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.
Here's a tip, Ben : "good advertiser" is an oxymoron.
Is a two way street. I wonder how many businesses and business models that bit the dust over the last 15 years felt the same way about Google?
Advertisers have several blind spots.
1. They don't care about user security and malware-exclusion. ("It's not OUR content after all.")
2. They don't care that WE are paying for any bandwidth usage they suck up on our end. (2MB pages with 10K the content the user wanted. Rest is advertising.)
3. For those systems where advertisers bid the suppliers for who gets displayed, the end user can sit doing nothing while the site owners wait for some "optimum" bid.
4. Most advertising is utterly irrelevant as far as the viewer is concerned.
For all of the above reasons, ad-blockers are our friends, and advertisers are the enemy.
The whole point of adblockers is to 'disrupt the relationship between advertisers and consumers'; because that 'relationship' is inherently somewhere between 'adversarial' and 'cold war'. We don't go to varying levels of hassle just for fun; we do so because we fucking hate you and your 'product'.
Like any sane web user, I use a ton of browser extensions that warn me about requests to questionable third-party hosts.
When I browse Slashdot, requests are attempted to "Taboola" and "Janrain" and "ScoreCard" and "NTV" and "rpxnow" and "StackSocial".
Now I don't know what the fuck any of those are, and TBH I don't care to know.
So let's say I made an HTTP request to slashdot.org. As far as I'm concerned, the page served up by slashdot.org doesn't need to require requests be made to any other host to show me the stories and comments here.
whipslash, can you give us more information about what these questionable third-party hosts are doing, and why the pages served up by Slashdot try to trigger requests to these questionable hosts?
More importantly, when will slashdot.org stop trying to get my browser to make requests to them?
I hadn't heard about this particular adblocker. I'll go check it out.
Thanks for the tip, Google and Yahoo!
I think that mainstream users are just starting to wake up to the fact that ad blockers exist. Ads may be getting more and more prevalent and annoying, but frankly I don't think many of us here would know if they are.
Google and Yahoo have accused ad-blocking software Shine of "destroying the relationship" between advertisers and consumers
That's funny, because no one forces anyone to install and use an ad blocker (compare this with advertisers wanting to force people to "consume" ads). People make the choice of installing an ad blocker because the so-called "relationship" between advertisers and consumers essentially consists of advertisers wanting consumers to bend over and accept anything that gets shoveled at them. Maybe that relationship was doomed to fail from the start, and maybe most people are just waking up to the fact that they don't have to be in that relationship any more. This is like an abusive relationship where the person getting abused realizes that this isn't a normal productive healthy relationship, and they don't have to put up with it any more.
Benjamin Faes, managing director of media and platforms at Google, called Shine's technology a "blunt" solution that punishes users and good advertisers
If advertisers aren't going to police their own industry then, yeah, count on other people to create a blunt solution. It may not solve the problem the way that advertisers would like the problem to be solved, but then again advertisers have had a good 2 decades to figure out a workable relationship for online advertising. So far their solution has been to abuse people and not call each other out when they notice other bad actors. Thankfully we don't need to count on them for a solution, but it's not going to be the solution they want.
Blocking all ads I think it's diminishing my experience of advertising
Of course it's diminishing your experience of advertising, you're an advertiser. Blocking all ads actually improves my experience of advertising, by a lot. If only I could extend it to the physical world.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Kinda. Ad-Blocking was awesome when a tiny percentage of us used it to have a much better internet experience.
Now, as usage and awareness expands, I am see warnings, popups and outright refusal to serve me content if my ad blocking software is enabled.
This is the next frontier... sites will (legitimately, it's perfectly OK) stop serving you content, if you're not seeing their ads. Other sites will choose to make their money in more nefarious ways - and this one worries me - by using product placement / paid reviews / sponsored content, and blurring the lines between content and advertising. At least when I see an advert I *know* they paid for the ad. When Jonny Reviewer says "The new film, Badderass is awesome" is he really saying it's awesome, or is he saying "I can put bread on the family table now that the Badderass producers have paid me to shill for them"?
Personally, I think I'd rather have the ads back.
Far more likely, people become subconsciously aware of targeted ads and it made them more and more uncomfortable over time. You know, ohh look an ad I was just thinking about that, again, ohh it happened again, again, well that's odd, again, what the hell is going on, again, well that's starting to suck, again, eww fuck this what can I do, ADBLOCK, well glad that weirdness is over. Most people are ignorant of targeted advertisements and how much of their privacy is been perverted invaded, how ever they can be made uncomfortably with the results and will take actions to remove that discomfort, even though they do not know why or how it is occuring.
Targeted ads are inherently perverted sick stuff, especially those targeted at minors in order to manipulate their thoughts and desires in order to feed their greed and lusts of those seeking to exploit them.
