn, that must have been a massive multi million dollar move of "ignorance".
> I know, Never Attribute To Malice and all that, but hot damn, that must have been a massive multi million dollar move of "ignorance".
I think that this saying gets misapplied quite frequently. If you are talking to someone one on one, then you should assume that they are simply mistaken. Otherwise, you don't stand a chance of convincing them to see things another way. On the other hand, in trying to predict somebody else's actions, assuming malice can give the most accurate prediction.
On the part of Google, I don't know whether the nigh-unidentifiable ads are the result of some cackling executive trying to trick people to click on ads, or whether it is the result of overzealous A/B testing that stumbled upon a dark pattern. In the end, it doesn't matter, and either one is a good approximation of what will happen in the future.
Remember when Google claimed that paid inclusion was one of the worst sins a search engine could commit? One so bad that it made it claim other search engines were evil?
Yeah, me too, but I don't think Google hopes to convince adblock users to revert to an adblock-free experience.
They're probably hoping (as is indeed stated in the article) that by removing the biggest pain points they will stop new users from seeking adblocking solutions.
We'll see what happens, but it doesn't seem an unreasonable thing to hope for.
How will this not lead to google strangling their competitors.
Are we really going to have to just trust them to use this fairly?
Will we really expect google to interpret the Better Ads Standard without any bias, treating their own ads equally to other ads?
Maybe they will be good, but I for one am not comfortable with this.
Imagine what happens when chrome decides Facebook ads deserve to be blocked.
According to the article, this is more about google's competitors strangling them (by being so intrusive that customers consider full ad blockers to be necessary).
This is a good thing. Advertising is one of the most effective ways companies have to let people know about their products - I'd say they're essential in free market economies. But having ads is one thing and completely disrupting the user experience is another. Finding a balance is a better approach than blocking all ads.
Advertising is primarily about making you buy a product from a particular company, whether it's a good product or not, whether it's right for you or not.
If it were about letting people know your products then 'Nide' would have "if you want these for cross-training the best show are 'Reebob' Cross2" on the advert for their training shoes.
Advertising is almost orthogonal to informative disclosure.
>Advertising is primarily about making you buy a product from a particular company, whether it's a good product or not, whether it's right for you or not.
That a pretty simplistic view. I never said ads are 100% true and want the best for you. Ads are informational as they inform you of the existence of a product and their basic characteristics. Small, well-targeted ads can be the only way someone that's just starting could have to let people know about the existence of their product. They don't hold a gun at you to force you to buy a product, they don't remove competition between companies, they don't prevent third-party review sites from existing. Buying or not buying them is up to each individual.
There are also what I call reminder ads. They don't tell you anything new or convince anyone to change their mind about whether they like a product, but they remind people of products they already like. (Movie theater ads about buying food and drinks, for example. Or milk ads.)
Advertisers want to make sure their customers don't forget to buy their stuff. This is much easier than actually convincing non-customers to do something new.
And is equally disgusting. I am a grown-ass adult. I can make choices in my life about habits, desires, and expenditures without any of your bullshit "reminders". I am not a toddler who needs to be set on a schedule for "feeding time".
Don't let advertising companies fool you. Your entire purpose to them is to be just as valuable as the average slaughterhouse cow
Ads are almost never how informed purchasers make decisions. In the age of the Internet, review systems (whether collaborative or curated) are infinitely better sources of product information than ads. They are also vulnerable to manipulation from would-be advertisers, but less so (and any influence can be mitigated by trusted reviewers).
Ads do tell you something about a company though. Like, do they waste a lot of money on marketing? Have a good sense of humour? Target my in-group as a customer? Pay attention to detail?
They don't seek to inform you so much as they seek to inform you that something exists whilst manipulating your emotions to get a particular reaction out of you and millions of other people. This is particularly blatant in AV ads.
The other thing, mainly regarding software ads, is they don't seek to inform you so much as manipulate you whilst tracking your every move to guarantee that the ad was effective. This is particularly blatant with the Google and Facebook ad networks, but pretty much almost any 2-bit ad company you've heard of on the web at least tries to do something similar.
So in the end, advertising has at least two major problems with trying to either 1. manipulate you directly through your emotions or 2. manipulating your computer bandwidth and CPU time to violate your privacy and oftentimes, security.
Regarding #1, there are always going to be people that think they're smart enough, intelligent enough, or logical enough that they will never fall prey to this vector of advertising, and almost universally they are wrong. I don't doubt some few exceptions exist, I just don't think I've ever actually met someone who is an exception, nor am I under any illusions that I am. Your best defense is to cut ads out of your life to greatest extent possible. You'll probably never cut bus ads out of your life, if you at all enjoy city living, but you don't have to let advertisers into your home either.
How do you find out about things after that point? If you are at all social, read any kinds of news sites, invest any money into markets, have any kind of skin in some kind of game, or engage in any kind of recreational activities, you'll have other channels of information. Generally the signal will be of a much higher quality than if you were personally bombarded with advertisements intentionally seeking to cut out a large slice of your overall attention bandwidth every single day.
Even before ad-blockers, I have never intentionally clicked on an internet ad, whether in search results or on a website. These days, I block ads with extreme prejudice so I never even see most ads.
But I don't hate the concept of advertising. I don't deny being influenced by ads, or even sometimes finding them informative. I just reject being tracked and targeted.
I have adblock on my primary chrome profile, but occasionally browse using a profile where it is disabled because [reasons]. My experience has been generally pleasant if you discount the low-quality ads that would be blocked under this new scheme.
Instead, I get ads for interesting new components on DigiKey or Mouser, or the similar, and I find myself clicking on ads several times a week because I'm genuinely interested in what I see -- it's like a news feed for unusual devices.
Imagine if your Twitter feed was served several tweets at a time embedded in other sites you regularly visit. You could argue it's a distraction, but but it's far from unpleasant. "Personalized ads" work a lot the same way for me.
What percentage of ads do you learn from compared to the number of ads that make you pissed off at both the company and the content that allowed the ads? Come on, now, be honest.
For me, that first number is very, very low. I consume just like a lot of other folks, but its mostly art stuff. I have money in my account mostly because I don't have much I actually want that doesn't take some saving for. Mostly, I think these people just want my information or want me to pass on their advertisements. Clothing wants me to advertise for them with products splattered with their logo. They can go diddle themselves.
Want me to watch ads? Pay me. Have actual ad standards. Stop trying to trick me with "information". Stop trying to trick me with popups. And so on. Until then, back to the diddling.
It's a bit surreal that an advertising based company's browser will now block annoying ads by default while the privacy focused Mozilla corporation's browser is still not implementing any kind of built-in ad blocking.
You should not see this as a Google vs Mozilla thing but as a Google vs adblockers and Google vs its competing advertising networks issue. Then it makes much more sense.
Well, I have Mozilla's back personally since I've always used only Firefox ever since version 1 and never used Chrome except for trying it out for a test drive from time to time, but the millions of Firefox users worldwide will now have one more reason to jump ship to Chrome and that's something Firefox can't afford at this point. Built-in ad blocking is just too good to pass up. Firefox needs to implement their own version soon, IMO.
I'm aware of this, but it seems to be only basic tracker blocking and not even near as flexible and comprehensive as say uBlock. They need to expand this significantly to offer something equivalent to this Chrome initiative. At the very least, offer the ability to add custom blacklists and per domain rules.
Pretty sure they use the same list as uBlock (and pretty much everything else now, including Disconnect and EFF's privacy badger). My understanding is it's based on Disconnect.
If you want that kind of flexibility it's easy to add, which means there is no reason for Firefox to have that by default.
It is basic tracker blocking. You can and should be doing more.
I run a Pi-hole on a Raspberry Pi and highly recommend it. It's blocks ads, beacons, trackers all at the DNS level. The crap never even has a chance to come down to your PC because it's never called. Easy to set up, takes about 30 minutes from start to finish. I couple this with my finely-tuned Firefox with uBlock Origin, Dencentraleyes, Privacy Badger, Webmail Ad Block, and No Coin. This is defence in depth. I never see anything resembling ads, beacons, or trackers.
