1) Google wants the most money, so they don't care to let dodgy ads thru.
2) There are more ads going out then can be reviewed, so they would rather have people report them, then they automatically reject the report until enough people report it, then an actual person may review it.
As to why Google doesn't use AI to review them? Google would rather use the AI in a way that makes them more money, than review ads and if AI decides to take them down then that's less money for Google.
(To be clear: I don't work for Google in any way, these are just my guesses)
> (To be clear: I don't work for Google in any way, these are just my guesses)
To be ridiculously pedantic for a second:
If you don't narrowly define "work" in terms of an employment relationship, the number of people who don't in some way do work that benefits Google becomes vanishingly small.
> There are more ads going out then can be reviewed, so they would rather have people report them, then they automatically reject the report until enough people report it, then an actual person may review it.
If only there was a technology which could automate this... But we all know, AI is only used on users, not customers - and users get the two line perl script "AI" which says "We have reviewed your claim and decided to ignore it".
I have reported so many of those dodgy, scammy, sexualized ads on YouTube, that YouTube/Google has removed the option to report advertisements from my account.
They don't care as long as they're getting paid and there's no immediate liability for them.
I've been on the same crusade, reporting all the scam/fake-ai/misinformation ads as possible, when a couple weeks ago they changed how you report. The ad will still play through as you're reporting it, and once finished reporting it still remains and you may see it again after a few swipes (YTShorts). It feels like they did this so they could get the money before removing it.
The funny thing is it used to be that people warned you not to go to dodgy sites as they were full of ads that were trying to steal your money or online identity.
It was mostly just scaremongering, but it never hurt to be careful.
Nowadays, Google will serve you those exact ads if you go to any major news outlet.
> 2) There are more ads going out then can be reviewed
The "more than can be reviewed" might have been a logical conclusion in a purely human based workflow, even if you have the lowest cost per head click workers in like, an external contractor call centre type environment in Bangladesh.
As the author points out, the ordinary consumer class version of publicly available Gemini very accurately classifies the ad as malicious. I really doubt that there are THAT MANY unique new ads being submitted per day that they can't afford the compute to run them through a similar classifier.
As someone who advertised with them, they do seem to have an AI reviewer, and it also has false positives that no number of appeals seem to resolve. So in these cases you want to pay them money for good ads, but you can't because AI says no.
As someone who has worked for Google Ads, I should say that they do review ads with both AI and humans, and do spend quite a bit of money and energy on finding and stopping both bad-faith advertisers ("buy side", what we see) and bad-faith publishers ("sell side", more of a scam on the advertisers/google itself).
Is it enough? Probably not, based on this article. Are their policies strict enough? IMHO no way, considering Youtube left an ad up for "Ukranian women" in the early years of the war which wtf. But they certainly do try.
Like most businesses, the actual people involved are also well-intentioned, at least in the abstract; they wanted to make ads that sell products without annoying people. Obviously there's material conditions beneath and around all that, but we don't need to explain that part here ;)
Adding friction to the process (on the advertiser side) means less money for Google: 1) due to the cost of implementing the checking, 2) because some legitimate advertisers will be falsely denied, 3) because the scam ads were still paying money.
Not adding the friction doesn't seem to come with any serious downside. One would expect that it would, e.g. due to publishers removing the most profitable properties from the ad network or governments legislating this out of existence, but that doesn't seem to happen.
So, given these incentives, the outcome is inevitable.
If Google had to pay a massive fine for every scam ad that gets through, or was liable for the damages the ads cause, etc. - or otherwise had a strong incentive - suddenly there would be enough resources to make sure every ad is reviewed, advertisers that push scam ads get fully banned on the first offense rather than being given second, third, and fourth chances, etc.
> 1) Google wants the most money, so they don't care to let dodgy ads thru.
They have literally destroyed their own reputation, and all the reputations of legitimate products that might appear along these scams. Do you think anyone would want their car, smartphone, or tax software appear next to actual credit card scams?
