Google's Chrome Ad Blocking Arrives Tomorrow (theverge.com)

Google is enabling its built-in ad blocker for Chrome tomorrow (February 15th). From a report: Chrome's ad filtering is designed to weed out some of the web's most annoying ads, and push website owners to stop using them. Google is not planning to wipe out all ads from Chrome, just ones that are considered bad using standards from the Coalition for Better Ads. Full page ads, ads with autoplaying sound and video, and flashing ads will be targeted by Chrome's ad filtering, which will hopefully result in less of these annoying ads on the web. Google is revealing today exactly what ads will be blocked, and how the company notifies site owners before a block is put in place. On desktop, Google is planning to block pop-up ads, large sticky ads, auto-play video ads with sound, and ads that appear on a site with a countdown blocking you before the content loads. Google is being more aggressive about its mobile ad blocking, filtering out pop-up ads, ads that are displayed before content loads (with or without a countdown), auto-play video ads with sound, large sticky ads, flashing animated ads, fullscreen scroll over ads, and ads that are particularly dense.

Comments

Anti competitive

[ickleberry]

Google can basically redefine what they deem as an acceptable ad (ones made by themselves) on the fly. This is bad news.

Re:Anti competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

Google can basically redefine what they deem as an acceptable ad (ones made by themselves) on the fly. This is bad news.

If they start blocking competitors for anti-competition reasons then they will be breaking laws. They have a near monopoly situation and the European Union, as one example of places where laws are still enforced, has already made judgements against them.

The reason that Google is doing this is simple. The advertising industry has become so dangerous and dirty, serving malware and other garbage, that a computer without an ad-blocker installed is a clear security risk and most major companies are coming to realise that. In recent years malvertising has become one of the leading methods to attack companies. As other ad-blockers go mainstream Google's main business, selling advertising space, is being threatened. This is more or less the last throw of the dice for the advertising industry

Re:Anti competitive

[Larry_Dillon]

I think the idea here is to undermine more aggressive adblocking software. The adblocking genie is out of the bottle and the only way to combat it is to subvert the whole ecosystem by having a built-in option that's "good enough" for most people, yet leaves Google's ads untouched -- unlike 3d party ad blockers.

So if you don't run an ad blocker (70%, last I checked), it will be seen as an improvement. If you do run an ad blocker, you'll see it as a weak offering.

Re:Anti competitive

[StormReaver]

They way I see it, you don't have to use Chrome...

That is completely right. Long gone is the era of the browser monopoly. I can choose to use Firefox, Chrome, Chromium, Konqueror, etc. as I see fit. As it stands, Firefox has regained my preferred-browser status with the Quantum release. I had only preferred Chrome for Netflix viewing, since Firefox pre-Quantum was too sluggish. With its recent performance improvements, it is at least as good as (if not better than) Chrome for that purpose.

So it matters not one whit how Google plans to have Chrome handle ads. If its ad-blocking abilities are intended as a poor replacement for proper ad blocking, then users are free to use a different browser if they so choose.

Re:Anti competitive

[AmiMoJo]

Google is using Easylist, the same blocking list that uBlock and most others use. The only difference is that Google only enables blocking on sites that they have determined contain abusive ads. The determination seems to be a distributed thing, based on user's actions and reports. That's usually how Google works for stuff like malware warnings, they don't want to be doing manual checks.

I don't really buy the idea that they will start blocking everything but their own ads. Apart from getting them severely punished by regulators (the EU isn't afraid to hit them for billions of Euros) the same argument could have been made 10 years ago when Chrome launched with malware protection. Google could have marked Firefox as malware, same as Microsoft could mark Linux ISOs as malware in Windows Defender. It just doesn't seem to be an issue, probably because of the previously mentioned consequences.

Re:Anti competitive

[jbmartin6]

I'd rather see them take away the underlying capabilities which are abused by these ads.

Re:Anti competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really.

Although this ad blocker has good intentions, it's likely to be undermined by the very same algorithm bullshit that plagues youtube's demonitization and copyright strikes. Basically it doesn't know shit and expects you to do all the work.

