16 ms·

Why are currently no ads on Techdirt? apparently Google thinks we're dangerous

251 points by MaysonL 6y ago

im3w1l 6y ago
> Sometimes it was "dangerous and derogatory content." Sometimes it was "shocking content." So Google turned the filter sensitivity up to 11 just now huh? I don't get why techdirt insists that that is not about ideology.
- throwaway_1299 6y ago
  Is there something ideological about phishing protections?
  - im3w1l 6y ago
    Oh I missed that the first time around. That changes things. Especially given that phishing claims started same time as everything else. Sounds like someone is mass-report attacking them or something then.
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      Or there were two models, the output of one which is an input to another. Normally this would be a bad idea, but lots of people do it.
- creinhardt 6y ago
  My hunch on this was that there probably was a misconfiguration with whatever service they're using to send out emails. If they don't have the sending domain whitelisted with whatever service they're using, it can look super fishy (or phishy!). I'd be really, really surprised to find out that Google's automated AdSense ad quality tools are in any way tied to their email quality tools.
AlexandrB 6y ago
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. At least Microsoft had better customer support than Google.
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  That's because Microsoft has actual customers. Seriously it's functionally more of a protection racket than any other type of business.
madacoo 6y ago
It's refreshing to see an assumption of incompetence rather than malice, since I seem to have come across the idea that Google is questionably motivated by ideology rather a lot recently. One thing I don't understand is why Google continues to try to use algorithmic solutions for content moderation. Surely the frequent false positives ends up hurting potential revenue? And would it not be able to hire people to at least oversee the algorithms and respond to erratic behaviour as described in this article? It seems one could even argue that Google's focus on algorithmic rather than human solutions is a kind of harmful ideology, albeit not the kind that probably hasn't hurt Techdirt in this case.
- kiba 6y ago
  Who knows? They had decided long ago that genuine tech support is not in their business model, and that's the end of things.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  >It seems one could even argue that Google's focus on algorithmic rather than human solutions is a kind of harmful ideology It's the kind of ideology that you often find in people who think they are smarter than everyone else.
  - tmpz22 6y ago
    Imagine being plucked from college at 22 and getting payed 200k+ total compensation with an introduction telling you how you're now one of the best at your field working with the smartest people in the world... how you're changing the world before you've even been on-boarded.
    - asdff 6y ago
      It's like being told you are heir to the throne, and many engineers carry that same princely arrogance obliviously. At least doctors and lawyers have gone through a second gauntlet after acing school to temper this somewhat. Those fields might not even start making good money until you are years above the entry level, even with a pricey professional degree.
reaperducer 6y ago
I think the more correct answer to "Why Are Currently No Ads on Techdirt?" is "Because we put all of our eggs in one basket." Don't build a single point of failure into your revenue stream. There are plenty of alternatives to Google that they should have been using in a smaller way that they could then move into prime position. That way, Techdirt's revenue might have been diminished, but not eliminated.
- mdoms 6y ago
  Literally the last paragraph of the article is a call for help in finding these "plenty of alternatives" so instead of being snide maybe you can help out by listing some?
- phoboslab 6y ago
  I'm curious, what are the "plenty of alternatives" exactly? We have tried a lot of different advertising networks and sadly we have found none that's even in the same ballpark as AdSense (revenue wise). Advertising on the web is a shit show.
  - celestialcheese 6y ago
    TripleLift, Sharethrough, AppNexus (now Xander), Rubicon Project, OpenX, GumGum, Index, Amazon A9. There are dozens of video demand partners as well. All of those have performed as well or better, from my experience. Where google has all of them beat is payment terms - net 21 is hard to beat.
- nkozyra 6y ago
  There are plenty of alternatives to Adsense but none of them are comparable. They all take a huge dive in RPM, are iffy with UX and security and tend to not last long. My personal account was locked out of Adsense in the same way years back. A violation every 5 months or so, which I always "corrected." Then one day it's just off. I respond and eventually Adsense is restored. Then a few weeks later, closed and banned. And it's been that way since. No recourse. Just ... shut out. This was a site with 100% user-generated content. If Google can't handle something like that, well ...
blakesterz 6y ago
For some reason I read the comments... "Someone who hates you is doing this on purpose" reads one. While I have NO IDEA what that's about, it does make me wonder, can people cause trouble for their competition through ad sense by doing things to cause the site to be dropped like this? That comment says it's because someone is leaving bad comments on the site, which seems unlikely, but I've read other stories about DMCA abuse or something like that to bring down competing sites or videos or whatever. Can someone abuse some kind of adsense reporting system and cause this to happen?
- DevKoala 6y ago
  Yes, I can use a programmatic ad exchange such a Google’s to push ads on a site that would result in a negative experience for visitors. The creative review process is pretty lax. I haven’t heard of a documented attack, but it would be easy to grief a small site in such a way.
  - thatguy0900 6y ago
