8 ms·

This is a joke right ? We run Adsense display ads on our site and have to spend significant time every day reviewing and blocking new ads which try to use these

by whyleyc 11y ago

This is a joke right ? We run Adsense display ads on our site and have to spend significant time every day reviewing and blocking new ads which try to use these deceptive practices. Since Google clearly has the tech to detect this they should be implementing it at source on the advertisers (malvertisers). Instead they are pushing this down to the publishers and hitting them with penalties. It's a clever ploy in some ways - Google gets the revenue from the ads and also the kudos from Joe Public for "being on the side of the consumer".

Pharaoh2 11y ago
Google doesn't charge for ads, it charges for impressions. If you user doesn't seem it, google doesn't get paid. It also seems like a very different tech than trying to determine what an ad script will actually show a user. So it's not easy as if they can do A they can do B. Still doesn't excuse the fact that they should be doing their best to block those kind of ads in their ad network.
- oliwarner 11y ago
  FWIW, "impression" means "request". Who knows what the user saw. Google AdSense is pay-per-click (or some algorithm, based on clicks against and the subject matter's value). In the context of adware rubbish, we are probably talking about AdSense. So no, Google doesn't pay per impression. DoubleClick (part of Google for some time) may still offer an impression-based product. My experience of them a few years ago was that they'd negotiate on anything if you have enough traffic to make it worth their time.
  - Pharaoh2 11y ago
    Are you talking about google paying the website for each click/impression or are you talking about advertisers paying google for each click/impression. Both are termed under impressions (CPM or PPM). And in both cases google loses money in rolling out this feature.
blubb-fish 11y ago
yes, yes and yes ...
dzhiurgis 11y ago
I would expect an ad blocker to block stuff like this.
- Finnucane 11y ago
  I would not expect Google to recommend using an ad blocker. They still want you to be able to see the 'good' ads.
  - dzhiurgis 11y ago
    They also recommend not do any evil if you do not want it to be posted publicly on the internet (E. Schmidt in particular).
mattmanser 11y ago
It's a big company, I can imagine the browser guys wanting this but the ad guys saying they "can't" do this and there being a mini-war. You get the sense that sort of thing happens all the time at microsoft for example, before Ballmer left it felt like the ASP.Net team were pulling in one direction, the Visual Studio team another and the IIS team had gone rabid and were just trying to bite everyone. It happens when different products have different priorities.
- LeifCarrotson 11y ago
  It also happens when one department is perceived as an "expense" like IT or R&D, and starts pushing against "revenue-generating" departments like sales. Of course, all components of a properly-functioning organization are revenue-generating. An idealized business in some respects would be people giving you money with no money being spent. Everyone knows that's not how the world works, but it's awfully hard to justify on a quarterly statement. At Google, many departments aren't directly revenue-generating. Sure, Chrome and Android help people browse the Internet, where they view ads, but that's quite removed from actually selling the product, and those are very large projects. Search, maps, and gmail can show ads internally to generate revenue, but that's still a layer removed. Perhaps Google Apps and Drive are loss leaders, and maybe Fiber will make money eventually, but Glass? Calico? Driverless cars? Loon? Seriously, where does the money for these projects come from? I suppose you can answer "AdSense and AdWords", but why do those businesses give them money? And the harder question is how do they generate political and cultural capital to maintain these expenses? At most of the companies I have been involved with, these projects would have been cut, outsourced, or consumed by the AdWords and AdSense teams. But there's little question that the world is better and the Internet is used more because of projects like Search, Gmail, Android, and Chrome. How does Google generate this culture? How can other companies replicate this process?
  - ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
    Didn't Oracle reveal recently (maybe I'm totally misremembering this) that Google receives a shitload of revenue via Android?
idiot900 11y ago
Google doesn't control all advertisers. Presumably this applies to sites with non-Google ads too. Also, if these ads are rejected immediately (or nearly so) by Google, it will provide that much more feedback that malicious advertisers can use to "improve" their ads that much more quickly.
- tobltobs 11y ago
  Those download buttons look always the same. Oh wait, they changed their color. After years of blue buttons they are now green. So Goolge can detect your face in a crowd on a photo, but can not detect a download button on small ad?
onion2k 11y ago
Firstly, this will work on ad networks other than Google, so it''s more broad reaching than anything they could do just within AdSense. This is good. Secondly, and arguably more importantly, the way to stop these adverts is for them to cost the advertiser (in either money or time) without giving them the reward of revenue. If the ads stop working then people won't have a reason to make them. By stopping the ads in AdSense rogue advertisers would just change to a different ad network. The problem wouldn't stop. This is a good move by Google.
- marcosdumay 11y ago
  > By stopping the ads in AdSense rogue advertisers would just change to a different ad network. The problem wouldn't stop. It would stop the problem on every Google's partner that decided to trust it by displaying its ads.
