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Publishers Are Rethinking Those ‘Around the Web’ Ads

nytimes.com

11–20 of 96 posts

Re: Publishers Are Rethinking Those ‘Around the Web’ Ads

#11
post #4
post #3

Honest question: How many people are left without some form of ad-blocking? It seems to have become incredibly ubiquitous, and when malicious ads aren't teaching people to go and get it, loud and obnoxious ads are.

Mobile users. There just aren't any pleasant ad free browser experiences for stock mobile phone users. Firefox for Android is quite poor and fixing through chrome requires root, something most users are not going to be doing

I see, and that makes sense. Thanks for the reply.

Re: Publishers Are Rethinking Those ‘Around the Web’ Ads

#12
post #4
post #3

Honest question: How many people are left without some form of ad-blocking? It seems to have become incredibly ubiquitous, and when malicious ads aren't teaching people to go and get it, loud and obnoxious ads are.

Mobile users. There just aren't any pleasant ad free browser experiences for stock mobile phone users. Firefox for Android is quite poor and fixing through chrome requires root, something most users are not going to be doing

I use Focus by Mozilla with iOS Safari. It does a decent enough job. Not sure if there's an Android analogue.

Re: Publishers Are Rethinking Those ‘Around the Web’ Ads

#13
The web must be hell to people without multiple levels of adblocking extensions.

Meanwhile, I'm confused the NYT is now citing random people from Twitter:

One Twitter user asked The Guardian in April: “Don’t these @Outbrain articles kind of undermine the integrity of news outlets?”

That must be Outbrain inside.

Re: Publishers Are Rethinking Those ‘Around the Web’ Ads

#14
post #2

Surprised it took this long. These things are incredibly jarring and low-quality, and actively try to redirect users away from the publishers sites into a rabbithole of even more links. If they supposedly pay so well, I wonder where the money for that comes from. Just high ad-density?

Ultimately the money comes from a mark further down the line. For example some poor sucker desperate to fix their health problem spends hundreds on a flakey high margin product, be it physical or digital.

Sure there are legit ads too but I'd guess the greyhat stuff will give higher EPC.

Google ads takes the long term view and doesn't tolerate shit like that. They are very strict and would rather not take that money and destroy their brand. Result? People still use Google to search for stuff.

Re: Publishers Are Rethinking Those ‘Around the Web’ Ads

#15
post #4
post #3

Honest question: How many people are left without some form of ad-blocking? It seems to have become incredibly ubiquitous, and when malicious ads aren't teaching people to go and get it, loud and obnoxious ads are.

Mobile users. There just aren't any pleasant ad free browser experiences for stock mobile phone users. Firefox for Android is quite poor and fixing through chrome requires root, something most users are not going to be doing

Theres Adguard for Android, which installs itself as a local VPN:

https://adguard.com/en/adguard-android/install.html#howToIns...

It seems to be reasonably low on the scum scale as far as Android apps and ad blockers in general go.

Re: Publishers Are Rethinking Those ‘Around the Web’ Ads

#16
post #4
post #3

Honest question: How many people are left without some form of ad-blocking? It seems to have become incredibly ubiquitous, and when malicious ads aren't teaching people to go and get it, loud and obnoxious ads are.

Mobile users. There just aren't any pleasant ad free browser experiences for stock mobile phone users. Firefox for Android is quite poor and fixing through chrome requires root, something most users are not going to be doing

I use AdBlock on my iPhone with Safari and it's seamless (even though it's AdBlock and I'd much prefer uBlock)

Re: Publishers Are Rethinking Those ‘Around the Web’ Ads

#17
post #2

Surprised it took this long. These things are incredibly jarring and low-quality, and actively try to redirect users away from the publishers sites into a rabbithole of even more links. If they supposedly pay so well, I wonder where the money for that comes from. Just high ad-density?

The ad content is designed to look as though it is part of the source website, so claims made appear to be those of the originating site. Outbrain seems to be the web's answer to native content marketing.

Unfortunately NYT, Huffpo, Wapo don't realize by putting these on their legitimate articles they're allowing these third parties to siphon away some of their credibility.

Re: Publishers Are Rethinking Those ‘Around the Web’ Ads

#18
post #12
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mobile users. There just aren't any pleasant ad free browser experiences for stock mobile phone users. Firefox for Android is quite poor and fixing through chrome requires root, something most users are not going to be doing

I use Focus by Mozilla with iOS Safari. It does a decent enough job. Not sure if there's an Android analogue.

Does Focus actually block ads? All of the settings seem to concern trackers, not ads.

Re: Publishers Are Rethinking Those ‘Around the Web’ Ads

#19
These ads specifically were the ads that drove me to ad blockers. I resisted for years, as I took the stance I simply didn't visit sites that had overly obnoxious ads. I've had flash turned off for years so that likely cut down on a lot of that garbage anyway.

Then these fake "Other things you might like" ads started appearing around many sites. Occasionally somewhat relevant, but always click-bait headlines. I was even tricked once or twice early on, since I hadn't yet recognized those as ads.

Then they started becoming outright obnoxious, and everywhere, and one day I just lost it and installed an adblocker. Now I can't imagine how I'd ever go back.

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