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Google Will Help Publishers Prepare for a Chrome Ad Blocker Coming Next Year

166 points by relham 9y ago

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
As was previously discussed when this was first rumored, this is just begging for an anticompetition lawsuit of gigantic proportions as Google is using their dominant control of web browsers to block their competitors' ads from working. It is one of the most clear examples that the only way to remediate the differences between Google and a law abiding corporation is to break it up. EDIT: I think the strong feedback from everyone I've seen when this was first rumored was that this idea was concerning and likely illegal, and yet Google is proceeding anyways. I feel that should dismiss any notion that Google or the industry as a whole has the ability to self-regulate. To detail, I think Android and Chrome need to both be legally/forcibly detached from Google. Android could easily operate on funding from the OEMs that use the platform and the Play Store, which would go with it, and Chrome could use Mozilla's model, including letting companies like Google and Yahoo bid for the default search. (And obviously, would be prohibited from picking Google Search if it isn't the highest bidder.) Dominant platforms being tied to dominant services is just too large a conflict of interest.
- MichaelGG 9y ago
  Android being beholden to OEMs seems like a big loss for end-users though. At least Google is forcing a bit of decency, bit by bit.
- matt4077 9y ago
  It will be illegal only if and when they actually treat competitors' ads differently than their own. A good case study is AMP, which allows embedding ads and was, from the beginning, made to be integrated with competing ad networks. The potential for anti-competitive behaviour is so obvious, that Google probably takes a lot of care to crossdot all its legal i's and t's.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    But bear in mind: They're largely responsible for setting the standards by which these ads will be treated. Therefore, the standards will obviously be set in a manner that all their own ads will comply, and other businesses must change their business to suit Google's expectations or be blocked. Bear in mind, ads are like over 95% of Google's business, they would not be doing this if they thought it would impact their own ads at all. And since, by design, the standards will never go after Google ads, as a site owner, your best bet to not have your ads blocked will be to 'just' go with Google as your ad provider.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
pythonaut_16 9y ago
This is somewhat concerning to me. While I'm all for blocking obtrusive and obnoxious ads, I'm not sure I want Google using it's position as a web giant and browser vendor to push these standards by default via Chrome. An open web means I can host whatever (legal content) I want on my website and people are free to view it or not view it if they find it undesirable. Current ad blockers play well into this scheme because they protect the end user's right to view content in the way that they want. This move by Google on the other hand is telling websites that they have to play by Google's content rules or have their website broken by default. I'm not sure that's the web that I want to live in.
- bitmapbrother 9y ago
  These are ad standards agreed upon a consortium of companies.
  - ceejayoz 9y ago
    Were consumer advocacy groups included in that consortium?
    - a2decrow 9y ago
      Of course not. But even if they were, it'd be only for show. They wouldn't have a say in anything.
  - redm 9y ago
    Of which Google is a founding member and the only traditional ad publisher (AdSense/AdX/etc) who serves ads to 3rd party properties. [1] I'm sure they have plenty of control to shape the standards to their benefit. In other words, the "consortium" is biased by Google themselves. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/coaltion-for-better-ads-launched-by-iab-google-unilever-2016-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/coaltion-for-better-ads-launc...
    - bitmapbrother 9y ago
revelation 9y ago
So we've come full circle. The biggest ad peddler on the world and a predominant distributor of malicious ads (because ain't nobody got time to check that stuff) is now integrating an ad blocker and offering tools for publishers to check their sites for the bad ads they themselves offer.
- victorhooi 9y ago
  Do you have any sources or evidence for your statement "predominant distributor of malicious ads"? If true, that would be pretty radical - but I'm unsure if you're just being hyperbolic or just re-hashing something you read somewhere. (Disclaimer: Work for Google, but not in ads).
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    It's hard to prove numbers without Google sharing them. But suffice to say... You may recall this blog about fake download button ads: https://security.googleblog.com/2016/02/no-more-deceptive-download-buttons.html https://security.googleblog.com/2016/02/no-more-deceptive-do... ...That's the Chrome team. But fake download buttons are alive and well at Google AdWords. (Most of them you'll find on sites like paint.net are from Google.) As far as I understand, they aren't even against Google AdWords' policy. Google allows malicious ads which Google says are bad. And as a computer technician, most malware I remove, I check web history to figure out where they got it. Almost always it's a malicious Google ad at the top of search, which Google has progressively made look more and more like real search results over the years. Great for Google's bottom line, but terrible for everyone else.
    - victorhooi 9y ago
      I just went to your website "paint.net" - it redirects to "Warren Paint & Color Co." - which appears to be a paint company in the US. Did you perhaps mean getpaint.net? That's the download site for Paint.NET, a Windows-only paint program. I did see an ad there at the top for "FileSendSuite" which does have a download button: http://i.imgur.com/ed3CKGb.png http://i.imgur.com/ed3CKGb.png To me, it was reasonably clear the link was for FileSendSuite - but perhaps some other people could get mistaken? If you hit the "x" in the top-right of any ad, you can report an ad (e.g. for being misleading/spammy), or simply say you never want to see that ad again (it gets filtered).
redm 9y ago
"auto-playing video ads with sound and “prestitial” ads that countdown before displaying content." I guess Google will have to block ads on Youtube as well, not only does it have auto-playing ads with sound, but they block the display of content (prestitial/pre-roll). Oh wait, Google standards never affect Google.
- mining 9y ago
  I think there's a clear difference between an ad that plays sound as part of watching a video with sound, and as part of browsing a website that doesn't have sound / where the ad plays sound over the actual content.
  - robryan 9y ago
    So all you would need to do to make your autoplay video ad acceptable is place some of your content after it?
    - ajross 9y ago
      Maybe, yeah. The point isn't to enforce some magical unicorn principle of advertising purity, it's to limit advertisements to forms that users are known not to hate. Users have been OK with commercials in their TV shows for like six decades now. So my non-expert eyes would expect an ad embedded with video content to be broadly acceptable.
    - derefr 9y ago
      News websites already do things this way (have a text version of a news report, with an auto-playing video version of the same report embedded somewhere on the page, that has a pre-roll ad.) I'm not sure how Google will view that—I think it might come down to whether the user was expecting the video version of the news report.
    - swsieber 9y ago
      No - people would have to be expecting your content to autoplay, and then it would be okay.
Akujin 9y ago
I used to work for a small company that did print (and web) medical journals targeted at dentists and dental professionals. We handled all the ads ourselves and hosted the images on our server as any other image. This meant we were basically impervious to adblock. Except for the occasional iframe embedded ad that was given to us by the client we basically never had an issue with adblock. Same thing on a nightlife website I worked on. Ads hosted by others were blocked but our own hosted ads were never a problem. Granted our own ads also had zero chance of being hijacked by a bad actor since they were simple <a><img></a> ads. If only everyone did this we wouldn't be having this arms race.
