Slashdot Mirror
FTC Issues New Rules for Native Advertising on the Internet (blockadblock.com)
popo writes: Native Advertising, or advertorial content that's camouflaged to mimic a site's original content is all the rage among web publishers these days particularly as ad-blocking takes a bigger and bigger bite out of traditional web-advertising revenues. Well the FTC reiterated its position on native ads and may have just slammed the door shut on this "alternative" form of online advertising. The verdict: If it's not clearly marked "advertising", it may be considered misleading. And by misleading, the FTC means illegal. Of course, from an adblocking perspective, once you clearly indicate something is an ad — you make it all the more easy to block. Which defeats one of the primary goals of native ads to begin with.
I guess this won't bar product placement though. What distinguishes between "placement" and "native ads" anyway? Placement has gotten pretty ridiculous in some media. You know, I used to enjoy the Tonight Show monologue, right up through Leno. Come to think of it, even Leno did placements with his "products that shouldn't merge" routine; but at least it was funny. Sort of. Now I play a game with the Tonight Show and some of the other late night shows. When the first product placement appears, I turn the TV off and go to bed. Very often I fail to make it through the entire monologue.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I work in the advertising industry. Despite all the buzz around them and the dumb marketing nonsense, "native" ads had abysmal click-through rate, engagement, and literally negative brand metric. Turns out, users really really dislike being tricked into thinking an ad is actual page content, and brands are starting to get results back that show this. High end clients have specifically eliminated native advertisement from their purchased inventory.
The rules still need to be in place for the crap-tier networks, but chances are those are going to be based in eastern europe anyway and thus not subject to FTC rules at all.
I know how it should be: regulator should force every commercial media/service website to offer you a paid adless trackless version. For example, I should be able to choose between paying $10 a month and getting no ads and no tracking from google or pay 0 and get both. If I think that is not worth $10, they can bombast me any way they want with ads and play the arms race no matter how nasty they want. I think it is fair and it would show the clear value of targetted ads.
You won't believe what they did next!
Of course it won't, nor should it. There are two major kinds of placement (to me). There is version were the product is just being used in the course of the show. Character has to have a vehicle, phone, computer, etc. This is no problem. Then there is the kind where scenes are written just for the product. The (unnecessary) car chase that ends with a zoom on the logo, the beer bottle set down right in front of the camera. That kind will make me find another show.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Note that the article URL, blockadblock dot com, is that of some sort of anti-adblock piranha (cf. https://github.com/sitexw/Bloc...) so you might want to think twice before clicking it.
I personally, consciously support advertising because I recognize the the value from both the perspective of the advertiser and the website. However I still use adblock because the way these ads work is just downright annoying, but, I leave the acceptable ads option turned on to enable the ones that aren't.
Consider the perspective of the sponsor: When you have a new product you're trying to sell, you need a way to communicate with your customer that it is in fact available for them to buy. Take something you obviously use for example: A personal computer. Now, while you yourself might be well informed about the market and build your own, the vast majority of any given business's potential customers aren't. Advertising is how you reach them.
And then of course, the perspective of the website: They pay actual people actual money to write their content. That money doesn't come in when people don't pay to view it, but it DOES have to come from somewhere. Thus, advertising works suitably.
If some websites are getting tired of adblock, then instead of using anti-adblock scripts (which people create filters to work around these all the time, see the adblock forum) they might try doing the sensible thing and stop using assfucking annoying ads. Either that or if the acceptable ads don't pay enough, then show the regular annoying ads to people who don't use adblock and show acceptable ads to adblock users. Either that or they get nothing at all from adblock users who will either simply opt for a competitor site that has similar content or just find a way to circumvent their anti-adblock script.
Even Google, who is in many respects the king of internet advertising and likely gains the most from it, is trying to get the ad industry to stop with these crap tactics.
Isn't congressional oversight great?
Rest assured it won't happen here.
If MojoKid, StartsWithABang, StewPid and Nerval's Lobster all fall under a bus.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
That is why God created search engines. If you really have something to sell, then advertising on a random site is a piss poor way to get PAYING customers. In fact, putting advertising on a site is a sure way to piss people off and in some cases make them totally against whatever you are trying to sell.