The Pi-hole is highly configurable. You can add lots of blacklists to the already very capable list that is on by default. In addition, you can watch, in real time, all the calls being made and tune as you see fit. I was shocked to learn that my router, as well as other software, was phoning home. I nixed this behaviour on the Pi-hole immediately. It's a real eye opener to see what the software and devices on your network do and to whom they talk. The Pi-hole blocks bad crap for all devices on your network. You can even set up a free VPN on your router and use it for your mobile devices whilst your away from home.
The Pi-hole has become an indispensable tool on my network and I really think every person who cares about security should employ one for no other reason that it truly allows you to monitor your traffic in an easy-to-follow set of charts and traffic logs that are configurable. Well worth the time and little money involved.
The most annoying thing about Mozillas recent behavior is when they bake something into Firefox that should have been an addon. I for one am glad uBO or whatever isn't baked in.
You can trust a burglar to install a security system that will keep other burglars out, but you can be 100% sure that you will not be able to keep the installer out, in fact you are just about giving them an incentive to rob you blind at the first opportunity. Google will do an amazing job at blocking competitor ads.
Then why did the competitors, including the top competitors in terms of revenue, sign up to be part of the consortium?
I see this as a shot at piracy sites, if anything. Since they cannot join reputable ad networks, they join disreputable ones that don't even try to police their ads or publishers and show shady and misleading ads. Those will all be blocked now, choking the piracy sites of revenue.
The primary beneficiaries are content producers. The secondary beneficiaries are Internet companies that are hit by botnets.
> Then why did the competitors, including the top competitors in terms of revenue, sign up to be part of the consortium?
They don't have a choice. Either they join the cartel or they watch their ads vanish entirely[0] from the most popular browser.
I don't think this is an either/or thing. Google is doing something with positive externalities. But it also so happens to align 100% with their commercial interests.
[0] edit: "entirely" is hyperbole. But even a low percentage is worth giving in for.
> Either they join the cartel or they watch their ads vanish entirely[0] from the most popular browser.
Why do you think they didn't want to join? They get the same benefits as Google and the Internet at large. I'm having a hard time following your logic for why this is Google attacking its competitors if its competitors are unaffected by the change.
But when you're robbed you'll know exactly who did it.
I expect Google will try very hard to appear to treat all ads equally, hence the focus on all ads on particular sites, instead of trying to make judgements on individual ads. If they don't, they will quickly suffer massive fines that actually hurt their bottom line every year, as well as lawsuits from competitors that they stand a chance of actually losing.
The ADT company hired and trusted convicted serial killer Dennis Rader to install alarms. He'd then defeat the alarms and go in to the houses to bind, torture, and kill his victims.
As far as most people were concerned, Dennis Rader was a normal member of community. I used to live in Wichita where he operated. One of my coworkers had had dinner with them because they went to the same church as him.
I think Google is setting itself up for antitrust action. Isn’t this essentially what Microsoft did on the desktop by blocking competitors and priorritizing their own products?
The standards should be set by independent consumer watchdogs or the competent (one would hope) authorities, depending on the industry to self regulate has not worked in over 25 years, I see no reason why it would magically start to work now.
The ad industry had no means or incentive to self regulate. That has changed.
The incentive is ad blockers. The means is "Coalition for Better Ads."
Can't trust them to fight against tracking. Can't trust them to eliminate malvertising. Can't trust them to unblock your website in a timely manner or give good feedback about what is wrong with it. Can expect them to keep obnoxious use of advertising down to stop the whole industry from collapsing.
Which is it, the super secret consortium that won't even let you download the full list of bad sites, or Easy List/Privacy? Why don't they just use EasyList and report offenders there instead of this new consortium? The answer to that rhetorical question will let you know why I'll remain on uBO. They didn't need to build this in, but they did and gave the current ad-blocking community the finger instead of support.
I did read the article. That's why I included it in my comment. It should be exclusive. Not using only some of that list (e.g. no cosmetic blockers) and then using some super secret list the world doesn't have access to. Shouldn't have half of one and half of the other without the possibility of fine-tuned configurability. Otherwise, you are just an opaque piece of the system that I will supplement with a more transparent version.
They use EasyList+EasyPrivacy but only websites that they judge as having intrusive advertising. You can't manually enable adblocking on any website, nor add for example "youtube.com" to the blacklist.
>Which is it, the super secret consortium that won't even let you download the full list of bad sites, or Easy List/Privacy? Why don't they just use EasyList and report offenders there instead of this new consortium?
The lists serve different purposes. EasyList is a lit of ad-serving URLs to block. The uh, consortium list is a black/white list of which sites don't follow the standards. The standards are not about bad ads, but about sites that use ads in bad ways. The standards can't be automatically enforced since software can't reliably determine if an ad is a popunder or otherwise intrusive due to placement. Sites would quickly use CSS/JS hacks to work around the classifier.
EasyList is also a list of ad-serving sites to block and a list of elements to hide. Can you help me understand why the blacklist can't be just placed in a normal ad blocking list like EasyList? If it's by site anyways, I'm not sure the actual difference for the blocker itself. It's not like the EasyList standards can be automatically enforced by software either.
I think "serve different purposes" could be rephrased to "serve different overseers". I can't find a reason for the tech difference.
They don't want to block ads on sites, unless the site is on the other list.
That is, if site foo.com and bar.com both serve ads, but foo.com is on the "blacklist", the ad blocking will be enabled on foo.com. However, ad blocking will remain disabled on bar.com.
It's not Google's intention to block all ads on all sites - only ads on "bad" sites. If they can reduce the number of adblock installs by reducing the overall number of invasive ads, they can keep their own ad business from folding.
Ah, I see now, EasyList is selectively applied after first determining whether the site "deserves" it. That's an evil use of the hard work of EasyList maintainers IMO. I wonder if I can find a way to make Chrome think every site is "bad". If not, uBO still for me.
Yeah, this seems like it already is, or will soon become, solidly evil. If Google decides to flag your site, all of a sudden you don't get ad revenue from anyone. An AdWords sales-drone can then contact you to explain how you can remove yourself from Google's "naughty" list, e.g. by giving them more inventory, or giving their competitors less.
That whitelist is very likely an API endpoint or otherwise locked down, which will help them log every single url requested by your browser for "debugging purposes". Rather similar to how smartscreen works on windows
To have an ad network control so much of web traffic and then decide which ads to block is just absurd.
If the chrome team and google’s ad teams were not controlled by the same unit that primarily makes money from ads it would have been ok, but given that they do, what incentive will they have to block their own ads and how much more powerful is it making their own network?
Sadly, chrome is still the easiest browser to use, especially as a developer
Not OP, but that seems strange to me. Chrome is a product, not really a business. I can't see any way for them to make money, besides maybe enterprise deployments.
No, because Alphabet is still Google. A layer of shell companies doesn't change anything. Chrome (and Android, probably) should be forcibly split off from anything to do with Google/Alphabet, as fully independent companies. Any collusion between them and Google should be illegal.
^- This is breaking up an illegal monopoly. Shuffling around which division owned by Larry Page and Sergey Brin it is is not.
Now I'm half tempted to serve up ads from a path in the form '/a{n}b/\d+' with sufficiently large n to bring the O(mn) std::string::find subpattern matcher to a crawl when it encounters my harmless 'src="/a{m}"' iframes. Preferably n > 32K/2 to blow through L1 cache.
Also, from what I gather from their docs, this is only for the ad-block-filter formatted lists. For their own super-secret-better-ads list, they use safe browsing lists which use a hash-some-then-phone-home approach IIRC [0]. I mean, even Mozilla that uses the safe browsing lists says at [1] that the internal documentation [2] is only available under NDA.
Ah, I didn't dig, but I'd contend that URL length limits would apply and the worst you could do is slow down a client's browser in the same way you could just by multiplying the number of attempted requests to a blockable URL.
As long as your are not serving visually intrusive ads you can still track the shit out of users [1] under the Better Ads Standards [1]. If you are annoyed by flashing ads this is an improvement, if you are concerned about your privacy this does not really help at all. Sure, Chrome will seemingly also block trackers as some kind of side effect when blocking visually intrusive ads but just make your ads pass the visual standards and you are back in tracking business.
It sounds like Google is using it's Monopoly position to control the ad space. Microsft used these tatics to get like 90+% marketshare before the government stepped in.chrome is open source it shouldn't be too hard to modify the code so it block Google ads too. I publish a browser which is a modified version of chrome which block ads. The issue is a lot of sites now detect this and tell you to disable it. They seem to use the script on the page itself so it's harder to block.
