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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.
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.
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.
>"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.
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.
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 a self inflicted predicament. They shouldn't have gone into bed with evil Doubleclick.
I hate watching youtube and seeing the Same. Damn. Ad. Over. And. Over. After the fifth viewing, even the cutest ad is !@#$ing annoying.
"Hello, I'm a customer with more money then brains."
I guess that explains a lot of advertising.
With your clarification, you now appear to claim that all web search sucks. Now let's work on defining the problem in more detail: What do you want web search to do for you? And how are all the major search engines failing at it?