- vorpalhex 9y ago
  Pretty much. If Ads were without JS and videos (or, at least autoplaying videos) I really wouldn't care. Hell, if they were relevant ads to the website, I'd probably even click on them and buy things occasionally. But when a modal pops up or I get redirected, or your ad floats over your content and tries to follow my scrolling not only are you not going to sell to me, but I'm going to leave your website.
  - gwbas1c 9y ago
    Or ads that significantly slow loading, make the page jump around...
    - shakestheclown 9y ago
      90% of the reason I block ads on mobile is performance. Even on a newer phone, any news website takes forever to load all the junk and ads.
  - hobarrera 9y ago
    > Hell, if they were relevant ads to the website I had to watch youtube without an adblocker recently for the first time pretty much ever. The ads were not only extremely irrelevant. They were extremely sexist, strongly offensive and discriminating. Without exception (note I'm not in the US, so these probably aren't the same you're seeing!). I was incredibly surprised that most of the population watching youtube was exposed to this daily but not completely outrage.
45h34jh53k4j 9y ago
Companies that sell both the poison and antidote are not remembered fondly in history.
s73ver 9y ago
If it means good ads, without tracking, without popovers/unders, basically without all the bullshit that most ads do now, it'd be a good thing. Content creators need to eat too, you know.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  This is Google we're talking about. "Without tracking" is definitely not part of the equation here. Tracking is their entire business model.
janitor61 9y ago
I think the next move will be disabling other ad-blockers from the chrome plugin store with an excuse that it "will interfere with native chrome functionality"
- hxegon 9y ago
  My thinking exactly. Hopefully this will provide a good enough experience to 90% of current adblock users to go with this instead of blocking everything, so that Google never gets forced into a position where it has to choose between removing ad-blockers or taking big ad revenue hits, and heat from advertisers. Like how netflix, hulu, hbo now were the best ways to reduce piracy because they treated the problem, not the symptoms.
- colemannugent 9y ago
  This is my concern as well. This could well be the result of advertisers pressuring Google to do something about ad-blockers. We all know how much they're willing to do to please advertisers after the YouTube demonetization apocalypse.
- superflyguy 9y ago
  There are no plugins available for mobile chrome anyway, which is where I do 90% of my surfing. If anything this half-assed ad blocking will drive people to Firefox where you can block ads (and trackers and auto delete cookies etc) properly.
  - Sommersonn 9y ago
    You can use system-level addons that will filter a web traffic, providing that you can trust the publisher.
- sinaa 9y ago
  I doubt they'd go for it. Otherwise, this would give a huge boost to Firefox. Chrome's own adblocker would only reduce the incentive to install another adblocker. Especially if it's natively implemented as part of the browser.
deleted 9y ago
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ww520 9y ago
Google can use the ad-blocking thing to stamp out ad-network competition.
cosinetau 9y ago
This sounds like a conflict of interest. http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/020515/business-google.asp http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/020515/busine... On the other hand, I feel like we've been here with Google before, and they've generally done The Right Thing[tm]. How do we generally feel about people using this? Has Google done enough right that we might feel comfortable with them doing this? The general sense of other comments looks fairly bleak.
- ReverseCold 9y ago
  Why would it be a conflict of interest? They're probably going to block all ads that aren't their own/"approved" or something similar to that.
  - matt4077 9y ago
    It's impossible for them to treat competitors' ads different from their own. That chrome update wouldn't have time to download before they got dragged to court by every ad network, the European Union, and the Department of Justice.
    - awalton 9y ago
      maybe the European Union. The DOJ has clearly given up the ghost of even attempting to regulate US companies, and the current political news is just more evidence in that direction. Google can draw out these lawsuits for decades while continuing their practices with impunity. They already have two incredibly well studied playbooks to draw from: Microsoft v DOJ and SCO v IBM.
- matt4077 9y ago
  Seeing as how the public debate has deteriorated, and the results that it has led to, I'm willing to put up with almost anything that can bring civil societies back to, well, "civility". One of the most important pillar of that is varied, but high-quality media. These, however, have been squeezed relentlessly over the last years, with no end in sight. People think reporting isn't worth anything (an almost literal quote in many of these threads), just because they can read the same stories at different outlet–ignoring that somebody still had to be there. Or they're legitimising their use of aggressive ad blockers with the tired the-media-is-so-bad cliché (...then why are you reading it?). There are two paths that I believe print media can get back on track: First, such an ad blocker that allows reasonable ads, i.e. not moving, obscuring, or for low-quality products. Second: a netflix-style subscription that gives access to many publications. Because as it is now, I can't justify paying for any single subscription (except for the rather cheap New Yorker). But I'm willing to pay something like $30-$50 dollars/month for the written words I consume. There's just nobody to take the money. I don't actually have much of a problem with Google. They have always been really excellent in such regards, especially considering how much potential for scandals they have. But I'd prefer more diversity, if at all possible. I guess this will hurt other adblockers quite badly, and I'm wondering if they didn't create this problem by not creating a product that fairly accounts for publishers' interests.
ausjke 9y ago
what about porn sites blocking for kids? can chrome have a parent control mode somehow that kids can use chrome "safely" on android and on the PC these days?
- aanm1988 9y ago
  They have that, sorta https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/3463947?hl=en https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/3463947?hl=en
- JeremyBanks 9y ago
  That seems unrelated.
- Eridrus 9y ago
  This exists for Android: https://families.google.com/familylink/ https://families.google.com/familylink/
nkozyra 9y ago
This is such a giant genie to try to put back into the bottle with Adblock usage growing 30% last year and accounting for 10-12% of total worldwide users. How do you convince those people to worsen their experience - but only slightly - toward the noble goal of letting content producers monetize? Or do advertisers just consider that a lost cause at this point? The real question is whether Chrome will get more draconian and start preventing competing ad blockers in the browser. [1] https://pagefair.com/blog/2017/adblockreport/ https://pagefair.com/blog/2017/adblockreport/
- Houshalter 9y ago
  They don't need to be more draconian. Just like they do now, they make their adblocker the first option in search results and the webstore.
jasonmp85 9y ago
I feel like "Help" and "Ad Blocker" need scare quotes around them.
pfooti 9y ago
Nice ad you've got there. Be a shame if someone came along and blocked it.
combatentropy 9y ago
