It is interesting how this article starts. A guy has an app which drains users batteries. But it's not his fault of course, because it's the ad company.
Except the ad company says it's not their fault, because the ad came from some other company.
This fingerpointing points to one of the core problems of the ad industry: They created a system where nobody knows who's responsible for anything, so malware and fraud has an easy time.
But this mode of thinking makes no sense. If you put ads in your app YOU are responsible. If you use an ad service from a shady company that outsources to other shady companies then you're still responsible.
Adtech companies know exactly who is responsible. Every ad on any serious network is approved before going live. Every single auction is logged, that's just basic tracking and necessary for billing anyway.
The problem is that there are no serious consequences in this industry. Ad fraud isn't a technical problem, it's a business problem, one that most companies are not incentivized to solve or prevent.
I work for a publisher and basically these ad networks say "you'll lose 50% of your revenue if you implement 'safe frames' in Google AdManager 360. We have some publishers who do it but basically no advertiser wants to run ads in a safeframe."
So you're saying the standard practice is to let the malicious ad buyers from your network run arbitrary javascript on our sites...
SafeFrames are fine for most ads that are isolated in a box on the page, and those that wait for user interaction before changing dimensions.
The main issue today is because advertisers want viewability tracking (which safeframe has a minimal but poor API for) and they want it with their own independent providers. Also prebid.js used for header bidding does not support safe frames.
Things will improve though because IntersectionObserver is now built into modern browsers and even works in cross-domain iframes. There's also the Open Measurement SDK[1] from the IAB to standardize viewability finally, and Prebid.js is also working on using SafeFrames.
If companies are "people" in the legal sense, why isn't there a 'corporate death penalty' for utter gross violations that would get real humans locked in a case for decades?
The "why" is because it's a 12-figure global industry including two of the most valuable companies in the world with unlimited resources and lobbying power, combined with highly technical mechanics and a complex network of business relationships that no politicians have any real understanding of.
I must add that there's also a (sometimes irrationally) strong reaction by those politicians and many others to working with anyone in adtech to even attempt to solve these problems which clearly doesn't help.
This is simply not true. I work for a top 3 major ad exchange, and there's only so much validation that can happen when you process 10s of millions of requests per second that have to leave your system in 40ms.
Like I said, this is a business problem. Those major ad exchanges should stop working with bad actors. 95% of ad fraud is coming from known sources and/or blatantly noticeable.
This is overlooking the problem of detecting that people are doing something malicious. There is a fairly large variety of unwanted behavior, both by the advertisements, and by the sites or apps hosting the ads.
That's covered under "no consequences". You don't need fancy tech, most of the malicious behavior comes from a limited set of bad actors and vectors. It's just not stopped because nobody cares to.
Sorry, but you genuinely do need fancy tech to detect it. There are multiple businesses that do nothing but that, plus teams at most of the big ad tech companies. You may notice this article cites Protected Media and DoubleVerify. You can't manually audit that kind of traffic volume.
Several of the ad tech companies have pressed law enforcement to prosecute some of these people, but mostly unsuccessfully. They're often in places that are difficult to extradite from like Russia, hiding behind some botnet: https://adexchanger.com/online-advertising/why-the-doj-final...
My point is that detection doesn't solve anything, it's treating the symptom. The solution is to stop working with bad actors, but nobody does that because it's easy money and there's plausible deniability by creating new companies, accounts, sites, etc.
Your 2nd statement is what I'm saying: no consequences refers to the lack of oversight, regulation and enforcement in the industry. That's why there's barely any prosecution. For example, Buzzfeed did an expose last year about Newsweek/IBTimes committing ad fraud, except it was already well known by everyone in adtech. People like getting paid and they're not going to stop on their own.
Btw, I personally know the founders of all those companies. If fraud was eliminated then they would go out of business. They're not interested in solving the problem even if they could.
Yeah, many supposedly legit websites (even large media companies) run these very scammy "man from YOUR LOCATION got rich in 20 days!" "one weird trick to get younger" ads that ultimately lead to some scam
But if you ask them, it's not their fault, but the ad company (Google), which in turn will point to a different company, etc
And in the end, people are scammed and Google gets a bit richer, but it's nobody's fault or responsibility
those are why I use ad blocking (hadn't heard of revcontent but def taboola and outbrain)
Man, yesterday I read a New York Times article in a view without ad blocking... I was actually embarrassed for them as a company. It's difficult to read an article when there are so many ads that there's doubt as to if there is more article below the next raft of ads.
Google often has scummy ads as well. Haven't checked recently, but the ads on http://getpaint.net are often designed to look like download buttons to download the popular paint application.
Scummy AdSense ads are harder to pin down, of course, because of the live bidding and personalization.
Just check (3/22/19) and yup sure enough https://i.imgur.com/6SMBjDa.png . I find this is pretty common with many software websites that have ads, I'm really surprised paint.net doesn't switch to carbon or something.
EDIT: There's another one at the bottom of the page too. And they're randomized, some make it clear you aren't downloading Paint.net (such as the "Free Mac PDF Reader") but others aren't at all.
Why don't developers put a thick border with 'Advertisement' in bold around the ad space so that ads displayed doesn't look like they are native elements?
Even responsible journalistic websites like Der Spiegel (insert comment about Relotius here) run ads like these, where the ads appear like "related articles" underneath serious articles...
Even worse, I've seen several large media companies and news sites run ads on mobile that completely hijack the (Android, i.e. Chrome) browser and redirect to a third party landing page. They usually seem to get killed off eventually but every now and then they pop up again.
I'm not sure if these ads specifically target Android devices but it wouldn't surprise me.
I think it's a little bit more complicated. There's a point where this becomes somewhat questionable. Say the toy has a reputable certification and the company, up until now, never had any track record of mistreating their customers. In this case I'd argue the company is responsible, not the parent, and that it is actually worthy following through to find whoever acted maliciously rather than just picking the last person in the chain.
Now in the particular case of ads in applications, I think there are surely many developers who fail to do their due diligence when picking advertisement partners, but without a doubt there are also advertisement companies who excel at duping the developers they work with.
If someone trades a product with a neighbor, are they liable since they sold it for a different form of currency? Or would this only be aimed at those who reach a certain level of trading/selling per year?
I think retailer's liability here is also limited.
Imagine you are a shop selling cola in can.
If coca cola company put some unhealthy stuff in, you are not liable just for selling it. But if you made the stuff unhealthy because you stored it in direct sunlight long time, you are liable.
Because the parent is a natural person and the retailer is the last commercial entity in the chain. If the purchaser was a day-care center or other commercial entity, liability would be with them.
"without fault"? Is it reasonable to assume that a cheap internet connected toy with a video camera and microphone is secure enough to use without any precautions?
Interesting. So if you buy such a device for a gift, not knowing that it has a secret camera, and then decide you don't want it and resell it on Ebay, you'd agree that now it is you who are liable?
That's how consumer law works nearly everywhere: every party has full (civil) liability over the outcome. The parties can then sue each other to settle it, without involvement of the consumer.
I'm not sure what to call allowing any old shit to run in your app under the guise of ads other than negligent. The fact that it's so common should not be an excuse.
Liability seems to be focused on pointing blame, and then based on that we decide who should clean up.
In situations like this perhaps it would be more productive if we had a system that focused more getting everyone to clean up and prevent this from happening again first, and then look at the liability part.
I do believe that this is the innate human response, the desire to "do the right thing". Most of us have the right mixture of nature/nurture to want to do that. But if the system doesn't enable that behavior or punishes that, that behavior will get suppressed and we end up in a miserable situation for everybody.
I dunno, it's not exactly an easy question or it would be solved already, and bad faith actors will exploit the goodwill of others too.
To me it feels like it's less of "nobody [in the industry] knows who's responsible" and more of "everybody takes responsibility for the earnings and nobody for the evils".
Take that line of thinking one more step. If a user installs a "free" app that is ad-supported, the USER is responsible.
I tell my kids this when they bitch about needing a new phone because theirs is too slow and the battery drains too fast. I say look at all the crap you installed on it. Clean it up don't be so dumb.
Lol, Did we have the same dad you sound like me talking to my kids. It is because we love them we don’t sugar coat it. But the issue I have is why are these ad companies even allowed to siphon information from a tablet my “child” is using. I know one needs to watch the internet that small children use. But if I have a tablet solely used for my kid to watch shows and perhaps play some educational games or coloring, what business does any company have sucking up data from that tablet. Surely just by the list of apps installed, all children’s games, indicates immediately that a kid owned the tablet but I suppose that Is just another data point they have and like.