- clinta 11y ago
  This does not make any sense. Advertisers paying per view do not get charged for a view if crome prevents the user from viewing the page. The good news here is we now have official admission by google that allowing adsense ads without filtering is dangerous. And those of us who do not have sophisticated techniques that can detect deceptive ads have no choice to but to block the entire network serving them, if we want to be secure.
  - dawnbreez 11y ago
    >Advertisers paying per view do not get charged for a view if crome prevents the user from viewing the page. The cost isn't in money, it's in views. By not letting you click a fake DL button, the malicious ad doesn't lead you to the site it wants you to end up on, which is usually plastered with other ads and sometimes has malware lying around on it. The end result is that the malicious party can't make money off their own site's ads and can't redirect you to download god-knows-what onto your system.
  - alkonaut 11y ago
    Any blockning of "malverts" should arguably just emulate view so it costs the advertiser even more than the lost view. If Google don't want to do that themselves (which would be understandable) they could likely expose it in APIs so plugins like ad blockers can do it.
blantonl 11y ago
Spot On. I run an online media streaming site for public safety communications, and we've noticed that Adsense advertisers often use these exact social engineering techniques to display download/play links that end up having customers install crappy spyware infested "media players" and other software. My jaw dropped when I saw this blog post.
- criddell 11y ago
  I'm semi-serious here, but if you noticed that you are serving ads that are harming your users, why would you continue to use ad-sense? Why not switch to a different ad network and let Google know why you switched?
  - fixermark 11y ago
    Based on other comments in this thread: does such an ad network exist? If all your options are terrible, you might as well use the terrible option with the largest ROI, right?
    - drhayes9 11y ago
      > might as well use the terrible option with the highest ROI, right? No, thanks. Does The Deck serve spammy, malicious ads? I know they're tightly targeted at the techy/designy crowd, but they're also a great example of high ROI ads that aren't terrible.
      - cloudwalking 11y ago
        You can't just use The Deck, you have to be invited.
        drhayes9 11y ago
        Valid point. But I still reject the notion of "that sucks but might as well get mine". Sounds like there's a lot of space for ad networks that don't suck. Or monetization models that don't rely on spammy, useless ads.
notzorbo3 11y ago
> We run Adsense display ads on our site and have to spend significant time every day reviewing and blocking new ads which try to use these deceptive practices. This may be a very stupid question, but are there no ad networks that are more trustworthy?
- dsmithatx 11y ago
  Well I used to work for a few Ad Publishers and they are on this list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_advertising_networks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_advertising_networks
- fencepost 11y ago
  You could look at something like Project Wonderful, but I think they're a little more geared towards small-scale niche advertising (gaming, comics, blogs). Actually, never mind. I just looked and their top 5 sites are all well under 1,000,000 page views - and 4 of the 5 are webcomics plus Omegle which I think is one of those random chat sites that popped up a few years ago.
- davidgerard 11y ago
  tl;dr no. AdSense sucks, but all other networks are actually worse. (There are tiny ad networks that are actually trustworthy, e.g. Project Wonderful, but they won't make you a living.)
smileysteve 11y ago
I agree, I have a personal blog and wanted to experiment with ads, so I put AdSense up there. I reported the "Download" ones but just kept getting more, so i finally removed the ads.
20years 11y ago
Exactly this. Ads served through Adsense are flooded with these. We have spent countless hours trying to block all of them but they just pop up again under a different domain. So is Google going to punish publishers who are using Adsense if these ads come through Adsense?
- enzanki_ars 11y ago
  I could only wish that Google will punish their own sites the same too. There are countless ads on YouTube claiming to provide free Minecraft downloads, commonly shown to very young viewers of YouTube. You might even be able to see these right now by turning on Private Browsing and disabling your ad-blocker.
  - 20years 11y ago
    Yep! This is a big issue on pretty much most Minecraft specific content sites & videos. I think these spammers specifically target Minecraft keywords and Minecraft sites through Adwords display ads knowing that kids will click the ads. If your site has Minecraft content and is serving Adsense within that content, you are almost certain to have these types of ads display. Not the fault of the actual content site but an issue with the spammers targeting through Adwords. It is really common actually on most game content or videos that are geared towards the youth. These Adwords spammers target this category specifically.
cm2187 11y ago
Most websites seem not to care about the content they deliver to their visitors. When I visit xyz.com, it is xyz.com's job to ensure that it doesn't deliver to me malicious content. I have zero sympathy for xyz.com telling me that it's not their problem, they serve 3rd party ads and if these ads are malicious it's the fault of these advertisers not their.
- colanderman 11y ago
  Sure, this is fine, but Google seems to plan to block sites which show malicious ads served by Google's AdSense. That's idiotic. This is the second case in a month of Google punishing web publishers for using Google products. (The previous case was Google punishing non-https search results, when in fact many of Google's own web publishing tools don't support https.)
