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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?"

21 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 InsightIn140Bytes · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Said it before and I'll say it again ... by Toe,+The · · Score: 5, Funny

      Why would you want to remove ads? Genuine Rolex watches for only $99! They are what support the development of (Refinance today!) new applications for your benefit. Just like you can benefit from a bigger penis! I don't find it (THIS IS NOT ANNOYING!) annoying at all.

    3. 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."

    4. Re:Said it before and I'll say it again ... by H3lldr0p · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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!

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

      My favorite is still one email I got
      "Don't you deserve an Authentic Replica Rolex?"

      No, sir. I deserve better.

      --
      Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
    6. Re:Said it before and I'll say it again ... by masternerdguy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.
    7. Re:Said it before and I'll say it again ... by rel4x · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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!

      What users don't get is that the more people use adblock, the more marketers will have to extract every last penny they can out of the users they can. That means dirtier, high ROI ads, pop-ups, etc. Most users aren't going to install adblock no matter what they do.
      The other end of it is that marketers in general are confident that they can overcome adblock if it ever becomes popular to the point where it's a problem. Adblock only works by recognizing the domain hosting the image/scripts or common path names.
      Toss that banner add on the cloud, or have it hosted locally by the site owners(in a non-"banners" or "ads" subdirectory) and for the most part you've got it beat. Advertisers haven't adapted because there's not a big enough incentive to. But if push ever comes to shove, they'll win.
      Imagining that AdBlock provides(or could provide) enough incentive to make anyone even think about cleaning up advertising is nothing but wishful thinking.

      --

      Before you mod me funny, think, perhaps I was insightfully funny?
    8. Re:Said it before and I'll say it again ... by CodeHxr · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    9. Re:Said it before and I'll say it again ... by dcollins · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "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
    10. 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
    11. Re:Said it before and I'll say it again ... by vadim_t · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I suspect things don't escalate further because ad blocking has the nuclear option: doing everything as if the ad was showing, but without showing it.

      There's nothing that makes it impossible to move ad blocking to the browser itself, where the blocking mechanism sets a "don't render" property on the element. Then it doesn't matter much what the advertiser does, the DOM is the same, as far as JS can tell it's all there, the server logs are identical.

      Now how do you think advertisers will react when the advertising network can tell them "this ad was delivered on 10000 pages, but we have no clue how many of those people actually saw it"?

  2. Live by the sword, die by the sword by cornicefire · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  3. "Will only the last ad in the chain win?" by green1 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The summary asks "Will only the last 'ad supported' software in the chain win?"
    We could only wish! Unfortunately what usually happens is that each step simply adds more ads. Rarely do they remove existing ones to do that. As a result, you simply end up with more and more ads.

    I'm at a point now where I am so fed up with ads in general, that I am ruthless in my ad blocking. I run adblock, and flashblock, and I run adfree on both my cell phone and my tablet. Additionally I run my own DNS server that is used by my computers, as well as my cell phone and tablet, and any time I see an ad on any device I do my best to track down where it came from and block the domain.
    And it's not just the web either, I don't have commercial TV service because I can't stand the ads. Many of the networks have their shows available right on their websites, for free and without the long commercial breaks either!

    Had advertisers kept things reasonable, I might have never resorted to such measures, but as it is, I'm fed up enough to just block everything.

  4. It's not (so much) the ads... by Peter+Simpson · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...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?

    1. Re:It's not (so much) the ads... by CastrTroy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      THIS!

      Facebook is terrible for for. The have have hundreds of millions of people browsing their site everyday, and it's filled to ads for scammers, porn, dubious websites and other junk. They could make a serious amount of money if they would just only take serious advertisers. You don't see ads for fake Rolex watches on NBC, but you do on Facebook, even though Facebook has a much bigger audience. They need a real advertising department that goes after big companies getting real advertisements for legitimate products. If the ads were for real products, people would be much more likely to click on them, and advertisers would pay much more for the ads. Right now, no serious company will advertise on Facebook because they don't want their product showing up next to ads for Russian Brides and get rich quick schemes.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
  5. Cable Operators by geekboybt · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Is this not what the cable operators already do? If they sell a local ad, they simply dub over the national ad of their choice and call it a day. How is this any different?

  6. What goes around comes around: 1998 by jtara · · Score: 4, Interesting

    http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1998/04/13/240866/index.htm

    I designed the client software architecture for the above. It was an "interesting" experience. My favorite "death march" project ever! ;) I got to meet David Bois...

    The client was a wrapper around IE or Firefox, and attached a "PowerBar" to the top of the browser window. Due to the legal issues with EDS, they never got to dealing with any potential legal issues involving consumer privacy or publisher rights.

    While I had some misgivings initially about working on this project, I found Dale very receptive about protecting consumer privacy. There were safeguards to insure that advertisers could only gain access to aggregate data, and this was a stated goal. And he went along 100% with my ideas about insuring that uploaded data was as transparent as possible - passed in the clear so that users could examine it and see just what was being sent, with only a small opaque digital signature. (Which still worried me. *I* knew there was nothing hidden in the signature, but how could the user prove it?)

  7. I am amazed at how ads are funding the internet by Pausanias · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I am perpetually amazed at the amount of money companies spend on advertising. It's staggering---enough to support all of Google, Facebook, you name it.

    Did companies always spend this much money? Does it work? Why don't more people block it? AdBlock has been around for almost a decade now and it didn't cut into this pie at all. It's just still geeks like us using it.

    I don't know what's more amazing, this, or the resistance of most computer users to tweak or modify their browser setup in any way shape or form unless they absolutely have to.

  8. Advertisers will NEVER win. by oGMo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Adblock only works by recognizing the domain hosting the image/scripts or common path names. Toss that banner add on the cloud, or have it hosted locally by the site owners(in a non-"banners" or "ads" subdirectory) and for the most part you've got it beat. Advertisers haven't adapted because there's not a big enough incentive to. But if push ever comes to shove, they'll win.

    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

    1. Re:Advertisers will NEVER win. by adonoman · · Score: 5, Insightful

      When it becomes opt-in, then it's no longer spam. When I sign up to get weekly grocery store flyers, it's not junk-mail, since it's something I want. If groupon and other opt-in mediums become the next generation of advertising, then I'm fine with that.