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It may be laudable to try and lead an "industry-wide" effort to clean up ads but it stinks of hypocrisy when Google repeatedly allows all shades of garbage to p

It may be laudable to try and lead an "industry-wide" effort to clean up ads but it stinks of hypocrisy when Google repeatedly allows all shades of garbage to permeate its' own Adsense network. We talked about this only a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14094083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14094083

nojvek 9y ago
I hope this comes as an extension that can be turned off. E.g having flash pre-installed in chrome but having ability to turn it off. I expect reasonable defaults but some knobs to control the ads I want. If chrome team who thinks about the world and ads team who thinks about $$$ are total separate entities who don't influence each other for special interests then I applaud the effort. I hope this is done in the open in chromium source code. Basically the current way extensions work is by injecting massive amounts of CSS and js in the page. This makes a lot of optimizations in chrome useless for fast page renders. Doing an optimized ad block engine would make chrome feel faster
- freehunter 9y ago
  Chrome doesn't even allow you to control if a single click in the URL bar highlights the entire URL or just drops a cursor even though the behavior in the same application is inconsistent between different platforms. I have my doubts they'd allow you to fiddle with knobs about advertising preferences.
amygdyl 9y ago
I work tangentially to adtech, started with publishing when a xacto knife and bromides might be a handy skill still... I still cannot wrap my head around publishers apparently disinterested in manually clearing ad copy for press approval. Can anyone delineate a non obvious history to this complete laissez faire?
- greggman 9y ago
  the ny times maybe has the staff to do that (or used to). Joe's blog does not. back in print media each ad had to be placed by hand. it also had the aquired though manual labor. those things seriously limited the number of people publishing since the majority of your time was spent not making content for your zine but instead chasing down ads. the internet changed that. here's a spot on my page . fill it with ads please. make those ads geographically specific and or user specific . write me a check for $$$. it seems pretty obvious that history. if I decided the put ads on my sites I certainly would not have the time to find relevant ads for the world or even just my country. that's not something I want to deal with. that said, if there was a good ad company that currated their ads well, did not share info with 3rd parties and track users I'd certainly consider signing up to that over others
  - amygdyl 9y ago
    Hi greggman, I started ad sales using numerical techniques on the turn of the nineties. Our first hurdle was to bat off vexatious law suits brought by agencies, for copyright materials theft every time a major sent us the separations. All digital imposition - the layout of pages in final form to the n-up web offset affines that creates the cut pages in sequence from a running roller fold, indeed could require no manual intervention. (copy dot scanners captured and re digitized the pre stochastic screens of adverts) But I think you mean addressing the spots, or paginating what goes where. This is still actually manual for a ad network, if you mean deciding advert a never runs nearer than n pages to advert b, or ad y never runs in section k. Just the scale is inverted. And with it, pricing power, which is almost entirely buy side. I could easily flip a galley proof of the magazine pages laid out as they will run, in under a minute for all but the bulk ad titles like PCWorld.. That was the scrutiny I meant. Are there no tools to assist pre screening ad network proposed flows? I imagine, also, offensive adverts rarely have budget for impressions. I bet cutting the bottom 20% would solve most problems...
    - lmm 9y ago
      > I imagine, also, offensive adverts rarely have budget for impressions. I bet cutting the bottom 20% would solve most problems... I think that's backwards? The offensive ads are generally paying more, no?
WhitneyLand 9y ago
Ad blocking strikes so deeply at the heart of Google's success, it's simply not credible to believe there is no more to the strategy than the simple defense mentioned in the article. To speculate on just one possible strategy: - First order of business, crush Ad Block plus' pay to play business. Possibly just by entering the market with resources, IP, and channel that would overwhelm them. - Continue on this path until Google is the leader and standard setter, beating everyone on price - Start to innovate around adding higher value pay to play features, prioritization, options, etc, until it becomes a business with a decent margin. - Decide whether to wage all out ware with blockers that don't participate in a revenue share program. The war would be multi-pronged with technical, political, and PR fronts. A large team would work 24/7 to instantly defeat blocker updates in an effort to wear them down. Lobbyists would press hard to legislate and control ad-blocking to "protect" content creators. PR would enlist high profile loved content creators, show how much we love their work, and that now, they are forced to live in a cardboard box due to your ad-blocking. If 60 Billion in revenue is threatened, how does it play out any nicer than this?
- Arizhel 9y ago
  While this is a possibility, the wrench in the works is the Firefox browser. How is Google going to get them to play along and prevent 3rd-party blockers like UBlock Origin from working? I don't see it happening. They can certainly put ABP out of business, which honestly is fine with me. But UO isn't a business AFAIK, it's a Free open-source project. That's like trying to put vim out of business; you just can't, because there's no business there. Google can certainly change Chrome to prevent UO from working, but they can't do the same for Firefox, nor can they really for Chromium (though their actions can make it difficult, but that could also mean that many other non-blocker extensions won't work if they're too restrictive). Finally, these aren't the only browsers out there. Apple's Safari might also refuse to go along, and even go directly against Google somehow (including their own Google-ad-blocker, or helping UO work on their browser). Apple doesn't live on ads like Google does. Finally, as for legislation, that doesn't make much sense either. First, I have a hard time seeing any Federal US laws actually succeed that force users to view ads, and even if such a law passed, there's no way to enforce it. How would they? Are websites going to sue users whose browsers don't actually download all their ads? That'll be great for PR. Or are they going to block users who don't download the ads (they're already doing this on some sites). If it gets that bad, it wouldn't be hard for ad-blockers to switch to simply downloading all the ads, and then sending them to /dev/null instead of displaying them.