TV has standards for decency, and factuality, and might ban entire categories of ads (financial services) altogether.
In underregulated capitalism, the reason is very simple: because they get away with it. This is why they despise regulation; it enforces accountability. Want to advertise? Ensure the ads are legit. It doesn't work when you say 'we didn't know beforehand' when a significant percentage is scams. That is when you start to curate the content beforehand.
In any other normal market, the middleman would be held accountable. Big tech? Not so much. We seen the slap on the wrist regarding Microsoft at the start of the century/millennium. We can also witness the same with regards to the garbage coming from China, where China doesn't take responsibility. Learned from the best.
I don’t think they want the most money. If they did, they’d have done this long ago. The trend we’re seeing is about them just struggling to meet their quarter over quarter and year over year numbers. It’s a short term driven change to strategy, they’re trying to fill the hole with something else (we all know what) before admitting it exists. If they said their golden goose was dying, the stock would crash.
My father saw a similar ad and got worried. The ad said you need to update your pdf version immediately. He uninstalled the YouTube because he knew it was irregular and thought his phone was hacked.
And I suspect (would love some real data from scammy advertisers) that this is a bigger factor than most folks appreciate.
If you're a regular business that sells clothes or food or SaaS or insurance or whatever, online ads are a) not your whole customer acquisition system (you have regular marketing, word of mouth, maybe sales people, maybe brick-and-mortar brand presence, physical advertising, etc.) and b) not part of your expense sheet that you want to spend tons of time on.
The "b)" there leads companies to either overspend on stupid (but unlikely to be flagged) ads, or to try to keep their ad spend as low as possible for the highest reward, because they think of it like opex. After all, they have all the normal expenses of a normal business to worry about in addition to ad spend. Sure, there are outliers here who spend almost all their non-product money on online ads, but not most ordinary companies from Verizon to Dave's Local Auto Insurance to Safeway.
So "good"/ordinary advertisers aren't generating super high flag rates, but they're probably either a) spending lots of money without churn/support-needs risk or b) aren't spending that much ... compared to scam-ads-only businesses. Sure, google would prefer more upstanding customers in category "a)", but they're a near-monopoly and some of that growth is expensive to chase, while the scammers are beating a path to their door.
If you're a scam-ad business that produces malware or LLM-written gacha games or whatever, your product expenses are minimal and, if your business is lucrative, you can spend very large amounts of your balance sheet on ads for scam delivery channels. Tiny businesses in this area are likely to have whale-sized ad spends and a strong likelihood of growth (vertical as they get bigger/greedier, or horizontal as they keep spinning up new businesses to keep ahead of the law and bad press). I bet they punch above their weight ad-spend-wise, in other words.
You thought the unit economics of a SaaS business were good? Well, wait until you see the unit economics of a Play Store whitelabeled gacha game app with a credential stealer inside!
More specifically a very large number of dodgy companies spend a relatively small amount each but in aggregate it's a lot of money.
Google has no interest in policing that because money and won't until they are forced to and since they are a transnational that's difficult since it requires multiple countries to do it with the added wrinkle that if you even hint at the possibility that just maybe you might consider doing something about US big tech you get immediate screaming from across the Atlantic.
I suspect this boils down to a cost/benefit tradeoff.
The cost of strictly enforcing stated rules for ads is felt immediately and fully by Google. It is concrete, measurable, and probably non-insignificant; the benefit is essentially goodwill from the narrow sliver of the web that is verbal about this. That is intangible, difficult to measure, even harder to assign a reasonable dollar value to (meaning the ROI could look negative), and the benefit would accrue to parties other than Google who might not even notice.
Keep up these efforts to name and shame. If Google won’t act on these things because it doesn’t make them money, because they are unregulated, or because they are lazy, they might because it still cuts their credibility and reputation. Especially here on HN where Google is no longer considered such a darling by developers and thinkers.
I'm sure if I submitted an app that on the iOS app store that mimicked a system warning that tried to scare people into giving me access, it would not pass the review process.