  - ocdtrekkie 11y ago
    And I'm willing to bet Google will make a special exception for itself. I actually posted a screenshot on my G+ page yesterday of the most recent fake download button I saw online... On a YouTube banner ad, served by Google AdSense.
    - Nutmog 11y ago
      Do they have a history of making exceptions for themselves? If not, then you winning this bet will be quite a big deal - it'll show them as anti-competitive. They'd be forcing customers to use their AdSense product instead of just-as-good competitors. Maybe they'll just give this "malvertising" detection software to AdSense who can then filter their own content before it hits websites. I'd be more willing to bet this will be the beginning of Adsense cleaning itself up than what you suggest.
      - colanderman 11y ago
        Yes. On last week's story, a commenter mentioned how they decreed that web pages which showed a full-page ad on landing would be penalized in search, yet they themselves continued to show a full-page ad in mobile GMail for the GMail app, and it remained the first hit for "e-mail".
kbenson 11y ago
Well, it's a way for Google to throw their weight around to multiple effects. First, it's positively perceived and accepted by end users, which is good for Google and end-users. Second, it punishes ad networks that don't spend the time to vet what types of adds are allowed. As an end-user, I'm in favor of this. Third, it boosts ad networks that do spend time vetting ads to prevent malicious ones. Presumably Google, and other networks, that spend time and resources doing this will see a return on that effort. This is good for responsible ad networks, and as an end-user, I'm in favor of this idea to the extent that it should hopefully reduce these malicious ads overall. It's easy to see this as a way for Google to boost their own ad network, but I think that's too cynical of a take. They aren't boosting themselves specifically, they are punishing bad-actors and boosting good actors overall.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- Avshalom 11y ago
  >>Second, it punishes ad networks that don't spend the time to vet what types of adds are allowed. As an end-user, I'm in favor of this. It punishes the sites using those ad networks directly, the networks themselves are indirectly punished.
  - kbenson 11y ago
    Well, it punished them both. An ad network that can't display it's ads in places it could before is a form of direct punishment. Forcing sites for choosing ad networks that don't vet their ads well is an additional indirect punishment as well, as it may encourage those sites to choose a more discerning ad network. On one hand it's unfortunate that the site is being punished, on the other hand maybe they deserve some responsibility for not being more selective. I'm not sure.
Animats 11y ago
I used to have a Firefox add-on which rated the sites linked to in Google ads.[1] I could have deleted the ads, but didn't. Should I bring that back? It was amusing to run that. Ad quality was much better on some sites than others. Ads on Business Week pages were generally legitimate. Ads on entertainment sites were awful. Totally deleting ads seems to have won out over merely thinning them out. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adrater/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adrater/
rbobby 11y ago
You'd think that Google could use a Bayesian classifier to detect malicious AdSense display ads at setup time. Add an appeal process to take care of ongoing training. This would negatively affect Google's revenue... which is probably why they haven't done so.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
hyperpallium 11y ago
Fits with Google: free consumer services (paid for by advertisers); and Google gets the highest price possible by letting advertisers fight it out in real time (the other advertisers are the bad guys... but Google gets the money).
the_gipsy 11y ago
No, it's not a "ploy", it's the only realistic action google could take. It would be a huge business mistake to ban malvertisers from adsense, because those would move to other networks, which would then in turn be preferred by publishers because that's where the money moves. Adsense would lose, and the consumer wouldn't have won anything. The publishers aren't innocent at all. They decide to place ads right above, below, and all around the real download button. Because they know that a good percentage of their consumers will be tricked, and so they get payed.
JacobJans 11y ago
I too have seriously struggled with this. I recently discovered that you can ban this entire category of ads (mostly). Go to "Allow & block ads", then "sensitive categories" and select "Ringtones & Downloadables." This will remove most of these types of ads.
stvswn 11y ago
What you are describing is already against Google's policies for advertisers, and they do implement it in a very thorough review process for all ads: https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6020955 https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6020955 Do you report the deceptive ads to Google? https://support.google.com/adsense/troubleshooter/1190500?hl=en https://support.google.com/adsense/troubleshooter/1190500?hl...
yyin 11y ago
"It's a clever ploy..." Not really all that clever. Same old story. They take users for fools. Maybe users will stay dumb re: ads, but then maybe not. It's amusing to watch the companies that must jam the ads into your pages to make money claiming they can "make the internet faster" (a previous ploy) or "safer" for users. These companies are part of the problem, not the solution. Unless they find a new "business model". But why bother when this one - being a middleman to people's use of the internet, selling ads and jamming them into every page they can - works so well?