From the article: > While blocking pesky ads is appealing to consumers, > it also threatens a vital source of revenue for publishers Are "pesky ads" really "a vital source of revenue"? Is there any data? Everyone I know hates them, especially the autoplaying videos, animations, and pop-ups (the "pesky" ones). Are you saying that there are people who see these things and say, "Oh, that's interesting," and clicks the ad? Furthermore are you saying that there is a "vital" number of these people in the world? I believe that if anything, depeskifying ads will bring advertisers more success. I have always believed that intrusive ads were a lose-lose proposition. Not only do readers lose by being bothered, but advertisers lose because such ads make people just look away. Furthermore it makes people hate your website, tarnishing the brand. I, for one, am starting to remember at least some websites that are especially rude with ads, and I won't click the link if there is a choice (like on Google News). I remember many years ago when Google first insisted on text-only ads, relegated to the right side of the page so they were clearly advertising. Everyone thought Google was crazy. Billions of dollars later, people think Google is on to something. It was the most tempted I've ever been to click an ad (I still don't think I did, though). Because they weren't flashing, I didn't immediately ignore that whole area, an automatic response that most of us have developed. And so some of them I actually read. And because they were narrowly targeted ads, based on the words in my search, they were more interesting. In other words, if publishers switched to text-only ads, I bet their click-rate would go up. Maybe a tasteful still picture would be okay. I'm thinking of what is in newspapers and magazines. I actually used to look at some of their ads (back in the ol' paper days). I even enjoyed some of the more artistic or clever ones. The only times they annoyed me is if there were too many of them or it was those loose-leaf subscriptions cards in the middle of a magazine (pre-internet pesky ads).
- matt4077 9y ago
  It's one of the easiest businesses to optimise for revenue/profit, so I'm pretty sure that the the current situation is at least a significant local minimum. At this point, many publishers have run trials with more/less, intrusive/low-key ads and any other variable you can think of. There are maybe some publishers who found success with running ads only very selectively, but those are usually very small (The Deck, i. e. daring fireball comes to mind). Large, high-quality publications such as the new York Times are somewhere in the middle: ads that include animation, but don't obscure content, and not spam or fraud. For the mass of publishers without a famous brand name, the low-quality ads they're running are probably the best they can do. And ads do bring in significant revenue, although it's too little to offset the losses in print.
jasonkostempski 9y ago
If ad revenue wasn't based on impressions and clicks no one would want to shove them in their users faces. Ad networks like Google's are the cause of the problem.
- quadrangle 9y ago
  Google's tracking can be a terrible thing and we can still acknowledge that advertisers unrelated to Google do awful shit and always have. Advertising can be unethical even when payments aren't tied to clicks. Click-driven advertising makes it worse but isn't the cause of all problems.
  - jasonkostempski 9y ago
    Regardless of how they are presented, all ad networks do awful shit. It's an entire system built on distrust and the users machine is responsible for fixing it. It's an absolutely insane business model. Show me an ad network that doesn't work that way and I might consider it acceptable, until then all of them need to be universally disabled.
    - quadrangle 9y ago
      I agree with you 100% there.
deleted 9y ago
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redm 9y ago
Google's official announcement on their blog: https://blog.chromium.org/2017/06/improving-advertising-on-web.html https://blog.chromium.org/2017/06/improving-advertising-on-w... IMO, if Google's goal is to improve the web experience, it would be much better if Chrome was spun off into a non-profit of its own, and not controlled directly by Google. A non-profit not directly controlled by Google would eliminate the major conflict of interest that is: 1) Google is the biggest ad publisher/network in the world. 2) Google controls the majority of web browsers today. 3) Google will control how ad blocking is implemented, managed, corrected, adjusted, etc., as they see fit.
- polishTar 9y ago
  Google already made Chromium completely open source. Anybody's free to fork it and move it in any direction they want. As for Chrome, it's likely worth many 10's of billions of dollars. It would be absolutely indefensible to throw it away, especially when there are so many yet unexplored avenues to improve the web without requiring such massive and unneeded sacrifices.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    Spinning something out is not the same as throwing it away. Chrome is already 'non profit' because it does not cost money to the end user.
    - cm2187 9y ago
      So ad companies are all non profit organisations then?
      - jacquesm 9y ago
        I really don't understand your comment. Ad companies are all for profit. Browsers tend to not be a profit center for the companies that make them (Microsoft, Mozilla (a non profit), Google and Apple being the main ones).
ransom1538 9y ago
This will hurt professional journalism. Print is gone. Journalists survive on ads - and the only ones that work are quite obtrusive. Removing these annoying ads and moving to standardized google ads will just tighten the journalist's budgets. This will help the fake news blog outlets spread like the cancer they are. Sad.
- a2decrow 9y ago
  There are other ways to monetize without (intrusive) ads. Produce quality content and people will be happy to support it. If your entire business model only revolves around ad-driven revenue and it doesn't work any other way, then perhaps that business model simply offers nothing of value.
bobajeff 9y ago
It's kind of crazy to hear that the first mainstream browser to have a built-in adblocker turned on by default is going to be Google Chrome.
- ewzimm 9y ago
  When you put it that way, it sounds surprising, but of course Google won't block their own ads, so you could say "the first mainstream browser to block other companies' ads by default" and it would sound less strange. Not that I'm against it! This is a big move from the biggest browser that will push its competitors to do the same and change the web, likely for the better. Brave is pushing a similar agenda from behind the front lines.
- eli 9y ago
  Only a dominant player could pull it off. Detecting ad blockers is kinda hard, but sniffing user agents is easy. If Edge blocked ads by default some sites might choose to block Edge users entirely.
  - nradov 9y ago
    And then Edge would just use a different user_agent.
    - eli 9y ago
      What, like steal one from another browser. That seems unlikely
      - ry_ry 9y ago
        http://i.imgur.com/19VEBL7.png http://i.imgur.com/19VEBL7.png Pretty much. Not to mention Safari and IE user agents have included strings like "Mozilla/5.0" and "like Gecko" for years now to 'demonstrate compatibility' with those browsers. User, estate and recruitment agents are all equally untrustworthy!
        9y ago
cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
I don't care about "popup ads". I already use adblockers so I never see them. What I want to really see is blocking those popup "sign up for newsletter" modal.
- visarga 9y ago
  What's even worse is that special Chrome feature where the site asks you to allow it to send you notifications. It's a tiny window with a single button "accept" and a minuscule "x" for closing it that is light gray on white (hard to even see). What is missing is an option to reject all site subscription/notifications and never have to deal with that kind of intrusive offers again. They're not even popups or in-page popups, they are part of the browser UI. So it's an officially allowed way to send "popups" and pester people for subscribing. Many newspapers in my country use this shit technique.
  - yohui 9y ago
    Doesn't the "Do not allow any site to show notifications" setting cover that? chrome://settings/content#notifications-section
manigandham 9y ago
