Slashdot Mirror
Google, Yahoo Cry About Ad-Blocking (cnbc.com)
JustAnotherOldGuy writes: Google and Yahoo have accused ad-blocking software Shine of "destroying the relationship" between advertisers and consumers, after an executive from the company called its solution a "nuclear weapon" threatening the industry. Ad blocking software use grew 41 percent in the 12 months to August 2015 and there are now 198 million active adblock users around the world, according PageFair. Benjamin Faes, managing director of media and platforms at Google, called Shine's technology a "blunt" solution that punishes users and good advertisers, and said, "Blocking all ads I think it's diminishing my experience of advertising and in that case we see an issue for the user themselves." It appears that these advertising executives still don't "get it", and are disingenuously tone-deaf to the legitimate complaints raised about ads.
I'd say iOS supporting ad blockers probably contributed to it.
google et al seem to be living in another reality. There is no relationship to consumers, there is a WAR between consumers and arsehole companies like google. Ads have become more intrusive and obnoxious, ads that have video and or sound, dynamic windows that increase to cover the page if you accidentally scroll over them, ads positioned and made to look like search results or news items. They then wonder why Ad blocking is increasing and blame those that are trying to help the consumers, Googles lack of security/privacy awareness is just mindboggling, you want people to stop using ad blocking, then you need to stop acting like totally obnoxious pricks.
If you didn't know what was special about Shine compared to ublock or adblock like me then Shine is an ISP level blocking system. It's not something that gets installed on end users machines but further upstream. This is why people like google and yahoo are so disturbed by this. It means that even completely clueless users will have ads blocked.
I can absolutely see why the network providers would want this as well. Talk about a way of dramatically decreasing your network utilisation without any negative impacts on consumers.
From Shine's website it looks like they have just signed up 3 europe which means 300 million mobile users just installed ad blocking software.....
https://www.getshine.com/three...
These were all on the site when we acquired it. We are in the process of cleaning up all requests and scripts like this.
The irony is: unobtrusive ads are what made Google big. I remember when actual punch-the-monkey banners were common, and Google made its big breakout, by realizing the value of unobtrusive ads. The ads Google placed around search results didn't suck. The ads Google sold to place on other websites didn't suck. They were mostly text only, and there was no reason to block them. Times have changed.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
That's not how www works -- it's incumbent on the server owner to block my traffic if they don't want to serve me the content. All I'm doing is making HTTP requests and rendering the content in my browser as I see fit -- same as its been for 20+ years
It's bad advertisers that destroyed the relationship, ad blocking is just a natural reaction to that... It was the most intrusive ads (ie popups) that got blocked first, and it's the really intrusive ones (eg with sound) that cause people to install adblockers.
Personally i installed an adblocker after i had a large number of tabs open and suddenly one of them started playing an ad with sound, it took me ages to hunt down and close the tab making noise so the anger triggered a response.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!