Google paid AdBlock Plus to get its ads whitelisted • Hacker News Board

Re: Google paid AdBlock Plus to get its ads whitelisted

#181

Post by nknighthb » Sat, Jul 06, 2013, 12:32 AM UTC

RyanZAG wrote: post #144

kbenson wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really equate paying a third party to reduce their negative impact on your business to paying a third party to start negatively impacting a competitor? One takes advantage of market conditions their benefit, the other changes market conditions to the detriment of the competitor.

You can just twist the words a bit then - instead of Google paying for Bing's traffic to be reduced, they could simply pay for their traffic to always be sent first. Not affecting anybody but Google then, right? Also, sponsoring Adblock is changing the market conditions. Adblock can use the money provided by Google to make sure any non-Google ad is blocked more efficiently. They can also advertise their addon better,…

Critical distinction, people freely choose to install AdBlock Plus. There are already alternatives, and the barrier to entry for new competitors is pretty low. This is unlike the ISP market, which is not meaningfully competitive in a good chunk of the world.

In my area, if Charter and CenturyLink both chose to de-prioritize Netflix traffic, that would be the end of it. I would have no economic alternative. But if AdBlock Plus[1] started showing me ads that annoyed me, I could just go download a different adblocker.

[1] I don't actually use AdBlock Plus. I use AdBlock for Chrome, which is a separate product.

Re: Google paid AdBlock Plus to get its ads whitelisted

#182

Post by guelo » Sat, Jul 06, 2013, 12:47 AM UTC

adPothier wrote: post #72

jpdoctor wrote: post #6

Quick ref to get rid of Google Ads (and some others too) on Adblock Plus: FOR CHROME: Go to "Settings" Find Extensions in the list on the left Find AdBlock, select "Options" Click the tab "Filter Lists" Uncheck: "Allow some non-intrusive advertising" FOR FIREFOX: Go to the Firefox menu in the upper left corner Select "Add-ons" Select "Extensions" Find Adblock Plus, select Options. Find the "Filter Preferences" Button…

Combined with AdBlock, I use Ghostery[1], which is a nice add-on (Chrome/FF/Safari/Opera/IE) : it blocks any javascript from ads networks, but also from analytics, trackers, socials plugins (and more) , and also cookies from the same trackers. Everything is configurable per-tracker and per-website. It's quite a must-have if you don't want to be the product on the Internet. And a good failover over Ad-block. [1]. http…

The Ghostery extension tracks you and sells the data to ad companies, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5897682

Re: Google paid AdBlock Plus to get its ads whitelisted

#183

Post by bpatrianakos » Sat, Jul 06, 2013, 1:00 AM UTC

Retric wrote: post #171

bpatrianakos wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's a difficult question for most people but I can honestly say yes. Sometimes its hard to tell what exactly motivated you to buy a certain thing. My first car was a Volkswagen Jetta. The advertisements made me aware of the brand and its personality. That sounds superficial but its a real part of the appeal of a lot of products. It's hard to be zen and take your ego out of buying decisions. Sometimes it ca…

I see vary few advertisements and as a result I don't buy much stuff. Sure, I have missed out on say video games I would have enjoyed playing, but at the same time it's also removed a lot of disappointment and stress from my life. Generally, when I walk into a store brands mean nothing to me so I make some random choice and then decide to either stick with it or try something new. And honestly most big brands are goo…

You're kind of implying that being advertised to means you automatically end up buying more than you want it need. I think that can be true but not necessarily. I see tons of advertisements but buy very rarely. For example, I see tons of advertising for tablets. As a developer and the owner of the iPad 1 I don't feel the need to upgrade at all. Mine still does what I want it to. When I find it becomes a nuisance then I'll be glad for the ads. Clothes are another example. I happen to buy somewhat expensive clothes. But I've found what I like (via advertising) and I stick with it. I don't buy more when I see there's a sale, only when they get worn out.

My point is that I don't relate to the stress that people feel from advertising. I'm definitely swayed by it but only when it lines up with a real desire I have. The desire comes first and the advertising shows me the way toward fulfilling it. It doesn't both create and satisfy my desires. Well, not always. For example, after I saw iOS 7 I totally wanted it. Luckily I will but if I had to pay for it I might. Now, I'm wondering - did the advertising create the desire for that or did I just see something I liked and it happened to be a good match? Is there always a difference?

Re: Google paid AdBlock Plus to get its ads whitelisted

#184

Post by gaadd33 » Sat, Jul 06, 2013, 1:00 AM UTC

ronaldx wrote: post #168

bpatrianakos wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to live in an ad-free, review-only world myself. Advertising and reviews serve two different purposes. The one gets the word out about a product or service and lets the creator point out why their audience would like it. A review's purpose is to let others know if the product or service lives up to the advertising and lets you gauge how good a fit a given product is in relation to competitors or on its o…

>The one gets the word out about a product or service and lets the creator point out why their audience would like it. I've heard this argument countless times but I'm fed up with it and I want to call it out: the constant and worldwide glut of Coca-Cola advertising suggests this is not primarily what advertising is about. Advertising never tells me about a new product that I care about and I'm not already aware of:…

Coca-Cola advertising isn't product advertising, its brand advertising. The intent is to keep their brand in your mind when you are shopping so when deciding between two essentially equivalent products you will lean towards the one you remember better. This sort of advertising tends not to have a strictly measured ROI in my experience since its hard to measure the "value" of wrapping a subway car in Jameson ads.

Product advertising is advertising a specific product and the ROI on it is usually closely measured when it comes to channels that can do that such as banner ads. While you are quite well informed and get information about all the new products you care about via other channels, most people are not hence the need to make people aware.