This is a good thing. Ad blockers as they are today don't work because the "block everything" approach is not sustainable. Advertising is a good model, it works, but the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. Ad blockers, by being selective, can actually act as an agent of change by forcing the market to move towards the formats people actually prefer. Ad Block Plus attempted to do this with their pay-per-play whitelist approach but that obviously has major issues since it didnt have realistic goals, wasn't transparent, and clearly let crap through anyway. I wish the ad standards also included outstream video (the autoplaying video ads inside of an article) but this is a good start.
- mrob 9y ago
  Ad blockers work just fine. It's very rare for an advert to make it past the filters, and it will be quickly fixed if it does. The preferred format is "no ads". The web existed before ads and it will exist after ads. It's not my problem if you've built a business around the unethical practice of manipulating people into buying things against their own interests.
  - tuna-piano 9y ago
    Wow. A- Ads do not manipulate people into buying things against their own interests. Businesses who sell great products that people want don't just magically find their customers. They find customers with ads. B- You're free to use an ad-blocker, and websites are free to block your use of the site. C- I assume you enjoy the web, and that a lot of effort is put into the sites that you enjoy. Do you expect all of this for free?
    - frenchy 9y ago
      > A- Ads do not manipulate people into buying things against their own interests. Businesses who sell great products that people want don't just magically find their customers. They find customers with ads. I think that's a pretty rosy description of things. Advertisements are an effective way to influence peoples' choices. Sometimes good products get advertised, sure; and sometimes when you jump out of an airplane without a parachute, you get lucky and land in a pile of snow. > B- You're free to use an ad-blocker, and websites are free to block your use of the site. > > C- I assume you enjoy the web, and that a lot of effort is put into the sites that you enjoy. Do you expect all of this for free? Absolutely! I don't think many reasonable people would object to anything here. I personally don't block ads on most of the sites I enjoy, and I have to problem with websites paywall-ing me if I use adblock.
dingo_bat 9y ago
News like this makes me glad I've moved entirely to edge. It has ublock and lastpass and RES. It's as fast as Chrome and much more responsive than Firefox. There are some bugs but Microsoft is doing a good job of gradually ironing those out. That's enough for me.
webuser321 9y ago
Ad-supported tech company employee#1: Users are blocking ads. Ad-supported company employees: Uh-oh. Ad-supported tech company employee#2: We can use this as an opportunity to block our competitors ads! Ad-supported tech company employee#3: We might win some goodwill with users, too! Example tech companies: Apple Brave Google etc. Naive user: Oh well, I guess we just have to accept whatever the tech companies give us. Real answer: No, users are actually the ones in control. That is why ad blocking is causing these companies to take action.
chenster 9y ago
I would love to switch to Firefox if it only could run a little faster.
erikpukinskis 9y ago
I'm trying to understand Google's new rules... From what I can tell they have published the set of prohibited practices here: https://www.betterads.org/standards/ https://www.betterads.org/standards/ It weird language... they say things like "Included ad experiences tested: Auto-playing in-line video with sound" and "The Better Ads Methodology has not yet tested video ads that appear before (“pre-roll”) or during (“mid-roll”) video content that is relevant to the content of the page itself." I think that means pre-roll is OK if it fits into the content, but auto-playing inline video with sound is not. It would be nice if they could just say explicitly what the rules are. Instead I guess you are supposed to use the Ad Experience Report tools: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ad-experience-desktop-unverified?hl=en https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ad-experience-deskto...
- ajnin 9y ago
  > The Better Ads Methodology has not yet tested video ads that appear before (“pre-roll”) or during (“mid-roll”) video content Funny that they would have a special rule for this kind of ads, that's exactly what Youtube does ... (Except that for me it usually is completely irrelevant, like ads for cosmetics or video games in the middle of a chemistry video.) I'm not expecting them to include this type of ads in the methodology any time soon except to find that they are totally fine.
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ThePhysicist 9y ago
Considering Chromes market dominance I think this move is highly problematic from a legal point of view, as it will allow Google to effectively ban certain ads from the web at its own discretion. While this might be a great idea if it's really targeted at "obnoxious" ads, it also gives Google a perfect handle to force publishers into their ad ecosystem (because surely Google ads could never be obnoxious) while driving down impressions and revenue for its competition. I would be highly surprised if this will not incur a swath of class action lawsuits and another anti-Trust investigation by the European Union and possibly the US. Again, ad blocking is good and important, but the people who build the ad blockers should not run an ad business on the side.
- a3_nm 9y ago
  I agree but I wouldn't be surprised if nothing happens in terms of anti-trust. Google has a monopoly on search in EU, and is leveraging this monopoly to gain a monopoly in other areas (e.g., ads on the Google Search homepage telling people to use Chrome), which I think is clearly problematic. This has been going on for years but nothing happens about it...
amauta 9y ago
Blockchain will destroy ads as we know it. Can't wait for Google and FB to go downhill :D
- malikNF 9y ago
  But how? I am genuinely curious.
a_imho 9y ago
That is not adblocking, it is enforcing Better Ads Standards in Chrome. It might be useful to detect and block clickfraud sites. Imo it will be very hard to sell it as pro user change. I would not be surprised if few would even go further and call it insulting to think people are that gullible. For reference, the companies that make up the Better Ads Coalition https://www.betterads.org/members/ https://www.betterads.org/members/
lvillani 9y ago
I don't know. On one hand I applaud Google's decision[1] to put its weight against autoplay videos, prestitial ads, and huge above-the-fold ads that are the main driving factor for me and many others to install an ad blocker in the first place. I would love to live in a world in which ad blockers are not necessary, everyone displays tasteful ads and every party involved gains something in the end. On the other hand advertising companies are still hell-bent on tracking and profiling people by whatever means necessary to target them better with ads. They amass huge amounts of information that, if put in the wrong hands, could lead to a disaster. This is what still makes (and will still make) blanket ad-blocking a necessity, IMO. --- [1] I'm ignoring the huge conflict of interest for the sake of argument here.
real-hacker 9y ago
I think the ad-based business model for internet companies could possibly be toppled in the next few years: 1. The ads are becoming increasingly ineffective, the CTR keeps falling, even as the ads are being personally customized. People are growing biological ad-blockers that block ads subconsciously. There is an interesting theory of "Peak Advertisement": http://peakads.org/ http://peakads.org/. 2. The value of digital assets/services are being recognized, and people are more willing to pay for online services. So maybe in the future internet companies will rely more on customer's subscription fee + ads that are more transparent (sponsored content).
- real-hacker 9y ago
  Also, this is a video that argues for ad-blockers from an ethical perspective: https://youtu.be/bltoTMJZetc https://youtu.be/bltoTMJZetc.
konart 9y ago
Yandex.Browser (also Chromium base) already has one. Works perfectly well, but at the same time you can't block ads from Yandex.Direct network at all. uBlock, Adblock or whatever - they will just reappear after you apply a new rule.
yuhong 9y ago
Is that the main problem with GA or are there others: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14441740 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14441740