That is all true but for practical intents and purposes you should probably make ad company responsible. It might seem a bit illogical but from practice standpoint, it is much easier to pursue and punish an ad company than to hunt each and everyone of its clients. Especially that they can just abandon the company and create new one, and it will be just cost of doing business, everyone of those shady players will have an ad shill company that can be replaced quickly in case of trouble.
Is there an ad network that doesn't use JS? You make a call to the ad network server, it returns an image, you display it in a native UIImageView (not a web view), and if the user taps it, you open a URL in a web view.
Unless the user taps the ad, no JS or HTML is involved, which eliminates the possibility of such tricks.
I looked for such a library a while back, but didn't find any.
Yes, you would think it would be that simple, but it’s definitely not.
Advertisers will give you double click (by google), atlas (Facebook), mediamind, etc tags m, to deliver as the ad. They will load in god knows what JS into their little space and (I cannot stress this enough), advertisers love their gimmicky little iteractable/expandable, engagement-filled ads.
To boot, they’re all laden with code to detect what publishers/sites/apps you’re displaying on, how much of the ad is viewable on screen and for how long, every scrap of code they can possibly fit in there to identify the user down to the finest grain they can manage.
You would think that things needn’t be this complex, but ad-tech companies have done a wonderful job of convincing advertisers that “targeted advertising is definitely better, and you definitely invest the extra cost in it, and definitely do all these other things because if you don’t then you’re totally falling behind your competitors, who are totally scraping every bit of data from their users, so you’d be a loser not to do the exact same thing and ~give all that dats to us.~ Sorry, make “valuable use” of all that data”.
Part of what js does in that ecosystem is support independent accounting for the advertiser of whether their ad was viewed and by who/what...which on the margins of course can still be tricked/gamed, but which for mainstream advertising is important.
>> But this mode of thinking makes no sense. If you put ads in your app YOU are responsible. If you use an ad service from a shady company that outsources to other shady companies then you're still responsible.
Then it comes back to the Play Store. They like having all those free apps. It makes users feel like their Andriod phone has whatever they need. Google needs to make apps searchable based on privacy settings. They need to encourage people to pay for user respecting apps. I'd happily pay a buck or two for lots of apps if only they didn't have add or try to get me to buy add-ons. Just give me upfront honesty about what I'm getting and I'll pay you for it. Stop hosting crapware in the app store!
Have you ever tried to convince someone to pay for something they believe they can get for free? The number of people who will pay monthly for user-respecting basic fundamentals like email is shockingly small.
Gmail might have been best of breed in 2004 on the basis of its superior spam filter, but that's certainly not the case now. In fact, with the recent change to the UI, Gmail now loads incredibly slowly or not at all on Firefox. It's bad in Chrome too, but much closer to unusable on FF.
No other webmail service I've ever used has given me the lag issues Gmail has.
because fastmail is better than the free one. Just as good in the common use cases, they don't make me the product, and when in the rare case where I have a tech issue their support is responsive. There are a couple other paid email providers that I'm told provide services that are good.
I live this everyday. Our ad team blames the ad network they run on our products if malware gets through, rather than taking responsibility and banning the ad network. Or even better, taking responsibility themselves for selecting ad networks that run scams and malware.
To me, if an ad network allows crap through, we have to take onwership and penalize the ad network and move on. But there is no accountability. It's everyone fighting for that next penny.
No one in the supply chain takes responsibility for this. That's how I, someone who works for a company that has ad-supported products, runs an ad blocker at the router level in my home. If people are going to actively try to harm me and my family by hunting for pennies, I am going to seek protection.
And because no one takes responsibility for this whole mess, the whole house of cards will fall. More and more devices are coming with ad-blocking built in. If we can't responsibly create ad-supported businesses, how can we honestly expect people to want to see those ads?
Digital advertising is so divorced from making users happy.
> This fingerpointing points to one of the core problems of the ad industry: They created a system where nobody knows who's responsible for anything, so malware and fraud has an easy time.
> - You invited me to dinner, went to shopping, bought some stuff to cook, one ingredient was bad, I got poisoned.
The difference is due diligence. In picking ingredients and preparing them the host of this dinner has most likely taken care to use what they have good reason to believe a reputable sources and methods.
People placing add on sites and in apps are doing no such thing for the most part - beyond concerns of outrageously illegal adverts or those that might otherwise offend their audience directly, they are simply picking the provider that is likely to pay them the most. This is insufficient due diligence so they shouldn't be able to pass the buck, but they can because there are so many levels of indirection in the industry it becomes difficult to prove who failed most.
There is commonality with your food example: the recent meat source problems in Europe when cheap horse meat was unexpectedly found in many places it shouldn't have been. This highlighted how little due diligence was happening at various points in that industry and the fact that the many levels of supplier supplying supplier supplying supplier made it easy for problems to go unnoticed as no one thought it was them that needed to check.
This isn't specific to ads. It's a problem either supply chain in every industry. It's why your clothes are made in dangerous sweatshops, why your electronics are made by dumping toxic chemicals in rivers, and why your chocolate is farmed by child slaves.
This happens all the time when a website serves malware through ads. The site will claim it isn't their fault, they aren't the ones serving the ads. And then they have the audacity to try and shame people for using adblockers.
And what if they aren't shady? Something large from a well known, non-shady company, like Twitter? Because that's who is mentioned in the article: Twitter's MoPub.
And is the reverse true? If you use these shady companies (Twitter and MoPub) are you contributing to the success of shady companies?
Bad advertisers are real, and they really exist. But trying to say that the person who relies on that software equally responsible as everyone down the pipe is a bit of a stretch. Otherwise, I could make the same extreme arguments about pretty much every tech company, big and small, and all the people that use them.
From the article -- which will see more than $20 billion stolen this year.
Think about the number in that article for a minute, $20 BILLION dollars "stolen" last YEAR.
How many places are there in the world where you can steal over a billion dollars from them, and they won't hunt you down and kill your family? A nation-state? Nope they will send their intelligence service after you. A drug cartel? Don't even get me started, this is the same scale of numbers that drug cartels earn[1]
And since there is no "War on Ad Fraudsters", no departments dedicated to hunting down and arresting 'kingpin' Ad hackers, why would you sell drugs when you can make about the same amount, so much more safely? When you figure all the expenses you don't need, the bribes, the security forces, the underground tunnels, even going out and acquiring product. This is so much better way to stealing money.
Keep in mind that it’s primarily the publishers that are hurt by this. Advertisers typically determine what they’re willing to spend on inventory based on the ROI, which is decreased by ad fraud.
As such, the inventory of “genuine” publishers is devalued as well.
Note that in this sense, a publisher can be both a powerhouse like FB or Google, or also smaller outlets.
I completely agree, it is perhaps the greatest source of Google's CPC erosion over the past decade. But the tools available to go after these folks are limited.
It's crazy that ads have reached through point where impressions-without-impressions are lucrative. If I was the type of scumbag to pay large amounts of money for data hungry ads, I'd be furious. But, they don't care? Are ads now just a sunk cost with no ROI analysis? Is it like a gym membership?
I think that the issue here is little to no access to a more detailed portfolio of the ads ran on your platform, as you are generally going through a middle-man, which in this case is the scammer by selling to providers on their front than they are paying you for.
I think the issue is that there are lots of number crunchers out there thinking :
"Well this ad campaign is profitable when we spend $100 on highly targeted Facebook ads, let's spend $10000... Oh they don't have that many impressions to sell us..."
"Where are we going to get all those ad impressions from?"
"Shady Bob's affiliate network has millions of impressions to sell us!"
"Great. That should work. The sky's the limit on this ad campaign! We're going to be rich!"
You say that as if shady Bob is to be less trusted regarding ad impressions than Facebook.
Facebook has untold millions and millions of fake accounts that they are not trying in the least to shutdown. Because they make just as much for an ad served to a bot as they do for a real user.
One of the issues is that there just isn't that many advertiser focused platforms that give the advertisers the data they need to actually do the analysis of that ROI. So they just kind of spray and pray sometimes.
It's not in the best interest of advertising platforms to give accurate data; their interest lies in giving data that makes you believe the money you spend on their platform is giving you good returns.
Marketing/advertising professionals are in the business of persuading businesses of their efficacy as much, if not morose, than they're in the business of persuading consumers to patronize those businesses.
