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Google Wants Online Ad Improvement Within Months, Not Years (wsj.com)
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.
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.
"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 have ads limited to less than 25% of the page
2 stop cutting articles into index card sized chunks to increase ad slots
3 NO AUTOPLAYING VIDEOS (unless the page is for a single video)
4 no more than 3 videos per page
5 no POP under over in down up (or any of the 8 possible directions)
6 absolutely no mimicking SYSTEM level elements or hiding existing ones (gimme a proper close button that does so)
7 No Audio or Animations
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.
The problem is that nobody is selling their own ads. It's that simple. It's these stupid shitty ad networks (Google, included) that are the problem. And I'm always going to block them. If web sites want to sell their OWN advertising and host it from their OWN web sites, then I'd have absolutely no problem. But, what web site wants to employ salespeople and (ad) designers when you can just copy and paste a line of code into a web site? Well, I think the ones that continue to do that into the future are the ones that aren't going to make money. Whether they stick around or not is up to them. I wouldn't mind having a pre-AOL web back, personally. But sites that rely on ad networks for revenue are going to start drying up as more and more people block these stupid fucking ad networks. Web sites that produce valuable content are going to (have to) employ people to sell advertisements and put those ads into their own content, just like the big boys of the much-scorned "old media" do (ie: Newspapers, TV, Radio).
I don't respond to AC's.
As I'm watching Shield right now and the only commercials that won't play worth a crap are Google's.
I notice that there is no mention of cleaning up the malware/exploit/drive-by-download issues the advertising networks currently have.
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.
When it comes to the Internet, the biggest problem they're going to encounter is that there is nothing in this world that advertising improves .
I've sat and tried to think of anything that advertising actually improves (in my mind at least). About the closest I can seem to get is movie trailers before a movie. And that's it. And I don't see how that would apply to websites.
There is no advertising anywhere that improves the web experience, thus users will always have an incentive to block it. It uses end-user and ISP bandwidth, so it actually costs the consumer (and everything in-between) for its delivery.
Anything that costs me money which detracts from the overall experience, even by a tiny bit, is going to get blocked when there is an easy technological means to do so. There is absolutely no way Google or anyone else can change that -- being less annoying is still infinitely worse than not being present in the first place.
Yaz
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.
55% of ad revenue is brokered by Google, Facebook and Twitter account for another 30%. That's 85% of all online ads between those three companies. Whichever standards these companies select to make ads less annoying, advertisers will have to deal with it.
Online ads? They have online ads? Seriously? Where?
-- Fuck Beta
As long as it is possible to block ads, I will do it. I hate ads. I would gladly sacrifice the web as it currently exists to avoid ads. If that means subscription only sites, so be it. If it means going back to the web of 1998, so be it. Ads are vomitory, corrosive, fatuous mind-leeches. Kill them all.
No auto-play, no complexity, fast loading, no tracking? Does not matter. All ads are horrible. Kill them all.
—G
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
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.
I notice that there is no mention of cleaning up the malware/exploit/drive-by-download issues the advertising networks currently have.
If you eliminate all but simple text and image ads, you pretty much eliminate the malware problems. Obviously image decoders do sometimes have bugs that allow infection, so text-only ads would be even better.
Who cares about your interests? We're talking market sizes here, not personal preferences, and reality is, many people do like these social web services and continue to use them. Hence, owners of said resources get to make the calls on the ad tech.
Tiered internet. Prepaid cellular plans. Screen space. Obscured exit or hiding. Hiding prompting tertiary menu. Show me a picture of what you're selling in a compressed image or get off my lawn.
>"halt the rise of adblocking services by addressing common reader annoyances such as autoplay video, overly complex and slow-loading content, and excessive tracking."
Too late now, the damage is already done. Besides, more and more web sites are now just as annoying as the ads were with stupid an pointless moving/animated/scrolling content, overuse of numerous overlapping huge backgrounds and usually with transparency, pop-up everything, mouse-overs hidden over the whole page blocking the view of what you want to see, slide-ins, slide-outs, fadein/out on every object, etc, etc. I swear- in just one year the majority of sites are just FLOCKING to this stuff and even my fast machines are coming to a crawl loading and displaying these sites. It is a shame. I try to go places to research or buy things and find nothing but endlessly long pages full of nothing but marketing fluff and eye candy. There is barely any content anymore... the idea of adding ads back into that mix would be enough to push anyone over the edge.
They can guarantee all they want. I won't trust them until they start bearing the weight of liability and reparations for when their ad network is used to spread malware.
Then you're not trying nearly hard enough.
The first thing I do when I land on a page is click on my blockers to identify any new trackers and ad companies, and make sure to block them.
Google's ad shit was among the first. There's no less than 3 Google domains which have been blocked on the page as I type this comment. Then I remove any cookies not already blocked.
