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We’re dropping Google Ads

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Re: We’re dropping Google Ads

#381

Post by coldpie »

NLips wrote: post #283
zoul wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again: if they choose one you’re not happy with, you’re free to decide not to read the content. Otherwise I don’t see how the situation is different from not paying for a meal in a restaurant if you’re not happy with the payment methods offered.

Actually, if the restaurant only accepts payment by credit card, you are free to not pay. That's the concept of legal tender - if they want to demand payment of a debt (i.e. after you finish the meal) from you with backing by law, they _must_ accept legal tender. If they only accept credit card payments, they can't use the law to make you pay.

I would be surprised if this is true.

Re: We’re dropping Google Ads

#382

Post by noxToken »

hawski wrote: post #320

I had a bit silly idea about financing of web services. Create beautiful, fast and very lean web serivce - "easy" part. It should be very lean - every page at most few hundred kB. Serve the website with useless bytes at front. Example: page weights 100kB - add 500kB of garbage to it at front. You can place them in html or js comment. You can add useless EXIF data to jpegs. You could place small number in every HTTP h…

I absolutely hate the idea of serving garbage byte to users - even if it is only 500 kB worth.

The internet already has enough useless cruft. CNN loads 4.9 mB of data with no adblockers. Fox News loads 2.6 mB. MSNBC loads 4.2 mB. The Guardian (US Edition) loads 4.3 mB. Padding a site with 500 kB (or really any amount of bytes) is unfair to mobile users without unlimited data plans.

A user who visits your site twice per week and navigates to 5 different pages on your site each visit receives about 12 mB of garbage bytes per month.This isn't that big a deal if only one site is doing it, but imagine if that's how all sites did it?

Re: We’re dropping Google Ads

#383

Post by PeterisP »

paulcole wrote: post #62
mikestew wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By visiting the site, you're entering into an agreement to exchange your ad views for content and you're breaking that agreement. C'mon, you know better. What agreement? If your answer contains the word "unspoken", I'll let you in on the real definition of that word in this context: "non-existent". I didn't sign anything, no notice was posted. The only agreement I have is that I ask for data, and should your server d…

Society has many unwritten agreements. You don't like ads, I get it. You take without compensating because you want to. Don't just shrug and say, "no notice was posted." Own it. Say, "I felt like taking this so I took it."

You could argue that the society has an unspoken agreement about views vs ads, but that agreement includes limitations on what kinds of ads are considered acceptable - and guess what, most of the sites are violating that unspoken agreement.

Adblockers didn't happen by magic, they are a reaction to advertising trampling all over the implicit social contract.

Re: We’re dropping Google Ads

#384

Post by Pigo »

davidgerard wrote: post #315
justabystander wrote: post #242

Ad networks regularly serve various forms of malware and spyware, as well as tracking beacons that put my data at risk of being stolen or misused. And once it's in a database somewhere, it's only a matter of time until it gets stolen and someone attempts to hijack accounts or steal an identity. It's funny how you never see the sites that whine about adblockers offer to accept legal responsibility for their complicity…

> It's funny how you never see the sites that whine about adblockers offer to accept legal responsibility for their complicity in the potential theft and property destruction served from their site. yep. This is an effective way to get newspapers whining about ad blockers to shut up as well.

Every time I'm blocked from a news site because of my blocker, I just get context from comments and move on with my life. It's so rare that there's important information beyond what's in the headline anyways. I respect paywalls much more.

Re: We’re dropping Google Ads

#385

Post by bananarepdev »

redm wrote: post #378
andrepd wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why you're being downvoted, teachers fit in the definition of malware.

"Malware, short for malicious software, is any software used to disrupt computer or mobile operations, gather sensitive information, gain access to private computer systems, or display unwanted advertising. Before the term malware was coined by Yisrael Radai in 1990, malicious software was referred to as computer viruses." [1] [2] I don't think most people would consider Google's purposeful display ads, which site ow…

I think they are talking about the tracking capabilities of these ads, which are unexpected by the user and compromise their privacy. Thus, they behave as malware.

Re: We’re dropping Google Ads

#386

Post by NathanKP »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #348
chrisan wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question: has google ads been responsible for virus/malware in the past? I thought they were, while still annoying, safe from serving such content. So much that if they detect your site has malware they prevent it from serving their ads https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/1308246?hl=e... As such I went along with allowing google ads since it seemed like a good middle ground between not wanting to…

I have gone so far as to suggest a significant portion of Google's revenue is likely serving malicious content, which leaves them very little incentive to do anything about it. Almost every senior citizen I've ever had clean up malware for got it from a malicious search ad. And the tech support scams they continue to list take advantage of tons of people as well. I've pointed out before that Google happily lists phon…

It is quite exaggerated to say that a significant portion of Google's revenue comes from serving malicious content.

But malicious content (even on the SERP) is common enough that one of the most effective steps that you can do to protect senior citizens from malware is to install a good ad blocker. The ironic thing is that the search algorithm does a decent job of filtering out malicious sites from appearing on the first page, but that does no good if there is a malicious ad right above the filtered results.

