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.

Comments

Punishes users and good advertisers

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a tip, Ben : "good advertiser" is an oxymoron.

Re:Punishes users and good advertisers

[sycodon]

When I open Slashdot, the site isn't obscured by a large graphic selling shit.

There isn't shit crawling around the margins.

There isn't any bullshit where random clicking somewhere takes you to an ad page.

The page doesn't jump up and down as it loads various ads of unknown dimensions.

In fact, Slashdot is doing the Ads correctly.

Re:Punishes users and good advertisers

[v1]

"destroying the relationship" between advertisers and consumers,

I wonder if they mean the love/hate relationship, where the advertisers LOVE us, and we HATE them?

This is like saying security guards are ruining the robbers' relationships with the banks.

And yes, agree 100%, quit annoying the piss out of us and we'll stop blocking the ads. There's a few easy gimmies right off the blocks, the animated ads that start talking to you or the popover ads, those are just a few asshats really dragging the advertisers' images thorugh the mud. Things get only slightly better from there, going to a page to read a short 4 paragraph article that has been carved into 9 pieces across 9 pages, and displayed in the middle of each page, surrounded by ads. I don't have much pity for them either.

Beyond that, the most bothersom thing I think are the animated banners, and the recent surge in huge clickables on mobile pages. There's a few sites I'm probably going to stop going to simply because it's getting difficult to scroll to navigate the content without accidentally clicking one of the full-page ads every other screen. Each time, I have to stop, pull up a tab list, close the popover, and go back to the artice tab again. Over and over and over. Gets tiresome.

(TV is also essentially unwatchable at this point, I've already given up completely on it, I'll get my content online or buy the discs, a total failure by the advertisers there for me, I'd be happy to watch some ads for your content, but you've made it a completely inequitable exchange at this point)

Re:Punishes users and good advertisers

[Anonymous Coward]

There is also the fact that malvertising is a significant method of attacking systems. With little to no curation by the ad servers about this, they have pretty much become accessories to the bad guys. To boot, they at best don't give a rat's ass, and at worst, seem to be doing the "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" game with the ransomware writers.

It isn't about annoyances; it is about security. I can easily run a computer without an AV and not get it infected. Running it without an ad blocker... it will be pwned in minutes.

The real life equivalent are door to door vacuum bed selespeople. If one in every 10 pulled out a 12 gauge and robbed the place, it will be no wonder why they will not find anyone to show off their products to. This is how it is with ads.

Re:Punishes users and good advertisers

[Anonymous Coward]

If you actually bought the discs, you'd know you have these pleasures waiting for you:

* Unskippable trailers
* BD-Live!, which uses your Bluray player's internet connection (if you have a streaming service on it or a PS3/PS4/Xbone, likely) to download NEW TRAILERS FOR AWESOME MOVIES YOU SHOULD WATCH AT HIGH VOLUME.

Very few places are safe from advertising. We haven't quite gotten random pages in our eBooks replaces with ads, but give it time.

Re:Punishes users and good advertisers

[UnknownSoldier]

Next story:

TV manufacturers whine about "mute button" and "off button".

Re:Punishes users and good advertisers

[Bert64]

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.

Re:Punishes users and good advertisers

[vtcodger]

"There actually is good advertizing. I mean, actually good and not merely unobtrusive. It's very rare but it exists."

Yes, there is some. For example, I just typed "Toyota Camry tie rod ends" into Google. The search page comes back in three or four seconds and near the top there is a box that says sponsored, and has half a dozen images of tie rod ends from various suppliers ... with prices .. in USD. I wonder if I lived in Canada if the prices would be in Canadian dollars.

No problem there, really. Google is trying to be helpful as well as trying to make money. And they are succeeding. That's fine. I wouldn't block those ads even if I could.

Ads == Malware Delivery and Nuisance Content

[sehlat]

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.

Re:Ads == Malware Delivery and Nuisance Content

[ChunderDownunder]

5. You shouldn't need a quad-core CPU to process a web page.

If a site puts my computer in a death throttle for 10 seconds processing random JavaScript, I'll close the tab.

Re:Ads == Malware Delivery and Nuisance Content

[KiloByte]

Advertising is nothing but visual spam. It places non-relevant crap in place of information you actually look for, and in the best case is a waste of time.

Thus, there's no such thing as "good" ads. As with all spam, if I wanted penis enlargement, I'd search for it.

Re:Ads == Malware Delivery and Nuisance Content

[kimvette]

I don't mind unobtrusive ads.
I hate when ads cover 90% of the page (linkbeef, etc. I am glaring at you fuckers)
I hate it when Ads autoplay audio and/or video (die in a fire, fuckers!)
I hate it when ads display this ginormous layer over the page, with the close button rendering off screen, and if I try to zoom out, the image increases in size, regardless of smartphone browser (Chrome, Firefox, Dolphin). Safari is the same - I had to go back to my stone-age iPhone 4 for a few days after an OTA update soft-bricked my Galaxy. This is of course in reference to mobile sites... which tells me the fuckers don't ever test their web sites on smartphones.
Stupid fuckers. Die in a fire.

Bring back the unobtrusive text and banner ads.

Hey dumbass!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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'.

Re:Hey dumbass!

[cfalcon]

Exactly. It "disrupts the relationship" in the same way mosquito netting "disrupts the relationship" between mosquitoes and mammal flesh.

For those who didn't know about shine.

[Harlequin80]

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...

Re:For those who didn't know about shine.

[Registered Coward v2]

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.

Re:Why does Slashdot use a "Taboola" or a "Janrain

[whipslash]

These were all on the site when we acquired it. We are in the process of cleaning up all requests and scripts like this.

Re:Why the steep climb

[Drishmung]

Neither do I, but that might be because I've run some sort of ad blocking for years. :)

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.