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This year we will stop using AdSense altogether. No support at all and the payouts have been declining every year. With the increase of ad blockers, even less e

This year we will stop using AdSense altogether. No support at all and the payouts have been declining every year. With the increase of ad blockers, even less encouraging to use ads in general. Sometimes I wonder, are ads as we know it, dead? Everyone hates it, has real usability impact and security risks. Didnt get the email though...

t0pz 10y ago
Let me provide you with some insight into your bewonderment: 1) I work in the Ad technology industry and i can tell you with confidence that ads are far from dead. The human logic of "We hate it, so it must not be working" is understandable but condradicting the actual data entirely. I look at this data on a daily basis and i can tell you that Ads have increased by a LOT in the last 10 years. They are also working for the Advertiser better now than they did 10 years ago, as we are able to track and measure much better. What people haven't noticed is the fact that they have become more native, less intrusive and more relevant altogether. I am not talking about your flashy ads that you encounter on your various pirating sites and other places that Adsense blocks to begin with. 2) Adblock: Adblock is a big scam. While the average user sees the value (just for them) they do not understand what it is causing and how it is developing. Let me enlighten you: First of all, adblock has destroyed a significant number of small bloggers, content-writers, and other publishers, as especially those were struggling to stay above water. On the other hand, one of the most prevalent Adblockers out there (i wont name) is now ironically making money by selling its Adblock space to certain Advertisers & Networks to show Ads (ha! ha!). This is literally the behavior of modern-day pirates. You have an economy of trade-ships crossing the seas, and then a pirate ship comes along, blocking your passage making you pay taxes/goods in order to carry on. Sound familiar? Yea... everyone loses, except the average internet user who won't care until all their content either a) disappears b) deteriorates in quality or c) becomes a paid service
- pgsandstrom 10y ago
  I understand if you dislike adblockers, but calling them a scam seems misguided. I think most people are well aware that adblockers prevent income for the site owners.
  - maze-le 10y ago
    Although the example he gives (AdBlock plus) is definitly a scam, as you can buy your way into it, so your ad will not be held at ransom.
    - mirimir 10y ago
      So far, one can still uncheck the "Allow some non-intrusive advertising" box in Filter Preferences.
      - t0pz 10y ago
        aside from the fact that less than 2% of users actually do this, it is still quite arbitrary how they determine intrusive and non-intrusive. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt to improve on this. But the amount of trust given to Adblock Plus is ridiculous. They are a money-grubbing extortionist company that is in no way improving the advertising landscape at the moment. They are just taking full advantage of the fact that people hate ads and block them altogether, and unblock them for a big fee
        RubyPinch 10y ago
        Can you give a couple of examples of how you feel it is arbitrary? And you are not really giving any "benefit of the doubt" by calling them scammers straight out, are ya?
        coldpie 10y ago
        > Can you give a couple of examples of how you feel it is arbitrary? He can't, because it isn't. Their acceptable ads policy is dead clear, and yes, it takes time to verify new entries and maintain that list, so they charge money to get onto it. Personally I use uBlock Origin for technical reasons, but I have no problem with AB+'s acceptable ads program.
        SyneRyder 10y ago
        While I see your point on the Acceptable Ads shakedown, the reason I chose Adblock Plus was because of the Flattr Plus integration, which seems like the first attempt to really fix things (ie sites that let you block ads in return for a Flattr micropayment). I avoided using an ad-blocker (and generally viewed people who used them as selfish cheapskates) until ads became a malware vector. ABP with Flattr Plus seemed the best alternative to block ads & protect my computer but still ensure publishers are compensated. Incidentally, thanks for posting, even though it incurred a karma hit for you - good to hear both sides. HN has too much groupthink sometimes.
- madeofpalk 10y ago
  As someone who also works in an industry tangentially related: * Ad impressions have gone up - its getting easier and easier to launch sites so the absolute number of ads on the internet is definitely going up. That doesn't speak to either side of the 'ads are dying' claims. * CPM rates are more or less going down * As CPM goes down, publishers are looking to recoup their losses, so they use bigger/more invasive ads, and/more ads more . * Again, this leads to 'Ads have increased by a LOT in the last 10 years' * Just because there's a lot of it doesn't necessarily mean it's gotten better. * Native advertising is good and all, but it's out of reach for _a lot_ of people. There's a huge opportunity here to bring quality native advertising to smaller publishers. Maybe there already is, I don't pay too much attention to that specific space. * Even still, it's naive to say that display advertising (banners, mrecs etc) is limited to just porn sites. * Feel free to 'name names' - it's no secret that Adblock Plus has it's Acceptable Ads program https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads * As ads get more invasive and out of control and start to detract from the browsing experience of sites in measurable ways, user's are wanting to take back the control. That's not a scam. Ad Networks and Publishers (at least the larger ones) have clearly brought this problem on themselves by building great products and websites, and then sticking a really shitty ad network on top of it and suck the performance all out of the site. I've measured this directly by disabling ad code on certain sites and seeing a very significant improvement in performance. But instead of trying to understand _why_ users are using adblockers, they're instead just sticking their head in the sand and saying that what they're doing now is the only way forward when clearly it's not. As well, I feel while publishers definitely deserve a lot of this criticism, I'm constantly shocked by how little blame Google and other ad networks get. I get the predicament that smaller publishers are in though. The only way for them monetise their site so it slap Adwords on and call it a day. They see adblockers as a direct assault on them but they can't do anything about it as they have no other way to make money or to improve the quality of the ads. But I think there is a huge opportunity for ad publishers (Google) to accept their responsibility in making the internet better by fixing the reliability and performance of the ads they serve.
  - t0pz 10y ago
    "Acceptable Ads program" is a label that covers up the extortion of Advertisers & Networks. Also, if the USER were actually controlling/deciding what is shown and what isn't then i would have 0 problems with it. However, so far their practice of who/what they allow and what not is arbitrary at best. Im not talking about the automatic acceptable ads program. I'm talking about their closed-door deals that have been going on since 2015. Large sums of money crossed over to Eyeo's accounts from the big Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. to simply allow all their ads. Eyeo posted that they verify that these "agreements" are kept manually https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads-agreements https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads-agreements HA HA HA. Any reasonable person who has ever worked with ad networks knows that manually monitoring ads is impossible. When looking at their Team, they certainly don't possess the resources to do this manually. Basically, they accepted cash for ads. Aside from all that, Adblock the plugin logs everything you do. From what websites you browse, to how long you spent on them, all the way to keystrokes. I heard they are even considering building a sort of Ad network since they have data on their users that NOBODY else can offer. I get the whole blind fanboy-trust for things that you find useful, but i look at people not at products. And Eyeo has been fishy from the start. I have no doubt they will do whatever is necessary to increase monetization on their tool. The guys come from the Advertising Industry after all.
- zeta0134 10y ago
  While I appreciate your viewpoint on adblockers, being in the advertising business yourself, that is not enough of an argument to convince me to disable mine. I find the entire practice of invasive advertising to be a huge disservice to users in general. There is one type of ad my ad blocker regularly fails to block: original, vetted content put in place by the site owner, that does not come from a third party. "Sponsored" posts on blogs, recommendations in youtube videos, even textual links at the bottom of some blog articles. This content comes from the website, is organic and difficult to detect (because it is not served in some mass campaign) and is usually far more relevant than any rotating ad space I've ever seen. I think my distaste for internet advertising mostly is a distaste for intrusive things that dance and distract, trying to steal my focus from the content I arrived on the page to consume. But the reason I run an ad blocker is because I do not trust third-party embedded content on my pages, and there have been way to many cases of malware being distributed via the advertising networks for me to ever really trust them again.