nojvek 9y ago

I hope this comes as an extension that can be turned off. E.g having flash pre-installed in chrome but having ability to turn it off. I expect reasonable defaults but some knobs to control the ads I want. If chrome team who thinks about the world and ads team who thinks about $$$ are total separate entities who don't influence each other for special interests then I applaud the effort. I hope this is done in the open in chromium source code. Basically the current way extensions work is by injecting massive amounts of CSS and js in the page. This makes a lot of optimizations in chrome useless for fast page renders. Doing an optimized ad block engine would make chrome feel faster

freehunter 9y ago
Chrome doesn't even allow you to control if a single click in the URL bar highlights the entire URL or just drops a cursor even though the behavior in the same application is inconsistent between different platforms. I have my doubts they'd allow you to fiddle with knobs about advertising preferences.

amygdyl 9y ago

I work tangentially to adtech, started with publishing when a xacto knife and bromides might be a handy skill still... I still cannot wrap my head around publishers apparently disinterested in manually clearing ad copy for press approval. Can anyone delineate a non obvious history to this complete laissez faire?

greggman 9y ago
the ny times maybe has the staff to do that (or used to). Joe's blog does not. back in print media each ad had to be placed by hand. it also had the aquired though manual labor. those things seriously limited the number of people publishing since the majority of your time was spent not making content for your zine but instead chasing down ads. the internet changed that. here's a spot on my page . fill it with ads please. make those ads geographically specific and or user specific . write me a check for $$$. it seems pretty obvious that history. if I decided the put ads on my sites I certainly would not have the time to find relevant ads for the world or even just my country. that's not something I want to deal with. that said, if there was a good ad company that currated their ads well, did not share info with 3rd parties and track users I'd certainly consider signing up to that over others
- amygdyl 9y ago
  Hi greggman, I started ad sales using numerical techniques on the turn of the nineties. Our first hurdle was to bat off vexatious law suits brought by agencies, for copyright materials theft every time a major sent us the separations. All digital imposition - the layout of pages in final form to the n-up web offset affines that creates the cut pages in sequence from a running roller fold, indeed could require no manual intervention. (copy dot scanners captured and re digitized the pre stochastic screens of adverts) But I think you mean addressing the spots, or paginating what goes where. This is still actually manual for a ad network, if you mean deciding advert a never runs nearer than n pages to advert b, or ad y never runs in section k. Just the scale is inverted. And with it, pricing power, which is almost entirely buy side. I could easily flip a galley proof of the magazine pages laid out as they will run, in under a minute for all but the bulk ad titles like PCWorld.. That was the scrutiny I meant. Are there no tools to assist pre screening ad network proposed flows? I imagine, also, offensive adverts rarely have budget for impressions. I bet cutting the bottom 20% would solve most problems...
  - lmm 9y ago
    > I imagine, also, offensive adverts rarely have budget for impressions. I bet cutting the bottom 20% would solve most problems... I think that's backwards? The offensive ads are generally paying more, no?

WhitneyLand 9y ago

Ad blocking strikes so deeply at the heart of Google's success, it's simply not credible to believe there is no more to the strategy than the simple defense mentioned in the article. To speculate on just one possible strategy: - First order of business, crush Ad Block plus' pay to play business. Possibly just by entering the market with resources, IP, and channel that would overwhelm them. - Continue on this path until Google is the leader and standard setter, beating everyone on price - Start to innovate around adding higher value pay to play features, prioritization, options, etc, until it becomes a business with a decent margin. - Decide whether to wage all out ware with blockers that don't participate in a revenue share program. The war would be multi-pronged with technical, political, and PR fronts. A large team would work 24/7 to instantly defeat blocker updates in an effort to wear them down. Lobbyists would press hard to legislate and control ad-blocking to "protect" content creators. PR would enlist high profile loved content creators, show how much we love their work, and that now, they are forced to live in a cardboard box due to your ad-blocking. If 60 Billion in revenue is threatened, how does it play out any nicer than this?

Arizhel 9y ago
While this is a possibility, the wrench in the works is the Firefox browser. How is Google going to get them to play along and prevent 3rd-party blockers like UBlock Origin from working? I don't see it happening. They can certainly put ABP out of business, which honestly is fine with me. But UO isn't a business AFAIK, it's a Free open-source project. That's like trying to put vim out of business; you just can't, because there's no business there. Google can certainly change Chrome to prevent UO from working, but they can't do the same for Firefox, nor can they really for Chromium (though their actions can make it difficult, but that could also mean that many other non-blocker extensions won't work if they're too restrictive). Finally, these aren't the only browsers out there. Apple's Safari might also refuse to go along, and even go directly against Google somehow (including their own Google-ad-blocker, or helping UO work on their browser). Apple doesn't live on ads like Google does. Finally, as for legislation, that doesn't make much sense either. First, I have a hard time seeing any Federal US laws actually succeed that force users to view ads, and even if such a law passed, there's no way to enforce it. How would they? Are websites going to sue users whose browsers don't actually download all their ads? That'll be great for PR. Or are they going to block users who don't download the ads (they're already doing this on some sites). If it gets that bad, it wouldn't be hard for ad-blockers to switch to simply downloading all the ads, and then sending them to /dev/null instead of displaying them.