Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

If this actually results in an internet mostly free of super annoying ads, then I can't get too broken up about that even if it does give Google a major advantage over its competitors.

The question, of course, is whether Google can/will abuse this in anti-consumer ways. Some people have said that Google's criteria for "good" ads aren't that great. The article implies that Google can somehow force adblocker users to either pay per pageview or turn off their adblockers, which is awful if true, though I'm not clear how it's supposed to work.

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#5

Post by Shank » Thu, Jun 08, 2017, 10:40 PM UTC

> Google, a data mining and extraction company that sells personal information to advertisers

The content in this article, is, for the most part, good content. What annoys me is that The Intercept seems fit to act like a heroic good guy insofar as being completely biased against Google from start to finish in what could have been a mostly informational article. An opening lead like this serves no purpose other than making this bias known.

Are we really beyond "just the facts" journalism, even by new journalism companies?

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#6

Post by renlo » Thu, Jun 08, 2017, 10:41 PM UTC

> According to the Financial Times, Google will allow publishers what it’s calling “Funding Choices.” The publisher could charge the consumer a set price per page view to use third-party sites that block all advertising. Google would do the tracking of how many pages users view, and then charge them. Users could then “white list” particular sites, allowing ads to be shown on them and removing the charge. If users decided to pay to block ads, Google would receive a portion of that payment, sharing it with the publisher.

Assuming the price is reasonable this doesn't sound horrible (but it doesn't sound too great either). How much would a publisher charge for an article view? $0.01? Or something like $0.50+ ? If the price is too high then I'd have to ditch Chrome for Firefox or Safari; I do not like ads.

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#7

Post by nyc640 » Thu, Jun 08, 2017, 10:43 PM UTC

pmoriarty wrote: post #3

"What ads would get blocked? The ones not sold by Google, for the most part." That is hilarious. Talk about self-serving. How can they do this with a straight face? I guess "Don't be evil" doesn't imply "Don't be slimy".

Well, to be fair, it seemed to me from the release announcement that they were blocking ads on webpages where the publisher set their pages up for a frustrating experience (pop-up display ads, auto play video ads), irrelevant of which ad systems were serving the ads on the pages. They aren't blocking ads from certain ad systems or advertisers. In theory this means the ad blocker shouldn't treat any ad system, including Google's, preferentially.

In practice, who knows?

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#8

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 08, 2017, 10:44 PM UTC

Shank wrote: post #5

> Google, a data mining and extraction company that sells personal information to advertisers The content in this article, is, for the most part, good content. What annoys me is that The Intercept seems fit to act like a heroic good guy insofar as being completely biased against Google from start to finish in what could have been a mostly informational article. An opening lead like this serves no purpose other than m…

[deleted]

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#9

Post by Kenji » Thu, Jun 08, 2017, 10:46 PM UTC

Google's bold move only works this well because other browser developers like Mozilla (or even OS developers) were too hesitant to ship ad-blocking by default. Sad, a missed opportunity. I've said this a long time ago. It's unfortunate that Google does the first step when it really could have been one of the last if browser developers acted properly. Ad blocking is a more or less solved problem and could have been firmly integrated into browsers at least 5 years ago. And I mean free OSS ad blocking without bullying advertisers into paying fees to be unlocked.

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#10

Post by jfasi » Thu, Jun 08, 2017, 10:48 PM UTC

> Web users will quickly recognize their only options: pay to use the internet, or uninstall the ad blockers and surf the web for free.

Or they could disable Chrome ad blocking and install their ad blocker of choice.

If I'm reading this correctly then no portion of the user population is hurt by this. Power with religious objections to advertising are free to continue using them. Typical users who don't care don't have to deal with awful and broken stuff. People who feel charitable enough to pay for advertising get to do so.

But doesn't it hurt the advertisers? That's not a given either. This article makes it sound like all non-Google advertisers will be shut out. But that's clearly not true: plenty of non-Google advertisers are represented in the decision making process, to the point where one can be convinced that a variety of views were considered.

Ad blockers are a response to the absolutely worst of ads, to the detriment of better-behaved networks like Google, Facebook, and friends. While I agree it's a little creepy that an advertising company shoulda put out an ad blocker, Google is in a unique place to tackle the problem of poor advertising by filtering truly bad experiences, and doing so hurts no one except truly abusive networks.