    I remember an old blog that was trolled by having homoerotic ads plastered all over it, but looking into the details now they just bribed the server master.
    - luckylion 6y ago
      There have been several waves of attacks where somebody posted malicious ads via Adsense that would use JS to redirect visitors to a different page. In the cases I was involved with, they were only targeting mobile traffic and redirected to a scam-site that asked users to download an app to fix a virus etc. We've reported it, never heard back from Google. It went away after a few days each time, and hasn't happened in two or three years, at least not to any site I'm involved with.
      - thatguy0900 6y ago
        Crazy something like that was even allowed to continue for a few days
input_sh 6y ago
I play this game with Google every month or so when the webmaster console reports some mobile experience issues, but when I do a manual scan, there are no issues. So I mark them as resolved and then there are no issues for the next month or so.
- dawnerd 6y ago
  I thought it was just us, but webmaster tools is constantly flagging mobile issues that are not issues.
- nkozyra 6y ago
  As far as I know you can ignore those. Typically it's like "elements too close" or "font size too small to read." Then the next day it's fine.
  - shajznnckfke 6y ago
    Somewhere an instance of headless chrome is crashing and the thing trying to analyze your page on it is seeing every element located at (0,0).
- jorams 6y ago
  I've also seen several Search Console issues that displayed a "Last Crawled" date months or years in the past. They had long since gone outdated. In some cases the entire website had been replaced by that point.
specialist 6y ago
Open markets require a fair and impartial judiciary. I really wish Congress' investigations would put more emphasis on the practical, pragmatic issues. Like lack of accountability, lack of appeal, absence of recourse. Establishing tort (civil justice), more or less.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  >Establishing tort (civil justice), more or less. Tort is very important for a functioning free market. The government just doesn't have the capability to police everyone, and civil court allows the people to police each other. Which exactly why large corporations move to eliminate their civil liability with users.
jeffbee 6y ago
I don't know if this is the case with techdirt, but by far the most common reason why sites and domains (for mail) end up getting flagged is because their resources have been hijacked by organized criminals and are being used for crime, unbeknownst to the people who own the domains. So if this ever happens to you your first instinct should be to question your own production security situation, not to assume that Google has gone off the rails.
- nkozyra 6y ago
  Well let's entertain this possibility. It then seems very easy for Google to report why it disabled or why you were flagged. Playing the guessing game is not helpful. In my experience, things just go dark and you get very little or no helpful messaging about resolving the problem.
  - creinhardt 6y ago
    This. Having been in a similar scenario, the most frustrating part is hearing "there's a problem, it's bad enough that we're disabling your account, but we can't even give you a hint what the actual issue was. We hope you can figure it out, maybe we'll eventually re-instate your account". In my experience, you can usually find something that COULD be the cause by digging through analytics/reports, if you can demonstrate that you took positive action on this, and get it infront of the right support people, they can sometimes help you out and ask for your account to be re-evaluated. You will never, ever find out if this is the reason they disabled your account in the first place though. Then, prepare for your account to be paused again.
- bcrosby95 6y ago
  We had some abuse on our site that Google blocked us for - people were trying to run a scam through it. Except the scam was being propagated on youtube and Google did nothing about the videos despite multiple reports from us. So my attitude is pretty simple: Google can fuck off. They can't even fix their own properties and will ban you for their inability to do so.
  - 6y ago
dathinab 6y ago
Isn't it funny that Google complains about clickbait while many of there sites/apps do exactly that and have gotten worse in the recent years. Like in Gmail Google ads "pretend" to be mails, being exactly formatted like a mail and interleaving! with other mails. (Sure there is a small Ad label but it's indisguishable from a mail starting with Ad... in the subject) Similar things can be observed fruit custom page/domain search the first many entries looking like search results are actually advertisement pointing to somewhere outside if the domain you search, i.e. definitely not what you want when you do a search explicitly limited to one domain.
causality0 6y ago
Given Techdirt's philosophy I'm surprised they don't restrict themselves to only accepting individually curated, self-hosted ads.
- throwaway45349 6y ago
  Those don't make any money.
sebastien_b 6y ago
Google/Alphabet: a bunch of morons with PhDs.
scottrogowski 6y ago
A few months ago, I tried experimenting with Google ads to drive some traffic to a side project of mine which was basically a chess-over-videochat website. A little more than 40 impressions later, it was taken down for being "in violation of our Google ad policies". There was never any indication what the violation actually was. I replied and asked several times hoping to get a human to tell me what I had actually done wrong. Instead, they kept sending me an automated email that said, "After reviewing your case and taking your feedback into consideration, we've confirmed that your account was and still is in violation of our Google Ads policies." They also made it seem like I was some cyber criminal by suggesting that if I tried to create another account, they would automatically take that down too. This is what a monopoly looks like.
- esperent 6y ago
