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Google Upgrades AdSense
An anonymous reader writes "According to a story in the New York Times, Google will now "give advertisers more control over where their ads are shown, how they pay for them and what they look like." Author John Battelle claims "The core philosophy of Google's advertising business is that these ads are actually valuable and useful to users: look for Chevy trucks and get Chevy truck ads. Now we are in another place. It's more about branding and more about advertising other things than what you are looking for, and, cynically, it may be about being a public company that needs revenue growth."" The other thing that other submitters noted was that AdSense would also be accepting graphical advertising as well; but for display on partner sites.
Some registration free links:
Unfortunately, I don't see anything about this on Google's press release page yet.
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Conversions of Currency Rates of Exchange
Many of you might not like targeted ads ("privacy issues"), but face it --- Google's and Gmail's ads are far less annoying than the random irrelevant banners that, say, Yahoo puts up.
For Internet users, the most visible change will be an expanded use of ads with graphics and animation on many of the Web sites for which Google sells advertising, rather than the short text ads that have been Google's hallmark.
Looks like Adblock's going to be getting a new entry pretty soon.
From the summary:
The other thing that other submitters noted was that AdSense would also be accepting graphical advertising as well; but for display on partner sites.
So you can continue using the Google search engine, no unobtrusive ads there. (More pointed text ads, yes, but that's just obtrusive/unobtrusive as before, right?).
cynically, it may be about being a public company that needs revenue growth
Everyone raves about, say, Google Maps. I do too. But is it "cynical" for them to move around enough money to actually pay for all that great stuff? Come on, folks, we can't have it both ways. There's nothing "evil" about growing the company. And all of you Google stock holders had better come clean now if your preference is that the stock stays low!
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The other thing that other submitters noted was that AdSense would also be accepting graphical advertising as well; but for display on partner sites.
;-)
I've seen graphical Google ads for a while - I think they were followed by bits of text saying something like 'What do you think of these? We're testing them' or similar.
Of course, I can't for the life of me remember where I saw them - anyone else seen these adverts, or was I imagining them?
I do remember that they were relatively small and non-Flash - and much smaller than the whopping big Google AdSense advert at the top of Slashdot as I type this...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Adblock googlesyndication.com - no banners for me under any circumstances !
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Which then take longer to load. Take more time and become animated, then flash, then pop up..
It doesn't work. The only reasonpeople accept google ads is because they are like 1-2k each and they don't have flashy pictures or crap.
I like muppets.
I don't know about you, but I've had the option, so far, of accepting graphical AdSense ads or just sticking with text. It's in your account profile.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Extreme Adblocking is cool. Uninstalling Flash works well too. Often I have enough of all images and fire up lynx or elinks. The Internet is a hypertext medium, I want text, not flashy graphics or cola ads.
My little Linux and tech blog
I think Google ads are great. They're not too intrusive and they serve out relevant content, unlike many of the banner ad services out there.
As a tech savvy parent, I know only too well how some ad services work. For example, in the course of looking over the logs on my home network's main server, I found that somehow my son had been receiving some very questionable banner ads through some of the sites he frequents. When I confronted him about it, he said he had been downloading "r0mz," which are basically dumps of old video game ROMs that can be played using software emulators. Of course, I talked to him about the ethical issues inherent in using other people's work without paying whatever price they ask for (if any), but that seemed much less serious to me than the content of those ads!
I tell you, the smut they put on those sites -- I couldn't believe it! I would think these webmasters would have the sense not to put that sort of material on sites that presumably only children would be interested in. I can only assume their banner ad provider just doesn't have the kind of targetting technology Google uses.
-- Molly Lipton, Born Again Technologist.
I cant count how many times we have read that Google is tunring evil. Is it some kind of projection on the part of some people, they seem to WANT google to be evil somehow. I just dont understand why.
HTTP/1.1 400
According to TFA, they're allowing graphic ads om their partners sites only, not on google.com. I too will be blocking it, though.
This is quite possibly the worst summary I've ever seen.
Fallacies:
1. This affects AdWords advertisers whose ads are *published* on the AdSense network. Not AdSense publishers. At all.
2. Image creatives have been an option in our AdWords accounts for at least 6 months. You see them on some AdSense publishers already, you just don't know it.