166 points by relham 9y ago

As was previously discussed when this was first rumored, this is just begging for an anticompetition lawsuit of gigantic proportions as Google is using their dominant control of web browsers to block their competitors' ads from working. It is one of the most clear examples that the only way to remediate the differences between Google and a law abiding corporation is to break it up. EDIT: I think the strong feedback from everyone I've seen when this was first rumored was that this idea was concerning and likely illegal, and yet Google is proceeding anyways. I feel that should dismiss any notion that Google or the industry as a whole has the ability to self-regulate. To detail, I think Android and Chrome need to both be legally/forcibly detached from Google. Android could easily operate on funding from the OEMs that use the platform and the Play Store, which would go with it, and Chrome could use Mozilla's model, including letting companies like Google and Yahoo bid for the default search. (And obviously, would be prohibited from picking Google Search if it isn't the highest bidder.) Dominant platforms being tied to dominant services is just too large a conflict of interest.

MichaelGG 9y ago
Android being beholden to OEMs seems like a big loss for end-users though. At least Google is forcing a bit of decency, bit by bit.
matt4077 9y ago
It will be illegal only if and when they actually treat competitors' ads differently than their own. A good case study is AMP, which allows embedding ads and was, from the beginning, made to be integrated with competing ad networks. The potential for anti-competitive behaviour is so obvious, that Google probably takes a lot of care to crossdot all its legal i's and t's.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  But bear in mind: They're largely responsible for setting the standards by which these ads will be treated. Therefore, the standards will obviously be set in a manner that all their own ads will comply, and other businesses must change their business to suit Google's expectations or be blocked. Bear in mind, ads are like over 95% of Google's business, they would not be doing this if they thought it would impact their own ads at all. And since, by design, the standards will never go after Google ads, as a site owner, your best bet to not have your ads blocked will be to 'just' go with Google as your ad provider.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

pythonaut_16 9y ago

This is somewhat concerning to me. While I'm all for blocking obtrusive and obnoxious ads, I'm not sure I want Google using it's position as a web giant and browser vendor to push these standards by default via Chrome. An open web means I can host whatever (legal content) I want on my website and people are free to view it or not view it if they find it undesirable. Current ad blockers play well into this scheme because they protect the end user's right to view content in the way that they want. This move by Google on the other hand is telling websites that they have to play by Google's content rules or have their website broken by default. I'm not sure that's the web that I want to live in.

bitmapbrother 9y ago
These are ad standards agreed upon a consortium of companies.
- ceejayoz 9y ago
  Were consumer advocacy groups included in that consortium?
  - a2decrow 9y ago
    Of course not. But even if they were, it'd be only for show. They wouldn't have a say in anything.
- redm 9y ago
  Of which Google is a founding member and the only traditional ad publisher (AdSense/AdX/etc) who serves ads to 3rd party properties. [1] I'm sure they have plenty of control to shape the standards to their benefit. In other words, the "consortium" is biased by Google themselves. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/coaltion-for-better-ads-launched-by-iab-google-unilever-2016-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/coaltion-for-better-ads-launc...
  - bitmapbrother 9y ago

revelation 9y ago

So we've come full circle. The biggest ad peddler on the world and a predominant distributor of malicious ads (because ain't nobody got time to check that stuff) is now integrating an ad blocker and offering tools for publishers to check their sites for the bad ads they themselves offer.

victorhooi 9y ago
Do you have any sources or evidence for your statement "predominant distributor of malicious ads"? If true, that would be pretty radical - but I'm unsure if you're just being hyperbolic or just re-hashing something you read somewhere. (Disclaimer: Work for Google, but not in ads).
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  It's hard to prove numbers without Google sharing them. But suffice to say... You may recall this blog about fake download button ads: https://security.googleblog.com/2016/02/no-more-deceptive-download-buttons.html https://security.googleblog.com/2016/02/no-more-deceptive-do... ...That's the Chrome team. But fake download buttons are alive and well at Google AdWords. (Most of them you'll find on sites like paint.net are from Google.) As far as I understand, they aren't even against Google AdWords' policy. Google allows malicious ads which Google says are bad. And as a computer technician, most malware I remove, I check web history to figure out where they got it. Almost always it's a malicious Google ad at the top of search, which Google has progressively made look more and more like real search results over the years. Great for Google's bottom line, but terrible for everyone else.
  - victorhooi 9y ago
    I just went to your website "paint.net" - it redirects to "Warren Paint & Color Co." - which appears to be a paint company in the US. Did you perhaps mean getpaint.net? That's the download site for Paint.NET, a Windows-only paint program. I did see an ad there at the top for "FileSendSuite" which does have a download button: http://i.imgur.com/ed3CKGb.png http://i.imgur.com/ed3CKGb.png To me, it was reasonably clear the link was for FileSendSuite - but perhaps some other people could get mistaken? If you hit the "x" in the top-right of any ad, you can report an ad (e.g. for being misleading/spammy), or simply say you never want to see that ad again (it gets filtered).

redm 9y ago

"auto-playing video ads with sound and “prestitial” ads that countdown before displaying content." I guess Google will have to block ads on Youtube as well, not only does it have auto-playing ads with sound, but they block the display of content (prestitial/pre-roll). Oh wait, Google standards never affect Google.

mining 9y ago
I think there's a clear difference between an ad that plays sound as part of watching a video with sound, and as part of browsing a website that doesn't have sound / where the ad plays sound over the actual content.
- robryan 9y ago
  So all you would need to do to make your autoplay video ad acceptable is place some of your content after it?
  - ajross 9y ago
    Maybe, yeah. The point isn't to enforce some magical unicorn principle of advertising purity, it's to limit advertisements to forms that users are known not to hate. Users have been OK with commercials in their TV shows for like six decades now. So my non-expert eyes would expect an ad embedded with video content to be broadly acceptable.
  - derefr 9y ago
    News websites already do things this way (have a text version of a news report, with an auto-playing video version of the same report embedded somewhere on the page, that has a pre-roll ad.) I'm not sure how Google will view that—I think it might come down to whether the user was expecting the video version of the news report.
  - swsieber 9y ago
    No - people would have to be expecting your content to autoplay, and then it would be okay.