  I don't know much about adding ads to a website like this. Is there really no alternative to Google?
  - jasonv 6y ago
    I've been reviewing self-service ad sales & serving plugins for Wordpress sites and my conclusion would be: no, there isn't.
    - haecceity 6y ago
      Bing?
    - stevesearer 6y ago
      We use advanced ads pro for Wordpress and it seems to work well enough for serving self-hosted ads. What are you looking for that it or others don’t offer?
      - jasonv 6y ago
        There are a handful of decent "adsense/manage your own ads" and "add adsense to your site" plugins, but the self-service model wasn't rich with options. The few I did start testing had bumpy roads for implementing and managing the integration into the template. I didn't test this one. Appreciate the recommendation... will look into it further.
aasasd 6y ago
The post gave me hope that a change of perspective on Google might ease up my irritation and horror from it a little—if I see it as a clumsy old behemoth, instead of the pioneer of future tech that it's usually portrayed as, and which basically translates to ‘what cyberpunk warned about’. (But then I remembered that it has literal databases of incredibly personal realtime info on billions of people, and lets police peruse locations of people that committed no crime.)
Animats 6y ago
Finally, we started receiving reports from multiple Techdirt visitors (including those who told us they had purposefully whitelisted Techdirt from their ad blockers) that ads being delivered by Google were causing their computers to run hot. Multiple reports of ads on Techdirt failing to load properly, and causing Techdirt to fail to load properly. And also causing fans to turn on. "Ads being delivered by Google were causing their computers to run hot?" Anyone have more detail on this?
- WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
  Only that I've seen similar on other sites (carrying Google ads, like very site). It stopped a couple of weeks ago. I thought it might be a cryptohijacker but I dug thru elements, code & did some packet captures. I couldn't spot what the issue was - I couldn't even confirm it was ads.
ocdtrekkie 6y ago
This is really ironic considering Techdirt is on Google's public policy payroll (via "Copia Institute") on https://kstatic.googleusercontent.com/files/5a1907d78237ab177f4bfbbd3ee71354760419b9c69e03a2610c7ba99427e07a264d199288da7a7025846365c4a0b85ff4016bc2f6e3b9319ed1e980ff8b4cb1 https://kstatic.googleusercontent.com/files/5a1907d78237ab17... I suppose this suggests some manner of "fairness" to Google's widespread incompetence and inability to manage their platform effectively. If they can't keep things running smoothly for their paid shills, clearly nobody's getting an unfair advantage.
bluGill 6y ago
I've never understood why media companies don't treat ad sales as a core business. They are in the business of delivering ads to eyeballs, so why are they outsourcing their core business. I can see outsourcing the ad platform. However sales should be in house, and they should exercise editorial control over who is allowed to advertise.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  For the same reason why newspaper ads are rarer these days I would guess - next to nobody goes to them for their ads so the prices demandable tend to be lower than commodity or harder to fufill.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  I can see the cost of sales being quite high.
- creinhardt 6y ago
  Most medium to large media companies do have their own sales staff for online advertising! The problem generally is that they can't sell enough local/direct-sold ads at a high enough CPM to sell out their inventory. This is where they use something like AdSense, to fill in those gaps where they couldn't sell anything for a higher rate.
Supermancho 6y ago
While I do think TechDirt is rather scummy as a self-proclaimed rumor-monger site (one step away from clickbait), Google is an actual problem actor. This is not the first company to suffer their cruel indifference and nonsensical automated moderation. grits teeth I hope this story reaches more eyeballs.
daodedickinson 6y ago
Unaccountable monopoly
jeremiahlee 6y ago
I wish more sites would add a Web Monetization tag so that I can support them passively with my Coil subscription. They will earn more from the time I spend on their sites than from viewing the ads.
Animats 6y ago
Google would probably be happy if their ads ran only on sites that had only the site's own content. It wouldn't be surprising if Google de-monetized all sites that allow random users to submit comments.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
  > It wouldn't be surprising if Google de-monetized all sites that allow random users to submit comments. It would indeed be surprising. Also unfortunate and counterproductive. As with many sites that put competent effort into thoughtful moderation, some of Techdirt's best content shows up in article comments.
creinhardt 6y ago
Google's true customers are the people buying ads in the first place. They could care less about publishers. Banning one publisher (unless it's truly massive), isn't going to have much effect to Google's bottom line, so they err on the side of protecting the 'quality' of places ads can be served, at all costs. This also comes through when you see 'invalid traffic' deductions on your AdSense income reports, as i'm sure almost every account running AdSense does, along with the seemingly random crawler errors mentioned in the article. They don't feel the need to explain themselves, and can withhold the revenue at the excuse of 'protecting' the advertiser's side of things.
- creinhardt 6y ago
  Also, I'd love to see ad serving go back to direct sold simple images and links, with no tracking or programmatic targeting involved at all. Obviously for 99% of websites this is impossible, but it'd be more equitable long term. I often wonder how the web would have evolved differently if early in the HTML spec an <ad> html tag was added that just had a SRC and href attribute.
schappim 6y ago
It would seem Google has too much power.

