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Google Says Ad Blockers Will Save Online Ads
azoblue writes "Google — the world's largest online ad broker — sees no reason to worry about the addition of ad-blocking extensions to its Chrome browser. Online advertisers will ensure their ads aren't too annoying, the company says, and netizens will ultimately realize that online advertising is a good thing."
I think the point here is that ad blockers will have more impact in the less sofisticated ads (popups and the like). Probably Google thinks that it has the muscle to get its ads in a way that won't suffer as much. Either as they are less intrusive so less people is likely to try hard to get rid of them, or because they have technological ways of distributing the ad that make much harder to dismiss it without breaking the page that the users wanted to see. Or both of these reasons.
Why can't
If the ads were less annoying I wouldn't mind them at all. Some of the ads are actually very informative rather than spammy if you are on a website that caters to your interest and delivers ads based on content served on the site.
I'd love to see sites implement an ad protocol such as this:
1. No flash-based or animated ads.
2. No ads bigger than 300 x 100 pixels.
3. No ads with bright contrasting colours such as orange when the entire site is white and green.
4. All ads can be turned on or off at the user's preference. This site implements an honour system.
5. Users can select what categories of ads they would or would not like to be served.
If websites and companies were just more sane about their ad policies, I think a lot less people would resort to ad-blockers.
Valkyrie is about to die! Wizard needs food -- badly!
We are stuck with ad-blockers because there's always an guy that assumes that being as annoying as possible is good to business. However, there are rare examples of ads and networks that I have left unblocked because their ads are not distracting, annoying or plain stupid. There have even been ads that I liked and never wanted to block. Such ads usually come from well controlled smaller syndicates and that includes Google text ads unless there are more ads than content on the page.
I think it's a bit more nefarious than that. Allow me to finish that thought for you:
Google can come back and say, "Well, we've actually got some data on that, and...it appears that without the add blocker, your ad will be seen by 275 billion more people a day. We can add your adds to our "safe list" to allow them to get through our add blocker, but it will raise your rates by 35% in order to cover the administrative costs of maintaining your position on that list".
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Most people are OK with Ad's on some level... just not OK with obnoxious popup-type invasive ads that even crash your browser sometimes. ...)
The solution is an ad-blocker with level-based blocklist like this:
- Allow only text ads (this is where google wins)
- Allow simple image ads (not larger than
- Allow animated image ads
- Allow movie and interactive ads (flash ads)
- Allow all terrible ads (never use this ad)
I use an ad blocker to stop:
Video ads that automatically play
Animated ads
Blinking ads
Ads that automatically talk
Ads that automatically popup
Large multimedia ads on a wireless link
I don't want my web pages to move or make noise unless I tell them to. Telling them to means clicking - not mouse over.
Unfortunately the ads blockers catch all of the other ads too. I don't mind ads that behave but the moving/talking ones are so annoying that I will block everything to get rid of them.
Really, I don't. I use NoScript instead, and will add defenses as I see fit.
It isn't so much that I like ads as that I don't mind them as long as they aren't dangerous or obnoxious. (This means that I'm never going to give an ad site clearance in NoScript, for example.) As long as advertisers don't bother me overmuch, I won't worry about them.
Fundamentally, Google's got an idea here. The only question I have is whether the advertisers will, indeed, learn to control themselves and live within this contract. About a third of television shows is ads, and there's plenty of obnoxious ads on the web. Heck, there's plenty of billboards along highways that try to get your attention, and that's potentially lethal. So, I'd bet that there will continue to be a need for ad blockers.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I'm in this boat. I have nothing against online ads if they're not intrusive, annoying, and excessive. I never go back to sites which excessive ads because they clearly care less about their own content. I'd rather see a few simple ads on a quality site than block ads on a crappy site.
It's similar to TV advertisements. People watch superbowl ads because they expect them to be entertaining. The rest of the year I flip to a different channel when the ads appear because I just find them annoying. But the occasional unobtrusive product placement within a program doesn't deter people from watching the show.
Developers: We can use your help.