  - kasey_junk 10y ago
    The online ad industry is already gearing up to monetize/systemize/data mine "organic" sponsorships. The third part aspect will just be more hidden. I'm not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing but the ad industry absolutely wants to make ad content relevant but they also want to track it. The tracking part is just easier...
    - zeta0134 10y ago
      I'm totally OK with that actually. Organic sponsorships have the very important quality of being vetted by the site in question, which greatly lowers the risk of malware being delivered in a way that the site owner can't claim responsibility over. I think tracking of these types of sponsorships would also be fairly trivial (server-side code to report back pageloads or even access to youtube's analytics for sponsored videos) and shouldn't need to involve third-party software running in the user's browser. It's third-party javascript (and flash) that I mostly object to. If the site owners have to serve the script in question, they can inspect it for shady behavior, and make informed decisions. I believe the practice of tossing a third-party iframe in your template/css and calling it a day is the most dangerous trend on the web right now.
- Sir_Substance 10y ago
  >First of all, adblock has destroyed a significant number of small bloggers, content-writers, and other publishers, as especially those were struggling to stay above water. People used to do that for free because they cared about the content they were writing, rather than because it was making their daily bread. I distinctly remember the quality of writing during this time being much higher than it is today.
  - ManlyBread 10y ago
    I concur, in my opinion people writing with money in mind usually optimize towards reaching the largest amount of people possible while people who don't focus on the idea itself.
  - freehunter 10y ago
    Yeah, I run three blogs that I started within the last two years and none of them have ads. None of them make money. It costs me $15/mo for hosting and $30/yr for domain name registration for all three combined, so it's not like I'm going bankrupt if I don't make money from my blog. I just like writing, and I get pretty excited when I get 50 views a day on one of them. Run your adblocker, I don't care. It's not blocking anything on my site. I get "paid" (infrequently) in non-monetary ways, like when I'm given a coupon to a restaurant in exchange for writing an article about them. Your ad blocker won't do a thing to stop that, and on the plus side, that coupon won't infect your PC with malware.
    - RodericDay 10y ago
      I was toying with the idea of making it required to have some kind of ad-block enabled for people to read my blog. Just some hand-crafted full page splash with a generic class name that would get caught by the most primitive ad-blockers.
  - noxToken 10y ago
    You pretty much hit the nail on the head. Written content was either managed by major news outlets or by hobbyists. I can still remember reading many blogs in 2009/2010 by hobbyist who just wanted to spread their experience with the hobby or craft. Most had no advertising. Those that did had the small, occasional unobtrusive banner ad. All of the links to follow were to other blogs by those who proved to the writer that their blogs were topical and without cruft. Then the paid blogging boom took off. People realized they could churn out crap most of the time with the occasional heavy hitter[0]. Keep readers coming back to a mediocre blog plastered in ads for a minimal amount of effort and get paid. Note: This isn't a shot at Atwood. I'm agreeing with him. [0]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/how-to-achieve-ultimate-blog-success-in-one-easy-step/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/how-to-achieve-ultimate-blog-s...
- csydas 10y ago
  As you're in the industry, I'd like to ask two "aggressive" questions in the spirit of genuine curiosity. That is, I am looking to learn a different POV from my own end-user anti-ad POV. Regarding point 1: >They are also working for the Advertiser better now than they did 10 years ago, as we are able to track and measure much better. What people haven't noticed is the fact that they have become more native, less intrusive and more relevant altogether. I am not talking about your flashy ads that you encounter on your various pirating sites and other places that Adsense blocks to begin with. What is the benefit to the end-user though? I guess I've seen the opposite as an end-user. Non-pirate websites, common blogs, news papers, etc, push through video ads, pop-over ads, and in the mobile space, positioning ads deliberately close to navigation controls on iOS or with the dismissal moving or being difficult to accurately tap even with a precision tool. While I know there are "good ads", there is also a huge prevalence of bad ads, and the damage of the bad is far more impactful to the end user than the benefit of the good. I can't really comment on ad relevancy since I use ad-blockers on personal content, but similar systems (amazon's recs, youtube's recs) have an abyssmal "hit" rate for me, in that I rarely find the content worth pursuing. Re point 2, I've felt for some time that other payment venues would need to be pursued by content creators as I've heard frequently from streamers or vBloggers I've followed that the ad payout is very low, even with high subscription numbers. Most decline to get into actual details, but several game streamers on Twitch have commented that a one time donation of a few $$$ overwhelmingly makes up for adblocking on their stream. Realistically, are the payouts from ads enough for "small" operations with low viewership? It just seems like supplementary income at best, rather than something that a newcomer or casual creator can rely on for support. In fact, it's a frequent occurrence for many vLoggers and web comics for when the creators need to decide are they ready to commit to the project as a job or continue it in their spare time, and often it'd dependent on how popular they're getting. In other words, I don't think that anyone is denying that adblocking small operations lowers the payout, but are there that many operations that bank soley on ad revenue without other sources of income? It just seems like there's a point, once the viewership increases, that suddenly the project lives or dies by the revenue, instead of the project relying on the revenue from the beginning. Finally, just a general question, why not use more ad-walls if adblockers are a problem? I know for whatever reason people are against them, but to a degree I appreciate ad walls - the website is actively putting forth what the arrangement is, they're not trying to sneak an ad past me (native advertising, fake download links, etc), and I have to make a decision on how badly I want to read the content. Often I'll unblock briefly to read something from an unfamiliar site, and if I like the quality of the site, it goes on the whitelist. If not, AB goes back on and it's a reminder to me each time that I did not trust the website. Everyone's wishes get respected.
- chronid 10y ago
  Take away all the flash ads, the ads that start music (!), the ads that start video (!), and I will not block the site. Stop splitting articles in 1000 pages because you need to cram more ads in and I will unblock the site. Stop pushing useless overlays and pop ups into my face and I will turn the adblocker off. My first visit to a website is always with the adblocker disabled. The second visit depends on what ads I see the first time. Unsurprisingly I turn on the adblocker 95% of the time.
  - zzleeper 10y ago
    On my phone, I switched from Chrome to Firefox because many websites had ads that used the phone vibrator, others redirected to the play store, etc. It's insane and you can't disable it from Chrome...
    - marak830 10y ago
      This. That damn vibrate is so annoying. Especially as someone who wakes up 30 mins before my alarm, and decides to read news on my phone with my wife asleep next to me.
      - madeofpalk 10y ago
        Here, and people say that Apple is holding back 'the open web' by not implementing all these web standards. Maybe people will start realising why...
        raverbashing 10y ago
        It will be like Motorola shipping "the first Android tablet with Flash" then quickly giving up on the idea
    - illumin8 10y ago
      What? Android lets websites vibrate your phone and launch the Play store without permission? That's insane. This is one of the reasons I will never have an android phone.
- connorjburton 10y ago
