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Google, Facebook Upset By Ad-Injecting Apps

Posted by Soulskill on from the turnabout-is-highly-irritating dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Emily Steel at the Wall Street Journal writes about an unexpected twist for Google and Facebook, two companies that make their money selling ads next to content created by others. New companies like Sambreel Holdings are writing slick browser interfaces for popular sites like Facebook or Google and supporting themselves by injecting their own ads into the mix. Naturally, the original ad sellers aren't so happy about other ad sellers inserting themselves farther down the chain. Are we in the middle of an ad war where every company tries to inject their ads over the others? Will only the last 'ad supported' software in the chain win?"

6 of 282 comments (clear)

  1. Said it before and I'll say it again ... by amalek · · Score: 5, Informative

    Adblock, como te amo.

    1. Re:Said it before and I'll say it again ... by Lisias · · Score: 1, Informative

      Adblock, como te amo.

      In plain English, for all the non-Portuguese readers:

      Adblock, I love you so.

      (Me too, by the way)

      --
      Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
    2. Re:Said it before and I'll say it again ... by bonch · · Score: 5, Informative

      Google doesn't like AdBlock either. Chrome doesn't support the blocking of ads before they're downloaded, even though WebKit supports that functionality (and it's used in the Safari version of ABP). The author of ABP has implemented workarounds for some ad types, but it's still an arbitrary limitation in Chrome--a browser from a multi-billion dollar web advertising company with a vested interest in having you download their ads so that they count as "views."

    3. Re:Said it before and I'll say it again ... by InsightIn140Bytes · · Score: 3, Informative

      And don't forget Google Analytics. Since you can't actually block the request, it will hit it and Google gains more and more data about everyone. In other browsers you can actually deny the whole request so it doesn't work.

    4. Re:Said it before and I'll say it again ... by DJRumpy · · Score: 3, Informative

      Ghostery works well for that sort of thing.

      It should achieve the effect you are looking for in preemptively blocking the content before it hits your browser.

      Supports most major browsers too.

    5. Re:Said it before and I'll say it again ... by Lucky75 · · Score: 5, Informative

      Actually, adblock blocks youtube ads embedded in videos. I didn't even realize that youtube HAD started putting ads in videos until I used a browser without adblock.

      --
      DNA -- National Dyslexic Association