Akujin 9y ago

I used to work for a small company that did print (and web) medical journals targeted at dentists and dental professionals. We handled all the ads ourselves and hosted the images on our server as any other image. This meant we were basically impervious to adblock. Except for the occasional iframe embedded ad that was given to us by the client we basically never had an issue with adblock. Same thing on a nightlife website I worked on. Ads hosted by others were blocked but our own hosted ads were never a problem. Granted our own ads also had zero chance of being hijacked by a bad actor since they were simple <a><img></a> ads. If only everyone did this we wouldn't be having this arms race.

vorpalhex 9y ago
Pretty much. If Ads were without JS and videos (or, at least autoplaying videos) I really wouldn't care. Hell, if they were relevant ads to the website, I'd probably even click on them and buy things occasionally. But when a modal pops up or I get redirected, or your ad floats over your content and tries to follow my scrolling not only are you not going to sell to me, but I'm going to leave your website.
- gwbas1c 9y ago
  Or ads that significantly slow loading, make the page jump around...
  - shakestheclown 9y ago
    90% of the reason I block ads on mobile is performance. Even on a newer phone, any news website takes forever to load all the junk and ads.
- hobarrera 9y ago
  > Hell, if they were relevant ads to the website I had to watch youtube without an adblocker recently for the first time pretty much ever. The ads were not only extremely irrelevant. They were extremely sexist, strongly offensive and discriminating. Without exception (note I'm not in the US, so these probably aren't the same you're seeing!). I was incredibly surprised that most of the population watching youtube was exposed to this daily but not completely outrage.

45h34jh53k4j 9y ago

Companies that sell both the poison and antidote are not remembered fondly in history.

s73ver 9y ago

If it means good ads, without tracking, without popovers/unders, basically without all the bullshit that most ads do now, it'd be a good thing. Content creators need to eat too, you know.

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
This is Google we're talking about. "Without tracking" is definitely not part of the equation here. Tracking is their entire business model.

janitor61 9y ago

I think the next move will be disabling other ad-blockers from the chrome plugin store with an excuse that it "will interfere with native chrome functionality"

hxegon 9y ago
My thinking exactly. Hopefully this will provide a good enough experience to 90% of current adblock users to go with this instead of blocking everything, so that Google never gets forced into a position where it has to choose between removing ad-blockers or taking big ad revenue hits, and heat from advertisers. Like how netflix, hulu, hbo now were the best ways to reduce piracy because they treated the problem, not the symptoms.
colemannugent 9y ago
This is my concern as well. This could well be the result of advertisers pressuring Google to do something about ad-blockers. We all know how much they're willing to do to please advertisers after the YouTube demonetization apocalypse.
superflyguy 9y ago
There are no plugins available for mobile chrome anyway, which is where I do 90% of my surfing. If anything this half-assed ad blocking will drive people to Firefox where you can block ads (and trackers and auto delete cookies etc) properly.
- Sommersonn 9y ago
  You can use system-level addons that will filter a web traffic, providing that you can trust the publisher.
sinaa 9y ago
I doubt they'd go for it. Otherwise, this would give a huge boost to Firefox. Chrome's own adblocker would only reduce the incentive to install another adblocker. Especially if it's natively implemented as part of the browser.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

ww520 9y ago

Google can use the ad-blocking thing to stamp out ad-network competition.

cosinetau 9y ago

This sounds like a conflict of interest. http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/020515/business-google.asp http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/020515/busine... On the other hand, I feel like we've been here with Google before, and they've generally done The Right Thing[tm]. How do we generally feel about people using this? Has Google done enough right that we might feel comfortable with them doing this? The general sense of other comments looks fairly bleak.

ReverseCold 9y ago
Why would it be a conflict of interest? They're probably going to block all ads that aren't their own/"approved" or something similar to that.
- matt4077 9y ago
  It's impossible for them to treat competitors' ads different from their own. That chrome update wouldn't have time to download before they got dragged to court by every ad network, the European Union, and the Department of Justice.
  - awalton 9y ago
    maybe the European Union. The DOJ has clearly given up the ghost of even attempting to regulate US companies, and the current political news is just more evidence in that direction. Google can draw out these lawsuits for decades while continuing their practices with impunity. They already have two incredibly well studied playbooks to draw from: Microsoft v DOJ and SCO v IBM.
matt4077 9y ago
Seeing as how the public debate has deteriorated, and the results that it has led to, I'm willing to put up with almost anything that can bring civil societies back to, well, "civility". One of the most important pillar of that is varied, but high-quality media. These, however, have been squeezed relentlessly over the last years, with no end in sight. People think reporting isn't worth anything (an almost literal quote in many of these threads), just because they can read the same stories at different outlet–ignoring that somebody still had to be there. Or they're legitimising their use of aggressive ad blockers with the tired the-media-is-so-bad cliché (...then why are you reading it?). There are two paths that I believe print media can get back on track: First, such an ad blocker that allows reasonable ads, i.e. not moving, obscuring, or for low-quality products. Second: a netflix-style subscription that gives access to many publications. Because as it is now, I can't justify paying for any single subscription (except for the rather cheap New Yorker). But I'm willing to pay something like $30-$50 dollars/month for the written words I consume. There's just nobody to take the money. I don't actually have much of a problem with Google. They have always been really excellent in such regards, especially considering how much potential for scandals they have. But I'd prefer more diversity, if at all possible. I guess this will hurt other adblockers quite badly, and I'm wondering if they didn't create this problem by not creating a product that fairly accounts for publishers' interests.

ausjke 9y ago

what about porn sites blocking for kids? can chrome have a parent control mode somehow that kids can use chrome "safely" on android and on the PC these days?

aanm1988 9y ago
They have that, sorta https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/3463947?hl=en https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/3463947?hl=en
JeremyBanks 9y ago
That seems unrelated.
Eridrus 9y ago
This exists for Android: https://families.google.com/familylink/ https://families.google.com/familylink/

nkozyra 9y ago

This is such a giant genie to try to put back into the bottle with Adblock usage growing 30% last year and accounting for 10-12% of total worldwide users. How do you convince those people to worsen their experience - but only slightly - toward the noble goal of letting content producers monetize? Or do advertisers just consider that a lost cause at this point? The real question is whether Chrome will get more draconian and start preventing competing ad blockers in the browser. [1] https://pagefair.com/blog/2017/adblockreport/ https://pagefair.com/blog/2017/adblockreport/

Houshalter 9y ago
They don't need to be more draconian. Just like they do now, they make their adblocker the first option in search results and the webstore.

jasonmp85 9y ago

I feel like "Help" and "Ad Blocker" need scare quotes around them.

pfooti 9y ago

Nice ad you've got there. Be a shame if someone came along and blocked it.