Smooth talking and flashy slide decks about how great their advertising service is can blind business owners to poor results.
Isn’t the real issue here a technical one with MoPub’s ad platform?
How is it possible that a banner ad can open hidden off-screen views, and play video ads using a different (fraudulent) publisher ID? Can’t banners be sandboxed in order to prevent such activity, or at least detect it?
> why does a banner need to be anything more than an image?
Because of exactly situations like this! Say you're an advertiser and you make an image banner. You make a deal with an ad network to show your ad on some pages. Some site makes a deal with the same ad network to show ads on its pages. Your ad is on the publisher page, users are seeing it, everything is good.
Now a scummy publisher signs up with this ad network, and sets the ads to display underneath something else. If the ads are just simple images and nothing more, there isn't a way for the advertiser or the ad network to tell that they're being scammed.
(Disclosure: I work at Google on making ads declarative so they don't get to do this sort of thing. Speaking for myself and not the company.)
Simple: Because video ads are more effective, thus providing more sales for whatever's being advertised and more advertising income. Ad companies are trying to find the limit of annoyance vs effectiveness, and despite most people finding video ads and the like annoying, they're proven to be more effective than static ones.
They reason they're annoying is because they distract from the content, which is the reason they're effective, they steal focus.
The ad companies aren't trying to find the limit of annoyance vsc effectiveness, they're trying to maximise their profit. They don't care about annoyance, in fact annoyance can actually be positive for brand advertising.
In general, ads get to run arbitrary javascript. This is terrible, because once you open the door to a programming language people can pull in anything. Automated and manual review can help, but it's hard to stop technically.
I'm currently working on making ads declarative [1] so they don't get to do this anymore.
I think I have written than more than a dozen times already :)
NoRoot Firewall for android devices. You make a Global Filter (aka firewall rule) that writes: asterisk.XYZ.com:asterisk and you are done with that specific tracker/advertiser. Sometimes they don't use URLs but IPs, in which case I take the extra 30 seconds to check who does the IP belong to on www.ipaddress.com and if it is a CDN, I allow it (only for the app), if it is MoPub, Adjust, etc. they get a royal block on 123.123.asterisk.asterisk:asterisk to get done with it.
NoRoot firewall also has a "Access Log" tab which shows which connections have gone through and which are rejected, so you can fine tune further.
> He also acknowledged removing the photos and names of people, including his cofounder, Tal Melenboim, from Aniview’s website after being contacted by BuzzFeed News.
And their app lies about the scope of devices it can control. For example, it won't even warn you if your target device outright lacks an IR port before you install it.
Worse yet, check out the permissions it demands: Calendar (!), Contacts (!!), Camera, precise Location, microphone, Bluetooth... even body sensors!
A few years back Lockscreen was identified as one of the most underutilized real estate on the mobile phone. So a lot of phone companies started selling it to the highest bidder. While Samsung shouldn't be needing it, a lot of the lower end Chinese companies make razor thin margins on the phones, even if a company offered $1-3 for pre-installing an always running app that would show ads to users, they'd happily take it.
I doubt it's the Samsung launcher/ lock screen showing ads though. I remember a particular lock screen I tried out that was great. Functional, beautiful... Except, you know, when it showed an ad on half the lock screen.
Yeah, fuck that.
But a less tech savvy person might just go "well this is fine, I guess that's just how it is", and live with it.
I don't mind Google or Facebook showing ads in their own products, because that's the only business model that works at their scale and for what their offer. Imagine the world, in which the access to the most advanced search engine or social network was only available to the people who can afford to pay for it.
But I don't support using ad networks in the products that are not big enough to sell them themselves. Firstly, because it makes those products completely dependent on third-parties for their own existence. And secondly, because these products often become proxies for third-party user tracking.
Just let me pay for your product, if I like it enough. Otherwise, I will just rely on Blokada[1] to protect me from your unwillingness to find a sustainable business model.
> that's the only business model that works at their scale and for what their offer.
Do you have any basis for that claim? Because my impression is that historically there have been and are plenty of other businesses at their scale that did/do not need this at all.
How is Microsoft a physical business? They provide services delivered online, just like Facebook, Google, etc does.
> Yahoo! had ads since 1990s. Twitter has ads. Reddit has ads.
And yet seems like Reddit is the only one doing somewhat good (and even then the community is pissed off and rightfully so, and without the community they'd suffer the same fate as the two former ones).
Why is that even possible to hijack an active ad feed? It implicates that in-app ads are high risk security-wise. I just can't believe how broken the infrastructure for web services actually is, and why the companies doing and serving ads space only act when revenue is at stake. This and many other things are getting out of hand.
A lot of people listened to Douglas Crockford when he talked about "The Good Parts"[1] of Javascript. Unfortunately, very few people also listened to his warning[2] than mixing foreign Javascript was insecure by design (only proper trust boundary is the page).
How? Google's last secret bastion of defence was a common opengl driver glitch that was checked from well hidden webgl shader code. Even that was said to be cracked in no time.
Simple explanation is that people on the other side of adfraud war are the ones getting incomparably bigger money than any ad-fraud specialist hired by ad companies (and they both hire pretty much the same people...)
Imagine, the more Google cracks down on it, the bigger is the monetary reward for cracking the protection. I remember reading mid-naughties era Russian computer journals with pics of "advertising specialists" racing off their new Ferraris in Moscow right at the moment it was said a big crackdown was going on.
I'm curious about this "hidden webgl shader code" you're talking about, but only getting google results for this comment. Do you have a reference for this?
What makes you say that? Ads are generally powered by webviews, and there is little that Apple can do to determine what is desired behaviour and what is nefarious. Unless you are suggesting iAds should be the only game in town?
Web standards are introducing resource limits that can be used to prevent this abuse in the future, but that is not platform specific.
Google could ignore it but that would make users use their phones less, which would impact Google's bottom line. Users associating video ads with fraud would also be bad for Google's brand. There are lots of reasons why Google would want to resolve this problem.
I imagine Google might even employ risk assessors to figure out the cost impact and decide if it's worthwhile spending time fixing it.
I like how the issue of draining the battery is in title. It indicates that the actual fraud aspect is less important, and that the issue that we're really suppose to be upset about is the battery issue.
Directing angre towards the advertising is a little weird too, if there was less fraud, then maybe the ad buyers be more critical in regards to which ads they buy and how many they run.
The advertiser who's paying for fraudulent impressions, the user who's battery life is drained, and the app developer who might be getting reports/bad reviews about the app draining battery life
On unmolested Android an app running in the background causes the o/s to display an un-closable icon in the notification bar, according to google so as to help users avoid getting into these background battery-draining situations. This doesn't absolve the app writer from deploying what's essentially badly-behaving fraudware.
I guess the advertisers whose video ads run in the background don't care about ad viewability.
Most of our advertisers require at least %90 of viewability, big brands. But a still significant amount of them use VAST and don't care about any other measurement. When we ask them to if they have VPAID tags many times they just say no, we only have VAST.
Seems like an impossible arms race though (to fake viewable) plus it looks like this fraud was a VPAID container.
VPAID adds a overhead compared to the possibility of a native implemented VAST player. If there was a way to verify & build trust with pubs/networks to run vast tags natively, no JS, I would buy that inventory. Newer vast also has a viewable event, but again is on the pub to specify legitimately hence the verifiable trust. There's a reason FB gets a lot of my $$
Between players, ad network wrappers, third party service wrappers, creative teams getting the spec wrong, more requests for ad blockers to block etc., VPAID is a mess in terms of successful playback though. It's like developer for early 2000s browsers when you have to test in multiple tools and work around multiple quirks. I can see why advertisers might not want to bother.
I'm with you. I would prefer the much simpler VAST (maybe even change to json lol) with trusted/verifiable publishers. It can be natively implemented and not have to call webviews and all kinds of js bloat! I just dont know how to make that happen. In essence it's what FB offers just using their own internal video delivery platform.
There are. Google doesn't allow apps that block ads in other apps on play store (anymore, they were on play store some years ago), but you can always just download and install them manually on android.
NetGuard is on Google's store, and (at least in pro version) you could use it to monitor and block individual addresses any app wants to access. It's a bit involved, though I recommend at least the basic functionality: the ability to selectively allow and deny access to Wi-Fi/mobile connection for apps. I don't run any ad-filtering for apps, but I disabled networking for any app that IMO shouldn't use it, and I'm surprised by which apps suddenly start popping up in NetGuard's notifications (especially when I'm not using them).