On most sites, all it takes to block ads is to find what script invokes it, and block the address of it. That's what we have all been doing for over 15 years to block ads using the host files. ublock/adblock only started making ad shit worse because the people blocking the ads weren't diluting the ad-display base, and thus all the potential shit ads weren't being noticed by people who could report them, they were simply being blocked silently.

What really created the uptick in shitty ads was a combination of three things:

1. Shitty cloud hosts like Amazon Web Services who don't vet anyone.
2. Shitty CDN's like Cloudflare who don't take down malware.
3. Shitty domain registrars who allowed the all these additional shitty TLD's. Now it seems like all these additional TLD's are good for are are malware because they're so cheap to buy hundreds of them.

Put the three together and you are constantly having to ban-hammer different domains that you can't block the IP address for. Often blocking the DNS is fruitless because another one pops up in it's place in an hour.

Really the right thing to do right now would be for all ad-supported content to quickly move to Patreon/Kickstarter crowdfunding, strip ALL ads and third-party links off their sites, and just let the existing ad business wither up.

Re:Anti competitive

[sg_oneill]

Its kind of critical at the moment.

A friend of mine is a journalist who makes his living off the website he writes for now that the newspaper it sprung out of has died. That means he's 100% dependent on ads to pay the rent (The sites fairly opposed to paywalls). So understandably he's got a bee in his bonnet about ad blockers.

My self on the other hand actively advocate people using full strength no exception ad blocking, simply because I've had on more than one occasion been pwned by zero days sprung out of advertisements dropping malware on my machines without my consent. In the current deeply unethical state of internet advertising, its just too dangerous to permit ads in my browsers.

And so we have a problem. Because without good writers and content makers being able to make a living off their trade, we're going to lose a lot of the good content on the net to paywalls, and a lot of content makers are simply going to quit. And thats BAD for the internet.

So maybe companies like Google and Apple laying smackdowns on badvertising , despite the conflict of interests involved might be what it takes to save the internets content infrastructure from the slow death that losing advertising might bring

Re:Anti competitive

[jareth-0205]

I thought IE was a problem because it was a bundled and default browser, and Windows isn't free.
Chrome is obviously a completely free, and completely optional third party web browser.

I guess unless we are talking about Android. I was thinking about Windows and Mac PCs only before.

Even if you give something away free you can still get into trouble-- if you use your market power to give something away until all the competition goes bankrupt, then you are able to charge anything for it because there's no competition. It's not only about what you can do as a user, because the exact same thing that happened with IE when it got to 99% or whatever can happen again, websites stop developing for anything else and start to require you to run Chrome to use them. If you want to use your bank or whatever suddenly you have to use Chrome and your choice disappears, even if there still technically exists choice.

Re:Anti competitive

[MitchDev]

Or force them to ditch annoying auto-playing audio/video ads and pop-ups/pop-unders, etc.

Re:Anti competitive

[OneHundredAndTen]

Nobody owns your friend any job in particular. If ads stop working for him, he should move on to do something else - hopefully, something with a better social contribution than just living off ads.

Re:Anti competitive

[Voyager529]

They way I see it, you don't have to use Chrome...

Is there really a law that prevents me from writing my own web browser that blocks all ads except my own?

I'm torn on this topic because auto-play video ads, floating ads, ads with undesired audio, and ads on overlays have made using websites an absolute chore without ad blocking software. uBlock and friends, however, seem to go too far in the other direction and prevent any ads from being displayed, which is not what I want, either. In theory, Google has the balance right, and I think that having such capabilities built into the dominant web browser is going to instill corrective behavior in the same way that integrated pop-up blockers have brought that ad format to extinction.

However, Google is not the company that should be doing this. They are an ad company. This is the definition of 'conflict of interest'. Google also has an overwhelming market share of online advertising. Facebook admittedly rules the roost on their own platform, but it's not entirely apples to apples since they keep their ads in-house, and even though they're the most popular website on the internet, their decline has begun.

