Google says ad blockers will save online ads
theregister.co.uk
Google says ad blockers will save online ads
1–10 of 42 posts
Re: Google says ad blockers will save online ads
#2This is the historical Google line and a pretty fair one at that. Those of us that are extremely savvy enough to use ad blockers everywhere are also rather cognizant of where ads appear and usually consciously ignore the ads. Most average users won't find the ads so objectionable as to warrant blocking them or dealing with the hassle of installing extensions.
Firefox has over 90M active daily users. The Adblock Plus plugin is by far the biggest and most compelling Ad Blocker - it has 11M active daily users right now. Google seems willing to live with this 12% opt-out in effect. I suspect of those 12% of users, most of those wouldn't click ads anyways, so it's not a big deal in the end.
- http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2009/05/firefox-hits-27... - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/statistics/addon/1865
Re: Google says ad blockers will save online ads
#3Wow, the first half was all good and informative, than the second half the authors started to dump all his opinion as known, absolute facts.
The fact is that Google, a multi billion dollar company which make ~90% of its revenue through ads, not only allows ad blocking extensions to be installed in its browser (which is rapidly gaining market share) but also not-so-evil enough not to tinker with the Top 10 extension list and allow an ad blocking extension to be listed as the second most downloaded extension. (2 of the top 10 extensions are ad blockers: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/list/popular).
To top it off, they are forthcoming about the ad blockers and how they view it and discussed it openly with everyone, by justifying it as a good thing. They agree with something most of us already know is that the single biggest reason we use ad blocking extensions is because of the intrusive and extremely annoying ads. If ads were non-intrusive and fast and targeted most people wouldn't bother with ad blockers. Google, the biggest online ad company gets it. This is good news.
And this is what the author writes?
"And of course, there's no guarantee that Google will always allow ad blockers."
Is the author really this ignorant? You don't even have to rely on extension to block ads. Hello privoxy: http://www.privoxy.org/
Re: Google says ad blockers will save online ads
#4"There will always be some group of people who want to block ads for personal reasons. But if we do a good job on the advertising side, people won't want to block ads. People will find them actually useful.
"I think there will be a nice equilibrium. If people get too aggressive with ads, then ad blockers will become more popular and companies will get less aggressive with ads. The market will sort itself."
As an Adwords advertiser, I agree. Maybe it's because I am selling a B2B product, but I have no interest in 'aggressive' ads that trick gullible people clicking them (the phrasing from this post last week: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=989729)
P.S. The headline seriously distorts Google's argument. Saying that the market will balance itself out as aggressive ads and ad blockers play off each other is not 'ad blockers will save online ads.' In fact, the Google rep doesn't make that statement at all.
Re: Google says ad blockers will save online ads
#5I don't buy it. The assumptions seem to be that A) annoying ads work in the short term and B) annoying ads cause people to use ad blockers. Sure, it follows that it is in the ad industry's long-term interest to avoid destroying themselves through annoyance. However, individual advertisers still have the incentives to be annoying, since the costs (more adblock) are distributed to all advertisers, but the benefits accrue entirely to them.
Maybe individual advertisers can avoid being annoying and hope that adblockers only target the biggest offenders.
Re: Google says ad blockers will save online ads
#6I've never minded Google ads at all. In fact I quite like them. The reason I have an ad-blocker is because of the many sites featuring sexually explicit advertising with no warning - a big no-no when you use the internet as a reference at work.
I'm not sure if I trust their motives entirely, but Google's theory about the market balancing itself is right on, IMHO.
Re: Google says ad blockers will save online ads
#7I don't buy it. The assumptions seem to be that A) annoying ads work in the short term and B) annoying ads cause people to use ad blockers. Sure, it follows that it is in the ad industry's long-term interest to avoid destroying themselves through annoyance. However, individual advertisers still have the incentives to be annoying, since the costs (more adblock) are distributed to all advertisers, but the benefits accr…
At the moment I use ad block in manual mode and zap only ads that flash or move.
It's a pain though and it's a constant temptation just to turn on easy list and kill everything.
If there was a filter list subscription for those which still permitted 'responsible' ads I'd probably use that instead.
Re: Google says ad blockers will save online ads
#8I don't buy it. The assumptions seem to be that A) annoying ads work in the short term and B) annoying ads cause people to use ad blockers. Sure, it follows that it is in the ad industry's long-term interest to avoid destroying themselves through annoyance. However, individual advertisers still have the incentives to be annoying, since the costs (more adblock) are distributed to all advertisers, but the benefits accr…
It's a straightforward collective action problem. However, annoying interruption ads work only when they can successfully interrupt people - through pop-ups, flashing, grabbing focus, and all the other annoying things they do.
It seems to me that the widespread adoption of adblocking software can only hurt the annoying, short-term thinking advertisers and help the not-annoying, long-term thinking advertisers.
As it gets easier to avoid annoying ads, the PR cost of being annoying will continue to rise until it starts hurting annoying advertisers in the short term - in effect, internalizing the negative externality of their activities.
Re: Google says ad blockers will save online ads
#9I don't buy it. The assumptions seem to be that A) annoying ads work in the short term and B) annoying ads cause people to use ad blockers. Sure, it follows that it is in the ad industry's long-term interest to avoid destroying themselves through annoyance. However, individual advertisers still have the incentives to be annoying, since the costs (more adblock) are distributed to all advertisers, but the benefits accr…
It's a straightforward collective action problem. However, annoying interruption ads work only when they can successfully interrupt people - through pop-ups, flashing, grabbing focus, and all the other annoying things they do. It seems to me that the widespread adoption of adblocking software can only hurt the annoying, short-term thinking advertisers and help the not-annoying, long-term thinking advertisers. As it g…
And that spam email stuff is going to stop arriving, too.
Re: Google says ad blockers will save online ads
#10I don't want to see graphical ads with tits (I'm looking at you Evony), ripped bodies, or oral cavities (teeth whitening). All of that stuff is, just like porn, opt in. Its also why I sign new PC users up to Gmail and not Yahoo Mail. Anything else, and especially contextual text ads, is fine by me.
That's why I agree with Google's position.