combatentropy 9y ago

From the article: > While blocking pesky ads is appealing to consumers, > it also threatens a vital source of revenue for publishers Are "pesky ads" really "a vital source of revenue"? Is there any data? Everyone I know hates them, especially the autoplaying videos, animations, and pop-ups (the "pesky" ones). Are you saying that there are people who see these things and say, "Oh, that's interesting," and clicks the ad? Furthermore are you saying that there is a "vital" number of these people in the world? I believe that if anything, depeskifying ads will bring advertisers more success. I have always believed that intrusive ads were a lose-lose proposition. Not only do readers lose by being bothered, but advertisers lose because such ads make people just look away. Furthermore it makes people hate your website, tarnishing the brand. I, for one, am starting to remember at least some websites that are especially rude with ads, and I won't click the link if there is a choice (like on Google News). I remember many years ago when Google first insisted on text-only ads, relegated to the right side of the page so they were clearly advertising. Everyone thought Google was crazy. Billions of dollars later, people think Google is on to something. It was the most tempted I've ever been to click an ad (I still don't think I did, though). Because they weren't flashing, I didn't immediately ignore that whole area, an automatic response that most of us have developed. And so some of them I actually read. And because they were narrowly targeted ads, based on the words in my search, they were more interesting. In other words, if publishers switched to text-only ads, I bet their click-rate would go up. Maybe a tasteful still picture would be okay. I'm thinking of what is in newspapers and magazines. I actually used to look at some of their ads (back in the ol' paper days). I even enjoyed some of the more artistic or clever ones. The only times they annoyed me is if there were too many of them or it was those loose-leaf subscriptions cards in the middle of a magazine (pre-internet pesky ads).

matt4077 9y ago
It's one of the easiest businesses to optimise for revenue/profit, so I'm pretty sure that the the current situation is at least a significant local minimum. At this point, many publishers have run trials with more/less, intrusive/low-key ads and any other variable you can think of. There are maybe some publishers who found success with running ads only very selectively, but those are usually very small (The Deck, i. e. daring fireball comes to mind). Large, high-quality publications such as the new York Times are somewhere in the middle: ads that include animation, but don't obscure content, and not spam or fraud. For the mass of publishers without a famous brand name, the low-quality ads they're running are probably the best they can do. And ads do bring in significant revenue, although it's too little to offset the losses in print.

jasonkostempski 9y ago

If ad revenue wasn't based on impressions and clicks no one would want to shove them in their users faces. Ad networks like Google's are the cause of the problem.

quadrangle 9y ago
Google's tracking can be a terrible thing and we can still acknowledge that advertisers unrelated to Google do awful shit and always have. Advertising can be unethical even when payments aren't tied to clicks. Click-driven advertising makes it worse but isn't the cause of all problems.
- jasonkostempski 9y ago
  Regardless of how they are presented, all ad networks do awful shit. It's an entire system built on distrust and the users machine is responsible for fixing it. It's an absolutely insane business model. Show me an ad network that doesn't work that way and I might consider it acceptable, until then all of them need to be universally disabled.
  - quadrangle 9y ago
    I agree with you 100% there.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

redm 9y ago

Google's official announcement on their blog: https://blog.chromium.org/2017/06/improving-advertising-on-web.html https://blog.chromium.org/2017/06/improving-advertising-on-w... IMO, if Google's goal is to improve the web experience, it would be much better if Chrome was spun off into a non-profit of its own, and not controlled directly by Google. A non-profit not directly controlled by Google would eliminate the major conflict of interest that is: 1) Google is the biggest ad publisher/network in the world. 2) Google controls the majority of web browsers today. 3) Google will control how ad blocking is implemented, managed, corrected, adjusted, etc., as they see fit.

polishTar 9y ago
Google already made Chromium completely open source. Anybody's free to fork it and move it in any direction they want. As for Chrome, it's likely worth many 10's of billions of dollars. It would be absolutely indefensible to throw it away, especially when there are so many yet unexplored avenues to improve the web without requiring such massive and unneeded sacrifices.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  Spinning something out is not the same as throwing it away. Chrome is already 'non profit' because it does not cost money to the end user.
  - cm2187 9y ago
    So ad companies are all non profit organisations then?
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      I really don't understand your comment. Ad companies are all for profit. Browsers tend to not be a profit center for the companies that make them (Microsoft, Mozilla (a non profit), Google and Apple being the main ones).

ransom1538 9y ago

This will hurt professional journalism. Print is gone. Journalists survive on ads - and the only ones that work are quite obtrusive. Removing these annoying ads and moving to standardized google ads will just tighten the journalist's budgets. This will help the fake news blog outlets spread like the cancer they are. Sad.

a2decrow 9y ago
There are other ways to monetize without (intrusive) ads. Produce quality content and people will be happy to support it. If your entire business model only revolves around ad-driven revenue and it doesn't work any other way, then perhaps that business model simply offers nothing of value.

bobajeff 9y ago

It's kind of crazy to hear that the first mainstream browser to have a built-in adblocker turned on by default is going to be Google Chrome.

ewzimm 9y ago
When you put it that way, it sounds surprising, but of course Google won't block their own ads, so you could say "the first mainstream browser to block other companies' ads by default" and it would sound less strange. Not that I'm against it! This is a big move from the biggest browser that will push its competitors to do the same and change the web, likely for the better. Brave is pushing a similar agenda from behind the front lines.
eli 9y ago
Only a dominant player could pull it off. Detecting ad blockers is kinda hard, but sniffing user agents is easy. If Edge blocked ads by default some sites might choose to block Edge users entirely.
- nradov 9y ago
  And then Edge would just use a different user_agent.
  - eli 9y ago
    What, like steal one from another browser. That seems unlikely
    - ry_ry 9y ago
      http://i.imgur.com/19VEBL7.png http://i.imgur.com/19VEBL7.png Pretty much. Not to mention Safari and IE user agents have included strings like "Mozilla/5.0" and "like Gecko" for years now to 'demonstrate compatibility' with those browsers. User, estate and recruitment agents are all equally untrustworthy!
      - 9y ago

cocktailpeanuts 9y ago

I don't care about "popup ads". I already use adblockers so I never see them. What I want to really see is blocking those popup "sign up for newsletter" modal.

visarga 9y ago
What's even worse is that special Chrome feature where the site asks you to allow it to send you notifications. It's a tiny window with a single button "accept" and a minuscule "x" for closing it that is light gray on white (hard to even see). What is missing is an option to reject all site subscription/notifications and never have to deal with that kind of intrusive offers again. They're not even popups or in-page popups, they are part of the browser UI. So it's an officially allowed way to send "popups" and pester people for subscribing. Many newspapers in my country use this shit technique.
- yohui 9y ago
  Doesn't the "Do not allow any site to show notifications" setting cover that? chrome://settings/content#notifications-section

manigandham 9y ago

This is a good thing. Ad blockers as they are today don't work because the "block everything" approach is not sustainable. Advertising is a good model, it works, but the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. Ad blockers, by being selective, can actually act as an agent of change by forcing the market to move towards the formats people actually prefer. Ad Block Plus attempted to do this with their pay-per-play whitelist approach but that obviously has major issues since it didnt have realistic goals, wasn't transparent, and clearly let crap through anyway. I wish the ad standards also included outstream video (the autoplaying video ads inside of an article) but this is a good start.