If instead I decided to embed a WebView and later changed the html to do the same I would likely get booted from the app store (afair Apple's very particular about serving remote content in PWAs, and changing said content, even under benign circumstances).
iOS seems to have less scareware and shady apps than Android anyways.
the app store is filled with scammy apps, its just a different flavour
I once got a crypto-wallet PK leaked by a fake wallet app impersonating another very known brand. Found out on reddit it was a fake... After a few months the real app came out but yeah...
That's at least something. Last I was on a streaming service, they were very fastidious about not revealing who was behind a spammer's rotating "music labels", despite them by law having some kind of payment details for them.
It's a network made by snake-oil salesman. People on Brazil yearns for passive-income, and they get told by a lot of influencers that dropshipping is what will give them their freedom.
Then you have thousands of people dumping fake ads about borderline fake products on Meta and Google. It's actually a hive-mind.
I've mentioned this hundreds of time in various context and forums: I do not believe that there's sufficient quality ad content to keep companies like Google or Meta running at their current levels. It doesn't make sense to me that the stores and manufactures selling physical goods are able to fund the entire tech industry.
They simply have to allow a certain number of sketchy ads, perhaps not outright scams, but they need to pimp some level of questionable products and services to keep the money printer running.
Geography certainly plays a roll, the smaller the market, the less advertisers are available. When I occasionally wanders into the ad supported internet without a tracker-blocker I get the same ads on repeat. It's my local supermarket, where I shop regardless, it's ads for vitamins and assistive devices for the elderly and plastic junk from China. That's it... honestly I can't see how that funds the tech gigants.
Man, Google is catching strays from all directions. I recently posted an article about their bot behaviour [0], only to be drowned in other more pressing issues.
To comment on this one: as long as there is no backlash from their real customers (those that buy ads) nothing will change.
It's more than that. The 10% is the scam ads that "won" the ad auctions. It doesn't include the effect of scam ads bidding up the market and increasing the price of non-scam ad wins.
> Could also argue that the scam ad that won the slot for 10 cents would have gone for 9 cents without the scam and Meta's marginal revenue was only 1 cent.
They're probably taking that into account in their 10% of profit coming from ads estimate.
Ohhh, has anybody used AI to generate delicious statistics about how many ads served by various ad networks will get you hacked / violate the ad networks own policies?
There is a 3rd option: malicious stupidity / aka wilful ignorance.
Google is a collection of individuals, so it's very likely both sides of Hanlon's razor are true: a little malice from those in control, persisting a state of stupidity for those executing the process.
As others have pointed out, there will be resistance to improving a process that negatively impacts their bottom line. Incentives, dictate long term behaviour of organisations; whereas Hanlon's razor works better at an individual level IME.
I have a website with some adsense ads (that pay for the server).
I try blocking the most obvious scams by blocking the announcers but it's basically impossible because the same doggy ones keep coming back with a new name.
Also hard because they're not always in a language you understand.
I don't think I should do all this work instead of the biggest ad company in the world just to earn 5€ per day, but I'm also not aware of any better alternative.
Google can reply and confirm whether or not a report did anything?
I’ve never seen that. I report ads on YouTube all the time. I’ve reported ads for illegal drugs, illegal firearms, pornography, and all sorts of various scams. I’ve seen similar advertising to the example in this article, mimicking the phone’s UI. Ive reported them. I’ve never once seen Google reply to any of my reports to confirm what happened. I’ve always wondered, and since I continue to see the ads I just assume my reports go straight into a trash bin.
The illegal firearm ad I saw (more than a year ago, now) I was so shocked that I took screenshots and reported it multiple times. The ad advertised that the weapon was “easy to sneak through security” and “didn’t require an id to purchase” I saw the ad several times across multiple weeks. I reported it every time. I don’t think Google ever did anything about it. If they did, it took them weeks
There is am extremely pervasive trick where bots repost trending comments rewritten in AI very early in videos and boost their bot comments above the original, then if a bot lands a top comment the profile is suddenly switched to porn/scam links with a female model as the profile picture.
