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Google bans its ads on sites that use annoying ‘pop-unders’
- cronjobber 9y agoAntitrust regulators should look into this one. EDIT: ...because the policy punishes advertisers use of other advertising providers.
- korethr 9y agoOkay, I'll bite. Why? Why do you think this merits such an investigation?
- cronjobber 9y agoBecause my reading of the article is that Google doesn't restrict the policy to Google ads. > publishers have to also be responsible for any ad networks or affiliates they have on their site which could use these methods That may or may not be turn out to be legally anti competitive, but it certainly merits an investigation. My personal opinion is that it is a clear abuse of G's market dominant position.
- criddell 9y agoI don't know if that's true that it's an abuse of their position. Here's the paragraph from their policies: > Sites showing Google ads should be easy for users to navigate. Sites may not change user preferences, redirect users to unwanted websites, initiate downloads, include malware or contain pop-ups or pop-unders that interfere with site navigation. That all seems reasonable to me. They don't want to be associated with garbage websites.
- ozaark 9y ago> or contain pop-ups or pop-unders that interfere with site navigation. Then.. Google on "AdSense Page-level ads" > We don't count them as "advertisements" when evaluating your site for compliance with our valuable inventory policy. https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/6245304?hl=en https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/6245304?hl=en Yes, these ads are not ads compared to other ads: we profit from these.
- s73ver 9y agoAnd my personal opinion is that this kind of thing is exactly what G should be doing with their market position. No consumer, anywhere, in the history of ever, has wanted things to pop under their browser window stealthily. As such, G abusing their position to hurt companies that do it is a good thing. Those companies should be hurt, and preferably die a terrible, terrible death. If and when G uses their market dominant position to do something which hurts consumers, then things should be investigated. But an action like this, which has no negative consequences for users, should be applauded.
- duskwuff 9y agoGoogle AdSense already has a bunch of requirements in place for sites that want to run their ads -- content restrictions, restrictions on traffic sources, limits on the number of ad units on the page (including ads from other networks), etc. Many of these restrictions are in place because Google's advertisers won't want to run their ads on pages that don't meet those requirements, and Google's new limitations on popunder ads probably fall into that category as well.
- AznHisoka 9y agoI developed malware that injects spammy ads into people's browsers. Google banned my site from their index! Antitrust regulators need to look into this because it costed me my business and my employees! </sarcasm>
- greglindahl 9y agoThis is why US antitrust law focuses on harm to consumers, not companies. I don't see much harm to consumers if Google refuses to do business with websites that annoy consumers. Google already has a lot of rules that websites have to follow in order to be eligible for AdSense.
- grillvogel 9y agothis is not because google is your friend, this is because they want you to have less reason to use adblock.
- frenchie4111 9y agoBut in this case I align with their decision. I don't mind websites that have advertisements as long as they aren't intrusive, and my privacy is maintained. If those demands were met on all of the sites I frequent I would uninstall my ad-blocker
- gruez 9y ago>I don't mind websites that have advertisements as long as they aren't intrusive, and my privacy is maintained It would be a cold day in hell if google stopped tracking people.
- jm_l 9y agoAgreed, Google is unlikely to stop trying to track it's users; it's too profitable. On the other hand, privacy is more about choosing what you share than not sharing things, and imo Google does an okay job at letting users control what they share; better than most companies operating at that scale. And while their privacy controls are not very fine grained, there seems to be an emphasis on making sure even non-technical users understand what is being shared and why.
- frenchie4111 9y agoAgreed, and I don't want them to quit using my data altogether. A lot of their best products are powered by my data (search, inbox, assistant)
- yogenpro 9y agoFWIW, https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols to control what data they'd use and how it's used, and http://history.google.com http://history.google.com lists the data they've collected. You can delete some or all from there.
- paulpauper 9y agowouldn't it be better to just find a way to prevent pop-unders in the first place. Why is it so hard to thwart them? All these sites use the same script that evades the popup blocker built into chrome yet none of google's 1000's of engineers can do anything about it apparently.
- gruez 9y ago>All these sites use the same script that evades the popup blocker built into chrome yet none of google's 1000's of engineers can do anything about it apparently. Because it's really hard to differentiate between legit popups (that the user wants) and popups that are unwanted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop-up_ad#Pop-under_ads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop-up_ad#Pop-under_ads
- jwilk 9y agoI have hard time imaginig a popup that the user wants.
- teraflop 9y agoNever clicked the "pop-out" button in Gmail or Hangouts?
- jwilk 9y agoNo. What does it do?