  Adverts have already created a persona of obtrusive, irrelevant shit. It's not the users fault that they don't want their browser playing music or redirecting them or trying to get them to take a survey. (Seriously look at my local newspaper website http://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/ http://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/ - try using that on mobile, you will never want to go on the site again). If adverts were relevant and unobtrusive I would have no problem using my local news site, but at the moment I avoid it completely or use AdBlock I regularly read uncrate.com and everything on there is pretty much a paid advert. Just my 2 pennies.
- misnome 10y ago
  I installed ad blocking on my phone when half the (high profile) websites I visited just ended in an endless loop of app-store redirects, non-loading full screen images (that blocked interaction anyway) and interactive 'games' that make you sit and wait for however long they felt they could get away with. If it were only smaller, unobtrusive banners/inline separate ads it'd be tolerable, but it isn't. The ad industry has done this to itself. I'd compare it to the Tea Party rather than piracy.
- RubyPinch 10y ago
  You talk of native ads, + bloggers being ruined by ad blockers (with all their near zero operating costs?). Isn't native/sponsorship ads practically the perfect fit for blogs? along with being unblockable?
- djhn 10y ago
  Since you seem to know the industry well, what are the top resources (of any kind) to study the current state of online advertising for an advanced audience? Both from the technical side, and from the advertiser's business side. At a level that you would ideally know and learn if you were working as an executive in the industry.
- nathanaldensr 10y ago
  Sorry, but you're not enlightening anyone. Maybe there was no real business model to begin with. What you're essentially saying is that the demands of bloggers to make money are more important than the security, privacy, and experience of web users. I and many, many others don't see it that way.
- kriro 10y ago
  Well there's also the scenario of someone not running an ad-blocker and unsuspectingly getting served ransom ware which results in you know actual pirate like behavior of arrrrsking for bitcoin ransom to decrypt you data. I urge everyone to turn on ad-blockers and stop this security madness stop. Additionally I urge people to write to their congressman/woman (or whatever means you have) and demand that the add-serving people should be held liable for security issues they cause, hefty fines prefered (similar to the tobacco industry being held liable for cancer they cause)
  - Grishnakh 10y ago
    It's not enough: due to the multiplicative effect (one ad-server can serve billions of ads and affect countless people), and the hefty fines, the ad-servers simply won't have enough funds to pay the fines and will go bankrupt. So, your proposal would also need the following measures: 1) fines cannot be discharged by bankruptcy, ever, 2) anyone working at the ad-serving company is liable, and 3) if their money runs out before all the fines are paid, they go to Guantanamo and get tortured daily until someone pays all the fines. If the advertisers are OK with these terms, then maybe we can think about stopping the use of ad-blockers.
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  The problem is typical ads like Google Adwords are dead. Not in terms of usage maybe but it's coming. Social and native advertising is the bigger game now. Facebook and Instagram advertising brings in a better ROI than Google Adwords from every person I've talked to who buys ads. Everything I read on the internet about advertising it's massively swinging to social. So either my anecdotes suck and I'm reading terrible articles or there is something to it and I believe there is (especially SnapChat is HUGE with it but you have to do content production not just pay for a shitty ad).
- HillRat 10y ago
  Having consulted in the adtech space, let me make some counterpoints: First, ad growth is fueled entirely by mobile at this point; non-mobile ad revenue has flatlined despite continued growth in non-mobile content consumption. Second, while we can "track and measure [consumers] much better," this is based on a combination of walled-garden ad networks (GOOG and FB, specifically) plus a series of ever-more-intrusive tracking technologies that essentially subvert consumers' own applications, and many of which are susceptible to better endpoint privacy and security technologies and practices. (And there's a non-negligible regulatory and statutory risk to a lot of tracking practices inherent to modern DMPs, too.) Third, while the loss of revenue for content producers is a critical issue, ad exchanges are themselves responsible as a first-order cause of ad blockers. Publishers' ever-increasing need for demand and the need for AXs to hit fill rate targets means that all sorts of demand-side crap -- not just spam, but phishing and malware vectors -- makes advertising actively dangerous to consumers. (Remember when Forbes forced users to turn off their adblockers, then immediately started serving malware?) Unless AXs figure out how to deal with the quality issue on the demand side, adblockers are a security, not a convenience, issue. One can be concerned by the potential conflict of interest in adblockers' whitelisting, but at least they generally seem to have fairly objective standards. The fact that those standards are antithetical to current adtech practices is, for them, a feature, not a bug. More generally, the lack of transparency in terms of what data is collected on consumers, and how it's being collected, will continue to be a concern until meaningful and transparent standards are devised, enforced, and communicated. Until that happens, adtech will continue to be a watchword for anti-consumer, anti-privacy practices.
GoToRO 10y ago
I'm not sure that ads are the only ones to blame. I think the problem is with the web nature of the... Web. I just looked at a simple Wordpress plugin that implements a Call Now feature for mobile sites (<a href="tel:555555555">Call Now!</a>) and for some reason they include a bunch of scripts from PayPal and what not. The only solution to this is to have everything on a page come from the same origin.
- biztos 10y ago
  > have everything on a page come from the same origin Would that really be so bad? It's not like you couldn't still hook into an ad network and all that, in fact if I were building something AdSense-like I would love to get API calls from the server instead of worrying about the browser. Things like WordPress could bake that into the server side and nontechnical publishers wouldn't have to even know the difference. Of course, Google would still "need" to get its Orwellian Cookie somehow, but even that could be trivially done without loading the ads themselves from another origin.
  - GoToRO 10y ago
    It's a problem of trust. If the impressions come from the publisher's server then the publisher is tempted to inflate that number.
  - corobo 10y ago
    > > have everything on a page come from the same origin > Would that really be so bad? Yes definitely. Many sites use CDNs and the likes to serve their static files but even if we exclude those with newer technologies (HTTP2 etc) you've still got the big behemoth sites such as YouTube that simply can't serve everything from the same origin. They've got some smart folks over at Google but I'd imagine even they'd have a bit of trouble trying to make that mess work!
  - blakeyrat 10y ago
    Same origin ads can't be independently verified; the ad purchaser would just have to trust the publisher to give them accurate numbers, and publishers have every incentive to exaggerate or just plain lie about their views. That's basically the reason ad exchanges were created in the first place.
adsense_is_crap 10y ago
Hear, hear! It truly amazes me, though I can confirm witnessing them (old and new users to the internet mostly), that there actual people who click on "One Weird Tip to Lose Ten Pounds"... But even they eventually learn like the rest of us to be wary of them from what I have learnt. My conjecture is that ultimately when new internet user growth rate slows enough, ads will no longer be a viable and naturally die out! The alternative, is that nothing changes, and that ads continue to derive value by consusensus of excessively consumerist and stupid people similar to the cult classic film, Idiocracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
- tonmoy 10y ago
  I don't know, I do see a few relevant ad sometimes these days. I found the shoes I am wearing from an ad, and they are neither good nor bad, but the ad did serve its purpose of notifying me that a product of my liking was available.
  - adsense_is_crap 10y ago
    Of course, not to say you cannot be a victim of consumerist determinism. The ads I get are terrible because I do not use social media for the ad networks to build a consumer profile like yours. I am autistic though so may be immune to ads or maybe the ad networks have given up on me and think I am a morbidly obese man? lol
peter303 10y ago
As 90% of google revenues, they should worry about comments like this. Their arrogance is killing their golden egg.
webtechgal 10y ago
You (as well as others here) might find a recent thread running over at the WebMasterWorld forums to be interesting: Why AdSense is Alive and Well https://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adsense/4811179.htm https://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adsense/4811179.htm