I use advertisements on most of my sites not because I want to make money, but because I want to pay for the site. It's not cheap running a dedicated server (Not to mention the time I spend administrating and developing the site), typically a few hundred $$$ per month... If I can recoup that cost (which I do), than I am happy. Is that such a bad thing? I'm not talking about a lot of money here either, I average around $500 per year above my raw expenses. I think that $10 per hour for the admin duties that I do isn't bad to take...
With that said, I see such a low impact from ad-blockers (around 5% or so), that I really don't mind. I keep the ads unobtrusive, and haven't heard a single complaint (yet). It's the few bad apples that overload their sites with ads that spoil it for the rest of us who are just looking to have an expense neutral side project (or make a little bit of beer money for the time invested)...
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
How, precisely, are you supposed to search for something that don't know exists? This is the primary function of advertising as a concept, (though not the primary function of the ads that I'm sure annoy you).
FanFictionRecs.net
I think you and the GP stumbled on the idea. Googles ads, IMHO at least, have always seemed intrusive and sometimes downright useful. They generally don't break web layout either.
That makes Google a winner either way. If people who don't like ads, refuse to use them and most important won't click them want to block ads, Google as the biggest web advertiser can get a higher click-through rate. Conversely, the people that actually interact with helpful ads will block some annoying ones, which will probably leave the remaining ones to be a higher percent of Google ads. Win - win.
lol: You see no door there!
Unfortunately the ads blockers catch all of the other ads too. I don't mind ads that behave but the moving/talking ones are so annoying that I will block everything to get rid of them.
I agree 100%. I feel bad about blocking huge swaths of ads (e.g., everything from doubleclick) just for one or two bad apples -- but I tried playing whack-a-mole by blocking only the annoying ones for a while. It simply didn't work. The hyperactive flashing, jumping, talking ads simply are created too quickly to block each of them as a one-off. So I have rules that, for example, block all of doubleclick.net. And anything with /ads/ in the URL. And 245 similar other rules.
I've even had to block the small, boutique ad providers -- like projectwonderful.com -- that I'd really like to see succeed. But they end up serving up too many animated and/or risqué ads, so I had to block them as well.
So, as much as I'd like to believe what Upson has to say about adblockers destroying the market for annoying ads, I just haven't seen it happen. And I've been watching for well over a decade now.
I'm a multiplyer. I set up my PC, my gf's PC, my parents' PC, my steppatrnts PCs... whatever I do will affect a number of people.
Many PCs are configured by multiplyers like me. We pushed the use of firefox over that of IE in Germany. And we implement adblockers.
Now, why do we do that? It's not because we were asked for it. The people whom we help don't know that ads can be blocked before we tell them. No, we want to have less work.
How do we minimise our workload for administration of relatives' PCs? We secure them. Part of securing a PC is to make sure that only intended content is executed on it. That's why we install adblockers on so many PCs.
One or two years ago, a web-advertising company called "Falk AG" in germany got hacked. They had their banners on all sorts of resprctable sites like major newspapers. Suddenly, when you were visiting the websites of the leading German magazines, your PC would be hacked through manipulated ads served by Falk.
Again, we want to reduce the time we have to spend on those machines, therefore we want to keep them as clean as possible, therefore we make them block ads. What type of ad? Flash, animated gif, static image? I don't care. If it's not loaded into the browser, it cannot exploit a weakness.
Now for google.
If something needs to be found, it will be searched for, most likely using google. If all other ads are blocked, only the text-ads served by google on the google result-page will ever be seen. It increases their value.
Why would google care about banners on other people's sites?
And even if Chrome would not allow adblocking, what if a user actually found something in an ad he likes? He wouldn't have to google it. Google loses.
So, I'm actually surprised it's not google themselves who provide an adblocker for Chrome.
Ad-blockers work on URLs for the most part don't they? If a company starts using ads from a new URL they aren't blocked by default.
I've always allowed ads that come from the site I'm viewing. I block on principle ads that come from remote servers. If an online company wants to invest in ads they are willing to host, I'll deal with the ads.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
OK, ABP has 11 million users. That's great. Can we compare to another open source project? VLC has a few more downloads than that. (I know I can't compare downloads to users, so I won't).