251 points by MaysonL 6y ago

> Sometimes it was "dangerous and derogatory content." Sometimes it was "shocking content." So Google turned the filter sensitivity up to 11 just now huh? I don't get why techdirt insists that that is not about ideology.

throwaway_1299 6y ago
Is there something ideological about phishing protections?
- im3w1l 6y ago
  Oh I missed that the first time around. That changes things. Especially given that phishing claims started same time as everything else. Sounds like someone is mass-report attacking them or something then.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    Or there were two models, the output of one which is an input to another. Normally this would be a bad idea, but lots of people do it.
creinhardt 6y ago
My hunch on this was that there probably was a misconfiguration with whatever service they're using to send out emails. If they don't have the sending domain whitelisted with whatever service they're using, it can look super fishy (or phishy!). I'd be really, really surprised to find out that Google's automated AdSense ad quality tools are in any way tied to their email quality tools.

AlexandrB 6y ago

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. At least Microsoft had better customer support than Google.

Gibbon1 6y ago
That's because Microsoft has actual customers. Seriously it's functionally more of a protection racket than any other type of business.

madacoo 6y ago

It's refreshing to see an assumption of incompetence rather than malice, since I seem to have come across the idea that Google is questionably motivated by ideology rather a lot recently. One thing I don't understand is why Google continues to try to use algorithmic solutions for content moderation. Surely the frequent false positives ends up hurting potential revenue? And would it not be able to hire people to at least oversee the algorithms and respond to erratic behaviour as described in this article? It seems one could even argue that Google's focus on algorithmic rather than human solutions is a kind of harmful ideology, albeit not the kind that probably hasn't hurt Techdirt in this case.