t0pz 10y ago

Let me provide you with some insight into your bewonderment: 1) I work in the Ad technology industry and i can tell you with confidence that ads are far from dead. The human logic of "We hate it, so it must not be working" is understandable but condradicting the actual data entirely. I look at this data on a daily basis and i can tell you that Ads have increased by a LOT in the last 10 years. They are also working for the Advertiser better now than they did 10 years ago, as we are able to track and measure much better. What people haven't noticed is the fact that they have become more native, less intrusive and more relevant altogether. I am not talking about your flashy ads that you encounter on your various pirating sites and other places that Adsense blocks to begin with. 2) Adblock: Adblock is a big scam. While the average user sees the value (just for them) they do not understand what it is causing and how it is developing. Let me enlighten you: First of all, adblock has destroyed a significant number of small bloggers, content-writers, and other publishers, as especially those were struggling to stay above water. On the other hand, one of the most prevalent Adblockers out there (i wont name) is now ironically making money by selling its Adblock space to certain Advertisers & Networks to show Ads (ha! ha!). This is literally the behavior of modern-day pirates. You have an economy of trade-ships crossing the seas, and then a pirate ship comes along, blocking your passage making you pay taxes/goods in order to carry on. Sound familiar? Yea... everyone loses, except the average internet user who won't care until all their content either a) disappears b) deteriorates in quality or c) becomes a paid service