mrob 9y ago
Ad blockers work just fine. It's very rare for an advert to make it past the filters, and it will be quickly fixed if it does. The preferred format is "no ads". The web existed before ads and it will exist after ads. It's not my problem if you've built a business around the unethical practice of manipulating people into buying things against their own interests.
- tuna-piano 9y ago
  Wow. A- Ads do not manipulate people into buying things against their own interests. Businesses who sell great products that people want don't just magically find their customers. They find customers with ads. B- You're free to use an ad-blocker, and websites are free to block your use of the site. C- I assume you enjoy the web, and that a lot of effort is put into the sites that you enjoy. Do you expect all of this for free?
  - frenchy 9y ago
    > A- Ads do not manipulate people into buying things against their own interests. Businesses who sell great products that people want don't just magically find their customers. They find customers with ads. I think that's a pretty rosy description of things. Advertisements are an effective way to influence peoples' choices. Sometimes good products get advertised, sure; and sometimes when you jump out of an airplane without a parachute, you get lucky and land in a pile of snow. > B- You're free to use an ad-blocker, and websites are free to block your use of the site. > > C- I assume you enjoy the web, and that a lot of effort is put into the sites that you enjoy. Do you expect all of this for free? Absolutely! I don't think many reasonable people would object to anything here. I personally don't block ads on most of the sites I enjoy, and I have to problem with websites paywall-ing me if I use adblock.

dingo_bat 9y ago

News like this makes me glad I've moved entirely to edge. It has ublock and lastpass and RES. It's as fast as Chrome and much more responsive than Firefox. There are some bugs but Microsoft is doing a good job of gradually ironing those out. That's enough for me.

webuser321 9y ago

Ad-supported tech company employee#1: Users are blocking ads. Ad-supported company employees: Uh-oh. Ad-supported tech company employee#2: We can use this as an opportunity to block our competitors ads! Ad-supported tech company employee#3: We might win some goodwill with users, too! Example tech companies: Apple Brave Google etc. Naive user: Oh well, I guess we just have to accept whatever the tech companies give us. Real answer: No, users are actually the ones in control. That is why ad blocking is causing these companies to take action.

chenster 9y ago

I would love to switch to Firefox if it only could run a little faster.

erikpukinskis 9y ago

I'm trying to understand Google's new rules... From what I can tell they have published the set of prohibited practices here: https://www.betterads.org/standards/ https://www.betterads.org/standards/ It weird language... they say things like "Included ad experiences tested: Auto-playing in-line video with sound" and "The Better Ads Methodology has not yet tested video ads that appear before (“pre-roll”) or during (“mid-roll”) video content that is relevant to the content of the page itself." I think that means pre-roll is OK if it fits into the content, but auto-playing inline video with sound is not. It would be nice if they could just say explicitly what the rules are. Instead I guess you are supposed to use the Ad Experience Report tools: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ad-experience-desktop-unverified?hl=en https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ad-experience-deskto...

ajnin 9y ago
> The Better Ads Methodology has not yet tested video ads that appear before (“pre-roll”) or during (“mid-roll”) video content Funny that they would have a special rule for this kind of ads, that's exactly what Youtube does ... (Except that for me it usually is completely irrelevant, like ads for cosmetics or video games in the middle of a chemistry video.) I'm not expecting them to include this type of ads in the methodology any time soon except to find that they are totally fine.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

ThePhysicist 9y ago

Considering Chromes market dominance I think this move is highly problematic from a legal point of view, as it will allow Google to effectively ban certain ads from the web at its own discretion. While this might be a great idea if it's really targeted at "obnoxious" ads, it also gives Google a perfect handle to force publishers into their ad ecosystem (because surely Google ads could never be obnoxious) while driving down impressions and revenue for its competition. I would be highly surprised if this will not incur a swath of class action lawsuits and another anti-Trust investigation by the European Union and possibly the US. Again, ad blocking is good and important, but the people who build the ad blockers should not run an ad business on the side.

a3_nm 9y ago
I agree but I wouldn't be surprised if nothing happens in terms of anti-trust. Google has a monopoly on search in EU, and is leveraging this monopoly to gain a monopoly in other areas (e.g., ads on the Google Search homepage telling people to use Chrome), which I think is clearly problematic. This has been going on for years but nothing happens about it...

amauta 9y ago

Blockchain will destroy ads as we know it. Can't wait for Google and FB to go downhill :D

malikNF 9y ago
But how? I am genuinely curious.

a_imho 9y ago

That is not adblocking, it is enforcing Better Ads Standards in Chrome. It might be useful to detect and block clickfraud sites. Imo it will be very hard to sell it as pro user change. I would not be surprised if few would even go further and call it insulting to think people are that gullible. For reference, the companies that make up the Better Ads Coalition https://www.betterads.org/members/ https://www.betterads.org/members/

lvillani 9y ago

I don't know. On one hand I applaud Google's decision[1] to put its weight against autoplay videos, prestitial ads, and huge above-the-fold ads that are the main driving factor for me and many others to install an ad blocker in the first place. I would love to live in a world in which ad blockers are not necessary, everyone displays tasteful ads and every party involved gains something in the end. On the other hand advertising companies are still hell-bent on tracking and profiling people by whatever means necessary to target them better with ads. They amass huge amounts of information that, if put in the wrong hands, could lead to a disaster. This is what still makes (and will still make) blanket ad-blocking a necessity, IMO. --- [1] I'm ignoring the huge conflict of interest for the sake of argument here.

real-hacker 9y ago

I think the ad-based business model for internet companies could possibly be toppled in the next few years: 1. The ads are becoming increasingly ineffective, the CTR keeps falling, even as the ads are being personally customized. People are growing biological ad-blockers that block ads subconsciously. There is an interesting theory of "Peak Advertisement": http://peakads.org/ http://peakads.org/. 2. The value of digital assets/services are being recognized, and people are more willing to pay for online services. So maybe in the future internet companies will rely more on customer's subscription fee + ads that are more transparent (sponsored content).

real-hacker 9y ago
Also, this is a video that argues for ad-blockers from an ethical perspective: https://youtu.be/bltoTMJZetc https://youtu.be/bltoTMJZetc.

konart 9y ago

Yandex.Browser (also Chromium base) already has one. Works perfectly well, but at the same time you can't block ads from Yandex.Direct network at all. uBlock, Adblock or whatever - they will just reappear after you apply a new rule.

yuhong 9y ago

Is that the main problem with GA or are there others: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14441740 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14441740