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Google’s Ad System Has Become Too Big to Control

69 points by Fjolsvith 11y ago

johansch 11y ago
What utter total bullocks.
yc1010 11y ago
Google adsense has a bigger problem, adblocking It has gone from hardcore nerds (about 10%) blocking ads which was fine to everyone and their mother blocking ads on desktops/laptops, and I do not blame them. According to my measurements of adblocking (surprisingly easy to detect if ads are being blocked) I have used adsense since it started in 2003 making close to million euro in that time, but the last few months have been absolutely disastrous (tho my traffic has also fallen in last couple of years unfortunately) Basically the writing is on the wall and I have concentrated on other projects in last while There must be alot of worried people now at google wondering if they will still have a job in a few years, yes mobile is helping but for how long?
- Udo 11y ago
  I think it became disastrous for Google when they made the decision to serve image ads, and even worse: animated ads. This means as a user you can no longer whitelist Google ads with the expectation they'll stick to unobtrusive text-only ads. But there's also a deeper problem. In my opinion, when you install an ad blocker, you're already exceptionally unlikely to click an ad on purpose.
  - corin_ 11y ago
    > In my opinion, when you install an ad blocker, you're already exceptionally unlikely to click an ad on purpose. I don't think that's the case, I think it's just a lie told by people working in ad sales Nobody installs ad block because they realised they weren't interested in any of the adverts. They're doing it because some adverts are annoying or distracting or browser intensive or privacy violating or... None of those things make a person less likely to click on an advert if they see one that is both reasonably presented and relevant to their interests. Of course there are people who detest adverts, and in those people there's obviously a (close to 100% I presume) crossover between "has adblock" and "wouldn't click anyway", but I think those people are a small minority of people blocking ads.
    - Udo 11y ago
      > I don't think that's the case, I think it's just a lie told by people working in ad sales I don't work in ad sales, and I'm not lying. Yes, ads are beyond annoying and they're making some websites borderline unusable - but the reason why ads don't work lies in the fact that the number of ads I ever clicked on purpose could probably be counted on one hand, over my entire lifetime. It may well be the case that I'm exceptional, but on the off chance I'm not: advertisers were wasting their dollars on showing me stuff since way before I even knew what an ad blocker was.
      - agumonkey 11y ago
        I'm close to your one-handed-click-count 'niche'. I'm really not a commercial target. I kinda despise the actual idea of advertising. It's in your face, takes a lot of resources, distract and also rarely on point. I don't think I would ever install an adblocker if it was 80% small text ads (like Google off side ads), or a non invasive static image (granted it's not taking more space than the content I was about to read). Could website function with this kind only ? Also, I really wonder what it looks like for a user to click on an ad... ps: I didn't count the few times I did click on them voluntarily just to give some prints to a website in need.
      - teddyuk 11y ago
        i'm like you, the only time I had clicked an ad has been by accident and I have hit back straight away.
        geomark 11y ago
        Same here. Never clicked an ad intentionally. Not on a website or on Google's search results pages. I guess that's why it seems to me that all the huffing and puffing about the evils of ad blockers is nonsense, because ad blocker or not I'm not going to click an ad. I'm also going to avert my eyes if I see a display ad, so brand building with display ads is also lost on me. And I have never purchased music that includes DRM, except a DVD by accident one time and I returned it for a refund when I discovered it was infected with DRM. I guess I'm just a really terrible consumer and not part of anybody's target market.
  - cronjobber 11y ago
    > you're already exceptionally unlikely to click an ad on purpose. I hate distracting blinkety-blink and I hate the tracking and spying aspect of the whole sordid business model, so I adblock. But I can't say I'm immune to the ads I do see.
- HappyTypist 11y ago
  Google is reportedly paying 30% of ad revenue to the company behind Adblock Plus to get on the "acceptable ads" whitelist for Google search. I find this a despicable pracrice and encourage my friends to use another ad blocker. If you use ABP, you are funding Eyeo.
  - golergka 11y ago
    > reportedly Can you please provide a source?
    - jmngomes 11y ago
      Also curious...I'd be surprised if they are still paying 30% to the publishers.
  - philjohn 11y ago
    Like it or not, ads pay for much of the content you consume online. I don't mind unobtrusive ads, and the google adsense ads tend to fall into that camp.
  - blfr 11y ago
    You only need to untick one box in ABP and it stops letting through the whitelisted ads.
  - fridek 11y ago
    That would be $20 billion, making it one of the top 1000 companies by revenue globally. I'll leave it to you to decide if it looks like a true information.
  - cbr 11y ago
    https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads No applicant will be favored or treated differently, and no one can buy their way onto the whitelist. Everyone has tocomply with the criteria and everyone has to go through the same process before the ads qualify as "acceptable." https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads-agreements https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads-agreements Do companies pay you for being added to the list? Whitelisting is free for all small- and medium websites and blogs. However, managing this list requires significant effort on our side and this task cannot be completely taken over by volunteers as it happens with common filter lists. That's why we are being paid by some larger properties that serve non-intrusive advertisements that want to participate in the Acceptable Ads initiative.
- pjc50 11y ago
  I'm considering rooting my Android phone and tablet simply so I can install effective adblockers against three things: - in-app ads which, without clicking on the ad, bounce me out of the app and into a browser - browser ads which bounce to the good old "your computer has a virus!" exploitware - animated web background ads which slow the browser to a crawl
  - blfr 11y ago
    You can have a regular in-browser AdBlock in mobile Firefox without rooting the phone. It doesn't stop the in-apps ads of course.
  - raverbashing 11y ago
    Really, displaying exploitware should be reason to ban completely those who use it (from the app stores)
  - DanBC 11y ago
    > - in-app ads which, without clicking on the ad, bounce me out of the app and into a browser On iOS there are ads that bounce you out of the browser and into the app store. I cannot understand how anyone thinks this is a good idea. I am ad tolerant but those ads make me want to use ad block technology.
    - falcolas 11y ago
      Yeah, Imgur would run some of these ads, and I wanted to scream every time I would be browsing reddit and get bounced to the app store with every third click.
    - jmngomes 11y ago
      Deep linking was being touted as the next big thing in mobile advertising, namely by some well known VCs (1) that love to play the predict-the-next-breakthrough lottery, yet it has proven to be more of a nuisance than anything else... (1) https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/608713213702713344 https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/608713213702713344
    - 11y ago
- honest_joe 11y ago
  Can that be "fixed" by dynamically CSS generated ads ?
- ExpiredLink 11y ago
  Google could easily circumvent ad-blocking by making ads indistinguishable from content. I hope they will not do it, the internet would become a bustling nightmare.
  - thescrewdriver 11y ago
    The background color of ads section in search results seems to get closer and closer to the regular page background each year, or maybe it's just my eyes.
    - cbr 11y ago
      They've switched from coloring the background to adding a yellow "Ad" marker on each ad: https://www.google.com/search?q=credit+cards https://www.google.com/search?q=credit+cards
- amelius 11y ago
  > Google adsense has a bigger problem, adblocking Also, one day Congress will figure out that it could be a good idea to introduce a tax on ads.
- tobico 11y ago
  I use ad blockers for distracting image and popup ads, but I fairly frequently click on Google text ads in search results. When there's a product category that's very crowded, if a company is willing to pony up some money to get my attention, that's often one indicator that a particular product might be worth my time to investigate.
  - kps 11y ago
    These are about the only ads I deliberately use, and yet, it happens again and again that I am interested in buying XYZ, search for XYZ, click an ad that explicitly mentions XYZ — and find that the advertiser doesn't offer XYZ. What is it about marketeers that has them ceaselessly shitting upstream from where people drink?
dsjoerg 11y ago
from the article (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.6491v2.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.6491v2.pdf): "We also like to assign blame where it is due. However, doing so is often difficult. For example, our view on blame varies based on why females were discriminated against in our gender and jobs experiment. If Google allowed the advertiser to easily discriminate, we would blame both."
- cbr 11y ago
  Google allowed the advertiser to easily discriminate This is definitely the case: With demographic targeting in AdWords, you can reach customers who are likely to be within the demographic groups that you choose. Demographic groups that you can choose from include: * age * gender * parental status For example, if your business caters to a specific set of customers within a particular age range, gender, or parental status, you may want to target your ads to this audience because they’re more likely to be interested in your products or services. https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2580383?hl=en https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2580383?hl=en
EdwardDiego 11y ago
Speaking as someone who works for a competitor to Google in the online advertising space, we take great comfort in how large and unwieldy Google's system is. It gives us opportunities and niches to target.
- Jgrubb 11y ago
  Can I ask who you work for? I work for a publisher (who's deeply in bed with DFP, but also a couple others).
Donzo 11y ago
One person's notion of "discrimination" is another's notion of "targeting." Perhaps marketers should be able to target the demographics that they are trying to reach. Perhaps the system is working as it was intended.
- forgottenpass 11y ago
  One person's "questionable practice" is another's "profitable"? This is nothing new and the implied if not explicit backdrop of the article in the first place. Or maybe I'm missing your point.
treelovinhippie 11y ago
In my experience it's also one of the most complicated. Maybe it was just our specific use case but my experience with AdWords was 2 months of tweaking keywords and consulting with one of their free specialists. $40/day. After about $1000 we were seeing an average of $13 per conversion, and stopped. Facebook ads were setup in 5min, nothing special, same area targeting, same messaging and graphics: $2.50 per conversion.
- prawn 11y ago
  Back in the beginning, AdWords was actually a decent and affordable option. Then they started jacking up prices even in the absence of competition of others for the same keywords.
cbr 11y ago
The paper talks about two main findings: 1. Test accounts that visited substance abuse websites were much more likely to be shown ads for Watershed Rehab but nothing shows up on the ad settings page indicating the change. 2. Test accounts where the ad settings page has gender=male were much more likely to be shown ads for the recruiter careerchange.com, which offered "$200k+ Jobs - Execs Only". The first case sounds very much like retargeting. The substance abuse website would drop a cookie and get a small payment from a central db for telling them that this cookie is associated with viewing substance abuse websites. Then Watershed Rehab wants to advertise to substance abuse website visitors, so they pay the central db for a list of cookies, which includes this one. Then Watershed sets up an ad campaign with Google and asks to target visitors with cookies on this list. This can't show up as an "interest" on the ads settings page as "substance abuse" because the association was made by third parties; Google doesn't have enough of the picture to see what happened. You can opt out of retargeting by turning off "interest based ads" at https://www.google.com/settings/ads https://www.google.com/settings/ads The second case sounds like careerchange.com submitted an ad campaign that looked at the gender field. Advertisers have tried to target specific genders for a long time through color and where they advertise, but the internet does make it much more explicit. Still, this is a very small sample to be drawing large conclusions about, especially as careerchange.com stopped doing it (observed in their May run but not the June one). Disclaimer: I work at Google, on open source software, and I don't know anything about these specific cases.
- protomyth 11y ago
  "The substance abuse website would drop a cookie and get a small payment from a central db for telling them that this cookie is associated with viewing substance abuse websites." Any substance abuse website that does this is run by charlatans and has all the morality of a hyena. This is such a violation of trust that I cannot imagine any healing coming from it.
  - cbr 11y ago
    The effect of this is that people who visit substance abuse websites see ads for rehab centers. This seems generally positive, though there's a risk of other people seeing the computer and asking "why are you getting ads for rehab centers?" Or is there something else that makes this bad that I'm missing?
ashishk 11y ago
Anyone else find it ironic that this article has Adsense / Doubleclick ads on it?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
JupiterMoon 11y ago
This is exactly what Google's advertising system is designed to do!
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
CWuestefeld 11y ago
I'm not finding this terribly shocking. I just can't get worked up about the "problem" that Google is allowing people - not doing it themselves, mind you, but simply failing to actively block other people - from targeting ads in a way that some other people might find unfair. The world of advertising seems an odd place to have this battle. Do we really believe that a person of protected class X has an affirmative right to be targeted by advertising in the same way as everyone else? I find it difficult to imagine someone exclaiming "how come HE got to see the advertisement, but you didn't put the ad in for me?" - or anyone who does get offended in this way is probably seeking out faults to complain about.

69 points by Fjolsvith 11y ago

What utter total bullocks.

Google adsense has a bigger problem, adblocking It has gone from hardcore nerds (about 10%) blocking ads which was fine to everyone and their mother blocking ads on desktops/laptops, and I do not blame them. According to my measurements of adblocking (surprisingly easy to detect if ads are being blocked) I have used adsense since it started in 2003 making close to million euro in that time, but the last few months have been absolutely disastrous (tho my traffic has also fallen in last couple of years unfortunately) Basically the writing is on the wall and I have concentrated on other projects in last while There must be alot of worried people now at google wondering if they will still have a job in a few years, yes mobile is helping but for how long?

Udo 11y ago
I think it became disastrous for Google when they made the decision to serve image ads, and even worse: animated ads. This means as a user you can no longer whitelist Google ads with the expectation they'll stick to unobtrusive text-only ads. But there's also a deeper problem. In my opinion, when you install an ad blocker, you're already exceptionally unlikely to click an ad on purpose.
- corin_ 11y ago
  > In my opinion, when you install an ad blocker, you're already exceptionally unlikely to click an ad on purpose. I don't think that's the case, I think it's just a lie told by people working in ad sales Nobody installs ad block because they realised they weren't interested in any of the adverts. They're doing it because some adverts are annoying or distracting or browser intensive or privacy violating or... None of those things make a person less likely to click on an advert if they see one that is both reasonably presented and relevant to their interests. Of course there are people who detest adverts, and in those people there's obviously a (close to 100% I presume) crossover between "has adblock" and "wouldn't click anyway", but I think those people are a small minority of people blocking ads.
  - Udo 11y ago
    > I don't think that's the case, I think it's just a lie told by people working in ad sales I don't work in ad sales, and I'm not lying. Yes, ads are beyond annoying and they're making some websites borderline unusable - but the reason why ads don't work lies in the fact that the number of ads I ever clicked on purpose could probably be counted on one hand, over my entire lifetime. It may well be the case that I'm exceptional, but on the off chance I'm not: advertisers were wasting their dollars on showing me stuff since way before I even knew what an ad blocker was.
    - agumonkey 11y ago
      I'm close to your one-handed-click-count 'niche'. I'm really not a commercial target. I kinda despise the actual idea of advertising. It's in your face, takes a lot of resources, distract and also rarely on point. I don't think I would ever install an adblocker if it was 80% small text ads (like Google off side ads), or a non invasive static image (granted it's not taking more space than the content I was about to read). Could website function with this kind only ? Also, I really wonder what it looks like for a user to click on an ad... ps: I didn't count the few times I did click on them voluntarily just to give some prints to a website in need.
    - teddyuk 11y ago
      i'm like you, the only time I had clicked an ad has been by accident and I have hit back straight away.
      - geomark 11y ago
        Same here. Never clicked an ad intentionally. Not on a website or on Google's search results pages. I guess that's why it seems to me that all the huffing and puffing about the evils of ad blockers is nonsense, because ad blocker or not I'm not going to click an ad. I'm also going to avert my eyes if I see a display ad, so brand building with display ads is also lost on me. And I have never purchased music that includes DRM, except a DVD by accident one time and I returned it for a refund when I discovered it was infected with DRM. I guess I'm just a really terrible consumer and not part of anybody's target market.
- cronjobber 11y ago
  > you're already exceptionally unlikely to click an ad on purpose. I hate distracting blinkety-blink and I hate the tracking and spying aspect of the whole sordid business model, so I adblock. But I can't say I'm immune to the ads I do see.
HappyTypist 11y ago
Google is reportedly paying 30% of ad revenue to the company behind Adblock Plus to get on the "acceptable ads" whitelist for Google search. I find this a despicable pracrice and encourage my friends to use another ad blocker. If you use ABP, you are funding Eyeo.
- golergka 11y ago
  > reportedly Can you please provide a source?
  - jmngomes 11y ago
    Also curious...I'd be surprised if they are still paying 30% to the publishers.
- philjohn 11y ago
  Like it or not, ads pay for much of the content you consume online. I don't mind unobtrusive ads, and the google adsense ads tend to fall into that camp.
- blfr 11y ago
  You only need to untick one box in ABP and it stops letting through the whitelisted ads.
- fridek 11y ago
  That would be $20 billion, making it one of the top 1000 companies by revenue globally. I'll leave it to you to decide if it looks like a true information.
- cbr 11y ago
  https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads No applicant will be favored or treated differently, and no one can buy their way onto the whitelist. Everyone has tocomply with the criteria and everyone has to go through the same process before the ads qualify as "acceptable." https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads-agreements https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads-agreements Do companies pay you for being added to the list? Whitelisting is free for all small- and medium websites and blogs. However, managing this list requires significant effort on our side and this task cannot be completely taken over by volunteers as it happens with common filter lists. That's why we are being paid by some larger properties that serve non-intrusive advertisements that want to participate in the Acceptable Ads initiative.
pjc50 11y ago
I'm considering rooting my Android phone and tablet simply so I can install effective adblockers against three things: - in-app ads which, without clicking on the ad, bounce me out of the app and into a browser - browser ads which bounce to the good old "your computer has a virus!" exploitware - animated web background ads which slow the browser to a crawl
- blfr 11y ago
  You can have a regular in-browser AdBlock in mobile Firefox without rooting the phone. It doesn't stop the in-apps ads of course.
- raverbashing 11y ago
  Really, displaying exploitware should be reason to ban completely those who use it (from the app stores)
- DanBC 11y ago
  > - in-app ads which, without clicking on the ad, bounce me out of the app and into a browser On iOS there are ads that bounce you out of the browser and into the app store. I cannot understand how anyone thinks this is a good idea. I am ad tolerant but those ads make me want to use ad block technology.
  - falcolas 11y ago
    Yeah, Imgur would run some of these ads, and I wanted to scream every time I would be browsing reddit and get bounced to the app store with every third click.
  - jmngomes 11y ago
    Deep linking was being touted as the next big thing in mobile advertising, namely by some well known VCs (1) that love to play the predict-the-next-breakthrough lottery, yet it has proven to be more of a nuisance than anything else... (1) https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/608713213702713344 https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/608713213702713344
  - 11y ago
honest_joe 11y ago
Can that be "fixed" by dynamically CSS generated ads ?
ExpiredLink 11y ago
Google could easily circumvent ad-blocking by making ads indistinguishable from content. I hope they will not do it, the internet would become a bustling nightmare.
- thescrewdriver 11y ago
  The background color of ads section in search results seems to get closer and closer to the regular page background each year, or maybe it's just my eyes.
  - cbr 11y ago
    They've switched from coloring the background to adding a yellow "Ad" marker on each ad: https://www.google.com/search?q=credit+cards https://www.google.com/search?q=credit+cards
amelius 11y ago
> Google adsense has a bigger problem, adblocking Also, one day Congress will figure out that it could be a good idea to introduce a tax on ads.
tobico 11y ago
I use ad blockers for distracting image and popup ads, but I fairly frequently click on Google text ads in search results. When there's a product category that's very crowded, if a company is willing to pony up some money to get my attention, that's often one indicator that a particular product might be worth my time to investigate.
- kps 11y ago
  These are about the only ads I deliberately use, and yet, it happens again and again that I am interested in buying XYZ, search for XYZ, click an ad that explicitly mentions XYZ — and find that the advertiser doesn't offer XYZ. What is it about marketeers that has them ceaselessly shitting upstream from where people drink?

dsjoerg 11y ago

from the article (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.6491v2.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.6491v2.pdf): "We also like to assign blame where it is due. However, doing so is often difficult. For example, our view on blame varies based on why females were discriminated against in our gender and jobs experiment. If Google allowed the advertiser to easily discriminate, we would blame both."

cbr 11y ago
Google allowed the advertiser to easily discriminate This is definitely the case: With demographic targeting in AdWords, you can reach customers who are likely to be within the demographic groups that you choose. Demographic groups that you can choose from include: * age * gender * parental status For example, if your business caters to a specific set of customers within a particular age range, gender, or parental status, you may want to target your ads to this audience because they’re more likely to be interested in your products or services. https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2580383?hl=en https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2580383?hl=en

EdwardDiego 11y ago

Speaking as someone who works for a competitor to Google in the online advertising space, we take great comfort in how large and unwieldy Google's system is. It gives us opportunities and niches to target.