kiba 6y ago
Who knows? They had decided long ago that genuine tech support is not in their business model, and that's the end of things.
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
>It seems one could even argue that Google's focus on algorithmic rather than human solutions is a kind of harmful ideology It's the kind of ideology that you often find in people who think they are smarter than everyone else.
- tmpz22 6y ago
  Imagine being plucked from college at 22 and getting payed 200k+ total compensation with an introduction telling you how you're now one of the best at your field working with the smartest people in the world... how you're changing the world before you've even been on-boarded.
  - asdff 6y ago
    It's like being told you are heir to the throne, and many engineers carry that same princely arrogance obliviously. At least doctors and lawyers have gone through a second gauntlet after acing school to temper this somewhat. Those fields might not even start making good money until you are years above the entry level, even with a pricey professional degree.

reaperducer 6y ago

I think the more correct answer to "Why Are Currently No Ads on Techdirt?" is "Because we put all of our eggs in one basket." Don't build a single point of failure into your revenue stream. There are plenty of alternatives to Google that they should have been using in a smaller way that they could then move into prime position. That way, Techdirt's revenue might have been diminished, but not eliminated.

mdoms 6y ago
Literally the last paragraph of the article is a call for help in finding these "plenty of alternatives" so instead of being snide maybe you can help out by listing some?
phoboslab 6y ago
I'm curious, what are the "plenty of alternatives" exactly? We have tried a lot of different advertising networks and sadly we have found none that's even in the same ballpark as AdSense (revenue wise). Advertising on the web is a shit show.
- celestialcheese 6y ago
  TripleLift, Sharethrough, AppNexus (now Xander), Rubicon Project, OpenX, GumGum, Index, Amazon A9. There are dozens of video demand partners as well. All of those have performed as well or better, from my experience. Where google has all of them beat is payment terms - net 21 is hard to beat.
nkozyra 6y ago
There are plenty of alternatives to Adsense but none of them are comparable. They all take a huge dive in RPM, are iffy with UX and security and tend to not last long. My personal account was locked out of Adsense in the same way years back. A violation every 5 months or so, which I always "corrected." Then one day it's just off. I respond and eventually Adsense is restored. Then a few weeks later, closed and banned. And it's been that way since. No recourse. Just ... shut out. This was a site with 100% user-generated content. If Google can't handle something like that, well ...

blakesterz 6y ago

For some reason I read the comments... "Someone who hates you is doing this on purpose" reads one. While I have NO IDEA what that's about, it does make me wonder, can people cause trouble for their competition through ad sense by doing things to cause the site to be dropped like this? That comment says it's because someone is leaving bad comments on the site, which seems unlikely, but I've read other stories about DMCA abuse or something like that to bring down competing sites or videos or whatever. Can someone abuse some kind of adsense reporting system and cause this to happen?

DevKoala 6y ago
Yes, I can use a programmatic ad exchange such a Google’s to push ads on a site that would result in a negative experience for visitors. The creative review process is pretty lax. I haven’t heard of a documented attack, but it would be easy to grief a small site in such a way.
- thatguy0900 6y ago
  I remember an old blog that was trolled by having homoerotic ads plastered all over it, but looking into the details now they just bribed the server master.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    There have been several waves of attacks where somebody posted malicious ads via Adsense that would use JS to redirect visitors to a different page. In the cases I was involved with, they were only targeting mobile traffic and redirected to a scam-site that asked users to download an app to fix a virus etc. We've reported it, never heard back from Google. It went away after a few days each time, and hasn't happened in two or three years, at least not to any site I'm involved with.
    - thatguy0900 6y ago
      Crazy something like that was even allowed to continue for a few days

input_sh 6y ago

I play this game with Google every month or so when the webmaster console reports some mobile experience issues, but when I do a manual scan, there are no issues. So I mark them as resolved and then there are no issues for the next month or so.

dawnerd 6y ago
I thought it was just us, but webmaster tools is constantly flagging mobile issues that are not issues.
nkozyra 6y ago
As far as I know you can ignore those. Typically it's like "elements too close" or "font size too small to read." Then the next day it's fine.
- shajznnckfke 6y ago
  Somewhere an instance of headless chrome is crashing and the thing trying to analyze your page on it is seeing every element located at (0,0).
jorams 6y ago
I've also seen several Search Console issues that displayed a "Last Crawled" date months or years in the past. They had long since gone outdated. In some cases the entire website had been replaced by that point.

specialist 6y ago

Open markets require a fair and impartial judiciary. I really wish Congress' investigations would put more emphasis on the practical, pragmatic issues. Like lack of accountability, lack of appeal, absence of recourse. Establishing tort (civil justice), more or less.