pgsandstrom 10y ago
I understand if you dislike adblockers, but calling them a scam seems misguided. I think most people are well aware that adblockers prevent income for the site owners.
- maze-le 10y ago
  Although the example he gives (AdBlock plus) is definitly a scam, as you can buy your way into it, so your ad will not be held at ransom.
  - mirimir 10y ago
    So far, one can still uncheck the "Allow some non-intrusive advertising" box in Filter Preferences.
    - t0pz 10y ago
      aside from the fact that less than 2% of users actually do this, it is still quite arbitrary how they determine intrusive and non-intrusive. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt to improve on this. But the amount of trust given to Adblock Plus is ridiculous. They are a money-grubbing extortionist company that is in no way improving the advertising landscape at the moment. They are just taking full advantage of the fact that people hate ads and block them altogether, and unblock them for a big fee
      - RubyPinch 10y ago
        Can you give a couple of examples of how you feel it is arbitrary? And you are not really giving any "benefit of the doubt" by calling them scammers straight out, are ya?
        coldpie 10y ago
        > Can you give a couple of examples of how you feel it is arbitrary? He can't, because it isn't. Their acceptable ads policy is dead clear, and yes, it takes time to verify new entries and maintain that list, so they charge money to get onto it. Personally I use uBlock Origin for technical reasons, but I have no problem with AB+'s acceptable ads program.
      - SyneRyder 10y ago
        While I see your point on the Acceptable Ads shakedown, the reason I chose Adblock Plus was because of the Flattr Plus integration, which seems like the first attempt to really fix things (ie sites that let you block ads in return for a Flattr micropayment). I avoided using an ad-blocker (and generally viewed people who used them as selfish cheapskates) until ads became a malware vector. ABP with Flattr Plus seemed the best alternative to block ads & protect my computer but still ensure publishers are compensated. Incidentally, thanks for posting, even though it incurred a karma hit for you - good to hear both sides. HN has too much groupthink sometimes.
madeofpalk 10y ago
As someone who also works in an industry tangentially related: * Ad impressions have gone up - its getting easier and easier to launch sites so the absolute number of ads on the internet is definitely going up. That doesn't speak to either side of the 'ads are dying' claims. * CPM rates are more or less going down * As CPM goes down, publishers are looking to recoup their losses, so they use bigger/more invasive ads, and/more ads more . * Again, this leads to 'Ads have increased by a LOT in the last 10 years' * Just because there's a lot of it doesn't necessarily mean it's gotten better. * Native advertising is good and all, but it's out of reach for _a lot_ of people. There's a huge opportunity here to bring quality native advertising to smaller publishers. Maybe there already is, I don't pay too much attention to that specific space. * Even still, it's naive to say that display advertising (banners, mrecs etc) is limited to just porn sites. * Feel free to 'name names' - it's no secret that Adblock Plus has it's Acceptable Ads program https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads * As ads get more invasive and out of control and start to detract from the browsing experience of sites in measurable ways, user's are wanting to take back the control. That's not a scam. Ad Networks and Publishers (at least the larger ones) have clearly brought this problem on themselves by building great products and websites, and then sticking a really shitty ad network on top of it and suck the performance all out of the site. I've measured this directly by disabling ad code on certain sites and seeing a very significant improvement in performance. But instead of trying to understand _why_ users are using adblockers, they're instead just sticking their head in the sand and saying that what they're doing now is the only way forward when clearly it's not. As well, I feel while publishers definitely deserve a lot of this criticism, I'm constantly shocked by how little blame Google and other ad networks get. I get the predicament that smaller publishers are in though. The only way for them monetise their site so it slap Adwords on and call it a day. They see adblockers as a direct assault on them but they can't do anything about it as they have no other way to make money or to improve the quality of the ads. But I think there is a huge opportunity for ad publishers (Google) to accept their responsibility in making the internet better by fixing the reliability and performance of the ads they serve.
- t0pz 10y ago
  "Acceptable Ads program" is a label that covers up the extortion of Advertisers & Networks. Also, if the USER were actually controlling/deciding what is shown and what isn't then i would have 0 problems with it. However, so far their practice of who/what they allow and what not is arbitrary at best. Im not talking about the automatic acceptable ads program. I'm talking about their closed-door deals that have been going on since 2015. Large sums of money crossed over to Eyeo's accounts from the big Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. to simply allow all their ads. Eyeo posted that they verify that these "agreements" are kept manually https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads-agreements https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads-agreements HA HA HA. Any reasonable person who has ever worked with ad networks knows that manually monitoring ads is impossible. When looking at their Team, they certainly don't possess the resources to do this manually. Basically, they accepted cash for ads. Aside from all that, Adblock the plugin logs everything you do. From what websites you browse, to how long you spent on them, all the way to keystrokes. I heard they are even considering building a sort of Ad network since they have data on their users that NOBODY else can offer. I get the whole blind fanboy-trust for things that you find useful, but i look at people not at products. And Eyeo has been fishy from the start. I have no doubt they will do whatever is necessary to increase monetization on their tool. The guys come from the Advertising Industry after all.
zeta0134 10y ago
While I appreciate your viewpoint on adblockers, being in the advertising business yourself, that is not enough of an argument to convince me to disable mine. I find the entire practice of invasive advertising to be a huge disservice to users in general. There is one type of ad my ad blocker regularly fails to block: original, vetted content put in place by the site owner, that does not come from a third party. "Sponsored" posts on blogs, recommendations in youtube videos, even textual links at the bottom of some blog articles. This content comes from the website, is organic and difficult to detect (because it is not served in some mass campaign) and is usually far more relevant than any rotating ad space I've ever seen. I think my distaste for internet advertising mostly is a distaste for intrusive things that dance and distract, trying to steal my focus from the content I arrived on the page to consume. But the reason I run an ad blocker is because I do not trust third-party embedded content on my pages, and there have been way to many cases of malware being distributed via the advertising networks for me to ever really trust them again.