I use Adaway on Android; it's hosts file based and reasonably effective. It isn't in the Play store and requires root, so it's not exactly aimed at a mainstream audience.
“I don’t even think about me being ripped off,” Julien told BuzzFeed News. “All I think about is them damaging the app’s reputation. It can cost money to [a user] and drain his battery.
We need more of that attitude in the world. So many companies try to make a buck doing things that ultimately damage their reputation. Once that's gone it's all down hill.
This is why advertisers flock to Google and Facebook Ads. You can call them a lot of things but ad fraud is something they take very seriously. A view or a click on Facebook video ad is most definitively pointing to the real thing. And just that surety is a good reason to pay some premium.
If anything Facebook's clicks are much more reliable than Google's since Facebook shows almost all its ads on its O&O properties where there is 0 potential for fraud. A lot Google's mobile ads are via AdMob which are shown on third party apps which Google doesn't own - which can lead to scenarios where the publisher may be upto some mischief.
AdMob is O&O by Google. I would say mischief is doable on both platforms since it is up to the developer to implement either SDK within their apps. This is why it is important to monitor conversion rates and be selective as to which apps your ads appear on. You could select Google's apps only for example.
No, I do know the meaning of owned and operated. What I stated is true as well, admob is O&O by Google. Facebook ads can appear on non O&O content the same as admob via their audience network. Both networks have options to advertise on just their O&O website or apps. Do you understand now?
Comparing AdMob to Facebook Audience Network is like comparing a lemon to a watermelon. Majority of FB's display revenue comes from ads on their own properties. This is not true for Google where their display network dominates their display ad spend.
Anyways, the fact that I have to explain all these things tells me you are pretty new to this and don't understand things deeply enough to have this debate. I will sign off.
"Aniview denies any involvement and instead says the platform and banner ads and code, which were created by one of its subsidiaries, were exploited by a malicious, unnamed third party."
The buzzfeed article goes into more detail, but the short answer is that the fraudsters buy a cheap banner ad in an app. They then resell that space for a higher fee, running a video that is hidden behind the banner ad. Because the video just keeps running, the brand whose ad it is ends up paying even more to the fraudsters.
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"Blogspam" is more an article attribute than a site attribute. In this case the article was a couple paragraphs lifted from another source, which is usually how people use the term.
I understand where you're coming from, but that's painting with a pretty broad brush. Advertising covers everything from the signage stating the name of the mom-and-pop shop on the corner (which is why cities often limit the size of logos/names on building) to billboards on the side of the freeway. It covers movie trailers I seek out ant watch to see what's coming soon to commercials interspaced within a video that interrupts the flow.
I hate some of those, but i actively like, or at least value the utility of some of the others. A specific type of advertising has grown outsized that last couple of decades, and it's causing real problems. But let's not paint with too broad a brush just because we're fed up. That's how stupid laws get passed.
> ...They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers...
> ...You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
This is fair. Both sides of the debate have made this ideological.
The pro advertising side make it sound like it is your capitalist duty to suffer ads.
No. Fuck that, I block annoyances in my life if I can. And I still buy crap don't worry.
Is a catalogue? Yes, I would say so, however it's a fundamentally less offensive, less coercive, format than billboards. I am not made to suffer the contents of a catalogue unless I opt into it. I would only open a catalogue if I've already decided that I want to see what it contains, probably because I want to purchase something that it may contain.
Shops are similar to this, I don't enter a shop unless I've decided to purchase something I believe they might have. One difference is the amount of signage outside the shop, which assaults me whether or not I've decided to enter the shop. (The cover of a catalogue arguably does the same, but is much smaller and that's an important difference.) Thankfully many municipalities have taken a stand against this and have begun regulating commercial signage, if only to preserve the local aesthetic / property values.
Consider the difference between Victoria and Vegas. Both have no shortage of commercial zoning. One is delightful, the other is an blight. A monument to just how bad things can be when we allow commercial interests to run rampant. Cynical, exploitative, and ugly.
So if i want to build a shop with a self contained (non structural or otherwise regulated) frontage of my own design, you think you should have a say over that?
And yet, the raison d'etre of movies and video games is not to be noticed. For advertising, it is. If the non-extreme forms of advertising are not being noticed, it means they are indeed dying out.
The purpose of advertising isn’t to be noticed, it’s to make people give you their money. It’s an open question whether being consciously noticed is a prerequisite for this or not; can ubiquitous but ignored Coca-Cola logos successfully change someone’s answer to “What would you like to drink?”
It is in a way, but that's because advertising has become underhanded and is inadvertently being done by the people at large. This is particularly prevalent in the media industry (TV and movies), where things like posters or TV commercials are not nearly as effective as the buzz a movie creates online.
When I checked my Facebook the other day, at least half of the posts made by my friends were in some way expressing how much they like a movie, TV show or game. I mean on the one side that's fine, it's sharing and talking about what they enjoy, but on the other it's a form of marketing / advertising, and I'd rather they talk about themselves or politics or something that matters more.
You're right. Advertising is just a symptom of the root problem, capitalism.
"Attention is currency in the marketplace of ideas" as they say. If everyone is supposed to vote with their dollar, you need to make them vote for you. The easiest way to do that is by fighting for your attention.
We're talking digital ads here, and the root cause of that is the cultural assumption that Internet content = free content. Now we know that someone is paying for the content one way or another. But we let the imbalance stick around too long, and programmatic advertising rushed in to fill the vaccuum.
And capitalism enables occasional charity, if you want. So I'd say it's a pretty good parallel for our nature. Certainly though it's not the "root of the problem" when it comes to self-serving behaviour.
Right, capitalism enables personal ownership which creates an opportunity for charity. Which parallels how humans and other animals behave in general. They seek out personal possessions but also sometimes understand the value of sharing them.
And means of production are just one type of possession. I am arguing that humans inherently seek personal possessions, of which one type is means of production.
Yes, I've considered that and I think it is much more likely that capitalism was shaped based on us, its creators, rather than us being shaped by capitalism.
Have you tried not seeking out movie trailers and seeing how your life changes as a result? Between my television avoidance, adblocking, and theater avoidance, I've not seen a movie trailer in many years. Instead of deliberately blasting your brain with fast paced A/V propaganda for a minute or two, try learning about movies through word of mouth with people who share your general interests.
Yes, but then I miss stuff I would have wanted to watch, or more accurately miss it longer than I would have wanted to. If a show or movie is genuinely engaging or thought provoking then I want to know, because material like that has value to me.
There are ways of becoming aware of what's available other than watching trailers. For instance, reviewing lists of recent releases then reading the wikipedia pages for them. The A/V format of trailers is fundamentally more coercive than text.
Television commercials are fundamentally more coercive than radio commercials, so should we all transition back to radio just to avoid those small additional coercive factors? No, of course not, there are benefits to television that are more important than those factors.
You should in fact practice television avoidance. It's an awful format in just about every sense.
You should not begin listening to more radio to compensate. Reading more newspapers and books would be more appropriate. Something movie trailers, television, and radio all have in common is the coercive use of music to manipulate how you feel, particularly when trying to persuade you to buy something or vote for somebody.
Try this simple exercise: instead of watching CNN on television, go to CNN.com and read the stories they have there in text. I assure you, anything important they have to say on television will be written down. And in text form, it will have less flashy graphics to daze you, the emotion in the television personality's voice will be neutralized, there will be far less repetition and typically more details organized in a more coherent manner. And perhaps best of all, the advertisements will be much easier to filter out.
Ok, maybe television wasn't the best example of my point. Let me give a different example. Advertisements on the web are fundamentally more coercive than advertisements in the newspaper, so should we regress back to newspapers? You mentioned adblockers but obviously that's not feasible for television, so for the purposes of the hypothetical, assume that adblocking on the web isn't feasible either. Would you stop using the web if that was the case?
> "Advertisements on the web are fundamentally more coercive than advertisements in the newspaper, so should we regress back to newspapers"
Emphatic yes, should adblocking on the web become infeasible. As I said, "Reading more newspapers and books would be more appropriate."
As it stands currently, it's possible to see fewer advertisements on the web of any sort than advertisements in newspapers. Web adblockers are currently very effective. Should that change, then I will change my reading habits and so should you.
(Of course websites that do not contain advertisements would still be perfectly fine.)
I don't get it. Basically you are saying that advertising has a greater negative utility than the positive utility of any technological advancement which could be used for advertising. How could this possibly be true? Would you prefer a world where reading and writing were never invented if that meant advertising could never be invented?
