Slashdot Mirror
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."
There are *ads* on the web? I haven't seen one in years!
I would be ok with the occasional banner ad or something along those lines, but we all know that for every advertiser that attempts to play nicely, a dozen others will come up with some new obnoxious ad. Lately on Wired I've noticed that I have to carefully move my mouse down the page, otherwise I trigger same extremely annoying pop-up/overlay Flash ad often containing sound or moving video which covers the page. I also recently started trying Chrome, so this could be something they've been doing for a while I'm not sure.
I think most people can understand how ads are good in keeping sites free, but I don't think we'll have the pleasure of non-intrusive ads ever. So we'll all be stuck using ad-blockers.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
And, presumably, if there are ad-blocking extensions to Chrome, they will send their information back to Google, and give Google information about precisely which ads are being blocked.
So, when company X comes to Google and says, "Your prices are far too high, most of our ads aren't making impressions anyhow, they're being blocked by clever browser extensions!", Google can come back and say, "Well, we've actually got some data on that, and..."
If you're as good at it as Google, if you, too, can delivery such customer-specific advertising in a peaceful, non-intrusive, text-only delivery system, then yes, you too will have no reason to worry about ad-blocking extensions.
So how will users who have installed ad blocking software at some point realize that the ads they are no longer seeing aren't really that annoying anymore? I suppose what they actually meant to say was "buy text ads, ad blocking software will ... perhaps ... not block them" (sure it does).
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
[glazing over]
yes, ads are a good thing.
I like ads.
They make me happy.
I want to click.
[snapping out of it]
What? Damned Jedi^H^H^H^HGoogle Mind Trick®
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
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!
Perhaps of interest: how many Firefox users currently use AdBlock Plus? According to this reference (search for "AdBlock" to find the spot), the number is around 12%.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Of course the core assumption here is that people block ads because the ad content is a problem.
What they don't realize (and what people in marketing can not realize, or they would have to admit that their whole professions is being a parasite and a PITA) is that it is the advertisement itself that is the problem.
I don't give a heck about what you're advertising for, nor what style, images, words, whatever you use. I don't want to see your crap. 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.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
While I don't use adblock per se, I do use a combination of Firefox's advanced option to disable animated gifs (actually, to have them animate only once) as well as flashblock so I don't have to see animated flash ads.
The reason I do this is because I'm used to reading books; books do not have anything that animates in them, and anything that animates or continuously moves is very distracting for me when I am reading something. I don't mind ads with bright, flashy colors; magazines have had those since the beginning of time [1], but I can't read a page when I see something animated; it's as annoying as having a fly.
As an aside, I remember in the early 2000s when Slashdot was very much against having animated flash ads. Now, they're very common here. I hope, now that the economy is picking up again, that Slashdot will go back to not having animated ads that I have to block. Also, it would be really nice if Adobe gave flash an option where a flash document would never animate until you clicked on it.
[1] The air conditioner was invented so color printing presses used by advertisers would not have the ink run.
MaraDNS is an open-source DNS server.
Don't worry, you aren't the intended target.
The idea seems to be - if the ads aren't too annoying, they are less likely to be blocked, and ad makes will be encouraged to make those less annoying adds.
Or more simply: Google is hoping that ad blockers will get rid of the more annoying ads that encourage people to get ad blockers. The idea is that everyone has a different point of "too much". I suspect google thinks that ad execs will end up targeting a middle ground. Probably little/no animation, no sound, and no more nudity/blood/violence than would be appropriate ofr the normal customers of the target site.
The most easily annoyed 25% are probably not going to be considered - nothing will satisfy them anyway. Most people, however, don't mind non-intrusive ads.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Flash is just evil (for that matter, so is Silverlight). I understand why designers like it, but it breaks the very paradigms that make the Internet great.
Example: I recently ran across the web-site of a very nice little company in my neighborhood. Whoever they hired to do their website put the whole thing into Flash: the menus, the content, even the contact information. Result: you can't find their sitein Google, not even under their company name and address. Accessibility to the blind: none. But the website looks pretty...
Flash: just say "no"!
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
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.
will be my first. I have seen some entertaining ads (for example during the Super Bowl), but never one I considered useful.
If the content is fantastic, there will be large scale contributors.
http://mises.org/ has no advertising that I've noticed. They have some million-dollar contributors.
I have a newsletter site that is free, with no ads, and I have some contributors that offer me a few hundred a year. I don't even openly ask for it (there's a link to contributing that just says "Contribute."). If the content is good, the money will still come in.