- kasey_junk 10y ago
  The online ad industry is already gearing up to monetize/systemize/data mine "organic" sponsorships. The third part aspect will just be more hidden. I'm not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing but the ad industry absolutely wants to make ad content relevant but they also want to track it. The tracking part is just easier...
  - zeta0134 10y ago
    I'm totally OK with that actually. Organic sponsorships have the very important quality of being vetted by the site in question, which greatly lowers the risk of malware being delivered in a way that the site owner can't claim responsibility over. I think tracking of these types of sponsorships would also be fairly trivial (server-side code to report back pageloads or even access to youtube's analytics for sponsored videos) and shouldn't need to involve third-party software running in the user's browser. It's third-party javascript (and flash) that I mostly object to. If the site owners have to serve the script in question, they can inspect it for shady behavior, and make informed decisions. I believe the practice of tossing a third-party iframe in your template/css and calling it a day is the most dangerous trend on the web right now.
Sir_Substance 10y ago
>First of all, adblock has destroyed a significant number of small bloggers, content-writers, and other publishers, as especially those were struggling to stay above water. People used to do that for free because they cared about the content they were writing, rather than because it was making their daily bread. I distinctly remember the quality of writing during this time being much higher than it is today.
- ManlyBread 10y ago
  I concur, in my opinion people writing with money in mind usually optimize towards reaching the largest amount of people possible while people who don't focus on the idea itself.
- freehunter 10y ago
  Yeah, I run three blogs that I started within the last two years and none of them have ads. None of them make money. It costs me $15/mo for hosting and $30/yr for domain name registration for all three combined, so it's not like I'm going bankrupt if I don't make money from my blog. I just like writing, and I get pretty excited when I get 50 views a day on one of them. Run your adblocker, I don't care. It's not blocking anything on my site. I get "paid" (infrequently) in non-monetary ways, like when I'm given a coupon to a restaurant in exchange for writing an article about them. Your ad blocker won't do a thing to stop that, and on the plus side, that coupon won't infect your PC with malware.
  - RodericDay 10y ago
    I was toying with the idea of making it required to have some kind of ad-block enabled for people to read my blog. Just some hand-crafted full page splash with a generic class name that would get caught by the most primitive ad-blockers.
- noxToken 10y ago
  You pretty much hit the nail on the head. Written content was either managed by major news outlets or by hobbyists. I can still remember reading many blogs in 2009/2010 by hobbyist who just wanted to spread their experience with the hobby or craft. Most had no advertising. Those that did had the small, occasional unobtrusive banner ad. All of the links to follow were to other blogs by those who proved to the writer that their blogs were topical and without cruft. Then the paid blogging boom took off. People realized they could churn out crap most of the time with the occasional heavy hitter[0]. Keep readers coming back to a mediocre blog plastered in ads for a minimal amount of effort and get paid. Note: This isn't a shot at Atwood. I'm agreeing with him. [0]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/how-to-achieve-ultimate-blog-success-in-one-easy-step/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/how-to-achieve-ultimate-blog-s...
csydas 10y ago
As you're in the industry, I'd like to ask two "aggressive" questions in the spirit of genuine curiosity. That is, I am looking to learn a different POV from my own end-user anti-ad POV. Regarding point 1: >They are also working for the Advertiser better now than they did 10 years ago, as we are able to track and measure much better. What people haven't noticed is the fact that they have become more native, less intrusive and more relevant altogether. I am not talking about your flashy ads that you encounter on your various pirating sites and other places that Adsense blocks to begin with. What is the benefit to the end-user though? I guess I've seen the opposite as an end-user. Non-pirate websites, common blogs, news papers, etc, push through video ads, pop-over ads, and in the mobile space, positioning ads deliberately close to navigation controls on iOS or with the dismissal moving or being difficult to accurately tap even with a precision tool. While I know there are "good ads", there is also a huge prevalence of bad ads, and the damage of the bad is far more impactful to the end user than the benefit of the good. I can't really comment on ad relevancy since I use ad-blockers on personal content, but similar systems (amazon's recs, youtube's recs) have an abyssmal "hit" rate for me, in that I rarely find the content worth pursuing. Re point 2, I've felt for some time that other payment venues would need to be pursued by content creators as I've heard frequently from streamers or vBloggers I've followed that the ad payout is very low, even with high subscription numbers. Most decline to get into actual details, but several game streamers on Twitch have commented that a one time donation of a few $$$ overwhelmingly makes up for adblocking on their stream. Realistically, are the payouts from ads enough for "small" operations with low viewership? It just seems like supplementary income at best, rather than something that a newcomer or casual creator can rely on for support. In fact, it's a frequent occurrence for many vLoggers and web comics for when the creators need to decide are they ready to commit to the project as a job or continue it in their spare time, and often it'd dependent on how popular they're getting. In other words, I don't think that anyone is denying that adblocking small operations lowers the payout, but are there that many operations that bank soley on ad revenue without other sources of income? It just seems like there's a point, once the viewership increases, that suddenly the project lives or dies by the revenue, instead of the project relying on the revenue from the beginning. Finally, just a general question, why not use more ad-walls if adblockers are a problem? I know for whatever reason people are against them, but to a degree I appreciate ad walls - the website is actively putting forth what the arrangement is, they're not trying to sneak an ad past me (native advertising, fake download links, etc), and I have to make a decision on how badly I want to read the content. Often I'll unblock briefly to read something from an unfamiliar site, and if I like the quality of the site, it goes on the whitelist. If not, AB goes back on and it's a reminder to me each time that I did not trust the website. Everyone's wishes get respected.