by whyleyc 11y ago

Pharaoh2 11y ago

Google doesn't charge for ads, it charges for impressions. If you user doesn't seem it, google doesn't get paid. It also seems like a very different tech than trying to determine what an ad script will actually show a user. So it's not easy as if they can do A they can do B. Still doesn't excuse the fact that they should be doing their best to block those kind of ads in their ad network.

oliwarner 11y ago
FWIW, "impression" means "request". Who knows what the user saw. Google AdSense is pay-per-click (or some algorithm, based on clicks against and the subject matter's value). In the context of adware rubbish, we are probably talking about AdSense. So no, Google doesn't pay per impression. DoubleClick (part of Google for some time) may still offer an impression-based product. My experience of them a few years ago was that they'd negotiate on anything if you have enough traffic to make it worth their time.
- Pharaoh2 11y ago
  Are you talking about google paying the website for each click/impression or are you talking about advertisers paying google for each click/impression. Both are termed under impressions (CPM or PPM). And in both cases google loses money in rolling out this feature.

blubb-fish 11y ago

yes, yes and yes ...

dzhiurgis 11y ago

I would expect an ad blocker to block stuff like this.

Finnucane 11y ago
I would not expect Google to recommend using an ad blocker. They still want you to be able to see the 'good' ads.
- dzhiurgis 11y ago
  They also recommend not do any evil if you do not want it to be posted publicly on the internet (E. Schmidt in particular).

mattmanser 11y ago

It's a big company, I can imagine the browser guys wanting this but the ad guys saying they "can't" do this and there being a mini-war. You get the sense that sort of thing happens all the time at microsoft for example, before Ballmer left it felt like the ASP.Net team were pulling in one direction, the Visual Studio team another and the IIS team had gone rabid and were just trying to bite everyone. It happens when different products have different priorities.