It's so common and so clearly reported by many people that I'm left to assume Google likes the engagement the profiles bring and chooses to leave them up.
I can recall one time I got feedback from Google that an ad had indeed been taken down, that was an Ukrainian women dating ad in Gmail which was not subtle at all about offering trafficked women. But that's some time ago.
Google's ad-serving is dumb as a rock. It seems to be based just on things it thinks you may be interested in, even when it should be 100% obvious that they are not things you are going to buy.
They should let people have more control over what ads they do and don't see.
If Google served me ads on stuff I was interested (I'd be happy to tell them) rather than womens clothing, they I might buy it. I'm a guy - show me as many skimpily dressed women as you like, but I have no need for women's clothes! Try it once or a hundred times it you must, but maybe after the millionth non-purchase you'd think they might figure it out and use that screen real-estate to serve an ad for something that my purchase history or what they know about me indicates I might have some interest in!
Well, the advertizers want my money, which they are not getting - wrong ads.
Google wants the advertizers' money, who are really being scammed by Google if they pay every time Google serves an ad to me that Google presumably knows is not going to result in a purchase. I guess Google don't care - if they get paid for click-thrus and I occasionally do that, but never buy, then Google still gets their money.
I’d love to know how much Google has made from accidental clicks since it started. I used to see my mum make a couple of mistaken clicks here and there on her computer; now on mobile it’s easily 10x worse. Sometimes because she doesn’t realize they’re ads, other times she tries to tap the X and it opens… It’s insane
I think the obvious answer is they aren't held to account by regulators. If a few execs were sent to prison for defrauding their users (and investors for taking on so much risk) things would change overnight.
This is one major reason why blocking ads is now a safety issue. If you have a family member who, for whatever reason, might be fooled by this sort of ad, install an effective adblocker on all their browsers and uninstall/disable browsers that don't support an effective adblocker.
If you are reliant on ad revenue, you should be expressing your displeasure to google right now.
When Google broke the original uBlock origin and made people switch to uBlock Lite, I found out about the change because my grandmother called me in a panic. She saw an ad like the one in this article on her Facebook page and clicked it, then it was telling her to call Microsoft support because her computer was infected.
Like, Google removing Adblock directly caused that. Facebook allowing the ad caused that.
The ad led to malicious page that was also hosted on a Microsoft thing, and I ended up reporting it to them too. Microsoft at least promptly took it down within a half hour after I reported it. But these big companies have almost no incentive to stop this, and some of them directly profit off of these scams happening.
* Got me a "BearSkin" jacket from youtube's incessant advertisement.
* Signed up for a $250 subscription to "The Daily Beast" when she was watching youtube tv right before bed and probably subscribed when she meant to just view.
* Signed up for Norton Antivirus when she got a gif that looks like a popup that tells you have a virus and it opens to a Subscription Plan on her phone.
None of these things were things she particularly wanted, some she didn't even consent to, but a combination of paid promotion / advertisement / confusion about the UI is basically doing things against her will.
I literally got her Youtube Premium just so she stops seeing all the ads that are feeding on her. It is a problem.
> got her Youtube Premium just so she stops seeing all the ads that are feeding on her
I don't blame you for your solution but it is so sad that we have to basically pay protection money to Google now so that our loved ones don't get scammed and robbed while they are consuming addictive/slop content.
If you think that is bad... Recently I discovered that even a tiny website with moderate textual content basically forces adoption of cloudflare due to incredible (~2k request per second at times) scraping by bots.
It isn't even a shakedown, they are genuinely protecting you from others. But how did we get to the point on the web that this is needed?
A lot of questions being raised today can be answered by the recently inverted power balance between users/customers and corporations. People have not yet internalized that old assumptions about how corporations fear losing customers are no longer valid. Consumers have become entirely docile and passive. Open hostility to consumers is now a norm. (Obviously regulation is also less powerful and less feared as well.)