Hey - Any time you visit a site and block their ads, you're stealing the Internet! Personally, I click on all banners and buy at least one item from each advertising vendor to support wherever I visit. Otherwise, I'm afraid that this whole "Internet" thing just won't stick.
Seriously, though, some places have it right. Google's ads are fairly unobtrusive and typically (although not always) relevant. Amazon's "People who viewed this item also viewed" or "...untimately bought" links are terrifically useful. And Slashdot's ads (IIRC) are certainly nerd-oriented and can be disabled if you give them money or contribute regularly - Seems like an OK system.
All that said, most places have it absolutely wrong which is why AdblockPlus and NoScript are my first two stops when installing FireFox.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
So, who do you think helps when family / friends / whoever has computer problems?
Yea, it's those geeks. What do you think they will install first when they try to find a solution in the Internet to some technical problem? AdBlocking. Mandatory 10 seconds.
And people like it. They talk about it and others follow.
General demographic is catching up to ad-blocking very fast.
I dunno. I think there's something to be said for looking at the problem in economic terms. Some people tune into the Superbowl to see the advertisements, after all, so that's a kind of exchange: entertainment for eyeballs. I don't mind the advertisements in Google's search results because when I don't want them they don't intrude, but they're often useful enough that I click through before doing a new search. That's win-win for the advertisers and me.
The problem I think is with crude advertising methods from the era of old media. The extreme difficulty of getting many high value impressions by old medial techniques means that if you want to scale your business, you've got to do it with a huge pile of low value impressions. At some scale, the old media advertising game becomes about racking up sheer volume. Since there is no way of distinguishing good impressions from bad, and you *need* impressions, the guiding principle is that there is no such thing as a bad impression. Think of the difference between carpet bombing an entire city and having an agent stick a ricin tipped umbrella into your target as he strolls to work. The assassin is more effective period -- not to mention cost effective. If the only weapons you have are unguided bombs, then no death in that city would be a "bad" one.
If the marginal benefit of the next thousand impressions is greater than their marginal cost, the advertiser will go for it. What Google has done is increase the opportunity costs of going for unwanted impressions. Why do that when you can find consumers who *want* your information? If the process of giving *unwanted* impressions is harder, so much the better for me (and Google, whose business is built on a competing strategy).
Google's search result adverts are a good deal for me: information that is often useful at the price of a few square inches of monitor space for a few seconds. That's the same strategy behind the advertising supported "free phone" idea. Done in an old-media any-impression-is-a-good-one manner, it would be hideous. Done in a way that is useful to me, I might not mind it so much.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
In case of Google it's quite justified - their ads are the only widespread ones which consistently don't seem to be annoying to vast majority of people.
When was the last time you've heard somebody being fed up with them? (vs. eye-raping GIFs or similar Flash ones? The latter often slow, loud or covering the webpage proper)
One that hath name thou can not otter
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!
...of anyone who uses the word "netizen."
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.
This is absolutely backward, though. When advertisers realize fewer people are responding to their ads, there reaction is to make them MORE annoying, MORE obnoxious, and hence more attention-getting. HEAD-ON!!! APPLY DIRECTLY TO YOUR IDIOT-DOME!!!
The way I see it, the only end-game is for advertisers to work closely with site owners so that ads are integrated with the content in such a way that software cannot distinguish the ads from the content.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
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.
This seems like yet another situation that is subject to the tragedy of the commons. Even if a few advertisers choose to use unobtrusive ads there will be others who do not. Ad blocking software generally blocks all ads regardless of how annoying they are. Doing the right thing will not prevent you from being blocked and it will result in less ad impressions.
Generally, an advertiser wants to accomplish a couple of things: (A) make the target demographic aware of its product or service offering, or (B) raise that existing awareness... remind people about the product or service. In both cases, they are ultimately attempting to influence people who would otherwise not spend their money, to do so.
Personally, I find that motive A, if demographically appropriate, doesn't bother me that much, and in fact, has been useful to me at times. After I've seen the motive A advertisement once, subsequent viewings fall into motive B. I usually find motive B extremely annoying. Back when I watched television, I would see the same exact advertisement multiple times a day. Before I started using Mozilla and Adblock, I would add sites to my hosts file constantly. One of the few motive B advertising methods that never got on my nerves are coupons and discount offers.
