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Google Says It Killed 780 Million 'Bad Ads' In 2015 (cio.com)
itwbennett writes: According to a new Google report, the search giant disabled more than 780 million "bad ads," including include ads for counterfeit products, misleading or unapproved pharmaceuticals, weight loss scams, phishing ploys, unwanted software and "trick-to-click" cons, globally last year. This marks a 49 percent increase over 2014. For perspective, it would take an individual nearly 25 years to look at the 780 million ads Google removed last year for just one second each, according to Google. If the trend continues, Google's team of more than 1,000 staffers dedicated to killing spam will be even busier in 2016, and they could disable more than a billion junky ads.
I bet I killed at least that many by installing AdBlock.
Ask me how the Heisenberg Principle may or may not have saved my life.
...did it deliver? :-)
The only good ads are dead ads, so these 780 million are arguably better than the ones that Google spared.
including include ads for counterfeit products
You do know typos make the site look stupid and unprofessional, right? But you just don't care?
Posted by timothy
Never mind.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I tried Firefox recently, after many years of using Chrome, and I was very surprised when Firefox started showing me "sponsored" tiles on the new tab page!
The problem with this is two-fold:
1) Firefox built the ads right into the browser.
2) Firefox labeled them as "sponsored" instead of being honest and labeling them what they are: advertisements.
I hear that they've come to their senses and are going to remove these ads, but the damage has still been done.
How the hell can I trust Mozilla and Firefox after this debacle?
How the hell could they have been so stupid as to build ads right into Firefox, especially when so many Firefox users use ad blocking extensions?!
I know they need revenue, but doing this was totally unacceptable, and that fact should have been obvious from the start.
I think that these ads built right into Firefox have completely ruined Firefox's reputation.
I download a number of mods for a popular open source game for members of the family. The mods are hosted on adfly and this site does a very poor job getting ride of malicious ads. There are literally four or five 'Download' buttons that try to trick users into clicking on them to download the hosted file. A person in the family accidentally did this once and it resulted in installing four malvertizing programs. I wold highly recommend using an ad blocker.
In other words, about 10% of them.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
In other words, about 10% of them.
And Google made a lot of money from the other 90%.
This is why the use of adblockers is exploding. Annoyance is one thing. Outright fraud and malware is another. When maybe 10% or more of ads are dangerous in some way, a person that browses 50 pages in a day, each with multiple ads will be exposed at least once, if not much more often to potential junk.
These aren't just shady overseas viagra and porn sites either, it is coming from mainstream sites. My local news station's website was delivering an ad that targeted nexus users with a scam that replaced their news page.
I am just afraid we will see lot's of good content die with the ad networks.
Silence is a state of mime.
Definitely!
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Yep, I noticed that. I am running an ad for my (very small, independent) software product. It's essentially a hobby - sales are barely break-even with related hosting, and AdWords bring about half. I don't have much time to deal with AdWords so ads are mostly fixed. Occasionally (about once a year) I shuffle a few words in the text. Sometime early this year I did that again - and suddenly my ads were blocked "due to policy violation". Automated email requires you to review policy and edit ads for compliance - but there is no policy as such (at least nothing is clearly explained in writing). So I did my best guessing what they may want, edited ads again and resubmitted - same result. I re-edited the ads to original text, resubmitted - and at that point my ads were blocked again and then my entire AdWords account was blocked for "repeated violations"
Through that time I attempted to contact AdWords support through online form (they don't expose direct email). I received several pointless replies - none of which directly answered my questions. Once account was blocked - I started calling. Most calls end up in the Indian call center, where reps seem to have neither desire nor ability to help, nor do they know what the actual rules are. I've been given several (perhaps 6?) different versions of what needs to be changed in the ad, on the web site and in the product itself. Examples include - "put EULA directly on the download page", "provide product removal instructions on the download page" (mind you, product removal instructions are - "drag application into the trash folder", quite literally). My favorite was a demand to "provide direct email for users to email my support on the download page", this is from AdWords that go to great lengths to hide their own email and allow only un-trackable contact through the web site. For comparison, I run a proper support ticket system - but there was no convincing them.
As far as I could tell, Indian associates had no authority to deal with issues whatsoever and themselves had to contact a 3rd party (with unknown degree of authority) for answers or clarifications. Even when I made required changes, and resubmitted account for review (as they suggested) - either nothing happened at all or an automated message would come a few days later restating account and/or ad blocking for "policy violations". The cycle of response was running at 1 week per question.