Beyond Google, you end up with small percentages in other areas where AdSense doesn't do the trick - the MSN, Yahoo, and AOL homepages (still seen by millions), the sketchy ad networks like Trafficstars and Taboola that serve up ads to torrent sites and porn sites, and places like DDG who run their own ads on principle for whatever they can get.

Ad networks should never have let things get this far in the first place, and shame on whoever thought it was preferential to do this rather than keep ads a 'necessary evil', as if the pop-up blocker battle of the 90's is forgotten history. I'd throw 'government oversight' into the ring as a solution, but if you're left-of-center, Trump and Ajit aren't going to make any decisions you like, and if you're right-of-center, it's more government oversight in general, which isn't desirable, either. Even if somehow there was a sudden outbreak of common sense from Washington, we start dealing with the same "physical jurisdictions don't apply to the internet" problem. Even a perfectly written and enforced federal law is thwarted by an office move and shifting the VMs to Ireland or Sweden.

To directly answer your question, no, there's no law preventing what you state. However, you're not a multibillion dollar company whose primary income is based on ad revenue with a browser commanding over half the browser market share...in which case, the rules are just a bit different. There's nothing stopping you from writing an operating system and shipping a web browser on it, but you're not Microsoft, you're not telling OEMs they can't ship computers with Chrome on it, and this isn't 1997...so context is involved here.

Re:Anti competitive

[nmb3000]

Tell your friend to stop being a leech and relying on ads for revenue. Get a real job that doesnt rely on polluting the web. and annoying users. Hes a parasite if he cant live without ads, we dont need his work if they are the only way to do it.

Harsher than I would have put it, but true nonetheless.

If all advertising revenue were to disappear tomorrow, any industry or product which couldn't migrate to another form of acquiring revenue in a few days probably doesn't need to exist in the first place. People would be able to choose if they want to directly pay for access to sites they like, or to move on and spend their time on something else they value more. Sites that are a hobby or a true labor or love (the way 80% of them were in the early days of the web) would go back to that, leaving a lot of the crap and cruft behind. Buzzfeed and other "TOP TEN WEIRD TRICKS" sites would hopefully just go away. There would probably be less crap on TV, and actor salaries would drop to a more reasonable level to compensate for the lack of an advertiser teat to leech from.

In all cases it's a win for everyone.

Re: Anti competitive

[AvitarX]

I'm just excited that YouTube ads will be blocked.

Yes, I know they won't, but it's amusing to me that they list count down as a bad thing.

Re:Anti competitive

[thegarbz]

Tell your friend to stop being a leech and relying on ads for revenue. Get a real job that doesnt rely on polluting the web. and annoying users. Hes a parasite if he cant live without ads, we dont need his work if they are the only way to do it.

The irony of you posting this on a service that is highly dependent on ads to survive is delicious.

Re:Anti competitive

[Dragonslicer]

A friend of mine is a journalist who makes his living off the website he writes for now that the newspaper it sprung out of has died. That means he's 100% dependent on ads to pay the rent (The sites fairly opposed to paywalls). So understandably he's got a bee in his bonnet about ad blockers.

As far as I know, ad blockers aren't doing any kind of advanced image analysis, they're just going by the domain the ad comes from. So if he wants to sell ads on his site, he can host the ads himself and they won't be blocked.

Re:Anti competitive

[tohoward]

I know I can't be the first to suggest that if the content producers were willing to source their own ads, and make them part of the articles being published (i.e. conform to a more "print media" approach), then current ad blocking approaches would become obsolete overnight, and the security risks would almost completely disappear.

So if you want content funded with ads, the underlying issue hasn't changed: FIX THE DAMN INTERNET AD MODEL ALREADY. Your friend shouldn't be getting a bee in his bonnet about ad blockers, he should be screaming loudly for an ad model that's workable, and has at least some attempt at security and content oversight from the website he writes for.

Sounds suspicious

[omfglearntoplay]

Sounds very much like they want to control what you see and who gets paid. I haven't met a single ad I like, so I'm skeptical that any "pro ad" committee is going to come up with a fair list.