LeifCarrotson 11y ago
It also happens when one department is perceived as an "expense" like IT or R&D, and starts pushing against "revenue-generating" departments like sales. Of course, all components of a properly-functioning organization are revenue-generating. An idealized business in some respects would be people giving you money with no money being spent. Everyone knows that's not how the world works, but it's awfully hard to justify on a quarterly statement. At Google, many departments aren't directly revenue-generating. Sure, Chrome and Android help people browse the Internet, where they view ads, but that's quite removed from actually selling the product, and those are very large projects. Search, maps, and gmail can show ads internally to generate revenue, but that's still a layer removed. Perhaps Google Apps and Drive are loss leaders, and maybe Fiber will make money eventually, but Glass? Calico? Driverless cars? Loon? Seriously, where does the money for these projects come from? I suppose you can answer "AdSense and AdWords", but why do those businesses give them money? And the harder question is how do they generate political and cultural capital to maintain these expenses? At most of the companies I have been involved with, these projects would have been cut, outsourced, or consumed by the AdWords and AdSense teams. But there's little question that the world is better and the Internet is used more because of projects like Search, Gmail, Android, and Chrome. How does Google generate this culture? How can other companies replicate this process?
- ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
  Didn't Oracle reveal recently (maybe I'm totally misremembering this) that Google receives a shitload of revenue via Android?

idiot900 11y ago

Google doesn't control all advertisers. Presumably this applies to sites with non-Google ads too. Also, if these ads are rejected immediately (or nearly so) by Google, it will provide that much more feedback that malicious advertisers can use to "improve" their ads that much more quickly.

tobltobs 11y ago
Those download buttons look always the same. Oh wait, they changed their color. After years of blue buttons they are now green. So Goolge can detect your face in a crowd on a photo, but can not detect a download button on small ad?

onion2k 11y ago

Firstly, this will work on ad networks other than Google, so it''s more broad reaching than anything they could do just within AdSense. This is good. Secondly, and arguably more importantly, the way to stop these adverts is for them to cost the advertiser (in either money or time) without giving them the reward of revenue. If the ads stop working then people won't have a reason to make them. By stopping the ads in AdSense rogue advertisers would just change to a different ad network. The problem wouldn't stop. This is a good move by Google.

marcosdumay 11y ago
> By stopping the ads in AdSense rogue advertisers would just change to a different ad network. The problem wouldn't stop. It would stop the problem on every Google's partner that decided to trust it by displaying its ads.
clinta 11y ago
This does not make any sense. Advertisers paying per view do not get charged for a view if crome prevents the user from viewing the page. The good news here is we now have official admission by google that allowing adsense ads without filtering is dangerous. And those of us who do not have sophisticated techniques that can detect deceptive ads have no choice to but to block the entire network serving them, if we want to be secure.
- dawnbreez 11y ago
  >Advertisers paying per view do not get charged for a view if crome prevents the user from viewing the page. The cost isn't in money, it's in views. By not letting you click a fake DL button, the malicious ad doesn't lead you to the site it wants you to end up on, which is usually plastered with other ads and sometimes has malware lying around on it. The end result is that the malicious party can't make money off their own site's ads and can't redirect you to download god-knows-what onto your system.
- alkonaut 11y ago
  Any blockning of "malverts" should arguably just emulate view so it costs the advertiser even more than the lost view. If Google don't want to do that themselves (which would be understandable) they could likely expose it in APIs so plugins like ad blockers can do it.

blantonl 11y ago

Spot On. I run an online media streaming site for public safety communications, and we've noticed that Adsense advertisers often use these exact social engineering techniques to display download/play links that end up having customers install crappy spyware infested "media players" and other software. My jaw dropped when I saw this blog post.

