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Google Wants Online Ad Improvement Within Months, Not Years (wsj.com)

Posted by samzenpus on from the hurry-up dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Speaking at the Wall Street Journal's WSJD Live Conference, Google's senior vice president of adverts and commerce Sridhar Ramaswamy has said (paywalled) that advertisers need to address the shortcomings of online ads within 'months'. "This is essential to our survival" said Ramaswamy. "We're talking about getting this in a time frame of months rather than years. We need to get going on this." Ramaswamy was referring to recent commitment from the advertising industry to halt the rise of adblocking services by addressing common reader annoyances such as autoplay video, overly complex and slow-loading content, and excessive tracking.

14 of 227 comments (clear)

  1. well then by fyngyrz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Well then the first thing Google should do is go back to text ads that didn't drag our poor browsers all over the damned web. You know, the actual reasonable ads that they put out once upon a time. That would be great.

    --
    I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
    1. Re: well then by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

      And stop accepting money from the bad advertisers. Oh yeah, and stop collecting data. Think that's going to happen? Nope. Google is the driving force behind all this ad-crap and data collection. Google needs to die.

    2. Re:well then by gweihir · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Not quite. There was for example mandatory ad consumption of the worst kind every Sunday in Christianity. And even worse in other religions. At least the cretins today only want to sell you something and are fairly easy to ignore. But this type of plague has been with the human race for a long, long time.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    3. Re: well then by tippen · · Score: 3, Insightful

      And then we could have competition on the search-engine front again, because Google search frankly sucks.

      Not sure what planet you are living on, but oddly enough, you are free to use all those other search engines that are better than Google.

      /boggle

    4. Re: well then by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Google is the driving force behind all this ad-crap and data collection. Google needs to die.

      Just go to the Android Play store and tap on same random app and check its permissions. 99% of these apps collect data they should not. If Google is evil, other companies are mini-evil. Getting rid of one company solves nothing.

    5. Re: well then by Coren22 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      because Google search frankly sucks.

      Yes, we can read. If Google search sucks so bad, go use the alternative. No one is forcing anyone to use Google. By all accounts, Bing is great, though uses way more bandwidth, and Yahoo just uses Bing's results. But if you hate Google's search so much, feel free to go somewhere else, it doesn't require Google to burn before you can go elsewhere.

      --
      APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
  2. And then ? by rudy_wayne · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "This is essential to our survival" said Ramaswamy. "We're talking about getting this in a time frame of months rather than years. We need to get going on this."

    And when advertisers do nothing, then what? A sternly worded blog entry?

    Advertisers don't give a shit. That's why there's a problem in the first place

    1. Re:And then ? by Lord+Bitman · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The question is: Does Google have enough money / clout to piss off its main source of revenue? Are advertisers still its main source of revenue?

      When advertisers do nothing, Google could (theoretically) say "follow our new standards or you are banned from our ad network". I mean, that's the obvious thing they "could" do. Whether or not they have the ability to get away with that, that's another thing.

      --
      -- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
  3. Not Excessive Tracking by FunkSoulBrother · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Not Excessive Tracking -- any tracking. They can put whatever they want in a static, hosted by the first-party domain, text or image ad, with no javascript, and I'll happily allow it past my blockers. Hell they probably wouldn't be able to catch it anyway.

    Just treat it like taking out an ad in Time Magazine or the New York Times, and there won't be any serious number of people blocking you.

  4. Until they can stop malware, I will keep blocking by jonwil · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Until such time as Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft and the other online ad networks can gaurantee that their ads are free of malware and nasties, I will keep blocking.

  5. taking the internet back... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Believe it or not, there was once a time when the internet had no ads, and no ubiquitous surveillance.. Yes, less "content", but the signal to noise ratio was about a million times higher then, than today. And virtually all of that "content" is social media crap and mass-market pulp anyway.

    Advertisers took the place over, and now it's filled with suck. Monitization, ubiquitous tracking -> more monitization, fake reviews -> yet more monitization, and "seach engine optimization" -> even more monitization!

    No thanks. The world at large can take the internet back, if it really wants to. The good stuff will persist. I and others donate explicitly to the stuff that's worth while, like Wikipedia. If your content is not able to survive on people wanting it to survive, maybe the internet didn't need it so bad after all.

    We had an ad-free internet once. We can have one again.

    1. Re:taking the internet back... by chipschap · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "We had an ad-free internet once. We can have one again."

      I wish that were true. Maybe it's possible.

      I run a site for checker enthusiasts ... I've run it almost 11 years with weekly updates and no ads, not ever, not even one. I run it because I want to, and there are plenty of other people doing similar things. Do I feel the need to monetize it? It costs me $10 a month for hosting, and how much revenue could I realistically get? It's not worth ruining it for my readers, even if I could make a little money. The fun would be gone for me and for them.

      That's what most of the internet used to be. There's still some of it left, but the percentage isn't high.

  6. It's the malware, stupid by PeterM+from+Berkeley · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I never bothered with an ad blocker until the risk of getting malware delivered to me instead of an ad was made clear to me.

    I can put up with annoying: I can filter ads very well mentally. I just look around them automatically.

    But having malware delivered to my browser to exploit some security hole I never heard of? Intolerable!

    No ads for me until the ad networks take responsibility for preventing malware and for the cost of cleanup if they deliver malware.

    --PeterM

  7. Popups by jason777 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What grinds my gears, are these fucking pop up ads that appear on every fucking news article I click. Who is the retard that thinks that shoving a huge fucking modal html window over top the fucking article im currently trying to read is going to make me stop reading and focus on their shitty ad? Stop this fucking bull shit right fucking now. Put it at the top or on the side, and I'll probably see it eventually. But pop this in my face, and piss me off and theres no way I'm even considering buying your product, even if I'd actually want it.