If you think ignoring those social media sites means you aren't tracked on pretty much every web page, you're delusional. That crap is embedded in most web pages, so they track you even if you don't use them, unless of course you're actively blocking them.
Rest assured, Google is trying to make change because the number of people outright blocking ads is becoming noticeable. They don't give a crap about what users want.
And if you think Facebook and Twitter don't see what most people are doing, you need to look closer. It's actually kind of scary.
If you're not actively stopping them, they're watching you anyway.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Interesting that you think the proper response to a story about the evils of advertising is to... advertise your stuff.
Just interesting. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Google is one of the worst offenders, as they purport to be "non-intrusive", yet happily accept ads from "companies" that deceive people into believing that they are offering genuine support for any number of companies. Search for Dell Support, HP Support, Gateway Support, etc. (which the elderly and less savvy tend to do) and you will be given a link called "Dell Support" or similar which has a toll free number posted next to it.
Typical "support" scam follows, including false claims of infection, need for optimization software, and of course a nice fat $375 support agreement.
Searching for Apple support no longer seems to result in these ads, by the way. I'm not sure if Apple threatened legal action or if enough people complained. For those who think it is just by chance, and they have no knowledge of the scams, take a look at the Chrome store. For years, when searching for Adblock Plus, Google allowed phony apps called Adblock Plus to appear in the list above the real extension. Now, they seem to have finally banned the name, but are allowing such nonsense as "Addblock Plus", again posted above "adblock plus", the extension (apps show first)
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
If they weren't such a security risk and such an annoyance I wouldn't have blocked them years ago, including blackholing all ad hosts via the hosts file.
So some sites won't play? Fuck you, I don't need you, I can get my information from other sites.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Introduce yourself to customers as you would like them to introduce themselves to you.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The thing is, it isn't the customers driving the bad habits in advertising. Those who buy advertising want it to be effective, but aren't really too well clued in as to how this happens.
This is due, at least in part, to the opaque systems operated by big advertising platforms like Google and Facebook.
I run some small businesses. We don't have huge ad budgets, so we've experimented with a lot of different platforms to see what works well. What follows is some of our experience, but of course it's anecdotal and you should imagine a huge "your results may vary" wrapped around this whole post.
In many cases, we start with a very low budget (maybe $100 for an on-line ad network) just to test the waters, because even that level has proven to be enough to identify cost-effective channels. We've found there's not much point trying to figure out in advance what you're really going to get from the auction-based systems anyway, you just have to try one and see if it's competitive with what you get from the others for the same money. They dress things up and show you a million knobs you can turn, but ultimately all you care about is how much money you put in and how much money you got out as a result. If you get one that looks plausible, then you can invest some more money in further campaigns and refining how you use it to improve the results.
We tried Google. Among the top referral sources from an already disappointing level of traffic were blatant spam sites with small print about Viagra, fake qualifications, and so on. We get some conversions from general Google search traffic, but I'm not sure we got a single conversion from the paid ad campaign with them. I suppose this is hardly surprising if that's the kind of site where the ads were showing.
We've never gone back. Sure, the ad industry consultants can probably tell us "how to do better", but if Google's system is that easy to game why would we even try? I can spend the same amount on some other channels that already do better, and I can spend any extra time and money to improve the performance on improving other channels that already do better too. As an obvious example, on Facebook an ad campaign with the same budget pays for itself within just a few weeks on average for us, and our numbers tend to improve over time.
Maybe Google's problem isn't the hostile advertisers. Maybe it's that our experience isn't unusual and they simply aren't offering a good service.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
It's certainly true that good, responsible advertising can be beneficial all round. After all, if someone invents the best product/service since sliced bread for some niche market, how is anyone in that market who would be interested in having that product/service supposed to find out about it without some form of advertising?
As you say, the trouble is that on-line ads are often so... well, evil. And the trouble with hoping to change that is that the evilness makes them much, much more cost-effective. It seems likely there is a more healthy balance to be found somewhere in the middle, but I don't know whether it will be possible to achieve it in practice because the potentially evil qualities of on-line ads tend to be all-or-nothing propositions.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
It's a self inflicted predicament. They shouldn't have gone into bed with evil Doubleclick.
By that logic you should block every web site, because none of them can guarantee that they won't be hacked and start serving malware. Some ad networks are particularly lax in their security practices, but if you don't trust Google's ad servers not to deliver malware then presumably you don't trust google.com not to either.
Note that Google doesn't let you upload your own ads. You can supply your own plain text or use their online ad builder to do simple graphics, but that's it. You can't insert your own arbitrary Javascript, for example. I'm talking about Google here, not Doubleclick.