Once you've gone a while without seeing virtually any advertising, your perspective changes a bit. The times when you are exposed to an annoying advertisement (on another person's computer, somewhere with a TV playing, rent a car and turn on the radio) it's even more distasteful than you recall. I think the annoying methods are crumbling fast. As Clear Channel destroyed the value and variety of radio, MP3 players rose to fill the gap; people obtain their news from website articles, sometimes using adblockers, while newspapers lose subscribers. Between independent video content, DVD collections of shows, Tivos, and piracy, people can get their episodic video fix without seeing a single commercial.
Advertisement exposure is no longer all that mandatory. The other side of this, however, is that people still want to know about products and services that interest them. As such, a person like me, who hates annoying old-school advertising, willfully signs up for deal mailing lists from my preferred hardware vendors, actively seeks out reviews and product previews on sites that cover my interests, and constantly monitors feeds of local news / reviews concerning the sorts of local businesses I like to visit. I am empowered by features like RSS, which make that kind of monitoring possible. The companies who do their best to get their products reviewed far and wide, who publish press releases, etc... will receive my attention. If they make a good product or offer a good service, that attention may have positive results for them. If advertisers wish to stay ahead of the curve (or just plain afloat), they need to start looking at this a lot more. Potential consumers are sending a pretty clear message: Be useful, or shut up.
If that's true, then those advertisers will shrink their market until they go out of business.
The surviving advertisers will be the ones who learned how to make ads that aren't blocked.
*sigh* back to work...
There's an old behavioral psychology experiment that seems to fit the situation:
To train a horse to lift one of its front legs whenever a bell rings, you start out with a piece floor that can be partially electrified to deliver a mild shock. You ring the bell, you deliver the shock. After a while the horse learns that to avoid discomfort it needs to raise its leg. It lifts the leg - no pain.
Now comes the tricky part: after a while you remove the shocking floor. Now the horse will still lift its leg whenever the bell sounds; and what's more, this behavior will even become stronger and stronger ingrained, since there is no more punishment and the "correct" behavior is re-inforced.
Now assume that instead of a horse there is a user, replace the electric shock with annoyance inflicted by ads and the act of lifting the front leg with using adblocking software. This means that in order to overcome the strong aversion of adblock users you have to offer a very, very high incentive and strong proof that reverting to the old browsing habits will not be punished by more annoying ads.
-- Language is a virus from outer space.
have always seemed intrusive [sic] and sometimes downright useful.
The whole point of an ad is to gain attention. Unless you take subliminal advertising seriously an unobtrusive ad is a non-functioning ad. It is a non-sustainable business model.
And useful? You have got to be kidding. Anybody who bases any purchasing decision at all based on unsolicited advertising is a fool.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
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
Well, maybe it's just me, but I have been noticing less and less flash ads lately. Less annoying and intrusive ads as well...
I think it's just you. I turned off my ad-blocker one day to see what the wild was like and I nearly threw my computer out the window.
I would say that the worst form of advertising is putting a 10 paragraph story across ten pages to up ad exposure. Nothing annoys me more than that (and ad blocker can't do anything about those).
"Educate the mind but never at the expense of the soul."~Blessed Basil Moreau
print view. problem solved.
The way I see it, the only end-game is for advertisers to work closely with site owners so that ads are integrated with the content in such a way that software cannot distinguish the ads from the content.
We have that already. It's called CNet.
Well, if the character is going to put on shoes anyway, why not just let them be branded shoes? Would it have been better if the logo was blurred out? No. It has no affect at all on the story or how well it's told.
Developers: We can use your help.
With prices up 200-400% and wages up 50%, I have to be selective.
What country are you living in? Unless you are talking about a time span of decades it certainly isn't the USA. In fact in 2009 the CPI fell for the first time since 1955. Wages certainly aren't up 50% on a nominal or real basis unless you are talking about a decades long trend - and on a real basis they have arguably fallen.
Wrong. "Unobtrusiveness", used in this context, is not a binary trait like you're assuming it is; you're trying to make it a synonym for "invisible". In this context, we're using the term "obtrusive" (and "unobtrusive") to confer degree. So "unobtrusive" doesn't mean "invisible", it just means "not as obtrusive as really annoying and in-your-face".
Google ads are most certainly "unobtrusive", compared to any Flash ad, and even any banner ad.
And yes, basing a purchasing decision solely on advertising is stupid. But without advertising, you frequently will never learn about products and services that are available to you. For some things, you may already know of their existence, and a Google search will help you find places to buy that widget from. But for other things, unless you read some article or third-party testimonial or your friend tells you about it, you don't know that it exists unless you see an advertisement. Sure, word-of-mouth is a great way to learn about things without being unduly influenced, but unless your business is very mature and has all the customers it needs, relying on word-of-mouth for advertising is foolish.