Can you point to the point where it says that instead of just attacking me?
This is what I saw.
Google have announced that their Google Chrome web browser will block every ad on websites that are not compliant with the Better Ads Standards by default. Google admits that they’re taking action against the types of web advertisements that annoy people the most in an order to halt the rise in ad blockers that block all forms of advertisements on all websites.
This is still not going to help with websites that force you to disable adblockers to access their content. It's especially annoying when after disabling the site looks like a cluster of ads with information hidden in between. It's an abusive relationship.
You are part of the problem. People should not have to give up their privacy and expose their devices to the evil of the advert companies just to get online. Ads are almost the number one vector for malware. Ad servers are rarely, if ever, equipped with decent security and are frequently compromised.
Ads are a poor method for making money and the system is horribly gamed at every opportunity. Anything worth having is worth paying for. Google and their ilk have ruined the Internet and the general online landscape by dint of offering "free" services that are not really free; people pay for them dearly with lack of privacy and security and the return of a "free" service is not worth what is given.
I have happily paid for Fastmail since 2002. They are security conscience, responsive, and give a damn about their customers. I will use no one else. They are very transparent with their issues and enjoy providing their use base with information regarding their running of the company. Good luck with Google or Microsoft giving even paying customers this level of service and transparency.
Google have become too powerful. Way too powerful. They have their awful ads, beacons, and trackers on most websites and people just blissfully go along with it. I use zero Google services and block all of their tracking with a Pi-hole and other software tools. Ditto allowing no Android devices on my network. Getting into bed with Google in any way, shape, or form is literally giving away your privacy for a few trinkets that are worth nothing. If it's worth having, it's worth paying for. It's all an electronic leash...
I for one welcome this - uBlock is great but it's slow and creates bugs with many legit applications. My first tech support question these days is, "are you running an adblocker?"
I think there's good intentions by Google here. That said, let's talk about the worst-case scenario, the thing that Google could actually do that is entirely anti-competitive.
Step 1: Google finds a large number of competitors who are doing pretty well playing by their rules. Google finds some trait they all have in common. Google then modifies their own ads to not have that trait.
Step 2: Google declares the given trait "not meeting the Better Ads standard", "clarifies" the standard (or their implementation of it), and blocks all their competitors ads. Their own ads of course are still meeting the new set of rules, as they knew the change was coming. If the Coalition for Better Ads disagrees or won't be bullied by the Goliath of advertising, Google will go form their own version of it claiming to be more strict, "for the sake of the users".
Step 3: After a few weeks or months, the competition will modify their ads and eventually everything will be back to normal. That's when Google goes back to step 1.
The final Step 4 is the opposite. Find a trait that none or few competitors have in their ads but would potentially increase click-through rates. Modify the rules to say that doing this thing is okay, and oh hey Google ads are doing that thing as of right now.
Why all of this? Because Amazon is growing in the advertising business and is ruthless. "Your margin is my opportunity". So Google needs an arsenal of dirty tricks up their sleeve.
Do I really believe this is the plan? No. I think Google are legit trying to meet a user need that exists. But I also know they're a publicly traded company with growing competition in a fierce industry. It's not what they plan to do that worries me, but what they can do when up against the wall.
> There are real issues with non-annoying ads, like tracking, but I don't think most people know or care very much about that.
I speak to a lot of people who find "retargeting" deeply creepy. The awareness of the problem is there. However, they don't understand what causes it, how it works or that it's even possible to stop it.
There was an electronics store called CompUSA. I didn’t always shop there but I did buy Christmas presents there. Then one year they started using transparent shopping bags. Which means you can’t shop for anybody that is on the trip with you, or lives with you. It made it a hassle to keep a secret and I just gave up.
So now if I am looking at jewelry for my partner, ads for the exact things I looked at will follow me around for the next several weeks. Dumber still, it will show me ads for an expensive item I already bought. Telegraphing my purchase history.
If someone just bought a new TV, then showing then TV ads is pretty much the dumbest move you can make. The target is at an all time low for probability of purchasing that item. And worse, you risk triggering buyer’s remorse. Repeatedly.
But this is Amazons engineering culture. Don’t reason about anything. Just try it and see. It’s amoral most of the time (but refusing to address ethics is itself immoral).
They are basically a giant factory for throwing spaghetti against a wall to see what sticks. I think all they can do is get more parasitic until people say no.
Wait. What does retargeting have to do with Amazon’s Engineering culture? Seems like a large leap in logic. Couldn’t it just as easily say “well, that’s Facebook’s caching layer not updating fast enough to remove finished campaigns?”
Its a casualty of their philosophy on code. If the numbers look good it doesn’t matter whose idea it was or how crazy it sounded. They tell you this pretty much at the top of the indoctrination material.
It certainly keeps them out of analysis paralysis, no question. But any armchair psychologist can tell you this is essentially numbing. Not listening to your fears or emotions can be as unhealthy as dwelling on them. Zero is not the only alternative to Too Much. These things take balance.
I just don't think this is true. There's plenty of shady and scummy stuff that Amazon can do (and other online retailers do) which Amazon doesn't do. It's far more straightforward at building customer loyalty by getting them stuff more cheaply than other retails, much faster, with free shipping by squeezing their own margins.
I haven't even interviewed with Amazon, but I'm still curious: outside of "office politics" bullshit, why should an idea ever be judged by who made it or its _a priori_ "apparent craziness", let alone given that it has been tested?
(regardless of the test results; if they were negative then any other concerns are redundant)
The behaviour you described is a bug. The "throw everything at the wall" advertising technique - also known as the contextual multi-armed bandit problem - should adapt to changes in the context, such as when an expensive TV set has been bought. It's part of the reinforcement learning subfield, which is the spearhead of AI.
> If someone just bought a new TV, then showing then TV ads is pretty much the dumbest move you can make. The target is at an all time low for probability of purchasing that item. And worse, you risk triggering buyer’s remorse. Repeatedly.
While I agree with your subjective experience -- right after buying product X I'm done, I wanna look at other stuff -- from a marketing/advertising perspective repeated ad exposures right after purchase actually do a lot to eliminate buyers remorse and reinforce our decision making. We're creatures of emotion first, logic second.
Seeing car ads after buying a car, unless it's the same model for less money, make you feel better about your purchase. I don't think that's why it happens online, but that's no small part of it in print and TV.
They're doing it, not to block ads, but to make sure ads reach you. So the question gets philosophical in a hurry. What is the "goodness" of an otherwise generous act done for self-serving reasons?
Is it good or bad to write a check to an orphanage for the publicity?
Is it good or bad to save someone's life because they owe you money?
Is it good or bad to block certain ads to make sure other ads still reach you?
> Is it good or bad to block certain ads to make sure other ads still reach you?
If there is a growing product that works better, and fully blocks ads and your goal is only to quickly take over the market and do a worse job then I say 'no' that's not being altruistic...
If they put up a big banner saying "only works half as well at blocking ads as the competition" then maybe it's a little better.
I would be surprised if the chrome ad blocker will block Ads for Google's own properties like Youtube, and while most ads probably adhere to the advertising standards they have still be caught accidentally serving crypto-mining ads (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/01/now-e...).
So to me it's bad because it's opening up people's computers to exploitation that even Google can't control.
If you don't see the issue with Google enabling putting up paywalls, but only on sites that are showing ads that belong to them or to companies that made a deal with them, while blocking ads on sites that don't do Google's bidding, I'm not sure what to tell you.
Note that they are not being public with their list of sites that they will block ads on and reason why; nothing prevents them from putting sites on that list for any arbitrary reason they want.
I use uBlock Origin, but it's pretty easy to bypass: host ads on your own site. That's how ads worked in other forms of media for ages.
How about providing a meaningful service and request adequate compensation? Paywalls work fine for quality content. There's tons of proof that people are willing to pay for books, games, movies, and music. But by having a paywall, you lose out on search indexing. You can't have your cake and eat it.
Hosting ads on your site isn't actually enough. uBlock Origin can and does block by CSS selector (and that's the default behavior if you use right-click -> Block Element).