If I am wrong, great. Somebody have the scoop on this?

In other words

[rmdingler]

The Coalition for Better Ads:

"While the Coalition’s consumer research was designed to identify the least preferred ad types, it also provides insight into consumers’ evaluation of a far broader range of ad experiences, including those more preferred by consumers.

Google: "We're only tracking your every move and recording your preferences to bring you a better online experience, you ungrateful dolt!"

Sorry, no sale

[Opportunist]

So, in other words, it still lets ads slip past, waste my bandwidth and time?

NEXT!

Re:Sorry, no sale

[tepples]

We noticed you're using an ad blocker. To continue to be able to bring you quality journalism, we kindly ask you to buy a subscription for full access to this website.

Re:Sorry, no sale

[Opportunist]

Close window.
Click next search result.

Re:Sorry, no sale

[tepples]

Next search result states something similar:

You are viewing the abstract for free. To read the rest, log in to your account or get your first week for 99 cents*

* Subscription requires a U.S. checking account, credit card, or PayPal account. Once the trial period concludes, you will be automatically billed at $9.99 per four weeks. Other restrictions apply.

My point is that after the web advertising market collapses, more of the top 10 search results will be paywalled than not. I have already begun to see this effect for some queries on Google Search.

Translation

[sjbe]

"While the Coalition’s consumer research was designed to identify the least preferred ad types, it also provides insight into consumers’ evaluation of a far broader range of ad experiences, including those more preferred by consumers.

"More preferred" actually translates as "less hated". Nobody actually prefers ads, they just hate some types more than others.

Re:Translation

[DontBeAMoran]

I prefer static images ads or text-only ads. If that's the end result of Google's filtering, I'm all for it.

Ads with scripts, plug-ins, videos and animated GIFs should be banned.

Re:Translation

[tepples]

People prefer ads to the other two possibilities: having to buy a 1-month subscription for $5.99 just to read one article, or the article not existing in the first place because the publisher went bankrupt. (I'm interested to read your fourth option.)

Re:Translation

[TheRaven64]

Back in the day, Google Ads were plain text, usually advertising content directly related to the page that I was viewing. I clicked on a few, and I actually liked them because they introduced me to products that solved problems that I had identified that I had. People liked them because they were a lot less intrusive than the animated banner ads that they were competing against, and also far more likely to be relevant. Now, they are based on a crappy model of me, which is either creepy if it's accurate, or annoying if it isn't (yes, I did want one of those last week. Then I bought one. Now I am looking for something else), and they're as likely to contain video as anyone else's.

Re:Translation

[phantomfive]

or the article not existing in the first place because the publisher went bankrupt.

It's amazing how much time this would give me back in my life.

Re:Translation

[Zocalo]

My fourth option is the same as the one I use when I come across a site with an anti-adblock script where the effort to work around it outweighs my desire to read their specific take on the content. See if that content is available elsewhere, with a side-option of probably not returning to that site again if it's a high-enough profile to enter my conciousness or particularly obnoxious about the detection. There are already far too many instance of ad-providers serving up malware to make not blocking ads across the board a remotely sane thing to do from a security perspective, and given the recent abuse of a popular script-hosting site to mine crypto-currency it seems like only whitelisting scripts is a pretty damn good idea too.

Of course, I do have the advantage of knowing what I'm doing with script- and ad-blockers so a whitelisting is a viable option. The average Joe's PC, on the otherhand, is probably going to be spending a lot of its time sending spam, mining crypto currency, or acting a a proxy for random script kiddies to do whatever they want. If Google really wants to make a difference with Chrome's ad-blocker (and AMP, for that matter), they could start right there and insist that all pages and content, including any ads, will still render a usable page without any scripting support. I'll still be blocking the ads though. :)

Re:Translation

[phantomfive]

What do you do for a living, and to what sources do you refer if you have a question about something?

I get paid because I am able to read documentation. There are programmers who would be lost without Stack Overflow, but the world would be far better off if they learned how to read documentation.

Also I want to point out there were forums and such, without ads, before Stack Overflow.