I don't quite agree, but they're very nearly bad if not worse because audio specifically is exceptionally power and very easy to manipulate people with. Arguably people in the radio industry might be more skilled at using audio for manipulation since they're forced to rely on it, but I think that's discounting the hypnotic effect of television, which controls your gaze as well.
Either way, avoiding television only to listen to the radio more is absurd. Like an alcoholic who's trying to quite booze so he starts chain smoking to cope.
I'm not against advertising, but I am against branding. The term was borrowed from the cattle industry, where a hot piece of metal scars the cattle with a logo of the owner. Branding in advertising is meant to scar your brain. I consider it a form of assault.
You mean those laws that allows companies to get a reputation with their clients without a scammer being able to legally exploit it and confuse everybody?
Branding is ok.
What I think is not OK but totally normal, is branding combined with advertisement. The name of the brand combined with all the perfect, beautiful and fun things of the world, so your name associates the brand with all the nice things. That is lying to me and I hate that it is the norm.
Oh, ok. You dislike brand advertising, that's reasonable.
I don't know if it's viable to separate good brand advertise (our soda tastes good, our bags last forever) from the bad kind (use our product and get all the pretty woman). Some regulation over emotional tone (and, of course, false info) may be much more successful than focusing on brands vs. unitary products.
I would not regulate it at all. I hope for more people to understand what is happening with their brains. Once you do understand it does not affect (as much). But with kids these days entrenched in their smartphone virtual reality consuming custom tailored ads .. the trend is unfortunately downwards.
I'm pretty sure if you actually look at cattle branding and advertising branding, the thing being branded is the product. Branding is as simple as the BIC logo on cheap pens, and hoping you'll remember the name when you need one or talk about one. I'm not sure how you're torturing the metaphor to get to the brand being applied to your brain.
The term was borrowed from the cattle industry, where it was used to know who owns a thing, thus you know the source and have a reasonable expectation of quality.
Voters are also usually not responsible enough to handle democracy either, and yet here we are.
1) If you don't tell people about your product, they won't know about it and probably won't use it. Word of mouth is ok, but it is surprising how many people are left uncertain and in the dark about what their options are if they aren't directly told what their options are.
2) Without advertising, the internet collapses. Google, in particular, collapses. And takes a lot of unprofitable-without-advertising services with it. Facebook probably goes as well. Most media companies too. Once you lose all those companies I'm not sure how many normal people would agree that the internet still existed.
The internet existed before advertising and it could continue to exist without it. People still desire instant communication and they would pay for it if a free option did not exist.
A lot of garbage like Facebook would fall and real social networks would take place with real interactions not algorithms trying to drive fake engagement.
> The internet existed before advertising and it could continue to exist without it.
It would, but it would be much harder to find content, because the major search engines pretty much only show corporate content marketing pieces that are written specifically to rank well in search results.
The other day, I was looking for some essays or blog posts about a particular TV show. The first 5 pages on Google were all variations of "10 things you didn't know", "this moment made our jaws drop", "How working in an office is like [completely dissimilar situation in the show]".
The only way I was able to actually find a human-written post (completely different style from a conversion-focused copy writer's post) was when I was searching for a screencap from the show on Google images. It's easy to distinguish user-captured images from corporate, licensed images, so clicking on the source link showed me a beautifully written, hilariously annotated season review on a cheap blogspot domain. That reminded me of the early Internet, when the writing felt much more personal and relatable.
SEO is SEO. Not all of those sites are ad-supported. You could have a copy writer post an article for that TV show, for the blog of a streaming service that offers it.
There are also plenty of corporate sites offering some SaaS product that will put out semi-technical blog posts that rank high but don't give you the full picture and end with a CTA like "Want to learn more? Sign up for our webinar".
The goal is for you to arrive on their blog page, and "convert" into a customer, or fill out a contact form. The content is a means to an end, which hurts content quality.
Advertising has been around for centuries, perhaps even millennia.
I mean, I think you mean "before online advertising", but that's not true either! Online advertising predates the web and even the Internet by decades; We had ads in the BBS days, and people didn't hate it. So what's going on?
China does a lot of "social" advertising and doesn't have the problems with ad fraud that the western world does: The trick is that "publishers" are responsible for what they serve. That's it.
> People still desire instant communication and they would pay for it if a free option did not exist.
People do pay for it. That's why we have slack and Cisco, and they aren't alone! The paid ones predate the "free" ones by decades too, but even the "paid" chat systems needed advertising to get those sales– we have throughout history always relied heavily on some form of sponsorship to bring products to market, so there will always be a channel for advertising.
> Advertising has been around for centuries, perhaps even millennia.
Not really, unless you stretch the definition so much that it does not make sense anymore. The problem here is the advertising industry, not the small sign on a local business, when you stretch definitions, of course the reasoning does not work anymore.
The advertising industry was not merely or limited to "a small sign on a local business" before the Internet. Not in the last few decades, or even in the last few centuries. Moving the goalposts doesn't help anyone.
The internet existed in a major fashion before there was any notable amount of advertising on the internet. The original goalpost was not "advertising did not exist in the entire world".
The discussion of the origin of advertising is a different issue. But I'd say that "advertising" as normally understood didn't really exist before mass-produced newspapers at the very least, so that's less than four centuries and nowhere near millennia.
> The internet existed in a major fashion before there was any notable amount of advertising on the internet.
We got Netscape Navigator, Yahoo! and the famous AT&T banner ad all in the same year. Even still, we had irc, email and newsgroup spam in the preceding decades (even if you can still call that "the Internet"). I would see advertising prior to this on commercial online platforms (like AOL and compuserve) -- but I can accept that this might not have been considered "the Internet".
I was thinking maybe you define the few years between "the WWW" was invented (1991, if you believe some accounts) to when it became popular (1993, maybe) as some kind of "golden era" of Internet when there weren't any banner ads, despite the fact early websites were directly advertising for eachother (a kind of "sign on the local business" perhaps?). This interpretation seems unkind though.
So I'm left thinking you and these couple other people are just wrong.
I simply can't imagine the Internet before advertising, and I doubt most people could. I have been online since the 1980s and I have in that entire time seen ads, so if you actually meant something by this statement, I'll need some help unpacking it.
I'm not counting spam, and I'm not counting sites that link to each other for free. And by "notable" I mean something like 10%, not an experiment or "it existed somewhere".
I don't agree. The internet definitely did not exist in any form that would be today seen as sufficient ever before. The sheer scale makes it impossible, advertising is the only way poor people could afford it and pay for it without paying money at the same time (so the developer now has a new option too). The options these companies that exist thanks to ads gave to all businesses in my country are enormous and have definitely helped greatly to grow our GDP (I live in the country with the greatest number of online stores per citizen). I love Facebook and Google for the options their advertising platforms have created for people (however not being ethical is not cool at all).
There is other ways to see ads. The companies don't pay money for advertising, they pay to make poor people buy things they don't need. If they would pay the site owner directly, maybe they would not be as poor?
Almost every ad is targeted at richer people, not poor people, for obvious reasons -- right her people have money to spend. Most companies would be fine giving their product free or at marginal cost to poor people if they could require richer people to pay. That's how freemium works, when it works. That's how DVD region coding works. That's how international book publishing works. That's why airfare is so cheap in economy class.
I doubt it. One of the interesting things about the ad funded internet is that it is effectively progressive. Rich people have more money to spend which makes their clicks more valuable which means the revenue made by ad funded companies comes disproportionately from the rich and yet poor and rich get to use the same exact internet despite the fact the it is mostly paid for by the rich.
I'm sad a lot of the top tier newspapers in America are starting to enforce their paywalls now because we are back to the state where only richer people can afford high quality news.
> Google, in particular, collapses. ... Facebook probably goes as well.
You say this as if it’s a bad thing. In my personal opinion, both of these companies have ultimately done more harm than good. Maybe Facebook more so than Google, and some Google products have pushed various tech forward, but at the expense of being tracked and watched and having garbage we don’t want or need constantly punch us in the face for our attention. More people seem to be suffering from anxiety and depression and I personally think these companies are a major part of the cause. If they were to collapse, good riddance I say.
> Most media companies too.
Most media companies are garbage peddling clickbait or misinformation, or at least empty-calorie/low substance content. I read a lot of stuff online because I’m just as addicted as everyone else, but the amount that is a truly insightful, actionable or entertaining in an any way memorable way is tiny. Good riddance to these too.