In parallel, to provide at least some visibility, I had to put ads on Bing. That's a whole another story, but suffice it to say - Bing payment vs. click rates did not make sense and I had to stop in about a month.
The final demand was to put the name of actual software package into the ad. Back 8 years ago when I started, I picked a fairly long name for a product - it seemed fun at the time. Putting that name into character-limited ad would leave no space to say anything useful about the software. I suggested that software name could be placed in the URL (which normally references company name, they are similar but not the same). Customer reps. stated that this is not going to help - the name must be in the text. Nevertheless, I decided to try. I registered a new domain that matched software name and resubmitted the ad. As soon as I did - ad was approved and remains so.
I suspect that through the entire process there was no connection at all between the (likely automated) review of ads and customer service. Ads marked as "bad" are probably left in that state forever, regardless of advertisers actions. By the time I changed the url either the giant push to "remove bad ads" was over or something's changed in automated rating, so the "new" ad passed. Curiously, ads for competing products (same industry, same type of software) ran unimpeded throughout the entire period, even though they do not comply with any of the requirements that were given to me. Perhaps they were smart enough to make no changes to ads during that time :)
In conclusion - I am sure a V-level manager at Google reported
The harder people push back against ads, the more arrogant and "Fuck You" the advertisers become. It's really getting to the point where finding information on the internet is looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack because of all the advertising pitfalls, page rank gaming, etc.. and the search engines simply aren't up to the task of sorting out what you need anymore. It's all noise.
You figure the advertisers are going to win after the internet becomes unusable? I'm not going to turn off my adblocker to look at sites that won't let me in because I'm using one. It isn't the right solution. If the customer becomes the enemy, then the advertiser shouldn't be too surprised if the customer treats them like the enemy.
I have no responsibility to break through my smartphone's data cap just because someone thinks I should be forced to see ad's about what some housewife in Pennsylvania discovered that is driving the insurance companies crazy.
Already, without ad blocking I personally consider the internet unusable. Making adblockers illegal will simply drive me away.
My effective, useful Internet has shrunk to about five websites. Every time I open the door to another website it seems I spend about 5 minutes waiting for it to render, then I have to update AdBlock to block all the invasive advertising, because the advertisers are desperately trying to end run around blocking. Shutting down all JavaScript speeds things up, but breaks a lot of sites. And when I finally find the information, I find that it is incomplete, un-cited, low quality.
I'm really starting to wonder whether having internet is truly indispensable. I could text instead of email, go to the bank in person, get information out of dead tree books. I would miss Slashdot as it is an outlet for my snarkiness, but I could just be snarky to my wife (that's what they're for, right?).
The problem is that we've pretty much killed it. Allowing the prime use of the internet to be commercial interests and that anything they do is just fine, we've just about done it in. I did an analysis a few years abo on what just noscript does. And there have been sites I've gone to that have had 50 or more javascripts that run when I listed them. The surprise finding was that the biggest abuser is facebook. They are tracking the living hell out of people. Facebook is tracking you even if you aren't on facebook. Google is in there as well. Big difference is that google doesn't try to obscure that they re doing it. There are other trackers as well. The only innocuous script was a font rendering one.
So if a site doesn't work for me, it's seldom my problem. I realize that all too many websites look at the user as the enemy, and have no desire to contract Intertoobz VD.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I want to disable all these stupid "dynamic HTML" ads. I also don't want to video ads because even if they're not auto-playing they could be pre-loading the video file in the background, wasting bandwidth.
"...killed 780 million bad ads"
So they got about 10% of them, is that what they're saying?
It's nice to know, but it's not really a problem for me, since I use Adblock and Noscript.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
No mention of "politically unreliable" messages having gone missing. Yet.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
With my Ad Blocker.
See screenshot.
There a non-bad ads?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Were we not just saying the other day that APK had been so quite lately that we thought he must have been locked in a padded cell at last? We were wrong.
FWIW, I have used a hosts file for some years, but I don't know how anyone can make an issue out of it
your payment for your data does not pay the remote end's cost. If they want to serve ads as part of their business model and you don't want the ads then don't visit the site.
I don't give a shit whether their business model works or not. The sites that depend on this business model the most are generally the ones I have least wish to visit. The internet is here to stay, but it could do with a lot of the crap being pruned out.