The real news here is the following:
1. Google is *bringing back* (they had it years ago) cost-per-impression advertising. However, this comes with improvements. I won't spam, see references. (R1)
2. Google is going to finally allow AdWords advertisers to decide what content network sites their ads are published on. (R1) Now we can decide NOT to place our ads on shady sites and fall victim to click fraud.
On the real news item #1, this is of huge interest because Google is allowing some "creepage" back to the CPM (cost-per-mil impressions) model. This seems to indicate that they're finally recognizing that click fraud is a *huge* problem. To the tune of it being estimated 15-20% clicks in competitive CPC (cost-per-click) markets on Google might be fraudulent. (R2)
References: (R1) (R2)
I use /etc/hosts to filter ad sites, but I wonder if it's the "best way" of doing it. I have some docens of lines on that file like this:
0.0.0.1 doubleclick.net ad.doubleclick.net ads.mcafee.com 247.vo.llnw.net
0.0.0.1 doubleclick.com m.doubleclick.net m2.doubleclick.net ad.au.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.1 ads.web.aol.com ads.web.de ads.web21.com adserv.newcentury.net
0.0.0.1 adservant.guj.de adservant.mediapoint.de adserver-espnet.sportszone.com
0.0.0.1 advert.heise.de banners.internetextra.com bannerswap.com customad.cnn.com
0.0.0.1 pagead2.googlesyndication.com
which will make browsers fail when they try to show you ads. The list is longer (get it if you're curious)
But this seems a bit "hacky". Is there a better way to do this, is there some project which keeps track of such ad sites, or even ip ranges and allows you to block them easily?
For now, at least, I don't think the search engine is going to be switching. This is talking about Google's Adsense program, which is the text ads it puts on affiliate sites. As an affiliate, one can choose to display text or graphical ads. Some affiliates will switch to the graphical ads, others will remain with the text ads.
Personally I've clicked on a lot more text ads than banner ads, and I think text ads work better. If this is true, then there probably won't be much incentive for any affiliate sites to switch - if they work best with text ads (google certainly does), then they can use text ads, if their content works better with banner ads, then they can use them.
But if banner ads really do get better results, in addition to being annoying as hell, then you might see the price being offered for them reach levels which are hard to ignore. If so, maybe you'll even see google make the switch for its search engine. I doubt any of this will happen, but maybe it will.
Google will not allow the increasingly popular formats that include video, sound and interactive elements. And it has restrictions on the animation, to keep ads from repeating endlessly or flashing in a particularly distracting manner.
Hmm. Dunno yet. I'm not unilaterally against all advertising, just irritating advertising. I may not block these ads. We'll see soon, I suppose.
Software Wars
What about ads that most will find offensive?
Search for negroes on Google.com and see what ads show up on the right hand side.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Firefox becomes Lynx!
R.
The OP is using AdSense when in fact should be AdWords. Advertsisers use AdWords, publishers use AdSense.
Ads are neccessary but they don't have to be graphical. AS USERS, WEBMASTERS AND ADVERTISERS, Google's text ads service really worked for me and just about everyone I know.
Only hypocritical parents who think of their children as little innocent angels who will somehow be corrupted, would agree. If your kid is "caught" actively (vs accidently) surfing porn sites, then TALK WITH HIM/HER to let 'em know it's perfectly natural to want to look at boobies, but that the younger they are the stupider they are and so they shouldn't consider doing any of it themselves until they're older.
Punishing them only forces them to learn how to go around your back and cover their tracks. And they will.
Power to the Peaceful
Of course I confronted him. I expect my children not to use their internet privileges to look at pornography.
You are missing the point, just because an ad from a porno site appears on the logs does not mean your progeny has been looking at porno. Given that even very good adblockers don't filter everything (or require lots of knowledge to use), it isn't the average surfer's fault if they get porny ads. Such is the nastiness of unregulated advertising.
Asking him to not use sites that have those ads is pointless as they could pop up on any site which deals in R0mz
(Incidentally, most of the emulator roms out there are for abandonware, so pretty much free of moral quandries about Intellectual Property).
As you run a home network with logging, why not block the domains that are bothering you? (just the ad domains, not the sites your son is learning from).
US Copyright law requires Google to defend their copyright or lose it. There is nothing evil about doing what you are required to do in order to defend your brand name.