chronid 10y ago
Take away all the flash ads, the ads that start music (!), the ads that start video (!), and I will not block the site. Stop splitting articles in 1000 pages because you need to cram more ads in and I will unblock the site. Stop pushing useless overlays and pop ups into my face and I will turn the adblocker off. My first visit to a website is always with the adblocker disabled. The second visit depends on what ads I see the first time. Unsurprisingly I turn on the adblocker 95% of the time.
- zzleeper 10y ago
  On my phone, I switched from Chrome to Firefox because many websites had ads that used the phone vibrator, others redirected to the play store, etc. It's insane and you can't disable it from Chrome...
  - marak830 10y ago
    This. That damn vibrate is so annoying. Especially as someone who wakes up 30 mins before my alarm, and decides to read news on my phone with my wife asleep next to me.
    - madeofpalk 10y ago
      Here, and people say that Apple is holding back 'the open web' by not implementing all these web standards. Maybe people will start realising why...
      - raverbashing 10y ago
        It will be like Motorola shipping "the first Android tablet with Flash" then quickly giving up on the idea
  - illumin8 10y ago
    What? Android lets websites vibrate your phone and launch the Play store without permission? That's insane. This is one of the reasons I will never have an android phone.
connorjburton 10y ago
Adverts have already created a persona of obtrusive, irrelevant shit. It's not the users fault that they don't want their browser playing music or redirecting them or trying to get them to take a survey. (Seriously look at my local newspaper website http://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/ http://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/ - try using that on mobile, you will never want to go on the site again). If adverts were relevant and unobtrusive I would have no problem using my local news site, but at the moment I avoid it completely or use AdBlock I regularly read uncrate.com and everything on there is pretty much a paid advert. Just my 2 pennies.
misnome 10y ago
I installed ad blocking on my phone when half the (high profile) websites I visited just ended in an endless loop of app-store redirects, non-loading full screen images (that blocked interaction anyway) and interactive 'games' that make you sit and wait for however long they felt they could get away with. If it were only smaller, unobtrusive banners/inline separate ads it'd be tolerable, but it isn't. The ad industry has done this to itself. I'd compare it to the Tea Party rather than piracy.
RubyPinch 10y ago
You talk of native ads, + bloggers being ruined by ad blockers (with all their near zero operating costs?). Isn't native/sponsorship ads practically the perfect fit for blogs? along with being unblockable?
djhn 10y ago
Since you seem to know the industry well, what are the top resources (of any kind) to study the current state of online advertising for an advanced audience? Both from the technical side, and from the advertiser's business side. At a level that you would ideally know and learn if you were working as an executive in the industry.
nathanaldensr 10y ago
Sorry, but you're not enlightening anyone. Maybe there was no real business model to begin with. What you're essentially saying is that the demands of bloggers to make money are more important than the security, privacy, and experience of web users. I and many, many others don't see it that way.
kriro 10y ago
Well there's also the scenario of someone not running an ad-blocker and unsuspectingly getting served ransom ware which results in you know actual pirate like behavior of arrrrsking for bitcoin ransom to decrypt you data. I urge everyone to turn on ad-blockers and stop this security madness stop. Additionally I urge people to write to their congressman/woman (or whatever means you have) and demand that the add-serving people should be held liable for security issues they cause, hefty fines prefered (similar to the tobacco industry being held liable for cancer they cause)
- Grishnakh 10y ago
  It's not enough: due to the multiplicative effect (one ad-server can serve billions of ads and affect countless people), and the hefty fines, the ad-servers simply won't have enough funds to pay the fines and will go bankrupt. So, your proposal would also need the following measures: 1) fines cannot be discharged by bankruptcy, ever, 2) anyone working at the ad-serving company is liable, and 3) if their money runs out before all the fines are paid, they go to Guantanamo and get tortured daily until someone pays all the fines. If the advertisers are OK with these terms, then maybe we can think about stopping the use of ad-blockers.
BinaryIdiot 10y ago
The problem is typical ads like Google Adwords are dead. Not in terms of usage maybe but it's coming. Social and native advertising is the bigger game now. Facebook and Instagram advertising brings in a better ROI than Google Adwords from every person I've talked to who buys ads. Everything I read on the internet about advertising it's massively swinging to social. So either my anecdotes suck and I'm reading terrible articles or there is something to it and I believe there is (especially SnapChat is HUGE with it but you have to do content production not just pay for a shitty ad).
HillRat 10y ago
Having consulted in the adtech space, let me make some counterpoints: First, ad growth is fueled entirely by mobile at this point; non-mobile ad revenue has flatlined despite continued growth in non-mobile content consumption. Second, while we can "track and measure [consumers] much better," this is based on a combination of walled-garden ad networks (GOOG and FB, specifically) plus a series of ever-more-intrusive tracking technologies that essentially subvert consumers' own applications, and many of which are susceptible to better endpoint privacy and security technologies and practices. (And there's a non-negligible regulatory and statutory risk to a lot of tracking practices inherent to modern DMPs, too.) Third, while the loss of revenue for content producers is a critical issue, ad exchanges are themselves responsible as a first-order cause of ad blockers. Publishers' ever-increasing need for demand and the need for AXs to hit fill rate targets means that all sorts of demand-side crap -- not just spam, but phishing and malware vectors -- makes advertising actively dangerous to consumers. (Remember when Forbes forced users to turn off their adblockers, then immediately started serving malware?) Unless AXs figure out how to deal with the quality issue on the demand side, adblockers are a security, not a convenience, issue. One can be concerned by the potential conflict of interest in adblockers' whitelisting, but at least they generally seem to have fairly objective standards. The fact that those standards are antithetical to current adtech practices is, for them, a feature, not a bug. More generally, the lack of transparency in terms of what data is collected on consumers, and how it's being collected, will continue to be a concern until meaningful and transparent standards are devised, enforced, and communicated. Until that happens, adtech will continue to be a watchword for anti-consumer, anti-privacy practices.