Personally any parent should install and run full adblock before letting their child on the internet, honestly it is the only sensible thing to do, along with all corporate access to your children.s minds, else you will leave them victims for the rest of their lives.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
What fucking "relationship"?
There is no relationship, there are the annoying parasites on the internet who want to inject themselves into what we do. I have never said "gee, I wonder what the assholes over at Double Click are up to these days".
But let's not pretend I gain anything from being tracked by a bunch of idiots who want to sell me something.
On behalf of those of us who have aggressively blocked ads for years, don't pretend there's some "relationship" here. And let's stop pretending that internet exists for the ad companies.
Do this shit without tracking me everywhere and violating my privacy, and I might have less of a problem. Expect me to allow 15 third parties to run scripts and set cookies, and you can fuck off.
You might as well say a guard dog is spoiling your "relationship" with a peeping Tom. Sorry, don't care.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
But, ads have become incrementally more annoying, and seem to have passed a threshold.
* I don't mind advertising. Advertising lets me find things that I might want or need.
* I don't mind sites showing me advertising.
* I don't mind advertisers knowing that their ad appeared on a page that was viewed.
* I don't mind advertisers knowing that someone clicked on that ad.
* I do object to the presence of ads making the page slow to load.
* I object very much to the presence of ads making the page extremely slow to load.
* I object to the presence of ads consuming lots of my bandwidth (I resource that I pay for).
* I object very much to the presence of ads making the page unusable (pop-overs, unsolicited audio, etc.)
* I do not cede my privacy to the advertiser.
- - you do not have permission to track me
- - you do not have permission to sell information (surreptitiously) gathered about me to 3rd parties
Stop treating me with contempt, stop treating me as a resource to be pillaged. If I tell you not to track me, do not ignore my instruction, and especially do not bleat that it's OK for you to ignore my instruction but it's not OK to for me to ignore your ads.
As your advertising becomes increasingly indistinguishable from malware, do not be surprised when a market springs up to counter it.
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
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.
As much as I dislike the plethora of ads websites serve up, Shine's approach strikes at the concept of net neutrality. The ISP is deciding what traffic to deliver to the end user; while it may be the blocking Amy be desirable to users it still means teh ISP is favoring some traffic over other traffic. The next step is offer to selectively deliver, for a small fee, some ads.I can decide quite nicely for myself what sites I want to let deliver ads, based on my assessment of the site's value. There are a number of sites that I whitelist because their content is of value and I want them to be able to make mone and keep delivering content; and I don't want my ISP unilaterally deciding I don't need to see those ads and thus depriving teh site of revenue.
If you value net neutrality you can't say "don't prioritize any traffic" and then say "go ahead and block ads." Ads may be junk traffic but it still traffic.
It would not surprise me if they implement it in the US, Stripe, and an ISP, get sued for tortious interference, since they are interfering with a lawful contract between two parties; the question would be is it improper interference or an acceptable business practice.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Good to hear, I don't think the Slashdot user base is the "One weird trick" kind of crowd.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the (supposed) good of its victims may be the most oppressive
I agree 100%! A few more points:
--Advertisers did not pay for my computer. I am the ONLY one that gets to decide what gets downloaded and displayed on MY computer.
-- Recently Advertisers have called those of us who block their ads thieves, and the authors of ad-blocking software criminals.
-- I consider that the advertisers are the criminals, trying to steal the (capped) bandwidth that we pay for,
-- They try to steal private information to target ads to us, and if thats not creepy enough, sell that information to make more money!
-- The try to steal our valuable time and attention, wasting that time, and distracting us from getting things done in a timely fashion.
And BTW, I never started blocking ads until they started to get seriously annoying and headache inducing!
Blocking people who block ads from viewing their sites unless we whitelist them or turn of ad-blockers is NOT going to work! Websites that do that are killing themselves, just as the advertisers are killing themselves with their stupidity!
... Better pay for every single other viewpoint ...
Believe it or not, it is entirely possible for a single source to offer multiple perspectives on an issue. Once upon a time this was known as journalism.
Not a problem. Once upon a time people bought newspapers. They were generally also available at the library but it was more convenient to have them delivered to your home.
**If** our current two decade'ish experiment with web based ad supported news fails its not the end of the world. We had a system that worked well for centuries. That old system's economic model may work with pixels as well as it worked with dead trees.
Any good fisherman will tell you, there's a certain point where the bait's not big enough for the hook; crying because the fish are uninterested in the hook isn't going to get you more fish.
Stop being irredeemably greedy, you're far, far past the point of diminishing returns.
-Styopa
fake download buttons are one of the reason why it's good to use ad block.
So you can't survive with me blocking your annoying, intrusive, malware laden advertising? Tough. If you can't compete, then die. It's free enterprise, bitch!
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America