>More people seem to be suffering from anxiety and depression and I personally think these companies are a major part of the cause.
That trend pre-dates Google or Facebook. Before them and Snapchat and instagram, it was text messaging. The basic ability to send messages to your friends in real-time is the problem. Individual services can make it incrementally better or worse, but it's the behaviour that's the actual problem and even very trivial modern technology enables that behaviour just fine.
Communication isn't the problem, in my opinion. Its the empty-calorie idle content consumption. All the people (myself included) in the train or bus or streets who are idly scrolling through facebook or twitter feeds, reading some low-content articles on some clickbait subject -- the kind of stuff that I can spend hours reading, but then not be able to act on or remember any of it. What's the point of consuming content if you don't remember it a day or two later? I estimate that about 90% of what I encounter online makes no difference to my life (both in terms of usefulness and entertainment) other than to consume my time, my energy, my focus and my phones battery ;) All the while, the advertisement is telling me I'm not good enough and don't have the right things.
Back in the early 2000's, I did spend a lot of time with text messaging and I did spend a lot of time on messenger applications/irc etc. The way I communicate with others hasn't changed that much: I use different apps or websites, sure, but ultimately its very similar. What has changed, though, is how much content I consume idly, just to pass the time, because my internet-addicted brain tells me I should, not because I get anything out of it. I'm slowly working on reducing it, at least.
> but it's the behaviour that's the actual problem
Sure, but what we put out there encourages certain types of behaviour and the current norms of internet use encourage an, in my opinion, unhealthy addiction to low quality content consumption.
> Voters are also usually not responsible enough to handle democracy either, and yet here we are.
What a weird way to start off. You should probably elaborate on that for it to make any sense outside of a high school economics class.
Regarding number 1: like what? I’ve never met anyone who looked really happy about seeing an ad for hot singles in their area, that they should feel insecure about how they look in lingerie, that they should go gamble.. would more than 1% of advertising be good? If an extremely large proportion of a thing is bad, then I can agree with someone calling it a scourge.
> What a weird way to start off. You should probably elaborate on that
The point I'm trying to get across is that something can be critical to a functioning system even if on its own it doesn't look very impressive. Voters are the scourge of every democracy, they push for all sorts of stupid policies and usually get them.
> Regarding number 1: like what?
Literally everything? You've identified 3 product categories for products that border on scams, but literally _every_ product category advertises. I just flicked through my open tabs, and the first ad I see is for forex (www.icmarkets.com). There is no way I'd ever have heard of them without that ad; in fact thanks to this HN thread I know know how easy it is for me to get involved in forex trading :P. The 2nd is for a retail energy supplier offering me new deals. Honestly I think your 99% figure just suggests you are browsing the wrong websites. Maybe visit parts of the internet that are less sketchy.
> The point I'm trying to get across is that something can be critical to a functioning system even if on its own it doesn't look very impressive. Voters are the scourge of every democracy, they push for all sorts of stupid policies and usually get them.
I'd love if you could expand how this applies to advertising. Voters are critical to democracy. Advertising isn't critical to society, it's mostly a way for a lot of people to waste a lot of time, man-hours and natural resources on zero-sum game, while polluting the physical and mental space around us. If it were to suddenly disappear (a wide ban, perhaps), it wouldn't make much difference to anyone except people working in ad/adtech space. Sure, the Internet would get leaner, but I strongly believe that what would disappear is mostly just garbage that's just contributing to information noise.
I go further than the OP: to me, advertising is - quite literally - a cancer on society.
> Voters are critical to democracy. Advertising isn't critical to society
Advertising is absolutely critical to society. Without advertising we can't figure out what companies are selling, because they can't tell us. That puts a real crimp of having a functioning economy.
I don't have statistics handy, but I assure you that if advertising were generally banned there would be a lot less, say, smartphone owners. If you think the average person is capable of figuring out what is available from word of mouth you are grossly overestimating what a normal person is capable of.
> Advertising isn't critical to society, it's mostly a way for a lot of people to waste a lot of time, man-hours and natural resources on zero-sum game
It isn't a zero sum game. It is value add. People can't exchange money for goods and services they want if they can't find a vendor selling said goods and services.
That's motte-and-bailey defense. Technically advertising is about informing consumers what's on the market. In reality, it's everything but. Real-world advertising is near-universally dishonest and manipulative. Getting rid of that would not preclude companies from making available (note the pull, not push, approach) information on what they're selling.
> It isn't a zero sum game. It is value add. People can't exchange money for goods and services they want if they can't find a vendor selling said goods and services.
It is. People can trivially find any goods and services they find through catalogs, phone books, trade shows, and Internet search engines. Advertising spending is mostly about shouting loud enough to get heard over shouting of your competitors - which is a zero-sum game of ever amplifying noise.
Well, if you have evidence of that then my interest would be piqued. But I must admit I suspect you're just being cynical. By far and away most of the ads I see are honest but with an agenda.
Manipulative is a debatable term. Advertisers are manipulating you in the same way I'm manipulating you right now - I have an opinion and I want you to agree with me. I don't really see how you can justify getting unhappy about that. It seems pretty reasonable given that they are ultimately funding whatever it is you are looking at at the time.
> catalogs, phone books, trade shows, and Internet search engines
Those are literally compendiums of ads, except search engines. But in this instance, the consumer is proactively searching for ads. Clearly the ad is providing some value to consumers. And the idea that consumers should attend trade shows to work out what their options are is patently absurd.
And working out exactly what search engines would look like if they were not ad supported is beyond me. I assume you'd be paying some sort of subscription free for the pleasure of basically googling ads. Seems a bit backwards.
> People can trivially...
No they can't, decisions about things outside a person't domain of expertise aren't as easy as you want to pretend they are. What the consumers really want is (a) cheap and (b) one of what everyone else has. Advertising isn't going to help with (a) but it is fantastically good at (b).
Figuring out what everyone else is doing is hard work. That is one of a couple of value-adding opportunities for an ad.
"I assume you'd be paying some sort of subscription free for the pleasure of basically googling ads. Seems a bit backwards."
Back in the day, many better mail order catalogs cost money to receive. Mostly to offset the cost of mailing them out, but partially as a form of filter, on the theory that someone sufficiently interested in a catalog to pay to get it would be more likely to actually order something.
Mobile phones, sure. Smartphones? That's a bit more debatable. At the very least, a cheap smartphone is probably fine for most "economic" needs. What we need less of is idle high-noise-low-quality content consumption, which is also the thing that's most supported by advertisement.
Smartphones, cheap or not, are not a problem. The core benefits they bring to poor people are mobile data connection, web browser, phone connection and IMs bundled in a single device. None of that is "supported by ads". The problems of smartphones (that are beyond mobile phones) start with the application ecosystem, completely disfigured by the cancer of advertising.
Fair point. Most of us here on HN don't require smartphones for that, but I take your point. Everything you list as a key benefit for poor people doesn't require an expensive smartphone, or at least, wouldn't if adverts weren't sucking up the compute and battery power when using a web browser ;) More seriously, though, beyond those basic capabilities, which we (ie not poor people) have had as long as I've been using the internet and while crappy adverts have always existed (punch the monkey and win a prize!) online, the amount of low quality content we consume has increased substantially, largely due to social media imho, which is supported by ads and is what I'm arguing against. I don't disagree with what you said here at all.
I know for myself a huge amount are gained, or saved. Being able to check email, keep in touch on Teams and SMS, track my meetings, etc save me a handful of hours every week. They're some of the most valuable hours too.
Imagine if literally the only way to get a phone, or even find out what phones there are, was through a carrier store.
Take away advertising and the only way someone could find out about a product is word of mouth, or walking into a shop. Functionally everything would originate in shops. That means looking at the available options would be very time consuming, involve a lot of travel and be dominated by very powerful gatekeepers who would control you access to goods and information. It would revitalise the high street, that's for sure, but in a very controlling, rent-seeking way.
> That means looking at the available options would be very time consuming, involve a lot of travel and be dominated by very powerful gatekeepers who would control your access to goods and information.
You make it sound like ads are purely informational and designed to help us make an informed decision. Remember the iPhone ads touting "fastest iPhone ever" with the bottom text "sequences shortened"?
Did you buy your last computer with no research, just the ad? Do you go to McDonald's because the burgers look exactly like the ones in the commercial?