Horseshit. You are totally ignoring that other metric they use to get money... Namely investors. They all love to tout the number of users they have in their financial reports (a number usually inflated) and use that to gain investors. If the site has value, they will have investors. If their content is really all that valuable then put it behind a paywall. We will then see just how valuable it is. But advertising on a website isn't at all the answer and in fact pisses people off. Even you are proclaiming that you use an ad blocker because of the risk to your security and the annoyance advertising causes. So don't feed me this shit of it being their only way to get money.
Bottom line, I am under no obligation to allow anything on my computer that I don't specifically want there with advertising being the top thing I don't allow. If a site doesn't like that then they can very well put it behind a paywall and I will move on.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
well this is actually something that's pretty common around the world already...
like, it has to be obvious to the reader in print media if it is a total advertisement or not...
of course plenty of (hobby, special) magazines especially tend to be pretty sketchy about this.
same goes for games media, car media etc portions that depend on publishers/manufacturers giving them free access to products in exchange of positive review pumping.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The site I work on uses native advertising (as well as more conventional ads). We prefer the native ads not because we're trying to fool blockers (or indeed users) - the ads are still clearly labelled as such. The reason we prefer them is they perform hugely better. When the ad content fits with the overall content of the site and is actually tailored to the audience it turns out people engage with it - and that makes the advertisers happy and makes us more money.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
It's everywhere. Morning TV shows are nothing but ads with actual 'news' tickered at the bottom. Ellen used to be an entertaining talk show. Now it's a 60 minute ad for her sponsors.
Hell Jurassic World was a 90 minute commercial for Beats, Samsung and Mercedes.
kr5ddit.com (still under development), where advertisers can buy moderation power directly from users so they can promote their stories to the top of the front page.
What problem are the FTC trying to fix here? Nobody is forced to read articles or visit any website... If user's don't find native adverts interesting, they will shy away from the websites that do that. Why do we need regulation here when the free market can sort this problem out? Making false claims about your product is already illegal, no?
What tribes are involved?
The best advertising is positive, trustworthy reviews. Everyone knows this, the problem is that many companies are trying to polish a turd. Most irritating advertising is only necessary if your product sucks.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I had no idea TV was like this. I haven't really watched any prime-time television in years now. Didn't know I was missing so much! Are the popular sitcoms and dramas like this also?
Advertisers can kiss my ass, due to the bullshit a few allowed in, I've been blocking ever since.
NO ad should use any form of: Java, flash, or animated GIFs. Until they all follow that rule, my blocker, in the form of DNS Redirect, stays up.
What? Not all of them will follow. Guess I won't be seeing many ads then.
Between the 10 minutes of commercials in a 30 minute time slot (including running closing and/or opening credits in a small window while a commercial for some other show is playing, sorta like picture-in-a-picture), the corner bugs, the bottom bars that over lap the corner bugs, the other corner bugs, etc. you don't even need a show to show it is about advertising.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Many people us it because they do not like ads. That includes me. I oppose to native advertising. I oppose to any advertising.
I understand that the ads industry has a different point of view, but they can defend themselves if they so like to do and they do that pretty well, as many people defend them without even being paid for it or get anything in return.
They say things like 'I would not mind ads that have XXX'. Well, I do.
Or to quote Banksy:
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply youâ(TM)re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. Itâ(TM)s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially donâ(TM)t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, donâ(TM)t even start asking for theirs.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Of course he is. He doesn't evey try to hide it. He denies it but in the same way he denies everything, rolling his eyes just right to tell his supporters "I'm just saying this to appease the media but you all know what I really think, wink wink, nudge nudge".
I personally, consciously do not support advertising even though I recognize the reason from both the perspective of the advertiser and the website.
They do not defend me, so I see no reason to defend them. Block it all, I say. If that means that 99% of the sites will close, so be it.
People are so bombarded by ads that they thing a small amount is ok. As if you are defending the bully and say a slap in the face is 'not that bad'. It is.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The web sites serving ads don't even know if the ads are annoying. It's all handled by a third party and he website owner fully intends to sit back passively and wait for the money to roll in. They're too busy writing their useless blog to actually pay attention. No real newspaper or television channel would ever use an advertisement that none of the staff has viewed first, yet that is the standard practice on the internet. The web site owners don't do the necessary work to decide what sorts of ads might be relevant to their viewers, they let Google figure that part out.
It's well past he absurdity stage. Youtube required me to watch part of a movie preview first before it let me see the video I wanted, even though that video was a movie preview (this actually happened). Imagine a classic rock radio station playing ads for country music because some algorithm decided that the listener appears to have an interest in music.
