I've blocked Google ads for so long I didn't realize they had been allowing Flash ads.
i've blocked flash for so long, most ads dont display for me.
Google is banning Flash from its display ads
71–80 of 148 posts
Re: Google is banning Flash from its display ads
#72Flash is like DLLs. Enough said.
Re: Google is banning Flash from its display ads
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow. Their highest tier is $10/month to see 25-50% fewer ads? That seems a bit steep for the minimal reduction you're seeing.
I think they're accounting for the fact that Google doesn't control all ads across the web.
Yea, why don't they account for that fact in the $10/month price?
Re: Google is banning Flash from its display ads
#74One thing HTML5 lacks is the ability to combine all assets into one file. This makes Flash particularly handy for advertisements. Safari almost got there with its .Webarchive format, and Mozilla experimented with a file format but it didn't get anywhere.
Google more or less invented the .adz file for that. It's a glorified zip file with a few naming conventions and a few other things. Many of the more common pieces of ad serving software support it.
This is from the perspective of the person who is uploading the ad, of course, not from the perspective of the browser that is downloading the ad later.
Re: Google is banning Flash from its display ads
#75I've blocked Google ads for so long I didn't realize they had been allowing Flash ads.
The only Google ads that I still get is on the Youtube app on Android... which is one reason why I don't like to install any Google binaries on my computers...
http://forum.xda-developers.com/xposed/modules/app-t2547316
will remove ads in the youtube app if you have a rooted device, just install the xposed framework, then this.
Keep in mind you need to update it when the youtube app updates (youtube app might be showing ads, or behaving weirdly/crashing if you don't)
Re: Google is banning Flash from its display ads
#76I suppose this means dropping it altogether (like from Chrome) can't be too far away. My only regret with that would be that we use flash as a way to allow one-button copy to the clipboard (using this http://zeroclipboard.org/ ). We had tried non-flash solutions, but none of them worked. This sounds like it might work https://clipboardjs.com/ , so I guess I'll be adding a backlog item to look at it.
There is a ZeroClipboard feature request to use the HTML5 Clipboard APIs, where available, and seamlessly fall back to Flash elsewhere. Hallvord R. M. Steen, editor of the W3C Clipboard API spec, started working on it here:
Re: Google is banning Flash from its display ads
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
For Google ads specifically? https://contributor.google.com/
Wow. Their highest tier is $10/month to see 25-50% fewer ads? That seems a bit steep for the minimal reduction you're seeing.
My understanding is that the system literally works by buying out your own ads, as if you were an advertiser targeting specifically yourself with ads that have no content. The effect is thus that you pay what advertisers would otherwise have paid. But if some advertiser bids $100 for one ad (this actually happens!), then Google is going to show that ad.
As such, the pricing structure, while maybe overcomplicated, is perfectly fair. Theoretically, in an ad-free world, this is the price you would need to pay to consume the same content. If you feel it is too high, then what you're saying is that, for you, ads are worth the annoyance. (Or, alternately, you're saying that you'd rather pay less and get lower-quality content.)
Personally, I think $10/month is an extremely reasonable price to pay for the web content I consume, and I'd certainly rather pay it than see the ads.
EDIT: That said, as a matter of product design, I think this pricing structure sucks. They really ought to offer a flat price that removes all ads. However, I suspect that would require strong-arming all AdSense sites to agree to new terms (since it would affect how much those sites are getting paid), and as we've seen when YouTube did this in order to create YouTube Red, it tends to create a huge PR backlash.
Re: Google is banning Flash from its display ads
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Firefox has had a top-of-the-page notification for click-to-play for a long time, making this a non-issue.
Chrome has an icon for this in the address bar. The only problem with this solution is you lose control of which elements you want to allow.
I think Firefox's top-of-page notification is just for Flash content that is not large enough for the inline "click to play" UI. It's pretty annoying, though, because it causes the whole page to shift down. Chrome's address bar icon sounds like a good alternative.
Re: Google is banning Flash from its display ads
#79Re: Google is banning Flash from its display ads
#80How can they continue to allow "video ads built in flash"? Isn't a video flash just like any other .swf, that happens to use the NetConnection, NetStream and Video classes? Or will they supply the .swf part and the advertisers just the .flv/.mp4 part? Also, what's to stop a "html5 ad" from inlining swfobject.js? They've fallen for malvertising before, so how could they not fall for an obfuscated swfobject.js? :)
This is because video ads use an obnoxious ad API called VPAID [1] that is mostly used to track viewability of video ads (which in turn conditions the billing event for advertisers). This is most effectively done with Flash and so 90% of video ads use Flash if given the opportunity. [1] http://www.iab.net/guidelines/508676/digitalvideo/vsuite/vpa...
The NY Times' recent post about their transition from Flash to HTML5 video highlighted VPAID as one of their big challenges. It sounds like they had to pull the ad vendors, kicking and screaming, into the HTML5 world.
http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/02/08/flash-free-video-in...