Heh, these ads were so bad to the point of being ridiculous. I had fun reading them because they seemed so self aware and like a parody of ads.
Publishers Are Rethinking Those ‘Around the Web’ Ads
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Re: Publishers Are Rethinking Those ‘Around the Web’ Ads
#22Oh yes the "chumbox" https://theawl.com/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum-de0b...
Re: Publishers Are Rethinking Those ‘Around the Web’ Ads
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use Focus by Mozilla with iOS Safari. It does a decent enough job. Not sure if there's an Android analogue.
Does Focus actually block ads? All of the settings seem to concern trackers, not ads.
I found Focus did a poor job. I switched to Adguard[1] and have found it quite a bit better.
[1]: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/adguard-adblock-privacy-prot...
Re: Publishers Are Rethinking Those ‘Around the Web’ Ads
#24The link just shows me a login form. Mirror:
Re: Publishers Are Rethinking Those ‘Around the Web’ Ads
#25One of my least-favourite parts of video game news outlet Rock Paper Shotgun is the box of Taboola links at the end of the article. They never have anything to do with video games.
The sad part it, I'm sure RPS gets a lot of money from that box of links, meaning if they ditched it, I'd get less content from them. I would greenlight their site in my adblocker but it's just not worth the crap fiesta of ads.
Re: Publishers Are Rethinking Those ‘Around the Web’ Ads
#26Surprised it took this long. These things are incredibly jarring and low-quality, and actively try to redirect users away from the publishers sites into a rabbithole of even more links. If they supposedly pay so well, I wonder where the money for that comes from. Just high ad-density?
Ultimately the money comes from a mark further down the line. For example some poor sucker desperate to fix their health problem spends hundreds on a flakey high margin product, be it physical or digital. Sure there are legit ads too but I'd guess the greyhat stuff will give higher EPC. Google ads takes the long term view and doesn't tolerate shit like that. They are very strict and would rather not take that money a…
"Google ads takes the long term view and doesn't tolerate shit like that. They are very strict and would rather not take that money and destroy their brand. Result? People still use Google to search for stuff."
Are you sure? I've seen loads and loads of some of the trashiest ads through Google's ad network.
Re: Publishers Are Rethinking Those ‘Around the Web’ Ads
#27Surprised it took this long. These things are incredibly jarring and low-quality, and actively try to redirect users away from the publishers sites into a rabbithole of even more links. If they supposedly pay so well, I wonder where the money for that comes from. Just high ad-density?
>If they supposedly pay so well, I wonder where the money for that comes from. Just high ad-density? Probably because ad-networks pay per click, and if you have something SO clickbaity like these ads there's a lot of ad clicks. For example if google ads and Outbrain both pay $7 per thousand clicks (I have never used either so this is just a random number) and google ads bring in 1000 clicks while outbrain brings in 3…
Some ad networks pay per click, some pay per thousand impressions. The numbers I've seen tend to be several dollars per thousand impressions, or a significant fraction of a dollar to several dollars per click.
Random blog post I just found talking about rates: https://www.hochmanconsultants.com/cost-of-ppc-advertising/
Re: Publishers Are Rethinking Those ‘Around the Web’ Ads
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ultimately the money comes from a mark further down the line. For example some poor sucker desperate to fix their health problem spends hundreds on a flakey high margin product, be it physical or digital. Sure there are legit ads too but I'd guess the greyhat stuff will give higher EPC. Google ads takes the long term view and doesn't tolerate shit like that. They are very strict and would rather not take that money a…
"Google ads takes the long term view and doesn't tolerate shit like that. They are very strict and would rather not take that money and destroy their brand. Result? People still use Google to search for stuff." Are you sure? I've seen loads and loads of some of the trashiest ads through Google's ad network.
And at least Google iAds give you the tiny little logo in the corner for you to click so you can report the ad that tries very hard to look like a download button :(
Re: Publishers Are Rethinking Those ‘Around the Web’ Ads
#29Heh, these ads were so bad to the point of being ridiculous. I had fun reading them because they seemed so self aware and like a parody of ads.
I've always enjoyed some of the juxtapositions, like some article about sexism with one of those things suggesting readers might also like "Top 10 smoking hot celebrities who got UGLY!"
And they I have to wonder, do those things even pay enough to be worth it?
Re: Publishers Are Rethinking Those ‘Around the Web’ Ads
#30Honest question: How many people are left without some form of ad-blocking? It seems to have become incredibly ubiquitous, and when malicious ads aren't teaching people to go and get it, loud and obnoxious ads are.
Mobile users. There just aren't any pleasant ad free browser experiences for stock mobile phone users. Firefox for Android is quite poor and fixing through chrome requires root, something most users are not going to be doing
I've found Firefox for Android quite excellent, especially because of Firefox Sync between it and laptops.