There are ways to optimize access to this information. Trade shows that display new products. Mail-order catalogs for companies or industry groups. Companies would find a way to make information - not ads - available for interested people to peruse. The core difference would be "pull not push", i.e. people with a problem would go looking for solutions, and very little space to compete on product information - preventing runaway zero-sum games.
Of course there are workarounds, but they are time consuming and therefore expensive, but also less efficient and reliable. It would be going back to the 80s, but even more locked in to physical outlets as gatekeepers. You're really just exchanging an inconvenience for a tyranny.
Trade shows and catalogs are forms of advertising.
Also, regarding "pull not push", people sometimes don't know there is a solution to their "problem" (where "problem" might not be a real problem, per se, but maybe simply not even knowing that a given option exists).
You can define anything as advertising if you try hard enough. That's not very helpful for trying to strike a balance, though.
Of the ads I see, if we exclude the drug ads that really should not be allowed, I'd say that an extremely small fraction are telling me about solutions I didn't already know existed. The "useful" case should not be so rare.
> Honestly I think your 99% figure just suggests you are browsing the wrong websites. Maybe visit parts of the internet that are less sketchy.
This is not true and I'm gonna provide some evidence:
I am a conservative christian[0].
I get those ads as well.
My browsing habits:
- stuff linked from hn
- local news
- one mainstream newspaper
- fringe political papers from the left and right (mostly don't agree with any of them but it makes for interesting reading, a better understanding of why people are mad etc)
- christian podcast
- technical stuff (both related to work and to my technical hobbies)
- repair videos, childrens videos (when they get to borrow one of my devices)
And still I get ads for singles in my area. Extremely stupid ads. E.g.:
- when I'm at work in the middle of nowhere and I get ads with a picture of someone who is supposedly desperately looking for someone like me, supposedly living in the valley next to nowhere where there are nobody except old farmers. That kind of stupid.
For a while I tried to hit that micro x in the corner of those ads and mark them as irrelevant. Only got equally stupid ads for other equally irrelevant sites.
I don't want to remove ad income for honest writers but I've given up now and I'm ad blocking like many others here.
I've also come to the conclusion that tracking doesn't work, it is just a thing they do to scam marketers.
And I've concluded that if I were to place ads for a product I would place them based on the content of the website, -like Google used to do. If anyone wants a proven business opportunity here it is :-]
[0]: No, not embarrased by it, but I do not want to discuss that here, this is a technical forum. Just pointing out I don't visit what I consider sketchy web sites at all.
Yeah, everyone does. Are you suggesting you see almost literally 100 such ads for every ad advertising something legit? Because for me they are the 20% dross for 80% potentially useful ads I see.
Honestly, the businesses in your region of the woods are truly woeful at advertising, and should probably spend more money on it. Realistically, if what you suggest is true, something has probably gone wrong and your demographic has been caught in a bubble where no-one serious is advertising to you. Because those ads should be in the minority.
> Because for me they are the 20% dross for 80% potentially useful ads I see.
Lucky you. For me it seems way below 50% useful.
The closest I get to relevant ads are if I search for something like x hosting, then I'll maybe see ads for that for a while.
Im not against ads:
In fact I'd like if local shops informed online whenever their deal of the week came out (they sometimes do and that is a click from me if for some reason the ad isn't blocked).
Same goes for other interesting ads if I see them, which means max twice a year.
> Honestly I think your 99% figure just suggests you are browsing the wrong websites. Maybe visit parts of the internet that are less sketchy.
Those are the kinds of things I see mentioned on Twitter. I use iPhone, so I don't see why I would see internet ads myself. Obviously as I am someone who doesn't like ads, I'm one to block them.
There's adblocking in mobile Safari since 2015? So there's very few ads that I see since then (the digital ads in the last month I've come across: "powered by x", "powered by y", and "you can subscribe to z at url" - I'm happy with those). Comparing life before mobile adblocking and after, I don't see that since then I've missed out on anything. People, without an interest in the success of ads, who come across an ad on their devices seem to find it irritating; haven't found anyone who didn't seem happy and kept using uBlock after showing how.
> The point I'm trying to get across is that something can be critical to a functioning system even if on its own it doesn't look very impressive. Voters are the scourge of every democracy, they push for all sorts of stupid policies and usually get them.
Eh.. am I living in some kind of singular utopia then?
The new technologies behind ads are really terrible, but I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with a full-page Rolex ad in the WSJ. Dude in a fancy suit wearing a watch that looks great, and a quick description - that's a very simple, easy to understand model. If I like that watch, I can save up for it. Rolex doesn't know I saw it and doesn't care.
New technologies behind ads, tracking users wherever they go and hounding them relentlessly and using their personal communications to harvest more data - that's the scourge. I'm fine with ads, but I block them on every website because I'm not fine with tracking.
Advertising is like cancer. It starts small but eventually consumes the entire product/company. Seems like there is no "safe" amount of advertising, it becomes bigger and bigger and ends up swaying the entire company into doing unethical and anti-user things (like optimising for "engagement").
What if people were directly paid to view adverts?
Introduce ad viewing apps where people voluntarily sign up, provide information about themselves, and use attention-tracking etc. to reward them with some money based on how many adverts they watch or surveys they answer.
Maybe go further and ban all other forms of advertisement that takes up space anywhere, classifying them as vandalism.
Everybody wins (unless this idea is fundamentally flawed):
• People only see ads they want to see, when they want to see them.
• Companies know exactly who is watching and what they’re interested in, instead of going through third-parties and overly roundabout, sometimes illegal, ways to acquire that information.
"What if people were directly paid to view adverts?"
One of the "problems" with that it is that it would reveal just how little money these things make. A page full of busy ads that annoy the heck out of you may still make well under a penny, only breaking a penny if you actually click on something and possibly even then only if you buy something.
Facebook's approximate revenue in 2018 is about 34 billion, it seems [1]. Facebook's user count in 2018 [2], call it two billion for math convenience and a fudge factor for fake & dead accounts. Simple math shows that even if 100% of their revenues are from ads, they're making $17 dollars a year from their average user. Revenue, not profit. And they're one of the big money makers in the ad industry!
Converted to daily terms, that's about 4.7 cents per day. That's what they're trashing your feed for, rearranging it so you see more ads and less of your family, rearranging it to drive "engagement" by putting more rage- and stress-inducing controversial content into your feed, and carefully managing your experience for. 5 cents a day, average.
Advertisers aren't just crashing our society, driving our news industries into death spirals, invading our privacy at scales that would make the Stasi blush, and annoying the hell out of us on almost every web page we visit, they're doing it for almost no money. They can't afford to pay you to view advertising. Even someone making minimum wage would find the offer they could make laughable, because your offer would be coming out of their profits, not revenue, so if Facebook wanted to pay you to view ads they'd be slicing up something like a $1/year with you.
(This is why I've proposed as one solution something like a 1cent/impression advertising tax. It would annihilate everything but the absolutely most profitable portions of the industry. Even a 0.01cent/impression tax would probably kill 90% of it. And I think there's a perfectly justifiable case to be made that such a tax would simply be internalizing externalities and perfectly justified under both left and right wing theories of economics.)
Advertising is what makes the web accessible to billions of people in the world for free.
Most apps offer the option to make an in app purchase and turn off ads. Why don't you do that vs. giving your unqualified opinions on what is good and bad for society?
I would rephrase as "fake advertising is a scourge on society" with "fake" specific to artificially generated "impressions" that, by design, no user ever actually selects or sees.
It is interesting how this article starts. A guy has an app which drains users batteries. But it's not his fault of course, because it's the ad company. Except the ad company says it's not their fault, because the ad came from some other company.
This fingerpointing points to one of the core problems of the ad industry: They created a system where nobody knows who's responsible for anything, so malware and fraud has an easy time.
But this mode of thinking makes no sense. If you put ads in your app YOU are responsible. If you use an ad service from a shady company that outsources to other shady companies then you're still responsible.
Adtech companies know exactly who is responsible. Every ad on any serious network is approved before going live. Every single auction is logged, that's just basic tracking and necessary for billing anyway.
The problem is that there are no serious consequences in this industry. Ad fraud isn't a technical problem, it's a business problem, one that most companies are not incentivized to solve or prevent.
I work for a publisher and basically these ad networks say "you'll lose 50% of your revenue if you implement 'safe frames' in Google AdManager 360. We have some publishers who do it but basically no advertiser wants to run ads in a safeframe."
So you're saying the standard practice is to let the malicious ad buyers from your network run arbitrary javascript on our sites...
"Yes that's what our publishers do..."