Many large modern corporations are third-hand cars. The original owner had a purpose and an emotional investment in owning the car; for the second-hand owner, it became a practical thing; for the third-hand owner, it is often a liability.
If you are lucky, your third-hand owner still checks the oil and puts quality tires on it. If you are not, your third-hand owner pours customer relationships down the drain and doubles down on indiscriminate cost-cutting, alienating good people from the organization.
You're right. It's in their power to kneecap the businesses they sit on Twitter and whine about. Twitter, incidentally, being another one of those businesses.
387 comments
[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 93.4 ms ] thread1) Google wants the most money, so they don't care to let dodgy ads thru.
2) There are more ads going out then can be reviewed, so they would rather have people report them, then they automatically reject the report until enough people report it, then an actual person may review it.
As to why Google doesn't use AI to review them? Google would rather use the AI in a way that makes them more money, than review ads and if AI decides to take them down then that's less money for Google.
(To be clear: I don't work for Google in any way, these are just my guesses)
To be ridiculously pedantic for a second:
If you don't narrowly define "work" in terms of an employment relationship, the number of people who don't in some way do work that benefits Google becomes vanishingly small.
If only there was a technology which could automate this... But we all know, AI is only used on users, not customers - and users get the two line perl script "AI" which says "We have reviewed your claim and decided to ignore it".
I have reported so many of those dodgy, scammy, sexualized ads on YouTube, that YouTube/Google has removed the option to report advertisements from my account.
They don't care as long as they're getting paid and there's no immediate liability for them.
Nowadays, Google will serve you those exact ads if you go to any major news outlet.
The "more than can be reviewed" might have been a logical conclusion in a purely human based workflow, even if you have the lowest cost per head click workers in like, an external contractor call centre type environment in Bangladesh.
As the author points out, the ordinary consumer class version of publicly available Gemini very accurately classifies the ad as malicious. I really doubt that there are THAT MANY unique new ads being submitted per day that they can't afford the compute to run them through a similar classifier.
Is it enough? Probably not, based on this article. Are their policies strict enough? IMHO no way, considering Youtube left an ad up for "Ukranian women" in the early years of the war which wtf. But they certainly do try.
Like most businesses, the actual people involved are also well-intentioned, at least in the abstract; they wanted to make ads that sell products without annoying people. Obviously there's material conditions beneath and around all that, but we don't need to explain that part here ;)
Adding friction to the process (on the advertiser side) means less money for Google: 1) due to the cost of implementing the checking, 2) because some legitimate advertisers will be falsely denied, 3) because the scam ads were still paying money.
Not adding the friction doesn't seem to come with any serious downside. One would expect that it would, e.g. due to publishers removing the most profitable properties from the ad network or governments legislating this out of existence, but that doesn't seem to happen.
So, given these incentives, the outcome is inevitable.
If Google had to pay a massive fine for every scam ad that gets through, or was liable for the damages the ads cause, etc. - or otherwise had a strong incentive - suddenly there would be enough resources to make sure every ad is reviewed, advertisers that push scam ads get fully banned on the first offense rather than being given second, third, and fourth chances, etc.
They have literally destroyed their own reputation, and all the reputations of legitimate products that might appear along these scams. Do you think anyone would want their car, smartphone, or tax software appear next to actual credit card scams?
TV has standards for decency, and factuality, and might ban entire categories of ads (financial services) altogether.
In any other normal market, the middleman would be held accountable. Big tech? Not so much. We seen the slap on the wrist regarding Microsoft at the start of the century/millennium. We can also witness the same with regards to the garbage coming from China, where China doesn't take responsibility. Learned from the best.
And I suspect (would love some real data from scammy advertisers) that this is a bigger factor than most folks appreciate.
If you're a regular business that sells clothes or food or SaaS or insurance or whatever, online ads are a) not your whole customer acquisition system (you have regular marketing, word of mouth, maybe sales people, maybe brick-and-mortar brand presence, physical advertising, etc.) and b) not part of your expense sheet that you want to spend tons of time on.