Re: We’re dropping Google Ads

#387

Post by teej »

victorhooi wrote: post #377
arthurfm wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> has google ads been responsible for virus/malware in the past? Yes. http://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security-intelligence/y...

I read the article - it's an interesting read. The claim is that a YouTube ad was serving malware. However, upon reading the article, it seems that: 1. Somebody purchased legitimate YouTube ad space. 2. They then redirected that traffic twice through two other legitimate ad networks. 3. They then broke into a Polish government website, and funnelled the traffic there, to serve up malware. That certainly doesn't seem…

I'm not sure what you expect "Google ads serving malware" to mean other than exactly this. Of course it's not as simple as going into Google ad manager and clicking "upload virus". The fact that it included partner networks and a compromised website is unsurprising. When malware makes it through ad networks, it is common for it to take that kind of approach. At the end of the day you're effectively exploiting networks of trust.

Re: We’re dropping Google Ads

#388

Post by Ajedi32 »

stonemetal wrote: post #48
ajross wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sort of confused. That list of yours is a bunch of stuff that (at least not generally) Google doesn't advertise . So where does the "only benefits Google and the peddlers pushing the dodgy adverts" bit come from? Seems like you're only angry at the peddlers. What did Google do?

If they are going to spend a million man hours of effort playing wack a mole with content creators, why haven't they spent a tenth of that effort keeping the ads they get paid to run safe and clean? Easy. Poor search results reflects poorly on them, when they put a dodgy ad on a site they get paid, and the site gets blamed.

I think perhaps you're underestimating the amount of effort that they do put into keeping their ads clean. A few highlights from [their 2016 report][1]:

> we disabled more than 5 million payday loan ads

> In 2016, our systems detected and disabled a total of 112 million ads for “trick to click,” 6X more than in 2015.

> We disabled more than 68 million bad ads for healthcare violations, up from 12.5 million in 2015.

> We took down more than 17 million bad ads for illegal gambling violations in 2016.

> In 2016, we took down nearly 80 million bad ads for deceiving, misleading and shocking users.

> in 2016, our systems detected and disabled more than 23,000 self-clicking ads on our platforms, a huge increase year over year.

> Last year, we took down almost 7 million bad ads for intentionally attempting to trick our detection systems.

> In 2016, we suspended more than 1,300 accounts for tabloid cloaking.

> We took action on 47,000 sites for promoting content and products related to weight-loss scams.

> We took action on more than 15,000 sites for unwanted software and disabled 900,000 ads for containing malware.'

> And we suspended around 6,000 sites and 6,000 accounts for attempting to advertise counterfeit goods, like imitation designer watches.

[1]: https://blog.google/topics/ads/how-we-fought-bad-ads-sites-a...

Re: We’re dropping Google Ads

#389

Post by hawski »

noxToken wrote: post #382
hawski wrote: post #320

I had a bit silly idea about financing of web services. Create beautiful, fast and very lean web serivce - "easy" part. It should be very lean - every page at most few hundred kB. Serve the website with useless bytes at front. Example: page weights 100kB - add 500kB of garbage to it at front. You can place them in html or js comment. You can add useless EXIF data to jpegs. You could place small number in every HTTP h…

I absolutely hate the idea of serving garbage byte to users - even if it is only 500 kB worth. The internet already has enough useless cruft. CNN loads 4.9 mB of data with no adblockers. Fox News loads 2.6 mB. MSNBC loads 4.2 mB. The Guardian (US Edition) loads 4.3 mB. Padding a site with 500 kB (or really any amount of bytes) is unfair to mobile users without unlimited data plans. A user who visits your site twice p…

If people would support the site all the garbage would disappear for everyone. If a dollar for a byte is a bit too high, you could place a ceiling at $5000 - it would be around 100 bytes for a dollar.

It would be an alternative to ads. Ads are a padding plus unfairness and dishonesty. They also track you and run code on your machine. This would be just a padding.

A creator has to eat and people don't have to use his site. Those that like it and would want to make it even better can pay.

And don't forget that a first step was to create a _lean_ website. 200kB + 500kB padding would still be more than 2 times less then any website you mentioned. For this to work the website would have to prove from time to time how it would work without useless bytes. You could also serve less useless bytes.

However it could still work with added latency instead of bytes. Example: 50ms every 100kB.

Re: We’re dropping Google Ads

#390

Post by user5994461 »

chrisan wrote: post #321
justabystander wrote: post #242

Ad networks regularly serve various forms of malware and spyware, as well as tracking beacons that put my data at risk of being stolen or misused. And once it's in a database somewhere, it's only a matter of time until it gets stolen and someone attempts to hijack accounts or steal an identity. It's funny how you never see the sites that whine about adblockers offer to accept legal responsibility for their complicity…

Genuine question: has google ads been responsible for virus/malware in the past? I thought they were, while still annoying, safe from serving such content. So much that if they detect your site has malware they prevent it from serving their ads https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/1308246?hl=e... As such I went along with allowing google ads since it seemed like a good middle ground between not wanting to…

>>> has google ads been responsible for virus/malware in the past?

Yes. Very much so.

Look for "VLC download" for instance, the first ads should be adware sites that distribute a fake version of the software and they paid to get that top search position.

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