criddell 11y ago
I'm semi-serious here, but if you noticed that you are serving ads that are harming your users, why would you continue to use ad-sense? Why not switch to a different ad network and let Google know why you switched?
- fixermark 11y ago
  Based on other comments in this thread: does such an ad network exist? If all your options are terrible, you might as well use the terrible option with the largest ROI, right?
  - drhayes9 11y ago
    > might as well use the terrible option with the highest ROI, right? No, thanks. Does The Deck serve spammy, malicious ads? I know they're tightly targeted at the techy/designy crowd, but they're also a great example of high ROI ads that aren't terrible.
    - cloudwalking 11y ago
      You can't just use The Deck, you have to be invited.
      - drhayes9 11y ago
        Valid point. But I still reject the notion of "that sucks but might as well get mine". Sounds like there's a lot of space for ad networks that don't suck. Or monetization models that don't rely on spammy, useless ads.

notzorbo3 11y ago

> We run Adsense display ads on our site and have to spend significant time every day reviewing and blocking new ads which try to use these deceptive practices. This may be a very stupid question, but are there no ad networks that are more trustworthy?

dsmithatx 11y ago
Well I used to work for a few Ad Publishers and they are on this list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_advertising_networks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_advertising_networks
fencepost 11y ago
You could look at something like Project Wonderful, but I think they're a little more geared towards small-scale niche advertising (gaming, comics, blogs). Actually, never mind. I just looked and their top 5 sites are all well under 1,000,000 page views - and 4 of the 5 are webcomics plus Omegle which I think is one of those random chat sites that popped up a few years ago.
davidgerard 11y ago
tl;dr no. AdSense sucks, but all other networks are actually worse. (There are tiny ad networks that are actually trustworthy, e.g. Project Wonderful, but they won't make you a living.)

smileysteve 11y ago

I agree, I have a personal blog and wanted to experiment with ads, so I put AdSense up there. I reported the "Download" ones but just kept getting more, so i finally removed the ads.

20years 11y ago

Exactly this. Ads served through Adsense are flooded with these. We have spent countless hours trying to block all of them but they just pop up again under a different domain. So is Google going to punish publishers who are using Adsense if these ads come through Adsense?

enzanki_ars 11y ago
I could only wish that Google will punish their own sites the same too. There are countless ads on YouTube claiming to provide free Minecraft downloads, commonly shown to very young viewers of YouTube. You might even be able to see these right now by turning on Private Browsing and disabling your ad-blocker.
- 20years 11y ago
  Yep! This is a big issue on pretty much most Minecraft specific content sites & videos. I think these spammers specifically target Minecraft keywords and Minecraft sites through Adwords display ads knowing that kids will click the ads. If your site has Minecraft content and is serving Adsense within that content, you are almost certain to have these types of ads display. Not the fault of the actual content site but an issue with the spammers targeting through Adwords. It is really common actually on most game content or videos that are geared towards the youth. These Adwords spammers target this category specifically.

cm2187 11y ago

Most websites seem not to care about the content they deliver to their visitors. When I visit xyz.com, it is xyz.com's job to ensure that it doesn't deliver to me malicious content. I have zero sympathy for xyz.com telling me that it's not their problem, they serve 3rd party ads and if these ads are malicious it's the fault of these advertisers not their.

colanderman 11y ago
Sure, this is fine, but Google seems to plan to block sites which show malicious ads served by Google's AdSense. That's idiotic. This is the second case in a month of Google punishing web publishers for using Google products. (The previous case was Google punishing non-https search results, when in fact many of Google's own web publishing tools don't support https.)
- ocdtrekkie 11y ago
  And I'm willing to bet Google will make a special exception for itself. I actually posted a screenshot on my G+ page yesterday of the most recent fake download button I saw online... On a YouTube banner ad, served by Google AdSense.
  - Nutmog 11y ago
    Do they have a history of making exceptions for themselves? If not, then you winning this bet will be quite a big deal - it'll show them as anti-competitive. They'd be forcing customers to use their AdSense product instead of just-as-good competitors. Maybe they'll just give this "malvertising" detection software to AdSense who can then filter their own content before it hits websites. I'd be more willing to bet this will be the beginning of Adsense cleaning itself up than what you suggest.
    - colanderman 11y ago
      Yes. On last week's story, a commenter mentioned how they decreed that web pages which showed a full-page ad on landing would be penalized in search, yet they themselves continued to show a full-page ad in mobile GMail for the GMail app, and it remained the first hit for "e-mail".