mywittyname 6y ago
>Establishing tort (civil justice), more or less. Tort is very important for a functioning free market. The government just doesn't have the capability to police everyone, and civil court allows the people to police each other. Which exactly why large corporations move to eliminate their civil liability with users.

jeffbee 6y ago

I don't know if this is the case with techdirt, but by far the most common reason why sites and domains (for mail) end up getting flagged is because their resources have been hijacked by organized criminals and are being used for crime, unbeknownst to the people who own the domains. So if this ever happens to you your first instinct should be to question your own production security situation, not to assume that Google has gone off the rails.

nkozyra 6y ago
Well let's entertain this possibility. It then seems very easy for Google to report why it disabled or why you were flagged. Playing the guessing game is not helpful. In my experience, things just go dark and you get very little or no helpful messaging about resolving the problem.
- creinhardt 6y ago
  This. Having been in a similar scenario, the most frustrating part is hearing "there's a problem, it's bad enough that we're disabling your account, but we can't even give you a hint what the actual issue was. We hope you can figure it out, maybe we'll eventually re-instate your account". In my experience, you can usually find something that COULD be the cause by digging through analytics/reports, if you can demonstrate that you took positive action on this, and get it infront of the right support people, they can sometimes help you out and ask for your account to be re-evaluated. You will never, ever find out if this is the reason they disabled your account in the first place though. Then, prepare for your account to be paused again.
bcrosby95 6y ago
We had some abuse on our site that Google blocked us for - people were trying to run a scam through it. Except the scam was being propagated on youtube and Google did nothing about the videos despite multiple reports from us. So my attitude is pretty simple: Google can fuck off. They can't even fix their own properties and will ban you for their inability to do so.
- 6y ago

dathinab 6y ago

Isn't it funny that Google complains about clickbait while many of there sites/apps do exactly that and have gotten worse in the recent years. Like in Gmail Google ads "pretend" to be mails, being exactly formatted like a mail and interleaving! with other mails. (Sure there is a small Ad label but it's indisguishable from a mail starting with Ad... in the subject) Similar things can be observed fruit custom page/domain search the first many entries looking like search results are actually advertisement pointing to somewhere outside if the domain you search, i.e. definitely not what you want when you do a search explicitly limited to one domain.

causality0 6y ago

Given Techdirt's philosophy I'm surprised they don't restrict themselves to only accepting individually curated, self-hosted ads.

throwaway45349 6y ago
Those don't make any money.

sebastien_b 6y ago

Google/Alphabet: a bunch of morons with PhDs.

scottrogowski 6y ago

A few months ago, I tried experimenting with Google ads to drive some traffic to a side project of mine which was basically a chess-over-videochat website. A little more than 40 impressions later, it was taken down for being "in violation of our Google ad policies". There was never any indication what the violation actually was. I replied and asked several times hoping to get a human to tell me what I had actually done wrong. Instead, they kept sending me an automated email that said, "After reviewing your case and taking your feedback into consideration, we've confirmed that your account was and still is in violation of our Google Ads policies." They also made it seem like I was some cyber criminal by suggesting that if I tried to create another account, they would automatically take that down too. This is what a monopoly looks like.

esperent 6y ago
I don't know much about adding ads to a website like this. Is there really no alternative to Google?
- jasonv 6y ago
  I've been reviewing self-service ad sales & serving plugins for Wordpress sites and my conclusion would be: no, there isn't.
  - haecceity 6y ago
    Bing?
  - stevesearer 6y ago
    We use advanced ads pro for Wordpress and it seems to work well enough for serving self-hosted ads. What are you looking for that it or others don’t offer?
    - jasonv 6y ago
      There are a handful of decent "adsense/manage your own ads" and "add adsense to your site" plugins, but the self-service model wasn't rich with options. The few I did start testing had bumpy roads for implementing and managing the integration into the template. I didn't test this one. Appreciate the recommendation... will look into it further.

aasasd 6y ago

The post gave me hope that a change of perspective on Google might ease up my irritation and horror from it a little—if I see it as a clumsy old behemoth, instead of the pioneer of future tech that it's usually portrayed as, and which basically translates to ‘what cyberpunk warned about’. (But then I remembered that it has literal databases of incredibly personal realtime info on billions of people, and lets police peruse locations of people that committed no crime.)