It _does_ get pretty hard to block if your ads are bespoke native advertisements, though.
> People mostly install adblockers to block really annoying ads.*
Many people use ad blockers because they want to block all ads. There are many reasons to block them, including malware, privacy, and brainwashing.
If ads works to manipulate behavior (and they do, otherwise people wouldn't buy them), and you don't want to be manipulated, you shouldn't let professionals attempt to hijack your brain (whether those attempts are done via ads, Facebook-style feeds, or other ways).
This is a very pessimistic view of the world. Not all ads are attempts to hijack your brain. For example, if you were already thinking about buying a specific keyboard and then saw an ad for that same keyboard with a 10% discount, that ad would have actually provided positive value to you. You save money for the thing that you already want. Not all ads are like that, but the example goes to show that there is a spectrum and that its not black and white.
Assuming the premises of your scenario (that the ad didn't change anything about you to make you more likely to buy the keyboard, or adversely influence you in any other way), the display of this ad is a disaster for the advertiser. Advertisers will work as hard as they can to make that not happen.
Not true. If I know you want a keyboard and that you can buy it from 100 different stores, I would probably give you a discount to buy it from me as long as it still makes me money.
This is true. However, I do think that there are a few (possibly rare) cases where advertisements can cause a mutual benefit.
If I intend to purchase a product of a certain category, and would like to choose one with a particular property, but am under the assumption that no such product exists, and I see an ad for such a product, correcting my impression, I may, as a result, purchase that product instead of competitors which don't have the property that I desire, which satisfies both my own wants, and the wants of the company advertising the product.
This has happened to me at least once.
However, most ads that I see do not provide me with any new information, and the strategy of having ads follow users around after the first time they see it seems somewhat contrary to this type of benefit, and I don't totally understand why it is understood to be effective.
I wasn't really talking about the 10% savings thing, so I'm not sure how this is relevant to what I said?
I do agree that the malware risk that current ad systems cause is bad, and it would probably be good if consumers behaved in such a way that the sort of ad systems that are a malware risk were no longer more financially viable.
However, I don't think I have any substantial objection to the style of ads on project wonderful, which do not allow embedding any extra JavaScript or anything like that, only permitting an image, a link, and a hovertext value, iirc. No tracking or malware risk there I think. Or, at least negligible risk.
If you have a proposed improvement on how to lead people who desire a product to discover that said product is available, I'd be interested in hearing it?
I think that most ads aren't leading people who desire a product to that product -- they are creating desire for products that people don't really need.
Most of the ads I see at the moment are on YouTube/Gmail and they are for things like junk food, "make money online" scam artists, and other garbage. Sometimes there are unblockable content ads on news sites that pretend to be news, but are really just paid content.
It certainly seems true that the vast majority of times that some person sees some ad, that that impression is not connecting a person who desires some product to that product, and furthermore, I quite doubt that that could plausibly be otherwise, at least assuming any substantial amount of people seeing advertisements.
However, I don't think that by itself is sufficient for a condemnation of advertisement in general.
If the cost to the viewer (and the advertiser) of the ad impressions which [do not connect a consumer desiring a product to that product] is sufficiently low, then it could be possible for both consumers and advertisers to benefit on average. (Not to say that it is currently the case that they do.)
This is true even if the advertisers were to only benefit from the ad impressions which connected a consumer desiring a product desiring a product to said product.
So, I guess the question would be, whether or not the costs to consumers (and advertisers) when [not connecting people desiring a product to the product] can be made sufficiently small to make it a mutual benefit.
Of course, if that by itself was enough to lead to a mutual benefit, one could wonder why it would be included as part of something else that the consumer wishes to look at, rather than just being something that consumers might look at separately from other content. One possible reason could be that seeing it as part of other desirable content decreases the cost to the consumer when the product is not one that they desire. I'm not sure how much credence to assign to that reason.
Thinking on this, I suspect that direct mutual benefit between the advertisers and consumers would not in practice be a sufficient reason by itself for (e.g.) websites to tend to have ads on them, even if ads were restricted to have many fewer problems for consumers.
So, I think that it is likely that if not for the inconvenience of removing ads from websites they view, the main reason that consumers might deign to allow the ads to display on the webpages they view would be because of the benefit it provides to the owner of the website.
So, I guess I would recommend blocking ads which create more of a cost to you than you consider worth it in order to provide the benefit to website owners get from the ads being displayed to people who reason similarly to you?
It is my opinion that for a certain fairly restricted set of types of ads, that the average cost to me is sufficiently low that I am willing to incur it.
However, don't get me wrong: I definitely support the freedom to block whatever ads you wish (unless you have made a contract to do otherwise or something like that).
I think that ideally, the only ads that should be profitable should be the ones which impose extremely low costs on the viewer, and occasionally provide some benefit to the viewer (even if this is rare enough that the only reason the viewer deigns to see them is so that the website owner benefits).
I'm never thinking about buying anything that I see in an ad. I don't own much more in life other than some books, my computers, and a few clothes. I prefer to take my own initiative on what I buy, and the less I buy, the better.
If you don't have enough money, and can only barely afford to buy something, then yes, very much you will follow it religiously. You will try to buy the most reliable for the cheapest price, because you can't afford the product failing, nor can you afford paying too much, and you don't want to go back to getting food from the food bank so you can spend your grocery money to replace the broken washing machine.
Of course if you're a SV programmer earning 5-10 times the average wage, you don't care about this and buy overpriced shit every day, but many people follow this to the letter.
I'd argue that we and our minds have enough weaknesses in comparison to machines, that it is not fortunate that we aren't more like machines. We'd be far less vulnerable to making the kinds of mistakes that only human minds can make.
It's a good idea, but I don't think that it will stop being influenced by ads.
Human behavior is contagious, and advertisers know that. That's why actors in commercials pretend to be just another person like the viewer while lying about performing some action or behavior that the advertisers want the viewer to copy. I don't think that it's possible to suppress that behavior-imitating instinct completely. Humans are generally not very rational creatures -- not even the self-proclaimed rational ones.
Many ads are not just about some product that one might really need, like a keyboard or other equipment that is essential for a person's work. Many ads I see are about junk food, bad lifestyle choices, and trying to convince the public that bad entities are actually good entities (example: greenwashing).
I think people who use ad blockers, like myself, KNOW all about how advertising works. Oh yes most certainly WE KNOW. That is why some of us choose to block them.
I limit my exposure to marketing as much as I can.
If you want to buy a keyboard, then you visit sites from where keyboards can be bought. Meanwhile, when you are doing other things, you shouldn’t be seeing advertising, least of all ads specifically targeting you. You seem to find it hard to understand that ads are aesthetically unacceptable to intelligent people. Do you see ads on the pages of a novel you are reading in a paper book?
I use an ad blocker solely to block popups that interfere with my reading. So many sites popup to ask for your email once you scroll far enough to move the mouse to leave, and I simply don't want to be on email lists. I'm totally fine with other ads and I'm not concerned I've been brainwashed.
> 2. People mostly install adblockers to block really annoying ads.*
I don't really think there's any other kind of ad. For the majority of us, there's absolutely no value in ads; so there's no reason I'd want them displayed.
Google's intent is to protect their advertising revenue stream. That's not good or bad, it's just business.
Definitely agree with you on the long term capability. There's just so much risk having your web interface owned by someone with a vested interest in what you see.
In the meantime expect 3rd party attempts at gaming this functionality.
seems to be if you listen to some of the corporate appologists around HN, where if it isnt explicitly against the law, people have nothing to complain about (and often not even then..)
There are definitely some for whom the pursuit of profit justifies the means, regardless of how immoral (or morally grey) it is, and any relevant laws are there to be dodged (bonus points for writing said actions off as "being disruptive").
Step 2, if taken anti-competetively would end up in tens of billions of dollars in fines and possibly the break-up of the company. I don't find it that unlikely, all things considered, but it should be the nail in the coffin.
I think you are overly optimistic in the willingness and ability of our governments to protect us from privacy invasion. They seem much more willing to protected us from seeing naked people.
I am EU-based and I guess you are US-based? That would count for some difference in perspective. IIRC Microsoft was fighting both US and EU competition cases and it pretty much handed them a lost decade. Not sure about the current US climate with regards to anti competitive behaviour, but if there are US-competitors in the ad market that are hit by step 2, I guess even some Republicans would see that as a bridge too far for Google?