For those unaware, here's the timeline:
2000 the domain, Froogles.com was purchased 2002 Froogles.com goes live, followed by Google bringing up Froogle.com, seemingly in response, and filing for trademark protection for Froogle.com 2003 Froogles.com files for trademark protection and attempts to block Google's trademark on Froogle.com 2004 Froogle.com trademark is granted to Google.As you can see, this was an escalation between the two companies, but the fact of the matter is that running a search engine called /^[a-z]oogles?.com$/ is pretty much guaranteed to make an adversary of Google. Oh the shock! ;-)
Evil, in my book, would be applying for and enforcing trivial software patents; forcing lesser companies to accept monopolistic strings attached to routine business dealings; or forcing users to accept ads that render useful content difficult or impossible to use (especially for the disabled). Asking companies to be creative and come up with their own names is about as far from evil as you can get.
I think that Google's old method of embedding text ads in search result pages was a little bit underhanded. While they were off in another column of the screen, they looked just like regular search results.
For a long time, I didn't even notice the ads on the right side. Further, how could you think these are regular search results? The format of the "ad column" is totally different from the search results.
What? You couldn't tell the difference? Are you really reading Slashdot?
Adding graphics to the advertisements seems to be a logical way of extending the power of advertising while at the same time minimizing the confusion of users.
No, no, no. How about more intelligent ads? How about understanding the context of what the user is looking for and placing appropriate ads? A previous poster mentioned that they were discussing milk allergies and that they would obviously want soy or other products, but because the search engine wasn't intelligent enough, it put milk products up.
How about timing the user's interest. Why bother the user at all until they are at the point of actually wanting to do research. So, during the first three e-mails with their friend, do not put up any ad. On the fourth e-mail put up a tastefully worded ad about soy products. Wouldn't this at least convey the impression of Google trying to understand the conversation before putting ads on the e-mail?
How about something of value within the ad. I'm not talking about FREE this or that, but rather *gasp* intelligent ads that talk about their product. How about just banning the word "FREE" from all ads and make them come up with something more useful -- like "trial pack" or "we will give you something to get hooked on our product in order to bash the competition into the ground."
How about introducing some sort of user rating system or ad review service that rated ads based on usefulness to the reader? Sure, this would be difficult to pull off, but Google can do anything, right?
There are plenty of ways to make advertising more effective without resorting to flashy crap. Yes, it is more difficult. Flashy crap pays for itself more quickly and supports graphic artists, which lord knows don't get paid enough, but that's another story.
I read someplace in the privacy policy that they try to filter ads for personal situations like a death or a breakup.
If you have an e-mail thread yielding lots of advertisements, reply with:
"my grandmother died"
And they're all gone.
Maybe I'll make it my sig.
The point is that pornography is degrading and turns good kids into creeps.
An empirical study published in an accredited, peer-reviewed journal backing up this claim would be of interest.
Hint: Readers Digest doesn't quite make the grade.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
will never, ever tell my son that it is okay for him to watch pornography. It promotes a disgusting view of sex and women that I don't want my son to be exposed to. He will grow up with proper guidance where sex is concerned and that is more than enough.
Please, you are sticking your head in the sand.. Your son will be exposed to porno (and cigarettes, and alcohol, and gambling, and probably drugs) whether you want him to be or not. If you have taught your son to think for himself and supported him to the point that he considers himself his own person he will make the right decisions when exposed to these things.. If you shelter him and pretend this stuff doesn't exist you don't know what will happen when he finds all of this cool stuff his family never told him about.
Growing up I was exposed to porn at an early age (10 or 11) through BBSes, however I never turned in to a "sneaky pervert". I had many homosexual friends that I met through BBSes, but never had a homosexual experience or desire to be homosexual. In high school most of my friends were pot heads, but I never smoked pot. I liked hanging around them but I decided for myself I had no desire to smoke a drug to make me lazy, stupid, and hungry.. I can do that on my own.
I'm not telling you or anyone how to raise your kid, just pointing out an alternate viewpoint that you can take or leave. I've had many friends growing up that were sheltered, and watched them all go wild and end up in jail, on drugs, or in rehab when they turned 18.
Today I didn't even have to use my AK; I got to say it was a good day -- Icecube