To be clear I block Google/Amazon/Microsoft ads anyway, I'm just pointing out the flaw in this logic.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Indeed. They deserve all the pain coming their way and more for that. But I guess GREED has set in at Google just as in any other large corporation.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Indeed. And their people going to jail for gross negligence when they infect a few 100'000 computers again.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Google search frankly sucks.
In what way is DuckDuckGo or Bing noticeably better in this respect? Last time I tried five queries at Bing It On, Google earned 3.5 points and Bing earned 1.5.
Firefox 42 and later show an indicator for HTML5 audio and video, as does Chrome. If you cannot wait for 42 to leave beta, install Noise Control for Firefox. Set Flash to "click to play".
All advertisements targeted at minors should be straight up banned, there is no space in any caring modern thoughtful society for adults who would economically target children's pocket money in order to live to extreme excess.
If taken literally, this would prohibit retail and food service establishments from posting help wanted ads advertising the intent to hire teens for summer jobs. How else should teens find companies willing to hire them in order to have work experience before graduating from high school?
Really? I thought Pop-Tarts ads implied that they'll make your head swell up (video, 2 minutes).
I hate watching youtube and seeing the Same. Damn. Ad. Over. And. Over. After the fifth viewing, even the cutest ad is !@#$ing annoying.
The real story here is that apparently you DO watch every add that Google produces, how do you do that? You have a live stream or something? Don't you ever get tired, or need to pee? Normal people miss 99.999% or something off all the advertising ever displayed.
to halt the rise of adblocking services by addressing common reader annoyances such as excessive tracking.
Contrary to what the advertising industry is trying to imply with weasel words here, there is no such thing as "reasonable" tracking.
All tracking is excessive.
There are too many ads so just block them all as much as you can. Don't visit sites with obnoxious ads and don't use apps. No cookies, skip stupid videos of cats dancing to clue you into the trick banks don't want you to know that saves saves saves on your mortgage. So what if some billionaire makes a billion less? The whole online "experience" is becoming an electronic ad circular aimed at the stupidest. It once was easy to find useful, obscure and interesting information, today it is very difficult with all the stupid sponsored ads. Google "Byzantine Empire" and how many ads will say "Get Great Deals on the Byzantine Empire, only 3 left"? How about a second "virtual web" that is totally non-commercial?
Maybe Google does this already, but if a site isn't playing nicely then hit them where it counts, right in their page rank. Rank them lower on search results for a given topic and kick them off of news.google.com. I'm looking at you National Post, Huffington Post and Wall Street Journal - damn you and your auto play videos and your full page blockup ads.
Oh yes, I use the hosts file. You bet.
That wasn't my point. It's okay, don't worry about it.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Use Opera and uMatrix. Then you can throw on AdBlock Plus and generally not see anything. Disconnect and Ghostery are fine backups but uMatrix catches anything so far - I've been using it for about a year now. It's a white-listing firewall, so to speak, for browsers.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
But, what web site wants to employ salespeople and (ad) designers when you can just copy and paste a line of code into a web site? Well, I think the ones that continue to do that into the future are the ones that aren't going to make money.
So how should the individual operator of a small web site recoup the cost of a domain, certificate, and VPS? That's the reason that Federated Wiki hasn't become as popular as traditional wiki software such as MediaWiki: each Federated Wiki editor needs his own web site if he wants to share his changes with anyone else.
pre-AOL web
There was no pre-AOL web. Nexus (formerly WorldWideWeb), the first web browser, was first released in December 1990. Quantum Link launched in late 1985, and it changed its name to AOL in October 1989.
There is no advertising anywhere that improves the web experience
What are Craigslist and eBay and Amazon.com if not ads?
If you exclude e-commerce and other sites where ads are the content, the known alternatives for paying the hosting bills and writers' salaries are either a not-for-profit company with an endowment or paywalls. But buying a year's subscription to read one article is impractical in a web of linking, searching, and sharing. And it'll remain impractical until microtransactions are figured out.
Remember that we're not going to lose the tech advances that the current internet drove
But the availability of tech advances to the public can disappear over time due to perceived lack of demand driving lack of supply. Case in point: Affordable X11/Linux-compatible laptops with a 10" screen were easy to find in 2010. They're a lot harder to find since manufacturers discontinued the category.
First, by those who appear on the site, or their relatives. Second, by those who get told about it by the first group. Third, by those who get told about it by the second group.
Once Facebook and Twitter close due to lack of ad revenue, through what medium will people instead tell other people about web sites?
My site gets traffic of up to 350GB/month (that's about 3Tbit for those who prefer bits to bytes) as a result.
How do you pay for the domain, SSL certificate, hosting, and bandwidth without ads or paywalls?
Incidentally, paywalled sites only show up in search results if bypassing the paywall is pretty easy.
The way these paywalled journals work is that you don't need to bypass the paywall to read the abstract, and the journal is happy with only the abstract being indexed for public search results. But it's still a gigantic rooster tease.