The whole attitude that someone "deserves" to be paid because of minimal effort spent creating the content is absurd. No one ever deserves anything, you have to work for it. If the money doesn't come in then find a new job.
I use it because I want to get the bandwidth that I'm paying for instead of having a lot of freeloaders piggy back on it. A 100 word article should not take several seconds to load, and if someone is on dialup it shouldn't take 5 minutes just to read the first line. Maybe if the advertisers starting paying their fair share here it wouldn't be so bad - after all, the junk mail that shows up from the postal service is not free, the advertisers had to pay bulk rates to get it to me (which I immediately throw away). If I get soo many advertising mailers the post office does not ask me to pay more money for a higher tier service. Internet advertisers slow down my computer, slow down my internet, and saturate the bandwidth.
I think that for people not streaming video and just going to web pages and reading email, that the majority of bandwidth usage is from advertising and analytics and trcking. If they don't use ad blockers and noscript that is.
Every show or movie I've seen in the past many years has such a list at the end The law probably already exists. Almost always the last item in the credits (shocker). And listed as "promotional consideration"
Keep in mind, the FTC isn't saying "you cannot." It's saying "you cannot do it and not tell people"
Your ad here. Ask me how!
The whole reason that adblock even works is because the majority of web sites don't serve up the ads themselves, they go through a relatively small set of third party sites that do all the distasteful stuff themselves. So if you visit welovecats.org you don't have to have a block rule for that site or algorithms to figure out if an image coming from that site is an ad or not, instead you've got block rule for googleadservices.com or something like that.
And it works because adblock users are relatively few. If adblock really started cutting into revenue then welovecats.org would start doing things the old fashioned way, do some actual work, curate the ads by hand, sell ad space to potential advertisers, etc.
You got modded down (obviously), but it's worth pointing out that if native advertising is banned or limited by the FCC, hosts blocking will retain its power indefinitely. The push towards mixing content with manipulative bullshit has always been the weak point of hosts blocking, and probably the biggest reason to not accept hosts based solutions in general.
Naw, that can be worked around.
Consider the perspective of the sponsor: When you have a new product you're trying to sell, you need a way to communicate with your customer that it is in fact available for them to buy. Take something you obviously use for example: A personal computer. Now, while you yourself might be well informed about the market and build your own, the vast majority of any given business's potential customers aren't. Advertising is how you reach them.
Yes, even though advertising is intrinsically bad because it spins, we're a long way from a nirvana where independent editorial is that's perfectly informed about both the market and each person's needs is always affordably available, and where no vendor tries to get an artificial leg-up by advertising anyway. But if we're going to have advertising, there's plenty of better forms of it than paid placements in and around other media. Company websites and point-of-sale for example.
To cover the situation where a start-up is finding it hard to get coverage, I'd support (disclosed) payments that encourage publishers to review or otherwise write about products in their own words. This is much better than a foreign or native ad, where the payment gives the advertiser the right to their own spin.
And then of course, the perspective of the website: They pay actual people actual money to write their content. That money doesn't come in when people don't pay to view it, but it DOES have to come from somewhere. Thus, advertising works suitably.
Advertising is working more and more poorly for information sources. The alternative is to better capture the value that the content gives the users. Direct charging is only one way.
If some websites are getting tired of adblock, then instead of using anti-adblock scripts (which people create filters to work around these all the time, see the adblock forum) they might try doing the sensible thing and stop using assfucking annoying ads. Either that or if the acceptable ads don't pay enough, then show the regular annoying ads to people who don't use adblock and show acceptable ads to adblock users. Either that or they get nothing at all from adblock users who will either simply opt for a competitor site that has similar content or just find a way to circumvent their anti-adblock script.
My favorite sites do just that. Their ads are unobtrusive and I don't block them because I value their content. They also sell their own branded items as well as offer a voluntary donation program to help keep the site free. As a result, I get to enjoy great content for free; although I do make donations as well.
I understand and agree with the argument that I should decide what gets displayed on my computer; however that also applies to the website owner who gets to decide under what terms the site's material will be provided. If they chose to not allow adblocker users to view content then that's their right. What I find hypocritical is people who seem to think they have a right to circumvent anti-adblocking because they want the content but don't want it on the terms offered; any of them no doubt are the first to whine when someone finds a way around their precious scripts. If you don't like the ads, avoid the site. It's that simple.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Um, if they could detect people who used adblock and customise content for them, many sites would just block those users outright rather than put up with the complexity of two ways to manage ads. And then the adblock guys would see that as an "attack" and fix it.