GoToRO 10y ago

I'm not sure that ads are the only ones to blame. I think the problem is with the web nature of the... Web. I just looked at a simple Wordpress plugin that implements a Call Now feature for mobile sites (<a href="tel:555555555">Call Now!</a>) and for some reason they include a bunch of scripts from PayPal and what not. The only solution to this is to have everything on a page come from the same origin.

biztos 10y ago
> have everything on a page come from the same origin Would that really be so bad? It's not like you couldn't still hook into an ad network and all that, in fact if I were building something AdSense-like I would love to get API calls from the server instead of worrying about the browser. Things like WordPress could bake that into the server side and nontechnical publishers wouldn't have to even know the difference. Of course, Google would still "need" to get its Orwellian Cookie somehow, but even that could be trivially done without loading the ads themselves from another origin.
- GoToRO 10y ago
  It's a problem of trust. If the impressions come from the publisher's server then the publisher is tempted to inflate that number.
- corobo 10y ago
  > > have everything on a page come from the same origin > Would that really be so bad? Yes definitely. Many sites use CDNs and the likes to serve their static files but even if we exclude those with newer technologies (HTTP2 etc) you've still got the big behemoth sites such as YouTube that simply can't serve everything from the same origin. They've got some smart folks over at Google but I'd imagine even they'd have a bit of trouble trying to make that mess work!
- blakeyrat 10y ago
  Same origin ads can't be independently verified; the ad purchaser would just have to trust the publisher to give them accurate numbers, and publishers have every incentive to exaggerate or just plain lie about their views. That's basically the reason ad exchanges were created in the first place.

adsense_is_crap 10y ago

Hear, hear! It truly amazes me, though I can confirm witnessing them (old and new users to the internet mostly), that there actual people who click on "One Weird Tip to Lose Ten Pounds"... But even they eventually learn like the rest of us to be wary of them from what I have learnt. My conjecture is that ultimately when new internet user growth rate slows enough, ads will no longer be a viable and naturally die out! The alternative, is that nothing changes, and that ads continue to derive value by consusensus of excessively consumerist and stupid people similar to the cult classic film, Idiocracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy

tonmoy 10y ago
I don't know, I do see a few relevant ad sometimes these days. I found the shoes I am wearing from an ad, and they are neither good nor bad, but the ad did serve its purpose of notifying me that a product of my liking was available.
- adsense_is_crap 10y ago
  Of course, not to say you cannot be a victim of consumerist determinism. The ads I get are terrible because I do not use social media for the ad networks to build a consumer profile like yours. I am autistic though so may be immune to ads or maybe the ad networks have given up on me and think I am a morbidly obese man? lol

peter303 10y ago

As 90% of google revenues, they should worry about comments like this. Their arrogance is killing their golden egg.

webtechgal 10y ago

You (as well as others here) might find a recent thread running over at the WebMasterWorld forums to be interesting: Why AdSense is Alive and Well https://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adsense/4811179.htm https://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adsense/4811179.htm