You're correct that I'm in the US. Microsoft repeatedly bested the US prosecutors- it took the EU to stop them. Is the EU aggressive about stopping trackers?
I'd say yes when considering the existing and new privacy laws being passed. Some of the identification and data reselling that is typical in the US is not done for European customers because it's not allowed.
That's a valid concern, but it's also a very obvious one, and Google already being in the crosshairs of regulators will certainly be aware of it.
They are clearly prepared to counter any such allegation in two ways.
1) It's not Google alone setting the standard. The "coalition for better ads" also includes Facebook, Microsoft and many others: https://www.betterads.org/members/
The combination of these two facts doesn't make it easy to pursue a strategy like the one you laid out. So I think this is sincere and can work to some degree.
BUT, the rules are insufficient! They don't ban animations. For me, anything that moves is a huge distraction especially next to or right in the middle of longer text.
Another extremely annoying thing is never ending layout changes. Pages keep jumping up and down because ads are being inserted and moved around all the time.
In other words, what this standard doesn't mandate is to keep the page still. That's why I like the reader mode in browsers that have one, such as Firefox and Safari.
Totally agree. I need uBlock just to remove elements or more often entire sidebars from websites that insist on having animated gifs right next to text that I'm trying to read.
I really can't concentrate with animation going on in in the corner.
Google is absolutely going down the wrong path here. They could blow Amazon away with one simple move that would benefit users AND, especially, advertisers.
The problem with online ads and the reason that things are getting scummier and scummier is that they simply don't work very well for the advertiser. Most clicks are bogus; most prospects are unqualified. That's how Amazon wins: when you click Amazon, you are a buyer wanting to buy. That's why I would far more readily pay for an Amazon ad than a Google ad.
But Google could get back in the game and dominate it with one simple step. If, in their search page, they had a button that said "I am looking to buy" or something along those lines; in other words, if they helped prequalify the prospect, then their ads would become super valuable and they would effectively become the meta-Amazon. Everybody would start using Google again for shopping. Right now, it's mostly Google = Research, Amazon = Shopping, which is why Google search ads are fairly worthless.
I actually witnessed this flow one time: User has car from Budget rent-a-car. User things goole = internet, so goes to google, types "budget rental car" into search bar. Ad for Budget rent-a-car comes up. She clicks it to go to the page to check on her rental. So, Budget had to pay for a click from a user that was already trying to get to their page. From an advertiser's perspective that is not a good use of funds. It's almost as if Google has set up a gate that you have to pay to let your customers get through even after you've earned their business.
>That said, let's talk about the worst-case scenario, the thing that Google could actually do that is entirely anti-competitive.
How exactly is this anti-competitive? The rules for ad guidelines are set by the Coalition for Better Ads and not Google. So any change in the rules that determine what an acceptable ad is must be approved by the coalition. The only scenario in which your hypothetical argument makes any sense is if Google controlled the coalition which they clearly do not and never will especially when you consider the caliber of companies in the coalition.
There isn't "good intentions". It's almost pointless to talk in that terms when it comes to multinational companies. Corporations don't work that way. They aren't charities. Google is acting in its own best interests - what's good for the shareholders. There is no other consideration.
I believe Google already does that with video ads. Part of Google's rules are that there be no autoplay video ads. But on YouTube annoying autoplay video ads are their bread and butter
Why should Google have "good intentions"? It's a company, a publicly traded one at that. Their intentions are profit maximization. Abiding the law and maintaining somewhat of a reputation tend to be non-optional for that, but it's not their primary goal.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 267 ms ] threadhttps://www.betterads.org/members/
A comparable situation would be Windows 10 ignoring users' manually edited HOSTS file that attempts to block telemetry.[1] Microsoft has hardcoded hostname-to-ip resolution inside the networking stack (inside dnsapi.dll).
If Google decides that Chrome will ignore some entries in EasyList, it means EasyList is more of a "suggestions" filter rather than a "user's final authority" filter.
[1] https://www.petri.com/windows-10-ignoring-hosts-file-specifi...
It's funny how Microsoft under Satya Nadella is heralded for opening up (embracing[0] open source, open standards, recognizing other platforms).
[0] I only noticed the irony a few seconds after writing that.
The article's sentence: "Google appears to be shipping the entirety of EasyList and EasyPrivacy; which includes blocking rules for Google’s own AdSense and DoubleClick advertisement platforms as well as Google Analytics,"
... is only talking about the existence of AdSense on EasyList -- because the entirety of EasyList entries is shipped. It does not talk about (or even speculate) whether Chrome will have a programming code that implements a whitelist to ignore certain entries.
Those are 2 different concepts.
>The Better Ads Standards are a set of rules, one set for desktop and one for mobile, that define unacceptably intrusive, distracting, and annoying advertisement formats.
If so, "Better Ad Standards" is orthogonal to "AdSense standards".
Or put another way, "unacceptably intrusive, distracting, and annoying" is orthogonal to blocking "AdSense" url _domains_. E.g. See layout rules from AdSense guidelines.[2]
Why are we parsing the text differently? Are we talking about 2 different abstraction levels? I'm talking about EasyList as a network traffic filter. Maybe others are talking about EasyList as a rule source for _rendering_ DOM elements. (E.g. if AdSense is rendered in an intrusive popup overlay which already violates Google's rules and wil get AdSense accounts banned even before "Better Ads Standards" was adopted.) These are 2 different concepts.
Let's not over-read things in the article that are not actually there.
[1] https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/1282097?hl=en
It could not be more clear all ads will be removed from failing sites.
https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/12/better-ads
Again, I wasn't talking about "failing _websites_". I was talking about ad serving _domains_.
You've lost track of what the conversation was about and the substance of what I was responding to. Please re-read the previous post to reset.[1]
That post by d2wa was claiming a direct cause-&-effect blocking based purely on entries in EasyList.
I replied that the article makes no such irrefutable claim and that he was over-reading something that wasn't there.
You, on the other hand, are talking about "Better Ad Standards"[2] which is orthogonal to my reply to d2wa. Your repeated citation of it actually muddles the topic because the Google's longstanding approved rules for the correct layout of AdSense already adheres to "Better Ad Standards".
To restate the different conversations in pseudo-code...
Argument by d2wa:
Argument by you (ec109685): Also see comment subtree[3] from Raymond Hill (uBlock maintainer that uses EasyList). Based on that, the pseudo-code would be: In summary...EasyList is not the final authority on blocking AdSense. Since Google's existing guidelines for proper AdSense layout already complies with "Coalition for Better Ads", the existence of AdSense in EasyList is not relevant because the EasyList filter is selectively applied to failing websites. In other words, Chrome's ad blocker will not block AdSense the same way as uBlock.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16297718
[2] https://www.betterads.org/standards/
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16298182
So are we in agreement then? Google’s ad sense ads will be removed from sites that violate the better ad standard guidelines per google’s official documentation on this feature.
If so, the question here that you originally posed would be answered in the negative:
“I read the article but it doesn't clarify whether or not Google will hardcode a "whitelist" that will ignore EasyList entries for AdSense, DoubleClick, GoogleAnalytics, etc.”
No. the answer is "positive" in the context of my reply to d2wa of how EasyList is not obeyed. The "whitelist" is achieved by correct use of AdSense. (See pseudo-code example #3 of how EasyList filter code is never reached for AdSense.) It does not work like uBlock.
"The standards ban ad formats like auto-playing video ads, large ads that stick to the screen when you scroll, and interstitial ads".
Doesn't seem like such a bad move.
The only ones in a position to break this cycle is the browsers, and I welcome any attempt to try and create a more healthy environment for ads to exist in. It would be a great service for both users and the industry.
I see this all the time when justifying bad business practices. How about you stop doing what you're doing if it isn't profitable?
I can't imagine that Google would start blocking their own ad network, let alone their own ads. Therefore, I'm sticking with an ad blocker that I control.
The specific shade of yellow was indiscernible from background white on a cheap laptop at almost any angle. I wish I'd taken a photo when I noticed. I knew people who had never even noticed the yellow, at all, let alone understood it was ads.
I know, Never Attribute To Malice and all that, but hot damn, that must have been a massive multi million dollar move of "ignorance".