Without making "the masses" aware you end up with product usage/growth spreading virally which while it might be "better" is a lot harder to predict or model production levels or possible ROI on an initiative. For example, the Taco Bell Doritos Taco would have probably become popular after a while but that would lengthen the payback period for redesigning the menus/training staff/etc, alternatively you could do partial rollouts but that defeats the economies of scale.

While its not perfect, or anywhere near, advertising does serve a useful purpose and until the economy changes to not reward advertising initiatives we will sadly have to deal with it.

Re: Google paid AdBlock Plus to get its ads whitelisted

#185

Post by pbhjpbhj » Sat, Jul 06, 2013, 1:08 AM UTC

nitrogen wrote: post #148

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel some charge is acceptable as the ad network needs to be assessed against the whitelist criteria.

But having the ad networks (or sites hosting ads) pay a charge creates misaligned incentives.

It can. Arguably however if you agree with the premise of the whitelist as beneficial and there is a fixed schedule of charges (ie no company is preferenced in charging) then to me it seems OK.

You can't have the whitelist without having ads/networks assessed to see if they meet the criteria. Even if you crowdsourced that [which probably wouldn't be objective enough] you'd need to administrate the whitelist and so you need some revenue to cover the overheads at least. Even automating it there's a cost in creating the code. It seems right to pass that cost on and the networks are the ones holding all the money.

You could have users pay for the whitelisting to avoid "misaligned incentives".

Indeed charging the companies for assessment gives an incentive to reject them so you can charge to assess them again ... 4) profit.

Re: Google paid AdBlock Plus to get its ads whitelisted

#186

Post by drummer32 » Sat, Jul 06, 2013, 1:22 AM UTC

kefs wrote: post #126

CrazedGeek wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/

For those curious, AdBlock Edge is a fork of ABP before they decided to add 'Acceptable Ads'.

And what is the point if you can just disable acceptable ads in Adblock plus? Doesn't it use the same list?

Re: Google paid AdBlock Plus to get its ads whitelisted

#187

Post by kbenson » Sat, Jul 06, 2013, 1:40 AM UTC

RyanZAG wrote: post #144

kbenson wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really equate paying a third party to reduce their negative impact on your business to paying a third party to start negatively impacting a competitor? One takes advantage of market conditions their benefit, the other changes market conditions to the detriment of the competitor.

You can just twist the words a bit then - instead of Google paying for Bing's traffic to be reduced, they could simply pay for their traffic to always be sent first. Not affecting anybody but Google then, right? Also, sponsoring Adblock is changing the market conditions. Adblock can use the money provided by Google to make sure any non-Google ad is blocked more efficiently. They can also advertise their addon better,…

> ...they could simply pay for their traffic to always be sent first. Not affecting anybody but Google then, right?

As long as others have the same option, what's the problem? The article specifically says "Google is not the only company." (at least the Google translated page does).

> Also, sponsoring Adblock is changing the market conditions

Sponsoring? Maybe you can parse the original article in the language it was written, but I cannot and the translated article doesn't seem accurate enough for me to make assertions as to exactly what Google is and isn't doing, or more specifically, what Adblock Plus is or isn't doing when Google, or possibly many others, give them money.

> To me, this is changing market conditions in the same way as my AT&T example

How is this different than Google taking out a full page add in the New York Times? In both cases Google is paying a third party which does not have complete control of the marker for some advantage (exposure in the NYT case). It's not as if they are paying for nobody else to be able to do as much (and even if they were, that's not a problem as long as a competitor could outbid them for the same right)

Re: Google paid AdBlock Plus to get its ads whitelisted

#188

Post by pyre » Sat, Jul 06, 2013, 1:42 AM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #91

pyre wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because they could be updated So, this is a rally against all extensions? Expanding this argument, we basically get to a point where we don't trust any software: 1. No more browser extensions. 2. Want ad-blocking in Firefox? Request feature. 3. Feature request denied. 4. Fork Firefox. 5. Add ad-blocking to Firefox fork. This leaves us with a couple of issues: 1. The bar to adding functionality to a browser has now…

> So, this is a rally against all extensions? Expanding this argument, we basically get to a point where we don't trust any software: Yes. So DON'T expand it. The thing is, third party updatable extensions are far less trustworthy than Firefox.

This is true, but to only trust Firefox means that you only get features that Mozilla adds to Firefox.

Re: Google paid AdBlock Plus to get its ads whitelisted

#189

Post by hobs » Sat, Jul 06, 2013, 1:43 AM UTC

lfcode wrote: post #5

bwy wrote: post #4

That explains Google sponsored links showing up again. Oh well, that's just another filter I'll have to add.

There is a setting to disable whitelisting ,so you don't have to add the filter manually.

And it is in a very obvious place, even though I dislike the whitelisting, they did tell me about it and make it clear how to change it. I see it as the adware installers in legit software you can uninstall, it is there to catch the unwary and make money off of them.

Re: Google paid AdBlock Plus to get its ads whitelisted

#190

Post by kbenson » Sat, Jul 06, 2013, 1:44 AM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #170

kbenson wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is exactly reversed. Adblock Plus is helping people to be exempt from certain "laws", and Google is paying Adblock's extortion fee. Remember, people have no inherent right to the content they are consuming it, they are getting it because Google is presenting it to them with some expectation that it will benefit Google. That benefit is usually revenue through advertising, in the cases where it's present.

The TV networks tried to make the exact same argument when they sued TiVO, but got shut down by the courts. Bottom line: nobody can be forced into seeing ads.

I can't seem to locate this lawsuit. Do you have information on it? I'm interested in seeing exactly what the decision was.