I wonder when we'll start holding Google response for the ads they serve. Lately there were ads for fake Blender and Rufus which installed some malware.
How can they not be held liable for that?
Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown
91–100 of 160 posts
Re: Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm clicking somewhat often on youtube ads, because there's no way to escape them without the content blocker, so you have to watch the ad anyway. So if I have to wait anyway until the ad ends, I just waste aditional click. But I never buy anything nor have any interest in the advertised product. I do this mainly for 2 reasons: - waste the budget of annoying/scam ads in hope that in the future I'll see less of those…
> there's no way to escape them without the content blocker, so you have to watch the ad anyway I’m confused. So you use the content blocker.
On iOS Safari, Firefox Focus acts as a content blocker, but it doesn't block YouTube ads. Elsewhere, uBlock Origin blocks everything.
Re: Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been so much happier with YouTube when I removed the Android app and replaced it with an icon on my home screen that goes to https://m.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions in Firefox (with uBlock Origin). Works perfectly.
You could try NewPipe instead!
or libretube. newpipe is a broken mess for me now that libretube is here.
i get buffering on a regular basis, videos take multiple seconds to get started.
libretube OTOH is much better.
been using newpipe since it came out first so i have seen the whole drama of previous many years.
Re: Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown
#94The fact that the ad model has worked so well is always a nice reminder of how much of a bubble I live in. Personally I have never intentionally clicked on a Google/YouTube/etc ad. Never. I wonder if the general population has been getting more tech-savvy and skeptical of ads over time, but this change takes a very long time to play out. I sometimes see my dad clicking on ads because he doesn't understand the mechani…
My dad browses the web without adblocker on his smartphone and tablet and he never clears his cookies on these devices either. It should be easy to target him with advertisement, and yet he mentioned how irrelevant all the ads are and that he couldn't understand why companies kept paying for them. So they can't show him interesting ads despite observing his browsing activity for years. I believe the only effective fo…
haha my favorite one is retargeting on things i already bought. Like Columbia pants hounding me for weeks on every website after i already bought them.
Re: Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
I run an ad blocker centrally on my router (pfSense with pfblockerng on an APU2.D4), which has an automatically updated list of all known ad servers worldwide, directing traffic for those into a DNS sink. No device configuration needed. Cannot be detected by websites.
Couldn't JavaScript on the page notice that ads aren't loading?
No, DNS sinkholes silently replace queries by a valid internal IP - to JavaScript, it looks like the resource is loading, but the webbrowser actually just displays whitespace instead of the app. Check for example this page [1] - if you run AdBlock, it will be detected. My page just looks void of Ads with pfblockerng [2].
It works inside Apps (Android etc.) and games or youtube videos, too. There are ways to get around this, like e.g. hardcoding IPs that are not known to serve Ads, but this needs additional work and 99% of ads don't do this. Benefits of router based DNS sinkholes:
- cannot be detected by websites with anti-adblock scripts
- no memory consumption on clients
- fewer web browser plug-ins needed
- lower device CPU utilization from AdGuard PC/Android apps, uBlock extensions etc.
- protects all network devices without requiring extra work
- browser, software and OS independent
- device and PC independent.
- implements redundancy should users remove/disable browser plug-ins
Re: Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown
#96The fact that the ad model has worked so well is always a nice reminder of how much of a bubble I live in. Personally I have never intentionally clicked on a Google/YouTube/etc ad. Never. I wonder if the general population has been getting more tech-savvy and skeptical of ads over time, but this change takes a very long time to play out. I sometimes see my dad clicking on ads because he doesn't understand the mechani…
I am tech savvy and run ad blockers on all my devices. However I consume Instagram through an app, and can’t be arsed setting up an ad blocker that would deal with that. I have bought a whole bunch of stuff through Instagram ads. I see too many ads on Instagram, but not enough to make me stop using it, and the ads are apparently relevant enough. I assume this is a large reason why websites are so keen for you to use…
Instagram ads are uniquely irrelevant for me. I get some ad for wayfair advertising an excavator or a cedar lined sauna. I don't even think wayfair sells these things they are advertising towards me.
Re: Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown
#97In other news Google's search continues to get worse at finding what you want. Randomly dropping words from your query, even when you quote them and + and allintext, even when they claim they haven't ctrl+f shows the word ain't in the result. They just want to get the easy money of you clicking the ad for $someco that they put in before the "i'm feeling lucky" spot where $someco should be. Want to find something you…
I'm trying to pay for Kagi search to see if it's better. Not sure if it is, but at least it's not worse. In my tests they seem to get most of the results from Google, but just jumble them about a bit. They do have a "programming" mode though, which is useful.
If nothing else, it's refreshing to pay for search, to support non-ad-driven revenue models for the most important feature of the web.
Re: Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I run an ad blocker centrally on my router (pfSense with pfblockerng on an APU2.D4), which has an automatically updated list of all known ad servers worldwide, directing traffic for those into a DNS sink. No device configuration needed. Cannot be detected by websites.
Enough non-ad stuff breaks for me using a browser-based blocker that I’m not sure it’s worth the hassle for me, to block ads only on Instagram, especially as I do occasionally buy stuff
Yes, then DNS sinkhole is the way to go because it cannot be detected and won't break stuff.
Re: Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown
#99Earlier today I was watching a legaleagle video about Alex Jones' argument that he has to keep pitching dietary supplements to pay his civil debts. YouTube interrupted this video to play an ad for... dietary supplements. Great work. I'm sure Alphabet will be fine.
Why are you using youtube without ad blocker?
Because Apple TV :(
Re: Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was in Google Ads 2008-10, and people from outside the company always said, "Oh, I never click on ads!" To which I responded, "Well, someone does, or we wouldn't have all this free food." There's a simple test of your hypothesis, which they can do easily inside Google but it's harder to do from outside: has CTR gone down over the years?
I don't think it's that simple of a hypothesis to verify, even inside Google. There are lots of reasons why CTR may be constant or go up despite fewer people converting through ads. Examples are bots, crawlers, more kids playing with iPads, or malicious website design, e.g, I have clicked on ads because I was tricked on it by the HTML/JS, but that doesn't help the advertiser because I'm not going to buy anything. CTR…
> Examples are bots, crawlers, more kids playing with iPads, or malicious website design, e.g, I have clicked on ads because I was tricked on it by the HTML/JS
Google considers all of those spam, and goes to great lengths to detect them, refund them, and remove them from the stats. Changes in spam-cleaned CTR, which is what advertisers see and what Google talks about for aggregate metrics, should not be explainable with any of those.
Also, even in the short term, CTR as a primary metric only matters if you're paying a fixed amount per impression on a fixed number of impressions - i.e., almost never, unless you're looking at a particular fixed subset of the network. If prices go down, e.g. because of adding enough new inventory to decreases auction pressure, or if you add new lower-CTR inventory in a CPC auction, then the total amount of ad spend can still go up as CTR goes down. Google-wide CTR has been dropping for years, mostly due to mix shifts. In particular, Youtube ads, which have lower CTR than search, have been growing a lot faster.