Malice or not, that yellow was surely intentional, and working as intended.
[1] http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html
I think that this saying gets misapplied quite frequently. If you are talking to someone one on one, then you should assume that they are simply mistaken. Otherwise, you don't stand a chance of convincing them to see things another way. On the other hand, in trying to predict somebody else's actions, assuming malice can give the most accurate prediction.
On the part of Google, I don't know whether the nigh-unidentifiable ads are the result of some cackling executive trying to trick people to click on ads, or whether it is the result of overzealous A/B testing that stumbled upon a dark pattern. In the end, it doesn't matter, and either one is a good approximation of what will happen in the future.
https://marketingland.com/once-deemed-evil-google-now-embrac...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paid_inclusion#History_of_paid...
References directly the founders letter, I do not have a link to that but I am not making this up.
Google motto 2004: Don't be evil
Google motto 2010: Evil is tricky to define
Google motto 2013: We make military robots
Yeah, me too, but I don't think Google hopes to convince adblock users to revert to an adblock-free experience.
They're probably hoping (as is indeed stated in the article) that by removing the biggest pain points they will stop new users from seeking adblocking solutions.
We'll see what happens, but it doesn't seem an unreasonable thing to hope for.
Same, and that is on Firefox too (both mobile and pc).
I don't understand companies, when I run some ad-block I clearly state that I _do not want to see ads_. Period.
It doesn't matter the format or how it looks, I just don't want too see ads and I get pissed if I do so it's actually bad for the company advertising.
I do a search for "Pay Lowes Credit Card"
The first couple of results are legit but everything afte ris some BS Scam.
Maybe they will be good, but I for one am not comfortable with this. Imagine what happens when chrome decides Facebook ads deserve to be blocked.
Advertising is primarily about making you buy a product from a particular company, whether it's a good product or not, whether it's right for you or not.
If it were about letting people know your products then 'Nide' would have "if you want these for cross-training the best show are 'Reebob' Cross2" on the advert for their training shoes.
Advertising is almost orthogonal to informative disclosure.
That a pretty simplistic view. I never said ads are 100% true and want the best for you. Ads are informational as they inform you of the existence of a product and their basic characteristics. Small, well-targeted ads can be the only way someone that's just starting could have to let people know about the existence of their product. They don't hold a gun at you to force you to buy a product, they don't remove competition between companies, they don't prevent third-party review sites from existing. Buying or not buying them is up to each individual.
Advertisers want to make sure their customers don't forget to buy their stuff. This is much easier than actually convincing non-customers to do something new.
Don't let advertising companies fool you. Your entire purpose to them is to be just as valuable as the average slaughterhouse cow
They don't seek to inform you so much as they seek to inform you that something exists whilst manipulating your emotions to get a particular reaction out of you and millions of other people. This is particularly blatant in AV ads.
The other thing, mainly regarding software ads, is they don't seek to inform you so much as manipulate you whilst tracking your every move to guarantee that the ad was effective. This is particularly blatant with the Google and Facebook ad networks, but pretty much almost any 2-bit ad company you've heard of on the web at least tries to do something similar.
So in the end, advertising has at least two major problems with trying to either 1. manipulate you directly through your emotions or 2. manipulating your computer bandwidth and CPU time to violate your privacy and oftentimes, security.
Regarding #1, there are always going to be people that think they're smart enough, intelligent enough, or logical enough that they will never fall prey to this vector of advertising, and almost universally they are wrong. I don't doubt some few exceptions exist, I just don't think I've ever actually met someone who is an exception, nor am I under any illusions that I am. Your best defense is to cut ads out of your life to greatest extent possible. You'll probably never cut bus ads out of your life, if you at all enjoy city living, but you don't have to let advertisers into your home either.
How do you find out about things after that point? If you are at all social, read any kinds of news sites, invest any money into markets, have any kind of skin in some kind of game, or engage in any kind of recreational activities, you'll have other channels of information. Generally the signal will be of a much higher quality than if you were personally bombarded with advertisements intentionally seeking to cut out a large slice of your overall attention bandwidth every single day.
But I don't hate the concept of advertising. I don't deny being influenced by ads, or even sometimes finding them informative. I just reject being tracked and targeted.
Instead, I get ads for interesting new components on DigiKey or Mouser, or the similar, and I find myself clicking on ads several times a week because I'm genuinely interested in what I see -- it's like a news feed for unusual devices.
Imagine if your Twitter feed was served several tweets at a time embedded in other sites you regularly visit. You could argue it's a distraction, but but it's far from unpleasant. "Personalized ads" work a lot the same way for me.
There's no "better approach".
For me, that first number is very, very low. I consume just like a lot of other folks, but its mostly art stuff. I have money in my account mostly because I don't have much I actually want that doesn't take some saving for. Mostly, I think these people just want my information or want me to pass on their advertisements. Clothing wants me to advertise for them with products splattered with their logo. They can go diddle themselves.
Want me to watch ads? Pay me. Have actual ad standards. Stop trying to trick me with "information". Stop trying to trick me with popups. And so on. Until then, back to the diddling.
[1]https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/01/23/latest-firefox-quan...
If you want that kind of flexibility it's easy to add, which means there is no reason for Firefox to have that by default.
I run a Pi-hole on a Raspberry Pi and highly recommend it. It's blocks ads, beacons, trackers all at the DNS level. The crap never even has a chance to come down to your PC because it's never called. Easy to set up, takes about 30 minutes from start to finish. I couple this with my finely-tuned Firefox with uBlock Origin, Dencentraleyes, Privacy Badger, Webmail Ad Block, and No Coin. This is defence in depth. I never see anything resembling ads, beacons, or trackers.
The Pi-hole is highly configurable. You can add lots of blacklists to the already very capable list that is on by default. In addition, you can watch, in real time, all the calls being made and tune as you see fit. I was shocked to learn that my router, as well as other software, was phoning home. I nixed this behaviour on the Pi-hole immediately. It's a real eye opener to see what the software and devices on your network do and to whom they talk. The Pi-hole blocks bad crap for all devices on your network. You can even set up a free VPN on your router and use it for your mobile devices whilst your away from home.
The Pi-hole has become an indispensable tool on my network and I really think every person who cares about security should employ one for no other reason that it truly allows you to monitor your traffic in an easy-to-follow set of charts and traffic logs that are configurable. Well worth the time and little money involved.
I see this as a shot at piracy sites, if anything. Since they cannot join reputable ad networks, they join disreputable ones that don't even try to police their ads or publishers and show shady and misleading ads. Those will all be blocked now, choking the piracy sites of revenue.
The primary beneficiaries are content producers. The secondary beneficiaries are Internet companies that are hit by botnets.
They don't have a choice. Either they join the cartel or they watch their ads vanish entirely[0] from the most popular browser.
I don't think this is an either/or thing. Google is doing something with positive externalities. But it also so happens to align 100% with their commercial interests.
[0] edit: "entirely" is hyperbole. But even a low percentage is worth giving in for.
Why do you think they didn't want to join? They get the same benefits as Google and the Internet at large. I'm having a hard time following your logic for why this is Google attacking its competitors if its competitors are unaffected by the change.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Rader#Early_life_and_ca...
Your analogy is good. Google and Chrome Adblocker is just like ADT and the "BTK Killer".
His wife kids didn't know, nobody knew.
https://marketingland.com/industry-groups-self-regulatory-pr...
The incentive is ad blockers. The means is "Coalition for Better Ads."
Can't trust them to fight against tracking. Can't trust them to eliminate malvertising. Can't trust them to unblock your website in a timely manner or give good feedback about what is wrong with it. Can expect them to keep obnoxious use of advertising down to stop the whole industry from collapsing.
For iOS in particular, there doesn't seem to be any officially supported way to block ads.
The lists serve different purposes. EasyList is a lit of ad-serving URLs to block. The uh, consortium list is a black/white list of which sites don't follow the standards. The standards are not about bad ads, but about sites that use ads in bad ways. The standards can't be automatically enforced since software can't reliably determine if an ad is a popunder or otherwise intrusive due to placement. Sites would quickly use CSS/JS hacks to work around the classifier.
I think "serve different purposes" could be rephrased to "serve different overseers". I can't find a reason for the tech difference.