kbenson 11y ago

Well, it's a way for Google to throw their weight around to multiple effects. First, it's positively perceived and accepted by end users, which is good for Google and end-users. Second, it punishes ad networks that don't spend the time to vet what types of adds are allowed. As an end-user, I'm in favor of this. Third, it boosts ad networks that do spend time vetting ads to prevent malicious ones. Presumably Google, and other networks, that spend time and resources doing this will see a return on that effort. This is good for responsible ad networks, and as an end-user, I'm in favor of this idea to the extent that it should hopefully reduce these malicious ads overall. It's easy to see this as a way for Google to boost their own ad network, but I think that's too cynical of a take. They aren't boosting themselves specifically, they are punishing bad-actors and boosting good actors overall.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Avshalom 11y ago
>>Second, it punishes ad networks that don't spend the time to vet what types of adds are allowed. As an end-user, I'm in favor of this. It punishes the sites using those ad networks directly, the networks themselves are indirectly punished.
- kbenson 11y ago
  Well, it punished them both. An ad network that can't display it's ads in places it could before is a form of direct punishment. Forcing sites for choosing ad networks that don't vet their ads well is an additional indirect punishment as well, as it may encourage those sites to choose a more discerning ad network. On one hand it's unfortunate that the site is being punished, on the other hand maybe they deserve some responsibility for not being more selective. I'm not sure.

Animats 11y ago

I used to have a Firefox add-on which rated the sites linked to in Google ads.[1] I could have deleted the ads, but didn't. Should I bring that back? It was amusing to run that. Ad quality was much better on some sites than others. Ads on Business Week pages were generally legitimate. Ads on entertainment sites were awful. Totally deleting ads seems to have won out over merely thinning them out. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adrater/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adrater/

rbobby 11y ago

You'd think that Google could use a Bayesian classifier to detect malicious AdSense display ads at setup time. Add an appeal process to take care of ongoing training. This would negatively affect Google's revenue... which is probably why they haven't done so.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

hyperpallium 11y ago

Fits with Google: free consumer services (paid for by advertisers); and Google gets the highest price possible by letting advertisers fight it out in real time (the other advertisers are the bad guys... but Google gets the money).

the_gipsy 11y ago

No, it's not a "ploy", it's the only realistic action google could take. It would be a huge business mistake to ban malvertisers from adsense, because those would move to other networks, which would then in turn be preferred by publishers because that's where the money moves. Adsense would lose, and the consumer wouldn't have won anything. The publishers aren't innocent at all. They decide to place ads right above, below, and all around the real download button. Because they know that a good percentage of their consumers will be tricked, and so they get payed.

JacobJans 11y ago

I too have seriously struggled with this. I recently discovered that you can ban this entire category of ads (mostly). Go to "Allow & block ads", then "sensitive categories" and select "Ringtones & Downloadables." This will remove most of these types of ads.

stvswn 11y ago

What you are describing is already against Google's policies for advertisers, and they do implement it in a very thorough review process for all ads: https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6020955 https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6020955 Do you report the deceptive ads to Google? https://support.google.com/adsense/troubleshooter/1190500?hl=en https://support.google.com/adsense/troubleshooter/1190500?hl...

yyin 11y ago

"It's a clever ploy..." Not really all that clever. Same old story. They take users for fools. Maybe users will stay dumb re: ads, but then maybe not. It's amusing to watch the companies that must jam the ads into your pages to make money claiming they can "make the internet faster" (a previous ploy) or "safer" for users. These companies are part of the problem, not the solution. Unless they find a new "business model". But why bother when this one - being a middleman to people's use of the internet, selling ads and jamming them into every page they can - works so well?