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Google, Facebook Upset By Ad-Injecting Apps
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?"
Why is this necessary? Both already have native apps on mobile devices. Users can browse with IE, Firefox, Chrome, etc. What does the browser do that a normal browser doesn't?
We don't live in Shouldland.
The irony is killing me. Google is so happy to frame other people's content with their own ads. It's going to be funny to see them spin up some kind of tortuous distinction between their advertisements and the ones that the Sambreel uses.
Adblock only works because it's not widely used. If everyone would use it, then advertising networks would have to come up with better ways to deliver ads without possibility to block them. It's already done on sites that are for geeks, like Slashdot. /. has ads, yes, but they also sell advertising spots on Ask Slashdot section and polls. By advertising Adblock (ironic, isn't it?) you're only giving webmasters and sites more reason to come up with hidden advertisements and things that really integrate into site. Google is already doing it on YouTube - they put some required components behind ad servers, so if you block video ads then the videos will stop working completely.
...but the absolute *crap* they advertise. Honestly, I do *not* want to look up my former high school classmates, I do *not* need a credit card with a lower rate and I do *not* want to see [random actress] nude! Perhaps if they were to advertise something I actually wanted...but then, they wouldn't ned to advertise as much, would they?
If Adblock becomes common, interstitials are going to win. They are the only form of ad that could be coded such that they cannot be blocked (e.g. make the interstitial send a message to the site at the beginning and end of the ad, and/or require the user to enter some content from the ad before the site sends the actual content of the website to the user).
If they win, adding more ads will only make the user not want to use your interface since it means a further delay until the website's content can be viewed.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
It's not that I want to hide the ads. What I want is to hide the annoyance of the ads. Keep the ads subtle and out of the flow of what I'm on a site for, and I won't want to block them.
What the marketers don't understand is that the more annoying they get, the less eyeballs they receive because of more and more people use ad-ons like Adblock to avoid the annoyance. All they seem to understand is the lazy approach. Be loud! Be garish! Be anything but smart and honest!
I have this cool idea for a plugin that lets 8086 assembly be embedded directly into web pages, maybe the advertisers could use that?
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
This whole business about making money just by slipping an ad in front of an eyeball is stupid, and I wish it would stop altogether.
Brought to you by Carl's Jr
Unfortunately, we may get a bad result of all this: if ads beside the content become entirely useless, the upstream providers will start putting the ads IN the content. Witness what happened to the bottom third of your screen after Tivo came out. When Adblock learns to block those, they'll just make it more subtle.
Product placements pioneered in-band advertising, but the first generation was pretty awkward. Diamonds are a notable exception. Those guys were brilliant. Instead of making a big deal of the rocks, they wrote a subtle preconception into the plots: that offering a girl a diamond is the universal standard when getting engaged. The girl is thrilled by the surprise proposal, but never surprised that he's offering a diamond. And thus the audience learns: she might be overjoyed by an unusually expensive one, but no diamond at all is NOT ACCEPTABLE. A hundred years ago, that wasn't even fiction; now it's reality.
Realize that this is still going on, and try to spot it. Don't just look for blatant logos smeared everywhere, and cumbersome shoehorning of brands into dialog... Those exist too, but that's just because not everyone can afford the genius advertising guys, even if there were enough of them to go around. But the subtle tricks of old are well known, and still in use. Look for the subtle stuff the cast takes completely for granted that you thought was just something the trendy conformist crowd was into... they are just the first to fall for it. Especially look for it in the news.
Now tell me how the hell you're going to slice that out of the content. Adblock isn't going to cut it.
That is CURRENTLY how they work. but if the advertisers change their tactics then the ad-blockers likely will as well.
This seems like the same paradigm that piracy/anti-piracy follows. The pirates will, by definition, always be one step ahead because anti-piracy is reactionary. Translating this to the current discussion, advertisers will always be one step ahead because anti-ad software is reactionary. Just $0.02.
"What the marketers don't understand is that the more annoying they get, the less eyeballs they receive"
Skeptical: Citation needed.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
They will never win. Look at it this way. You've essentially said that advertising gets dirtier the less people respond, and if everyone used Adblock, advertising would get so dirty we couldn't win.
Yet, spam is probably the dirtiest advertising there is. There is likely no trick the spammers have not tried. Send from any host, embed stuff in reasonble-looking text, etc. Yet spam detection is very, very good, to the extent that spam is on the decline.
Advertisers will never win, because you can write better software that detects ads. Adblock's simple host and XPATH detection is all that's there because it's all that's necessary right now. It would however probably not be that hard to write image detection software that can process images and assign a AD-PROBABILITY value to them. Use the cloud against the advertisers ... just set up software that learns by user submission on a cluster and click on an ad to submit it. Consult the "cloud" for any new images.
But, until most people care about ads the way they care about spam, it's not going to be necessary. Unfortunately we're so culturally inundated with advertisement that it's just not a thing. Though while this may look like a win for advertisers, it does make ad removal trivial for those of us who care.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage