Google to give 6 months' warning for 2018 Chrome adblockalypse – report Publishers will get a six-month headsup before Google kills intrusive advertising on Chrome, sources close to the ad giant have reportedly said. Google will also hand online publishers a special tool to make sure that their ads are "compliant", the firm blogged yesterday. It will be called "Ad Experience Reports" – ostensibly …
They could.
But the first hint of malware, guess who will be held responsible in law ? (Hint: not the advertisers).
Would you allow your website to serve ads that you would be held responsible for ?
Private Eyes regular feature "Malgorithms" might be worth a read ....
All kinds of print media used to contain ads which were indeed "served" in the same printed pages the content was. Didn't seem to be a particular problem.
And if it meant that the ads served were less intrusive (imo preferably simple passive images and/or text), I would even be prepared to turn off my ad blocker on such sites.
ads which were indeed "served" in the same printed pages the content was. Didn't seem to be a particular problem.
I used to buy printed weekly news magazines, until I noticed that I was paying more and more to be "served" more and more ads, so I stopped giving them my money.
Same thing with cable: stopped paying for it when I noticed that there were as many (if not more than) ads than open channels.
So, when it became a problem I voted with my wallet. I am the one who decides when ads are intrusive and/or inconvenient.
All kinds of print media used to contain ads which were indeed "served" in the same printed pages the content was. Didn't seem to be a particular problem.
Right. But they couldn't blink, move, play sound and video, slow down my page turns, block my view of the article until I sign up for their newsletter, track me through my entire life like a cow with an ear tag, or infect my kitchen table with malware.
Whatever the print ads did or didn't do, the point is that the publisher didn't mind inheriting the responsibility for them, presumably because they went through their ad department, were checked, and were passive.
So even now, publishers big enough (eg newspapers) could use their own servers to serve passive ads as checked and deemed acceptable by an internal department - and they would not be in any danger of extra "responsibility" than they were for print[1].
[1] They could be if they served video or flash ads ... but to reiterate, that wasn't the point being made.
> "If it's done server-side then they're not running potentially malicious code on my machine."
Of course they will, it'd be the same ads, just served as part of the content rather than a link.
FFS I'm not saying ads are great, just that there are ways to work around ad-blcokers, and that responsibility for the content is not a show stopper. The agencies could even form contracts with the publishers where they carry the financial consequences of action that results from their ad.
That they are annoying is irrelevant, of course they are annoying.
"All kinds of print media used to contain ads which were indeed "served" in the same printed pages the content was. Didn't seem to be a particular problem."
But you didn't have to peel several layers of adverts off before you could read the contents every time you opened print media....
Ah, you have never experienced the false ad cover over the real cover on a magazine or a special advertising section wrapped around a content section in the newspapers.
There were (are? I no longer consume magazines.) magazines that had several pages of ads before the table of contents with the only option to sequentially page through to find the TOC to find out on which page a cover story starts.
The difference with Print advertising and Web based advertising is rather significant.
1. Print ads don't make you read the ad before viewing the content
2. Print ads don't harvest and phone home metrics on where you have been and what you have been doing
3. Print ads are required to conform to an ethical standard set by the relevant media authority
4. Print ads are traceable to their creators
5. Print ads don't contain malware intended to back door or hold your files to ransom
6. Print ads don't try to scam you with fake errors or issues trying to get you to pay for bogus support you never needed.
In my opinion the more like Prind ads that online advertising becomes the better. If Google is forcing standards and ethics on advertisers then great, about time someone did
> Would you allow your website to serve ads that you would be held responsible for ?
Yes, in the same way that Private Eye has ads and is similarly liable for their content.
I'm not sure that you're protected by virtue of it being a link anyway, you've still put in the instructions to send that content to the browser.
I already hold the sites responsible for the ads they serve, even if they are are using ad networks. If they serve intrusive ads, or if they trip the antivirus/malware scanners on the systems that I support, I just block the sites or don't come back depending on severity. Whether their servers served up the ad is immaterial -- they allowed their website to be used for the purpose and that is enough for me.
They could embed content server side, then you'd have to identify the ads from the content of the ads.
Some responsible sites would never do that, not even to peddle seminars and conferences on DevOps. Seminars that could increase your knowledge, intelligence and follicle count, for a very, very low price, only 200.000 tickets left.
They could embed content server side, then you'd have to identify the ads from the content of the ads.
I wouldn't mind that so much. If it's done server-side then they're not running potentially malicious code on my machine. I block adverts because of all the JavaScript and the fact that malware can arrive by that route, it's a security issue at least as much as an ad issue. The problem with embedding it server side is that it means the server has to work harder and it scales less well on a busy site. If they call in adverts from a different host then they'll still get blocked by some means because there will be something with which to identify the ads, so they have to host the whole thing on the same server as the content.
Firefox + AdNauseum = everyone wins
I see no adverts on my page, but in the background the ads get shown and clicked on
The site get the click throughs, I don't see the ads and (even better) it polutes the metadata aggregator profiles so they don't know who I am or what I am actually interested in.
"ad-blocker in a dominant browser could mean the world's dominant ad network could be filtering out rival ad networks, which has competition implications".
Discouraging intrusive advertising is a good idea. But it's the wrong agency doing it. It should be a governmental responsibility, not left up to Google. I know, I know... but not all governments are as clueless and clumsy as the UK one; nor should the likes of Ruddy Awful be taken as the template for all possible governments.
If Google developed tools for this, and then made money selling them to governments to apply them fairly and across the board, what would not be to like?
Beer because it's Friday.
"If Google developed tools for this, and then made money selling them to governments to apply them fairly and across the board, ..."
So, Google develops software/plugins, sells them to Government which then forces us to install them? I'm not sure how your revolutionary idea would work. Please explain.
It's not that revolutionary an idea. How are intrusive ads going to be discouraged, except by some kind of authority? The question is: which authority? Governmental authority (which means that the UK gov in particular need to start their learning curve by buying a few Internet for Dummies books), or Google's own authority, which is technically competent but beyond anyone's control?
I suppose making these tools available but optional is what you're hinting at. Trouble is, how much effect is that going to have on the scum who sling ads round the Internet? The whole Internet ads ecosystem is so (deliberately) fragmented that market pressures just won't work on it.
"The whole Internet ads ecosystem is so (deliberately) fragmented that market pressures just won't work on it."
The stupid is strong in this one. Consider:
Website owners deploy obnoxious adverts - third party develops ad-blocking software - I haven't seen any ads for over ten years.
Market successful.
Exactly, this is nothing more than Google the ad slinger taking the role of ad gatekeeper in a market that isn't really broken.
The problem for website owners is that because of their use/allowance of obnoxious and at times malevolent adverts it becomes increasingly difficult to go the other way unless they go to totally passive ads they serve themselves. Note that Google and others don't want that since it would mean their fancy data miners have a much harder time serving up targeting ads.
.... their fancy data miners ....
And there, folks is where i suspect the evil A to G is really interested.
I'll lay a bet that the scumbags will have something inserted in all this to let them mine more luvverly data.
We'll now need a 3rd party data scraper blocker to go with the ad blocker, which we'll still need of course.
Me paranoid?
No seriously.
If the price to pay to not see ads was comparable to the average ad-revenue earned for each page-view (i.e. around 1/10th cent), then (as long as Google made it easy to set up an account with them, and they then dealt with the micropayments, and gave me some generic options for maximum to pay, or maximum before asking) I'd be very happy with that.
In fact I even suggested the idea to Google - they're the obvious people to implement such a system, at least for their own ad-network.
"(i.e. around 1/10th cent)" ... was on a site the other day that wanted 40c (South African)(== USD 0.31)
On 1000 pages that's R400 which is vastly above typical (I would image, certainly above my < R30) page RPM via Google Adsense...
So I didn't offer to join the micropayments scheme they were running ...
I would actually consider to pay a reasonable amount to El Reg if that means I stop SEEING THE GODDAMMED LADY SHAVING HER MOUSTACHE IN THE NAME OF GOD I HATE THAT AD WITH A PASSION AND I WILL NEVER EVER BUY ANYTHING FROM TINTRI EVER
</Rant>
whew! that was cathartic. As many people, I am stuck with a browser without adblockers due to company policies: I just can't install add ons, paying for an ad-free experience sounds very tempting in this particular case
Oh dearie dearie me, these people just don't get it do they.
Have a wild stab in the dark guess about why people use Ad-blockers...yep, you guys are pushing total crap through Ads along with opening holes for other people to throw all manner of malwareSpam at us so we are fighting back. Clearly the Ad-blockers are now having enough impact that revenues are threatened so I would say that is a win.
I use Vivaldi and it isn't bad at all. Problem is it's based on Chrome and also I dunno how they're making their money. There's been a couple of recent bits like the history monitoring thing that are a bit worrying.
I want a browser that just plain doesn't store history beyond the session you're currently in and doesn't send it anywhere; but that doesn't seem to exist.
I mainly use palemoon and firefox, but recently I found chromium makes twitter usable, quite noticeably faster than firefox. Chromium is supposed to be chrome with the more obnoxious google data-gathering removed.
So I was surprised a few days ago, following a link about webrtc, to see that a German group, iridium.de, has gone further, using the chromium base to strip out, they say, even more google snooping. I suppose iridium is to chromium what palemoon is to firefox.
But back to the topic - privoxy and ublock origin seems to block almost all unwanted content. Hard to see a downside to a web with few, and simple, adverts.
Ad slinging pages have themselves to blame here - Ad-blockers are popular because ads are annoying, and to a lesser degree (though more serious) potential ingress routes for malware.
The more pages sling annoying ads, the more people get annoyed with them (surprising, eh?) and want to stop them. So the more people block them.
Advertising in the street may or may not be eye-catching, but the majority is billboards in set locations, or bus stop advertising boards, or on the side of busses. It is passive, and people generally just get on with their lives.
If the web had followed suit, and restricted themselves to static banner ads on web-pages, then we probably wouldn't be talking about this now. People would just accept it and get on with their lives.
But no, we get popups, pop-unders, banner ads that spread across the page, ads that get in the way of what you want to do on the site, auto-playing videos, auto-playing videos with audio, and combinations of the lot.
So we want them gone. Is anyone suprised?
I don't see pay-per-view being a popular choice either. Most things don't exist in just one place on the internet.
I recently went through the process of selecting a few news outlets to support by actually paying a small amount per month. I rejected one which looked promising because their polite request to disable the Ad-Blocker opened a deluge like CNN (CNN is my go to example with 20 sites serving script and over a dozen trackers/beacons/etc). The outlet I eventually went for has no ad-block blocker, just a polite, non-intrusive nagging banner once per session asking for a bit of support if you like their content to either allow their ads or subscribe.
After a few weeks being able to read their content 'for free' with my ad blocker still on, they have received a far more positive, probably more lucrative response to the polite-nag-banner than putting up an in your face paywall or forcing bucket-loads of trash ads through my blocker to see the content.
Maybe this only works for the discerning purchaser, but this business model works in my book - offer a service your customer wants at a reasonable price and make it a practical, pleasant experience to decide to buy. Then provide that service and don't pollute it by extracting more then was originally agreed.
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