That is, if site foo.com and bar.com both serve ads, but foo.com is on the "blacklist", the ad blocking will be enabled on foo.com. However, ad blocking will remain disabled on bar.com.
It's not Google's intention to block all ads on all sites - only ads on "bad" sites. If they can reduce the number of adblock installs by reducing the overall number of invasive ads, they can keep their own ad business from folding.
If the chrome team and google’s ad teams were not controlled by the same unit that primarily makes money from ads it would have been ok, but given that they do, what incentive will they have to block their own ads and how much more powerful is it making their own network?
Sadly, chrome is still the easiest browser to use, especially as a developer
^- This is breaking up an illegal monopoly. Shuffling around which division owned by Larry Page and Sergey Brin it is is not.
Google doesn't determine what ads are blocked. That's done by the coalition that's composed of the following members and affiliate:
https://www.betterads.org/members/
https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/extensions/browser/api/...
And the code reviews cover the feature are tagged with DNR: https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/?polygerrit=0#/q/Dn...
Edit: this may just be the net blocking code.
Of course, looking at the code, I am not seeing where cosmetic filters are supported. Also, you should include the code from https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/extensions/common/api/d... in this I think. Also, there's the safe browsing code at https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/components/safe_browsin... of which the author references db/util.h.
0 - https://github.com/cretz/doogie/blob/master/src/blocker_rule... 1 - https://github.com/brave/ad-block
Also, from what I gather from their docs, this is only for the ad-block-filter formatted lists. For their own super-secret-better-ads list, they use safe browsing lists which use a hash-some-then-phone-home approach IIRC [0]. I mean, even Mozilla that uses the safe browsing lists says at [1] that the internal documentation [2] is only available under NDA.
0 - https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/v4/local-databas...
1 - https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Safe_Browsing
2 - https://mana.mozilla.org/wiki/display/FIREFOX/Safe+Browsing
#0 https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/components/url_pattern_...
#1 https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/components/url_pattern_...
#2 https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/components/url_pattern_...
#3 https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/components/url_pattern_...
[1] Unless I failed to find the relevant rules.
[2] https://www.betterads.org/standards/
Go re-read the article. It blocks google ads too already.
This is what I saw.
Google have announced that their Google Chrome web browser will block every ad on websites that are not compliant with the Better Ads Standards by default. Google admits that they’re taking action against the types of web advertisements that annoy people the most in an order to halt the rise in ad blockers that block all forms of advertisements on all websites.
That will be the day when fewer people search using Google, and someone will come up with noadoogle.
Ads are a poor method for making money and the system is horribly gamed at every opportunity. Anything worth having is worth paying for. Google and their ilk have ruined the Internet and the general online landscape by dint of offering "free" services that are not really free; people pay for them dearly with lack of privacy and security and the return of a "free" service is not worth what is given.
I have happily paid for Fastmail since 2002. They are security conscience, responsive, and give a damn about their customers. I will use no one else. They are very transparent with their issues and enjoy providing their use base with information regarding their running of the company. Good luck with Google or Microsoft giving even paying customers this level of service and transparency.
Google have become too powerful. Way too powerful. They have their awful ads, beacons, and trackers on most websites and people just blissfully go along with it. I use zero Google services and block all of their tracking with a Pi-hole and other software tools. Ditto allowing no Android devices on my network. Getting into bed with Google in any way, shape, or form is literally giving away your privacy for a few trinkets that are worth nothing. If it's worth having, it's worth paying for. It's all an electronic leash...
On HN, please make your points without stooping to personal swipes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Step 1: Google finds a large number of competitors who are doing pretty well playing by their rules. Google finds some trait they all have in common. Google then modifies their own ads to not have that trait.
Step 2: Google declares the given trait "not meeting the Better Ads standard", "clarifies" the standard (or their implementation of it), and blocks all their competitors ads. Their own ads of course are still meeting the new set of rules, as they knew the change was coming. If the Coalition for Better Ads disagrees or won't be bullied by the Goliath of advertising, Google will go form their own version of it claiming to be more strict, "for the sake of the users".
Step 3: After a few weeks or months, the competition will modify their ads and eventually everything will be back to normal. That's when Google goes back to step 1.
The final Step 4 is the opposite. Find a trait that none or few competitors have in their ads but would potentially increase click-through rates. Modify the rules to say that doing this thing is okay, and oh hey Google ads are doing that thing as of right now.
Why all of this? Because Amazon is growing in the advertising business and is ruthless. "Your margin is my opportunity". So Google needs an arsenal of dirty tricks up their sleeve.
Do I really believe this is the plan? No. I think Google are legit trying to meet a user need that exists. But I also know they're a publicly traded company with growing competition in a fierce industry. It's not what they plan to do that worries me, but what they can do when up against the wall.
1. Lots of people are using adblockers to block all ads, including Google's, and they don't like that.
2. People mostly install adblockers to block really annoying ads.*
3. By building in an adblocker that blocks annoying ads, people will stop installing full adblockers that also block Google's ads.
*There are real issues with non-annoying ads, like tracking, but I don't think most people know or care very much about that.
I speak to a lot of people who find "retargeting" deeply creepy. The awareness of the problem is there. However, they don't understand what causes it, how it works or that it's even possible to stop it.
There was an electronics store called CompUSA. I didn’t always shop there but I did buy Christmas presents there. Then one year they started using transparent shopping bags. Which means you can’t shop for anybody that is on the trip with you, or lives with you. It made it a hassle to keep a secret and I just gave up.
So now if I am looking at jewelry for my partner, ads for the exact things I looked at will follow me around for the next several weeks. Dumber still, it will show me ads for an expensive item I already bought. Telegraphing my purchase history.
If someone just bought a new TV, then showing then TV ads is pretty much the dumbest move you can make. The target is at an all time low for probability of purchasing that item. And worse, you risk triggering buyer’s remorse. Repeatedly.
But this is Amazons engineering culture. Don’t reason about anything. Just try it and see. It’s amoral most of the time (but refusing to address ethics is itself immoral).
They are basically a giant factory for throwing spaghetti against a wall to see what sticks. I think all they can do is get more parasitic until people say no.
It certainly keeps them out of analysis paralysis, no question. But any armchair psychologist can tell you this is essentially numbing. Not listening to your fears or emotions can be as unhealthy as dwelling on them. Zero is not the only alternative to Too Much. These things take balance.
(regardless of the test results; if they were negative then any other concerns are redundant)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit#Contextual_...
While I agree with your subjective experience -- right after buying product X I'm done, I wanna look at other stuff -- from a marketing/advertising perspective repeated ad exposures right after purchase actually do a lot to eliminate buyers remorse and reinforce our decision making. We're creatures of emotion first, logic second.
Seeing car ads after buying a car, unless it's the same model for less money, make you feel better about your purchase. I don't think that's why it happens online, but that's no small part of it in print and TV.
That's why Mozilla's approach is tracking protection which also happens to block annoying ads.
But yes, if the concern is only bringing in line what people "feel" with the product you want to sell, then Google's strategy makes perfect sense.
Is it good or bad to write a check to an orphanage for the publicity?
Is it good or bad to save someone's life because they owe you money?
Is it good or bad to block certain ads to make sure other ads still reach you?
If there is a growing product that works better, and fully blocks ads and your goal is only to quickly take over the market and do a worse job then I say 'no' that's not being altruistic...
If they put up a big banner saying "only works half as well at blocking ads as the competition" then maybe it's a little better.
So to me it's bad because it's opening up people's computers to exploitation that even Google can't control.
moreover when mozzilla made attempt to "non-tracking privacy-respectful ads" in the mr robot scandal everyone was at their throat.
how should site make money then?
Note that they are not being public with their list of sites that they will block ads on and reason why; nothing prevents them from putting sites on that list for any arbitrary reason they want.
How about providing a meaningful service and request adequate compensation? Paywalls work fine for quality content. There's tons of proof that people are willing to pay for books, games, movies, and music. But by having a paywall, you lose out on search indexing. You can't have your cake and eat it.
It _does_ get pretty hard to block if your ads are bespoke native advertisements, though.
I'd never use Google if Ublock didn't hide them.
Many people use ad blockers because they want to block all ads. There are many reasons to block them, including malware, privacy, and brainwashing.