The "b)" there leads companies to either overspend on stupid (but unlikely to be flagged) ads, or to try to keep their ad spend as low as possible for the highest reward, because they think of it like opex. After all, they have all the normal expenses of a normal business to worry about in addition to ad spend. Sure, there are outliers here who spend almost all their non-product money on online ads, but not most ordinary companies from Verizon to Dave's Local Auto Insurance to Safeway.
So "good"/ordinary advertisers aren't generating super high flag rates, but they're probably either a) spending lots of money without churn/support-needs risk or b) aren't spending that much ... compared to scam-ads-only businesses. Sure, google would prefer more upstanding customers in category "a)", but they're a near-monopoly and some of that growth is expensive to chase, while the scammers are beating a path to their door.
If you're a scam-ad business that produces malware or LLM-written gacha games or whatever, your product expenses are minimal and, if your business is lucrative, you can spend very large amounts of your balance sheet on ads for scam delivery channels. Tiny businesses in this area are likely to have whale-sized ad spends and a strong likelihood of growth (vertical as they get bigger/greedier, or horizontal as they keep spinning up new businesses to keep ahead of the law and bad press). I bet they punch above their weight ad-spend-wise, in other words.
You thought the unit economics of a SaaS business were good? Well, wait until you see the unit economics of a Play Store whitelabeled gacha game app with a credential stealer inside!
Google has no interest in policing that because money and won't until they are forced to and since they are a transnational that's difficult since it requires multiple countries to do it with the added wrinkle that if you even hint at the possibility that just maybe you might consider doing something about US big tech you get immediate screaming from across the Atlantic.
The cost of strictly enforcing stated rules for ads is felt immediately and fully by Google. It is concrete, measurable, and probably non-insignificant; the benefit is essentially goodwill from the narrow sliver of the web that is verbal about this. That is intangible, difficult to measure, even harder to assign a reasonable dollar value to (meaning the ROI could look negative), and the benefit would accrue to parties other than Google who might not even notice.
I'm sure if I submitted an app that on the iOS app store that mimicked a system warning that tried to scare people into giving me access, it would not pass the review process.
If instead I decided to embed a WebView and later changed the html to do the same I would likely get booted from the app store (afair Apple's very particular about serving remote content in PWAs, and changing said content, even under benign circumstances).
iOS seems to have less scareware and shady apps than Android anyways.
I once got a crypto-wallet PK leaked by a fake wallet app impersonating another very known brand. Found out on reddit it was a fake... After a few months the real app came out but yeah...
90% of the ads I see on YouTube are obvious scams. Many from untraceable shady overseas organizations.
You don't need to be Kreskin to figure this one out.
That's at least something. Last I was on a streaming service, they were very fastidious about not revealing who was behind a spammer's rotating "music labels", despite them by law having some kind of payment details for them.
It's a network made by snake-oil salesman. People on Brazil yearns for passive-income, and they get told by a lot of influencers that dropshipping is what will give them their freedom.
Then you have thousands of people dumping fake ads about borderline fake products on Meta and Google. It's actually a hive-mind.
They simply have to allow a certain number of sketchy ads, perhaps not outright scams, but they need to pimp some level of questionable products and services to keep the money printer running.
Geography certainly plays a roll, the smaller the market, the less advertisers are available. When I occasionally wanders into the ad supported internet without a tracker-blocker I get the same ads on repeat. It's my local supermarket, where I shop regardless, it's ads for vitamins and assistive devices for the elderly and plastic junk from China. That's it... honestly I can't see how that funds the tech gigants.
To comment on this one: as long as there is no backlash from their real customers (those that buy ads) nothing will change.
[0] https://blog.miloslavhomer.cz/how-google-sees-your-site/
They'll act if someone threatens to sue otherwise Google doesn't give a shit as long as they get paid.
They're probably taking that into account in their 10% of profit coming from ads estimate.
There is a 3rd option: malicious stupidity / aka wilful ignorance.