Jgrubb 11y ago
Can I ask who you work for? I work for a publisher (who's deeply in bed with DFP, but also a couple others).

Donzo 11y ago

One person's notion of "discrimination" is another's notion of "targeting." Perhaps marketers should be able to target the demographics that they are trying to reach. Perhaps the system is working as it was intended.

forgottenpass 11y ago
One person's "questionable practice" is another's "profitable"? This is nothing new and the implied if not explicit backdrop of the article in the first place. Or maybe I'm missing your point.

treelovinhippie 11y ago

In my experience it's also one of the most complicated. Maybe it was just our specific use case but my experience with AdWords was 2 months of tweaking keywords and consulting with one of their free specialists. $40/day. After about $1000 we were seeing an average of $13 per conversion, and stopped. Facebook ads were setup in 5min, nothing special, same area targeting, same messaging and graphics: $2.50 per conversion.

prawn 11y ago
Back in the beginning, AdWords was actually a decent and affordable option. Then they started jacking up prices even in the absence of competition of others for the same keywords.

cbr 11y ago

The paper talks about two main findings: 1. Test accounts that visited substance abuse websites were much more likely to be shown ads for Watershed Rehab but nothing shows up on the ad settings page indicating the change. 2. Test accounts where the ad settings page has gender=male were much more likely to be shown ads for the recruiter careerchange.com, which offered "$200k+ Jobs - Execs Only". The first case sounds very much like retargeting. The substance abuse website would drop a cookie and get a small payment from a central db for telling them that this cookie is associated with viewing substance abuse websites. Then Watershed Rehab wants to advertise to substance abuse website visitors, so they pay the central db for a list of cookies, which includes this one. Then Watershed sets up an ad campaign with Google and asks to target visitors with cookies on this list. This can't show up as an "interest" on the ads settings page as "substance abuse" because the association was made by third parties; Google doesn't have enough of the picture to see what happened. You can opt out of retargeting by turning off "interest based ads" at https://www.google.com/settings/ads https://www.google.com/settings/ads The second case sounds like careerchange.com submitted an ad campaign that looked at the gender field. Advertisers have tried to target specific genders for a long time through color and where they advertise, but the internet does make it much more explicit. Still, this is a very small sample to be drawing large conclusions about, especially as careerchange.com stopped doing it (observed in their May run but not the June one). Disclaimer: I work at Google, on open source software, and I don't know anything about these specific cases.

protomyth 11y ago
"The substance abuse website would drop a cookie and get a small payment from a central db for telling them that this cookie is associated with viewing substance abuse websites." Any substance abuse website that does this is run by charlatans and has all the morality of a hyena. This is such a violation of trust that I cannot imagine any healing coming from it.
- cbr 11y ago
  The effect of this is that people who visit substance abuse websites see ads for rehab centers. This seems generally positive, though there's a risk of other people seeing the computer and asking "why are you getting ads for rehab centers?" Or is there something else that makes this bad that I'm missing?

ashishk 11y ago

Anyone else find it ironic that this article has Adsense / Doubleclick ads on it?

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

JupiterMoon 11y ago

This is exactly what Google's advertising system is designed to do!

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

CWuestefeld 11y ago

I'm not finding this terribly shocking. I just can't get worked up about the "problem" that Google is allowing people - not doing it themselves, mind you, but simply failing to actively block other people - from targeting ads in a way that some other people might find unfair. The world of advertising seems an odd place to have this battle. Do we really believe that a person of protected class X has an affirmative right to be targeted by advertising in the same way as everyone else? I find it difficult to imagine someone exclaiming "how come HE got to see the advertisement, but you didn't put the ad in for me?" - or anyone who does get offended in this way is probably seeking out faults to complain about.