If ads works to manipulate behavior (and they do, otherwise people wouldn't buy them), and you don't want to be manipulated, you shouldn't let professionals attempt to hijack your brain (whether those attempts are done via ads, Facebook-style feeds, or other ways).
If I intend to purchase a product of a certain category, and would like to choose one with a particular property, but am under the assumption that no such product exists, and I see an ad for such a product, correcting my impression, I may, as a result, purchase that product instead of competitors which don't have the property that I desire, which satisfies both my own wants, and the wants of the company advertising the product.
This has happened to me at least once.
However, most ads that I see do not provide me with any new information, and the strategy of having ads follow users around after the first time they see it seems somewhat contrary to this type of benefit, and I don't totally understand why it is understood to be effective.
I do agree that the malware risk that current ad systems cause is bad, and it would probably be good if consumers behaved in such a way that the sort of ad systems that are a malware risk were no longer more financially viable.
However, I don't think I have any substantial objection to the style of ads on project wonderful, which do not allow embedding any extra JavaScript or anything like that, only permitting an image, a link, and a hovertext value, iirc. No tracking or malware risk there I think. Or, at least negligible risk.
If you have a proposed improvement on how to lead people who desire a product to discover that said product is available, I'd be interested in hearing it?
Most of the ads I see at the moment are on YouTube/Gmail and they are for things like junk food, "make money online" scam artists, and other garbage. Sometimes there are unblockable content ads on news sites that pretend to be news, but are really just paid content.
However, I don't think that by itself is sufficient for a condemnation of advertisement in general.
If the cost to the viewer (and the advertiser) of the ad impressions which [do not connect a consumer desiring a product to that product] is sufficiently low, then it could be possible for both consumers and advertisers to benefit on average. (Not to say that it is currently the case that they do.)
This is true even if the advertisers were to only benefit from the ad impressions which connected a consumer desiring a product desiring a product to said product.
So, I guess the question would be, whether or not the costs to consumers (and advertisers) when [not connecting people desiring a product to the product] can be made sufficiently small to make it a mutual benefit.
Of course, if that by itself was enough to lead to a mutual benefit, one could wonder why it would be included as part of something else that the consumer wishes to look at, rather than just being something that consumers might look at separately from other content. One possible reason could be that seeing it as part of other desirable content decreases the cost to the consumer when the product is not one that they desire. I'm not sure how much credence to assign to that reason.
Thinking on this, I suspect that direct mutual benefit between the advertisers and consumers would not in practice be a sufficient reason by itself for (e.g.) websites to tend to have ads on them, even if ads were restricted to have many fewer problems for consumers.
So, I think that it is likely that if not for the inconvenience of removing ads from websites they view, the main reason that consumers might deign to allow the ads to display on the webpages they view would be because of the benefit it provides to the owner of the website.
So, I guess I would recommend blocking ads which create more of a cost to you than you consider worth it in order to provide the benefit to website owners get from the ads being displayed to people who reason similarly to you?
It is my opinion that for a certain fairly restricted set of types of ads, that the average cost to me is sufficiently low that I am willing to incur it.
However, don't get me wrong: I definitely support the freedom to block whatever ads you wish (unless you have made a contract to do otherwise or something like that).
I think that ideally, the only ads that should be profitable should be the ones which impose extremely low costs on the viewer, and occasionally provide some benefit to the viewer (even if this is rare enough that the only reason the viewer deigns to see them is so that the website owner benefits).
It’s astounding when people think that advertising doesn’t affect them. And yet companies continue to pay billions for adverts...
It's called making data-driven decisions.
Step 1: Find a set of products that solve your problem based on independent reviews, e.g. what Stiftung Warentest writes.
Step 2: Use several price comparison engines, e.g. idealo, Preispiraten, Hardwareschotte to find the cheapest option for the products.
Step 3: Order there.
If you methodically follow this algorithm, you are immune to making ad-based decisions.
Of course if you're a SV programmer earning 5-10 times the average wage, you don't care about this and buy overpriced shit every day, but many people follow this to the letter.
Human behavior is contagious, and advertisers know that. That's why actors in commercials pretend to be just another person like the viewer while lying about performing some action or behavior that the advertisers want the viewer to copy. I don't think that it's possible to suppress that behavior-imitating instinct completely. Humans are generally not very rational creatures -- not even the self-proclaimed rational ones.
Many ads are not just about some product that one might really need, like a keyboard or other equipment that is essential for a person's work. Many ads I see are about junk food, bad lifestyle choices, and trying to convince the public that bad entities are actually good entities (example: greenwashing).
I limit my exposure to marketing as much as I can.
I know that advertising affects me. That's one of the reasons why I block ads at every opportunity.
1. Declare all ad blockers in the Chrome Web Store now obsolete, and ban them.
I'd say that's obviously a good intention.
The fact that Google also can gain from it doesn't change that to me, but I realize others have different moral philosophies.
99% of online tracking comes from Google Analytics, not ads.
> ...but I don't think most people know or care very much about that.
Indeed...
I don't really think there's any other kind of ad. For the majority of us, there's absolutely no value in ads; so there's no reason I'd want them displayed.
They do give value, they allow sites to operate without some subscription or entrance fee.
Definitely agree with you on the long term capability. There's just so much risk having your web interface owned by someone with a vested interest in what you see.
In the meantime expect 3rd party attempts at gaming this functionality.
I think I missed some nuance. Is doing business is beyond reproach these days?
Google "protects" us from visibly annoying ads while ignoring the much more troubling intrusive and problematic tracking.
The indirect effect of this, I believe, will be for fewer people to protect themselves from problematic cross-site tracking.
They are clearly prepared to counter any such allegation in two ways.
1) It's not Google alone setting the standard. The "coalition for better ads" also includes Facebook, Microsoft and many others: https://www.betterads.org/members/
2) The rules are few and reasonably simple: https://www.betterads.org/standards/
The combination of these two facts doesn't make it easy to pursue a strategy like the one you laid out. So I think this is sincere and can work to some degree.
BUT, the rules are insufficient! They don't ban animations. For me, anything that moves is a huge distraction especially next to or right in the middle of longer text.
Another extremely annoying thing is never ending layout changes. Pages keep jumping up and down because ads are being inserted and moved around all the time.
In other words, what this standard doesn't mandate is to keep the page still. That's why I like the reader mode in browsers that have one, such as Firefox and Safari.
I really can't concentrate with animation going on in in the corner.
The problem with online ads and the reason that things are getting scummier and scummier is that they simply don't work very well for the advertiser. Most clicks are bogus; most prospects are unqualified. That's how Amazon wins: when you click Amazon, you are a buyer wanting to buy. That's why I would far more readily pay for an Amazon ad than a Google ad.
But Google could get back in the game and dominate it with one simple step. If, in their search page, they had a button that said "I am looking to buy" or something along those lines; in other words, if they helped prequalify the prospect, then their ads would become super valuable and they would effectively become the meta-Amazon. Everybody would start using Google again for shopping. Right now, it's mostly Google = Research, Amazon = Shopping, which is why Google search ads are fairly worthless.
I actually witnessed this flow one time: User has car from Budget rent-a-car. User things goole = internet, so goes to google, types "budget rental car" into search bar. Ad for Budget rent-a-car comes up. She clicks it to go to the page to check on her rental. So, Budget had to pay for a click from a user that was already trying to get to their page. From an advertiser's perspective that is not a good use of funds. It's almost as if Google has set up a gate that you have to pay to let your customers get through even after you've earned their business.
https://imgur.com/a/SfdGr
It seems that you are describing Google Shopping.
However it is decent.
I don't use Amazon, and find I use Google Shopping to find suppliers a lot.
How exactly is this anti-competitive? The rules for ad guidelines are set by the Coalition for Better Ads and not Google. So any change in the rules that determine what an acceptable ad is must be approved by the coalition. The only scenario in which your hypothetical argument makes any sense is if Google controlled the coalition which they clearly do not and never will especially when you consider the caliber of companies in the coalition.
That is not my experience.
There isn't "good intentions". It's almost pointless to talk in that terms when it comes to multinational companies. Corporations don't work that way. They aren't charities. Google is acting in its own best interests - what's good for the shareholders. There is no other consideration.
I would imagine (i) to be much longer than (ii).