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Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

theintercept.com

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Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#11

Post by DiabloD3 »

nyc640 wrote: post #7
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, includi…

Someone is going to make that argument however: Google Ads disallows displaying their ads that way, and is extremely good at finding websites that do that, and not only banning them but keeping any potentially earned money as well.

EU has already tried to make similar arguments to "break up Google" (lol, it's an American company, glwt) by basically blaming them for having a fair ToS and enforces it like no tommorow, thus producing services that attracts users.

Thus, having an ad service that bans shitty publishers and advertisers both makes publishers and advertisers (sometimes exclusively) do business with Google.

So, Google making Chrome ban shitty publishers and ad networks that harbor shitty publishers and advertisers ... makes Google look like they're not attacking themselves: which, well, they aren't, because they simply don't engage in that behavior on their ad network.

There's probably a shorter way of explaining this.

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#12

Post by pcwalton »

jfasi wrote: post #10

> 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 ha…

If Google and Facebook use this policy to establish an oligopoly (or cement their existing one), and that allows Google and Facebook to raise advertising prices above equilibrium pricing, then that squeezes companies that wish to advertise with costs that are shifted onto consumers.

Additionally, having a Google/Facebook oligopoly hurts incumbents when Google uses its overwhelming advertising market power to give itself exclusive advertising deals in order to promote some product. Advertising monopolies can be used to prop up and establish other monopolies. The most obvious example of Google doing this is advertising Chrome on the front page of google.com.

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#13

Post by __jal »

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…

Google is a data mining and extraction company. That's hard to argue with.

Are you complaining about the "sells personal information" part?

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#14

Post by eveningcoffee »

jfasi wrote: post #10

> 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 ha…

I think that you are too naive and part of the problem why the Google has become so dominant.

I actually installed an ad-blocker because I could not stand video ads (I would call it TV-cation of the Internet) and that was the easiest way to eliminate them.

You argue that people can install another browser and use an ad-blocker with that.

This is true for now (given reasonably motivated and knowledgeable users), but Google is also pushing DRM into web browsers.

This opens a possibility to restrict access to a website to all browsers but Google one. Given their market dominance they can do this.

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#15

Post by CaptSpify »

jfasi wrote: post #10

> 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 ha…

> 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.

Just because they are seeking input from others doesn't mean they are the good guys. Google's opinion can change very quickly, and plenty of smaller shops can be hurt by that, even if they are offering a superior product.

This just reeks of too much potential for abuse.

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#16

Post by nyc640 »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #11
nyc640 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, includi…

Someone is going to make that argument however: Google Ads disallows displaying their ads that way, and is extremely good at finding websites that do that, and not only banning them but keeping any potentially earned money as well. EU has already tried to make similar arguments to "break up Google" (lol, it's an American company, glwt) by basically blaming them for having a fair ToS and enforces it like no tommorow,…

This makes sense. Thanks for explaining. I don't really know the ads ecosystem that well, so those were just my inferences from the blog post. I'm sure that was the intention of the post :-)

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#17

Post by Animats »

What ads would get blocked? The ones not sold by Google, for the most part.

I can see it coming - "Host on AMP, and your ads will get through". "Use Google Ads, and your ads will get through." "Pay dues to the Acceptable Ad Consortium, and your ads will get through."

Look what happened with TrustE and their ratings. It started out as a good idea, and ended up as a cover for scumbags. Today, a TrustE seal has negative value.[1]

[1] http://www.benedelman.org/news/092506-1.html

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#18

Post by maldeh »

jfasi wrote: post #10

> 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 ha…

I imagine this may irk some googlers on here, but after Hangout's effect on xmpp / Reader's on RSS, I find it hard to discount the impact a built-in Chrome ad blocker would have on other generally available blockers. A lot of major sites still allow their content to be read by adblock users today because of the volume of traffic they'd have to shut out; but I don't believe that'd be the case once they start becoming a minority.

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#19

Post by newtem0 »

I still dont understand why simple endorsments dont work for some sites. Just put a text banner somewhere prominent that says "thanks bobs burgers for being our sponsor" there is no way ad blockers could pick that text out of all the other text and block it. And there is no reason anyone would want to block it anyway.
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