Re:Translation

[karlandtanya]

Fourth option is I block ads and enough* of the rest of you don't--either because you don't know how or you don't care.
Yes, "Everybody else can block them, too", but that's irrelevant; as of today, you don't.

Before you cry "no fair", know this: It's too late for "fair" in advertising, and has been since *long* before there was an internet.
To the degree that it's profitable to abuse the public- producers, sellers, and advertisers have done exactly that. For millenia. Absent confiscatory fines or jail terms, regulations (and regulatory capture) are simply part of the business. "Fair" in this context is simply an opportunity for the enemy to exploit.

*Enough so it's the operator doesn't care about the last few users.

Re:Translation

[tepples]

I get paid because I am able to read documentation.

Would you still be able to do your job if you had to pay for access to said documentation? Or for help interpreting documentation, particularly to resolve discrepancies between the documentation and the behavior of the software or workarounds for functionality that the documentation acknowledges is missing?

Also I want to point out there were forums and such, without ads, before Stack Overflow.

With what source of money did the operators of said forums pay for hosting and moderation?

Not good enough.

[lfp98]

All self-playing video ads need to be blocked. Otherwise users are going to resort to 3rd party blockers. So many sites, including New York Times (which I pay for!) are practically unreadable without a blocker, due to animated ads.

Google can CMA

[phantomfive]

Skip Chrome and use Firefox with full ad block. If you don't have unlimited data, this is the wisest option (those ads aren't free for you, and they are heavy).

Since even 'approved' ads can contain malware, it is foolish to not block all the ads. Block them all (and if you must use a hosts file, why not?)

Re:Will websites start blocking Chrome?

[phantomfive]

Forbes does that (if you have adblocker installed, you can't visit their site). They seem to be happy with it.

For me the end result is that I don't visit their site. And nothing of value was lost.

No ads

[sjbe]

I prefer static images ads or text-only ads. If that's the end result of Google's filtering, I'm all for it.

I prefer no ads of any sort and no tracking. Google's preferred style of ads may be less obnoxious but it's more creepy.

Re:Fox guarding the hen house?

[dromgodis]

Are you saying that Google actually runs ads like those being discussed?

Youtube has "ads that are displayed before content loads (with or without a countdown)".

CSS can animate a JPEG

[tepples]

Blocking animation in ads isn't a very easy problem for two reasons. First, how would you distinguish desirable animations, such as the main video on the video's description page, from ads? Second, CSS can animate a JPEG.

Re:Fox guarding the hen house?

[ScentCone]

Youtube has "ads that are displayed before content loads (with or without a countdown)".

Not really. The web page that they're showing you does NOT do that. Inside of that page is some video content that YouTube is providing to you free of charge, and attached to that content is (sometimes) an ad. That ad does NOT prevent the page from loading, the page's navigation from functioning, etc.

Not the same thing at all. And of course you can choose to be an actual customer of YouTube and have that content appear without those ads that pay for the service and the people who create the content. But the web page itself? Come on, don't pretend you don't know the difference between an in-line ad with the video itself and those "curtain" ads that take over the actual page.

Plenty of options

[sjbe]

People prefer ads to the other two possibilities:

There are FAR more than just two possibilities.

having to buy a 1-month subscription for $5.99 just to read one article

So buy one subscription that aggregates articles. That's basically what the Associated Press is anyway. Or buy the article piece-rate. Maybe the value of that article is only $0.01 or less per read. Advertisers have to guess how much it will cost to get someone's attention so I see no reason why content providers should be unable to figure it out. Or give the article away and make money on something else like merchandise sales.

If no readers are willing to pay you for your article then maybe that says something about its market value and your business model.

or the article not existing in the first place because the publisher went bankrupt.

Someone else's bad business model is not my problem. I'm not about to relax my grip on my time and personal information just because someone else feels entitled to make a profit from it. If the advertiser wants my attention they can pay me cash money for it. Otherwise they can fuck off and I do not care at all if they go bankrupt. Your assumption that they are somehow entitled to profit from information about me is an assertion I reject completely.