Advertising seems to currently heading down through a death cycle just like it was at the start of the 2000's until AdSense came along. I don't see text ads all that often these days, it's all massive animated-reveal video ads. Between that and the stupid EU cookie warnings the web is killing itself, using it is like hacking through a jungle filled with vines and mosquitos in the search for great content. I don't use adblock and never have because viewing the website as the owners intended it is a part of the social contract - I get their content for free and in return, I agree to their terms. But that doesn't mean I like it.
The risk is that these issues will result in someone producing a much better platform than the web, but that's proprietary (though I guess that the web is now entirely driven by Google/Microsoft/Mozilla but Mozilla is dying, a single big company instead of three wouldn't be a huge difference). If it had some sort of monetisation or micropayments built in, along with ways to reduce costs, that could pose a big competitive challenge.
Alternatively, a search engine that ranked pages partly by how much advertising they had, would also be something that could pose a challenge to Google.
Fox News doesn't necessarily do what is best for Republicans. It appeals to Republicans, but only their instincts that lead those viewers to consume more Fox News.
Basically Fox News capitalizes on Republican outrage, but doesn't necessarily serve Republican interests.
I still think that the best thing that could happen to Fox News was a 2nd term for Obama. It definitely helps their viewership.
Find out what it means to me When advertisers finally respect me, my time, my my browser, and my computer, and display items that are not obnoxious, misleading, or blatant lies, then I will turn off my blocker. Until and unless that happens I'll continue to use them. As this will likely never happen, I will continue to use blockers whenever possible for the foreseeable future.
I take issue with ads regardless because I have literally zero interest in them, having never clicked one intentionally (sometimes they've used exploits to force me to click them when I click elsewhere on the page, but that's frankly a form of hacking and should be illegal if it's not). They're just a waste of time and bandwidth to me, therefore nowadays I block every type of ad I can.
The real problem is that you don't know if a page is ad sponsored until you visit it. Sites should have to disclose they're ad sponsored to search engines, such that search engines can show an icon or similar denoting each result as ad sponsored and allow users to filter results based on this (and potentially other flags - i.e. Paywall).
Whilst companies expect to be visible on the public web, whilst also expecting you to pay them somehow and crying when you choose not to (by blocking ads) then frankly I have little sympathy. They can't expect to have their cake and eat it too - whilst users don't get to make an informed choice about whether they wish to visit a site based on whether it has ads or tracking or not, sites using ads should not complain that users decide to block them. It's a two way street, if I don't know ahead of time what they expect from me before I view the content, then they can't complain when I restrict how I view the content (i.e. minus the ads).
Elect Trump for the supreme court!
You have no fscking ida what you're talking about
This is completely false. Publishers get to control every aspect of the types and behaviour of ads they allow on their sites, in real-time.
I cannot see how the Federal Trade Commission can in good conscience accept money from the American people. They don't protect a level commerce field. They don't do anything to stop anti-competitive legislation. They don't do anything about monopolies. The don't certainly don't protect consumers.
Why should the good tax payers pay them?
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
So this means they just don't care?
Consider the perspective of the sponsor:... And then of course, the perspective of the website:...
Hell, consider the perspective of the reasonable user. I don't mind at all non-obtrusive ads that don't screw up my browsing with too much data down, or burning CPU cycles with JavaScript, or blocking the main content. I find that a very few sites I visit actually have ads like that, which sometimes are for something I want to check out, and actually get clicked. But intrusive ads, not only do I not click them, I quit going to the site entirely--I have *never* found a site that I needed badly enough to put up with that crap.
When CNN went over the top with autoplay videos and giant animated ads that push the content out of the way or cover it, I went to the Washington Post, and found that I liked it much more--so much more that I'm probably going to subscribe after the holidays.
... there goes about 45% of "content" on Slashdot.
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
When my wife is also watching, I don't play my favorite TBBT (virtual) drinking game.
Whenever a character makes a reference to a product or franchise, I say "Drink". Two in a row for the same product/franchise, I say "Chug".
Virtual, because I generally don't drink much, and never drink _that_ much.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.