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Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?

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Re: Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?

#221

Post by franczesko »

conception wrote: post #82
jacobgold wrote: post #77

Someone who has spent $100M+ on Google Ads explained to me that Google is doing everything possible to juice their revenue right now, in ways they've never seen before. Seems like two things 1) Google is losing at AI and Sundar wants to mask this 2) AI is going to destroy their ad business and they want to get while the getting is good.

I think the 3.8 Flash release shows they are doing just fine at AI. Unlike OpenAI and Anthropomorphic, Google doesn’t have to release new models to capture VC sentiment every three months. They have the hardware, data and money. And when they release a model it’s very good. Now their product strategy however…

It's not about releasing models. Consumer market share of chatgpt is still >60%, if not more. Their search engine was hit and as soon as product search starts declining on Google this will be a code red. They're in an extreme nicle and dime mode.

Re: Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?

#222

Post by jjallen »

ungreased0675 wrote: post #141
jjallen wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do wonder if the more they goose their ad business the faster it eventually falls. I know I am more and more reluctant to view many normal Web page ads at all and usually immediately click away the second a site gets annoying

I block ads because I don’t want my family exposed to scams, clickbait, and offensive content. If ads weren’t so annoying, I wouldn’t put too much effort into blocking them.

I don’t see many these days thankfully. I Use happily YouTube premium and mostly AI for web browsing-equivalent activities.

Re: Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?

#223

Post by eek2121 »

hansvm wrote: post #204
sysguest wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hmm could you explain more?

- The big problem is that malicious ads are being displayed without appropriate attribution - Add that attribution -- blame Google (or, supposing the ads are good, credit Google; a good header goes a long way toward swaying people's opinions) - But it doesn't matter if a single website appropriately attributes Google's highest/lowest-quality ads. The last step (speculative and hand-wavy) is to incorporate that behavi…

The second you load JS onto your page, you lose that ability, you know that, right? the scammy ads aren't limited to that tiny little box you designate for ads. Advertisers work around that limitation pretty easily, and you should also probably read AdSense terms of service before doing too much to blame google. Some of the language will surprise you.

Re: Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?

#224

Post by CamperBob2 »

stillpointlab wrote: post #45

I don't think it is fair to pin this on Google - I get the worst ads on X. But something about how the X ad network works means that even when I report the ad, block the ad poster, etc. there is this army of alternate ad accounts that all show the same ad. I was feeling very guilty last night as I was watching YouTube and getting 30s+ unskippable ad blocks every 10 minutes in some video. And the repetition and low qu…

I was feeling very guilty last night as I was watching YouTube and getting 30s+ unskippable ad blocks every 10 minutes in some video. And the repetition and low quality were grating on me. I thought: being rich is never having to watch another ad

You don't have to be rich to avoid getting those ads. You can make them go away for ~$15 a month. If you can't afford that, you have bigger problems in your life than YouTube ads, and your first step towards fixing them is to spend less time watching YouTube.

Re: Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?

#225

Post by rawgabbit »

conception wrote: post #82
jacobgold wrote: post #77

Someone who has spent $100M+ on Google Ads explained to me that Google is doing everything possible to juice their revenue right now, in ways they've never seen before. Seems like two things 1) Google is losing at AI and Sundar wants to mask this 2) AI is going to destroy their ad business and they want to get while the getting is good.

I think the 3.8 Flash release shows they are doing just fine at AI. Unlike OpenAI and Anthropomorphic, Google doesn’t have to release new models to capture VC sentiment every three months. They have the hardware, data and money. And when they release a model it’s very good. Now their product strategy however…

Google’s cash cow is ads. I think the writing on the wall is ChatGPT and other AI search engines will dominate. It is to be seen how Google will respond. But in the end, their monopoly on web search is coming to an end.

Re: Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?

#226

Post by eek2121 »

patrakov wrote: post #161
Telaneo wrote: post #95

We need strict liability on this front. Google is complicit. No newspaper or equivalent publication in the days before web ads would allow ads that are down at the level of scam that seemingly make up the modus operandi of Google today (and even the ads back then that did bend the truth a bit, overpromised, or showed products that didn't actually have any legitimate use, shouldn't really have been legal back then eit…

We need strict liability on this front. Companies behind websites that embed ads that they didn't verify (and don't control) are complicit.

You are looking at this backwards. The average user DOES hold the site complicit. The issue is that there are many hundreds of millions (possibly billions) of sites serving Google ads. 1 user avoiding/blacklisting 1 site due to scam/spam ad won't even be a rounding error to most sites, and it is nothing at all to Google. Given that the internet has evolved to be ad-driven, of which Google is a major player, you also aren't going to convince sites to stop serving Google ads.

The change has to start with Google, and they can't be bothered to do so, thus far.

Re: Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?

#227

Post by CM30 »

Frankly speaking, because no-one is forcing them to stop serving them.

That's the biggest 'trick' companies like Google have pulled here. They've somehow tricked the regulators into thinking that because they're big companies serving a lot of customers over the internet, that any sort of fraud or product liability laws are irrelevant to them.

Because any other company doing this would get sued into oblivion, shut down and the executives criminally charged. If a brick and mortar business let blatant scammers and criminals advertise in their physical stores, that would be seen as a serious crime.

Same with a retailer that sold dangerous or counterfeit products, or one that turned their stores into surveillance panopticons where customer data was collected illegally and sold to the highest bidder.

Google, Amazon, Meta etc are doing things that would get a normal business owner sent to prison.

The solution isn't just technical, it's about being willing to enforce the law for internet businesses the same way we do for offline ones. If Sundar Pichai and the board were looking at 10-20 years in prison for fraud or cyber offences, then Google would fix those dodgy ads real quick...

Re: Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?

#228

Post by LeoPanthera »

Apple News does this too. In some ways it's actually worse. It's a real problem, and those who are less technologically ept are inevitably going to be scammed. I expect a lot more from Apple than I do from Google, so it's surprising that it's been going on for so long.

Re: Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?

#229

Post by pampas »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #169
CqtGLRGcukpy wrote: post #2

I have two guesses why Google does this: 1) Google wants the most money, so they don't care to let dodgy ads thru. 2) There are more ads going out then can be reviewed, so they would rather have people report them, then they automatically reject the report until enough people report it, then an actual person may review it. As to why Google doesn't use AI to review them? Google would rather use the AI in a way that ma…

Google gets paid to show the ads. Adding friction to the process (on the advertiser side) means less money for Google: 1) due to the cost of implementing the checking, 2) because some legitimate advertisers will be falsely denied, 3) because the scam ads were still paying money. Not adding the friction doesn't seem to come with any serious downside. One would expect that it would, e.g. due to publishers removing the…

All the friction goes down to the publishers fighting malvertising.

Re: Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?

#230

Post by pants2 »

nkrisc wrote: post #192
HomeDeLaPot wrote: post #107

Every YouTube ad I see now is an AI-generated scam ad hawking everything from free electricity to anti-aging products to birdhouses hand-carved by an AI-generated senior citizen. I've seen some multiple times, days or weeks apart. Their advertising standards are a complete joke.

The AI-generated video ads are getting really bizarre on YouTube. There's class of them that feature some AI-generated song with AI-generated animated characters. One song began with lyrics about having sex with a Jewish billionaire's wife and learning some secret (at which point I was able to skip the ad) and another is some grotesque looking creature singing about foamy urine. Normally I have an ad-blocker and don'…

FYI, using YouTube through Brave browser on iPhone/iPad will block ads. Same with Instagram!
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