Google is a collection of individuals, so it's very likely both sides of Hanlon's razor are true: a little malice from those in control, persisting a state of stupidity for those executing the process.
As others have pointed out, there will be resistance to improving a process that negatively impacts their bottom line. Incentives, dictate long term behaviour of organisations; whereas Hanlon's razor works better at an individual level IME.
I try blocking the most obvious scams by blocking the announcers but it's basically impossible because the same doggy ones keep coming back with a new name.
Also hard because they're not always in a language you understand.
I don't think I should do all this work instead of the biggest ad company in the world just to earn 5€ per day, but I'm also not aware of any better alternative.
I’ve never seen that. I report ads on YouTube all the time. I’ve reported ads for illegal drugs, illegal firearms, pornography, and all sorts of various scams. I’ve seen similar advertising to the example in this article, mimicking the phone’s UI. Ive reported them. I’ve never once seen Google reply to any of my reports to confirm what happened. I’ve always wondered, and since I continue to see the ads I just assume my reports go straight into a trash bin.
The illegal firearm ad I saw (more than a year ago, now) I was so shocked that I took screenshots and reported it multiple times. The ad advertised that the weapon was “easy to sneak through security” and “didn’t require an id to purchase” I saw the ad several times across multiple weeks. I reported it every time. I don’t think Google ever did anything about it. If they did, it took them weeks
It's so common and so clearly reported by many people that I'm left to assume Google likes the engagement the profiles bring and chooses to leave them up.
And since, as this article points out, Google does not need reports if they actually wanted to block such ads, it seems completely pointless.
Because some of us don't want to give in to the dead internet theory yet.
Maybe we should report obvious fraud or illegal content to the authorities.
They should let people have more control over what ads they do and don't see.
If Google served me ads on stuff I was interested (I'd be happy to tell them) rather than womens clothing, they I might buy it. I'm a guy - show me as many skimpily dressed women as you like, but I have no need for women's clothes! Try it once or a hundred times it you must, but maybe after the millionth non-purchase you'd think they might figure it out and use that screen real-estate to serve an ad for something that my purchase history or what they know about me indicates I might have some interest in!
Dumb as a rock.
It's like the whole purpose of ads, they're not trying to sell you stuff you need - they want your money.
Google wants the advertizers' money, who are really being scammed by Google if they pay every time Google serves an ad to me that Google presumably knows is not going to result in a purchase. I guess Google don't care - if they get paid for click-thrus and I occasionally do that, but never buy, then Google still gets their money.
If you are reliant on ad revenue, you should be expressing your displeasure to google right now.
Like, Google removing Adblock directly caused that. Facebook allowing the ad caused that. The ad led to malicious page that was also hosted on a Microsoft thing, and I ended up reporting it to them too. Microsoft at least promptly took it down within a half hour after I reported it. But these big companies have almost no incentive to stop this, and some of them directly profit off of these scams happening.
Not me.
Is that because I stuck with Firefox?
* Got me a "BearSkin" jacket from youtube's incessant advertisement.
* Signed up for a $250 subscription to "The Daily Beast" when she was watching youtube tv right before bed and probably subscribed when she meant to just view.
* Signed up for Norton Antivirus when she got a gif that looks like a popup that tells you have a virus and it opens to a Subscription Plan on her phone.
None of these things were things she particularly wanted, some she didn't even consent to, but a combination of paid promotion / advertisement / confusion about the UI is basically doing things against her will.
I literally got her Youtube Premium just so she stops seeing all the ads that are feeding on her. It is a problem.
I don't blame you for your solution but it is so sad that we have to basically pay protection money to Google now so that our loved ones don't get scammed and robbed while they are consuming addictive/slop content.
It isn't even a shakedown, they are genuinely protecting you from others. But how did we get to the point on the web that this is needed?
If you are lucky, your third-hand owner still checks the oil and puts quality tires on it. If you are not, your third-hand owner pours customer relationships down the drain and doubles down on indiscriminate cost-cutting, alienating good people from the organization.
:)