- vertex-four 9y agoMoves your chat or compose box into a new window. Useful for some people's workflows, less useful for others. I sometimes pop out a Hangouts chat so I can pin it somewhere I can see it while doing something else.
- aphextron 9y agoI find with things like this that it's a million times easier to have the feature turned off by default, and then whitelist your own specific use cases. Thats what Ive done with Javascript on the web. My browsing experience is so much better without downloading 20mb of ad network code on every page load, that I could never go back even with the minor annoyance of having to click "allow javascript on this site" every now and then.
- paulpauper 9y agoPop-unders are extremely annoying, not only do they slow the browser but they are always filled with malware. Good move by google.
- smegel 9y agoOr fix Chrome that allows this kind of abuse? Google doesn't give a shit about protecting users.
- fredley 9y agoThe apis used to control focus should just be put behind a permission, as microphone/camera access etc. are. If a site wants to control window focus, I should have to explicitly allow it.
- CyberShadow 9y agoNo focus APIs are necessary to implement pop-unders. AFAIU, the way modern implementations work, is that they make some link (occasionally the entire body) a target=_blank link, which points to some other part of the website. This causes the link target to appear in a new tab. Now, the original tab has its contents changed to that of an ad; when the user finishes browsing the website and closes the newly-opened tab, they will see the "pop-under" tab (which is actually the original tab the user entered the website with).
- pinum 9y agoCouldn't this be avoided by refusing to run onclick/similar events for target=_href links?
- savanaly 9y agoUnfortunately, preventing those events from running code could be easily programmed around, if, as I assume you mean, you let the rest of javascript run as normal. If you're trying to run code in response to someone clicking on link A but the browser had disabled onclick for link A, you could still register an onclick for the entire page and in that listener examine the coordinates of the mouse to see if it's over link A and then run code "in response" to the click. This is just one of countless ways you could get around the rule I'm sure.
- visarga 9y agoMaybe the browser itself should have more efficient anti-clickjacking tech, such as blacklists and spam classifiers. Users should be able to block all popups from a specific site when protection doesn't work well automatically.
- Sir_Substance 9y agoI didn't know these had become a thing, due to my use of ad blocking. Thanks, ad blocking.
- natch 9y agoThat's a great step. I can think of a few more steps they could take, such as removing ads from fake news sites. Of course that gets into difficult judgement calls, whereas this pop-under case is pretty clear cut. It makes sense if they want to move slowly and deliberately, but I hope they won't stop here.
- oh_sigh 9y agoAny particular fake news sites you had in mind?
- natch 9y agoStuff like outbrain.com, scribol.com, travelwhip.com, and their ilk. Obviously these are not strictly "news" but you get the idea. I think of them as sites that will do almost anything to increase clicks, ad impressions, and affiliate revenues, including presenting severely compromised content.
- tyingq 9y agoAre these honestly more annoying than YouTube ads?
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoMy father encountered a clickbait site a few weeks ago that would spawn pop-unders playing continuous video ads, muted, which closed as soon as they were focused. It was bizarre. My only guess was that the site was trying to scam advertisers by "showing" lots of ads to users, without the users actually seeing/hearing them and getting annoyed.
- dalbasal 9y agoFor Google to do this, there is a competition aspect to it. Pop-unders compete with Google. That said, something needs to give. Particularly disturbing is news sites. Otherwise reputable news sites are willing to put up the sleaziest "monetization" on their sites. Pop unders, pop overs and extremely dishonest advertising, especially under the "native ads" umbrella. Many of these are advertising fake news, fake products, fake customer stories. There is such a thing as advertising standards, where advertising standards. It works differently in every country, but the mechanism is generally 2-fold. (1)Some sort of advertising authority regulates the media side: they can complain/accuse TV stations or print papers. (2)Regulated industries (drugs, financial services) have a regulator that holds them to advertising standards. This part still works, but no one seems to have the ability/jurisdiction to complain about online advertising. At the very least, I'd like to see national advertising standards authorities ban the use of certain ad aggregotors on local news sites, if they violate advertising standards. Many of these ads are ilegal anyway, I think.
- CM30 9y agoI'm surprised they didn't ban them already. I mean, Google Adsense already had rules about not being able to use too many ads on one page, or about displaying them next to ads from other providers. Honestly though, I'm quite happy they're doing this. Yeah some people may say its anti competitive or what not, but the type of ads many sites run are ridiculous. Sometimes even your basic news site or forum is literally packed with ads from top to bottom, with everything from overlays to transitions and pop ups/pop unders and auto playing video going on at once. If this sort of thing discourages that, it'll make the internet a hundred times more tolerable for everyone (especially those unfortunate souls who can't use Adblock for whatever reason).