Let's try this instead: 1.7 billion people running web browsers, 47% running Firefox (815 million FF users), and only 11 million people choose to install ABP? That's 1.35%. Most of those are tech savvy people who are harder to brainwash with ads anyway. It's noise.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
The entire point of an unsolicited ad is to grab a person's attention. If it doesn't do that then it's not working. And a person's attention is valuable to them.
The ads you are talking about are the type that try to grab your attention and convince you that their product is something you want.
Google ads always try to be relevant to something you're already looking for.
It's the difference between ads in a trade journal and pharmaceutical ads in Time Magazine.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
If I need "product information", I will find it - ironically - on Google. The difference is that I'll be looking for it, instead of getting it shoved down my throat, willingly or otherwise.
Even from an advertiser perspective, Google's system sucks. On the forums for "search engine optimization", one discovers that ad clicks from Google search results tend to result in sales, while ad clicks from Google ads on non-Google sites (what Google euphemistically calls the "Google Content Network") don't. 50% of ad clicks come from 10% of the user base, and that 10% doesn't buy anything.
Google ads on non-search pages aren't that valuable to advertisers. So why are there so many of them? Because they're opt-out for the advertiser. Many Google advertisers have ads on the "content network" only because they haven't found the hidden button on Google's screens for opting out, as an unhappy Google advertiser reports: "I am running many Google ads and their CTR is around 10%-15% for search page impressions; However the CTR on the content network is 0.02%! I can exclude my ads appearing on certain sites however at the bottom of the URL list it states "Other Domains" which have a total CTR of 0.01% with well over 300,000 impressions in a month! This is driving my overall CTR down massively! If I can not view these sites and choose to exclude them...I need to opt out of all content based placements immediately. How can I do this?"
Also see "Good Reasons to Avoid Content Targeting: "The AdWords user interface misleads new advertisers. Industry consensus suggests that content targeting ought to be used selectively and one should bid lower on content than on search inventory. This is because ads on content inventory tend to convert at a lower rate than ads on search inventory. But when you walk through Google's campaign setup, you find that you've been automatically opted into the content network at the same high bid as your search campaigns."
Much of the "bottom feeder" problem on the Web comes from this one trick of Google's.
We measure some of this at SiteTruth, and some of the results are here.
Not what I'm saying...
http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/70yearsofpricechange.html
Dropping the great depression...
wages ,1970 $9,400.00 , 1980 $19,500.00 , 1990 $28,960.00 , 2008 $40,523
1940 $1,725.00, 1950 $3,210.00 , 1960 $5,315.00
Note the big discontinuity start at 1990. I see a smaller increase in 1960 looking at this fresh. at my company this year,
no raises, no bonuses, but there are numerous "promotions" in the executive ranks-- no change in duties. It's just a slimy way of giving themselves raises.
house
1940 $3,920.00, 1950 $8,450.00 , 1960 $12,700.00 , 1970 $23,450.00 , 1980 $68,700.00 , 1990 $123,000.00 , 2008 $238,880
More than doubled in 1980, so we were less able to afford houses. It went from 2 years salary to 3 years salary- to 4 years in 1990 to 6 years in 2008.
car
1940 $850.00, 1950 $1,510.00 , 1960 $2,600.00 , 1970 $3,450.00 , 1980 $7,200.00 , 1990 $16,950.00 , 2008 $27,958 ,
Cars stopped doubling in 1990-- people probably couldn't afford a 32000 car or perhaps the spike in 1990 was an aberation since 7200->14400->28800.
meat ,1970 70 cents , 1980 99 cents , 1990 89 cents , 2009 $3.99 ,
1930 12 cents , 1940 20 cents , 1950 30 cents , 1960 45 cents
Meat has gone up a lot since 1990- but that may be a reaction to the dip in 1990's (so ranchers had less incentive to raise new cattle)
Meanwhile the GINI coefficient has climbed from from 39.6 to 46.6 (dropping from 47 in 2006) putting the United States very high in the list of countries with unequal income distribution.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.