Animats 6y ago

Finally, we started receiving reports from multiple Techdirt visitors (including those who told us they had purposefully whitelisted Techdirt from their ad blockers) that ads being delivered by Google were causing their computers to run hot. Multiple reports of ads on Techdirt failing to load properly, and causing Techdirt to fail to load properly. And also causing fans to turn on. "Ads being delivered by Google were causing their computers to run hot?" Anyone have more detail on this?

WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
Only that I've seen similar on other sites (carrying Google ads, like very site). It stopped a couple of weeks ago. I thought it might be a cryptohijacker but I dug thru elements, code & did some packet captures. I couldn't spot what the issue was - I couldn't even confirm it was ads.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago

This is really ironic considering Techdirt is on Google's public policy payroll (via "Copia Institute") on https://kstatic.googleusercontent.com/files/5a1907d78237ab177f4bfbbd3ee71354760419b9c69e03a2610c7ba99427e07a264d199288da7a7025846365c4a0b85ff4016bc2f6e3b9319ed1e980ff8b4cb1 https://kstatic.googleusercontent.com/files/5a1907d78237ab17... I suppose this suggests some manner of "fairness" to Google's widespread incompetence and inability to manage their platform effectively. If they can't keep things running smoothly for their paid shills, clearly nobody's getting an unfair advantage.

bluGill 6y ago

I've never understood why media companies don't treat ad sales as a core business. They are in the business of delivering ads to eyeballs, so why are they outsourcing their core business. I can see outsourcing the ad platform. However sales should be in house, and they should exercise editorial control over who is allowed to advertise.

Nasrudith 6y ago
For the same reason why newspaper ads are rarer these days I would guess - next to nobody goes to them for their ads so the prices demandable tend to be lower than commodity or harder to fufill.
MattGaiser 6y ago
I can see the cost of sales being quite high.
creinhardt 6y ago
Most medium to large media companies do have their own sales staff for online advertising! The problem generally is that they can't sell enough local/direct-sold ads at a high enough CPM to sell out their inventory. This is where they use something like AdSense, to fill in those gaps where they couldn't sell anything for a higher rate.

Supermancho 6y ago

While I do think TechDirt is rather scummy as a self-proclaimed rumor-monger site (one step away from clickbait), Google is an actual problem actor. This is not the first company to suffer their cruel indifference and nonsensical automated moderation. grits teeth I hope this story reaches more eyeballs.

daodedickinson 6y ago

Unaccountable monopoly

jeremiahlee 6y ago

I wish more sites would add a Web Monetization tag so that I can support them passively with my Coil subscription. They will earn more from the time I spend on their sites than from viewing the ads.

Animats 6y ago

Google would probably be happy if their ads ran only on sites that had only the site's own content. It wouldn't be surprising if Google de-monetized all sites that allow random users to submit comments.

WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
> It wouldn't be surprising if Google de-monetized all sites that allow random users to submit comments. It would indeed be surprising. Also unfortunate and counterproductive. As with many sites that put competent effort into thoughtful moderation, some of Techdirt's best content shows up in article comments.

creinhardt 6y ago

Google's true customers are the people buying ads in the first place. They could care less about publishers. Banning one publisher (unless it's truly massive), isn't going to have much effect to Google's bottom line, so they err on the side of protecting the 'quality' of places ads can be served, at all costs. This also comes through when you see 'invalid traffic' deductions on your AdSense income reports, as i'm sure almost every account running AdSense does, along with the seemingly random crawler errors mentioned in the article. They don't feel the need to explain themselves, and can withhold the revenue at the excuse of 'protecting' the advertiser's side of things.

creinhardt 6y ago
Also, I'd love to see ad serving go back to direct sold simple images and links, with no tracking or programmatic targeting involved at all. Obviously for 99% of websites this is impossible, but it'd be more equitable long term. I often wonder how the web would have evolved differently if early in the HTML spec an <ad> html tag was added that just had a SRC and href attribute.

schappim 6y ago

It would seem Google has too much power.