SafeFrames are fine for most ads that are isolated in a box on the page, and those that wait for user interaction before changing dimensions.
The main issue today is because advertisers want viewability tracking (which safeframe has a minimal but poor API for) and they want it with their own independent providers. Also prebid.js used for header bidding does not support safe frames.
Things will improve though because IntersectionObserver is now built into modern browsers and even works in cross-domain iframes. There's also the Open Measurement SDK[1] from the IAB to standardize viewability finally, and Prebid.js is also working on using SafeFrames.
1. https://iabtechlab.com/standards/open-measurement-sdk/
If companies are "people" in the legal sense, why isn't there a 'corporate death penalty' for utter gross violations that would get real humans locked in a case for decades?
Is the CFAA only for fleshers? Why so?
I don't know about all that.
The "why" is because it's a 12-figure global industry including two of the most valuable companies in the world with unlimited resources and lobbying power, combined with highly technical mechanics and a complex network of business relationships that no politicians have any real understanding of.
I must add that there's also a (sometimes irrationally) strong reaction by those politicians and many others to working with anyone in adtech to even attempt to solve these problems which clearly doesn't help.
Because that legal fiction is only employed when it is convenient for the owners of the fictive "people" in question.
This is simply not true. I work for a top 3 major ad exchange, and there's only so much validation that can happen when you process 10s of millions of requests per second that have to leave your system in 40ms.
Like I said, this is a business problem. Those major ad exchanges should stop working with bad actors. 95% of ad fraud is coming from known sources and/or blatantly noticeable.
This is overlooking the problem of detecting that people are doing something malicious. There is a fairly large variety of unwanted behavior, both by the advertisements, and by the sites or apps hosting the ads.
That's covered under "no consequences". You don't need fancy tech, most of the malicious behavior comes from a limited set of bad actors and vectors. It's just not stopped because nobody cares to.
Sorry, but you genuinely do need fancy tech to detect it. There are multiple businesses that do nothing but that, plus teams at most of the big ad tech companies. You may notice this article cites Protected Media and DoubleVerify. You can't manually audit that kind of traffic volume.
Several of the ad tech companies have pressed law enforcement to prosecute some of these people, but mostly unsuccessfully. They're often in places that are difficult to extradite from like Russia, hiding behind some botnet: https://adexchanger.com/online-advertising/why-the-doj-final...
My point is that detection doesn't solve anything, it's treating the symptom. The solution is to stop working with bad actors, but nobody does that because it's easy money and there's plausible deniability by creating new companies, accounts, sites, etc.
Your 2nd statement is what I'm saying: no consequences refers to the lack of oversight, regulation and enforcement in the industry. That's why there's barely any prosecution. For example, Buzzfeed did an expose last year about Newsweek/IBTimes committing ad fraud, except it was already well known by everyone in adtech. People like getting paid and they're not going to stop on their own.
Btw, I personally know the founders of all those companies. If fraud was eliminated then they would go out of business. They're not interested in solving the problem even if they could.
Yeah, many supposedly legit websites (even large media companies) run these very scammy "man from YOUR LOCATION got rich in 20 days!" "one weird trick to get younger" ads that ultimately lead to some scam
But if you ask them, it's not their fault, but the ad company (Google), which in turn will point to a different company, etc
And in the end, people are scammed and Google gets a bit richer, but it's nobody's fault or responsibility
FWIW the companies responsible for those ads are Taboola, Outbrain, and Revcontent. I posted one especially egregious example last week on r/adops:
https://www.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/b0n57e/its_embarrass...
those are why I use ad blocking (hadn't heard of revcontent but def taboola and outbrain)
Man, yesterday I read a New York Times article in a view without ad blocking... I was actually embarrassed for them as a company. It's difficult to read an article when there are so many ads that there's doubt as to if there is more article below the next raft of ads.
Huh, you are right. Those scummy links at Washington Post are all Outbrain. I was mistaken then (because they use BOTH Google and Outbrain)
Google often has scummy ads as well. Haven't checked recently, but the ads on http://getpaint.net are often designed to look like download buttons to download the popular paint application.
Scummy AdSense ads are harder to pin down, of course, because of the live bidding and personalization.
Just check (3/22/19) and yup sure enough https://i.imgur.com/6SMBjDa.png . I find this is pretty common with many software websites that have ads, I'm really surprised paint.net doesn't switch to carbon or something.
EDIT: There's another one at the bottom of the page too. And they're randomized, some make it clear you aren't downloading Paint.net (such as the "Free Mac PDF Reader") but others aren't at all.
Why don't developers put a thick border with 'Advertisement' in bold around the ad space so that ads displayed doesn't look like they are native elements?
Because then they make less money.
It's fairly common for large media sites to use multiple ad vendors. WaPo isn't unique here.
I clicked but I still don't know who's #1 on Hillary's list.
Even responsible journalistic websites like Der Spiegel (insert comment about Relotius here) run ads like these, where the ads appear like "related articles" underneath serious articles...
And people ask me why I block ads.
I block, but some still get through. Ive got them blocked by a firewall and dns but parts go out of date. What do you use?
ublock origin + privacy badger has been virtually flawless for me.
Thank you
Even worse, I've seen several large media companies and news sites run ads on mobile that completely hijack the (Android, i.e. Chrome) browser and redirect to a third party landing page. They usually seem to get killed off eventually but every now and then they pop up again.
I'm not sure if these ads specifically target Android devices but it wouldn't surprise me.
Just as if you were to buy a child’s toy that has a secret embedded camera that streams to some foreign server.
It may be the manufacturers fault, but the person who sold it to you (the provider) is liable.
Should be the same here
I think it's a little bit more complicated. There's a point where this becomes somewhat questionable. Say the toy has a reputable certification and the company, up until now, never had any track record of mistreating their customers. In this case I'd argue the company is responsible, not the parent, and that it is actually worthy following through to find whoever acted maliciously rather than just picking the last person in the chain.
Now in the particular case of ads in applications, I think there are surely many developers who fail to do their due diligence when picking advertisement partners, but without a doubt there are also advertisement companies who excel at duping the developers they work with.
If you want to sell a product, you are liable for that product. It's simple.
Excessive trust is negligent. Let the market decide how to mitigate risk, but eliminating the risk creates opportunity for profiting from malfeasance.
If someone trades a product with a neighbor, are they liable since they sold it for a different form of currency? Or would this only be aimed at those who reach a certain level of trading/selling per year?
Right, and from the POV of the child, the parent is liable.
The child is crying, because the parent took the toy away.
Liable is a bit strong word here, liability without fault is mainly rejected concept in modern world.
If so, why is the retailer liable but not the parent?
I think retailer's liability here is also limited.
Imagine you are a shop selling cola in can.
If coca cola company put some unhealthy stuff in, you are not liable just for selling it. But if you made the stuff unhealthy because you stored it in direct sunlight long time, you are liable.
Because the parent is a natural person and the retailer is the last commercial entity in the chain. If the purchaser was a day-care center or other commercial entity, liability would be with them.
"without fault"? Is it reasonable to assume that a cheap internet connected toy with a video camera and microphone is secure enough to use without any precautions?
" secret embedded camera "
I bought "child's toy" and sold you "child's today", you expect seller to check every toy if there is "secret camera" ?
Yeah, I expect the seller to know what they're selling.
Interesting. So if you buy such a device for a gift, not knowing that it has a secret camera, and then decide you don't want it and resell it on Ebay, you'd agree that now it is you who are liable?
Sorry I don't have anything more substantive to add, but yes, I would be liable.
caveat emptor
This is settled now, everyone says google shouldn't have put a secret camera in their fancy thermostats:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19407147
> the person who sold it to you (the provider) is liable
I don't think that's true unless they knew it had this behavior or were negligent in some way.
That's how consumer law works nearly everywhere: every party has full (civil) liability over the outcome. The parties can then sue each other to settle it, without involvement of the consumer.
> or were negligent in some way
I'm not sure what to call allowing any old shit to run in your app under the guise of ads other than negligent. The fact that it's so common should not be an excuse.
Liability seems to be focused on pointing blame, and then based on that we decide who should clean up.
In situations like this perhaps it would be more productive if we had a system that focused more getting everyone to clean up and prevent this from happening again first, and then look at the liability part.
I do believe that this is the innate human response, the desire to "do the right thing". Most of us have the right mixture of nature/nurture to want to do that. But if the system doesn't enable that behavior or punishes that, that behavior will get suppressed and we end up in a miserable situation for everybody.
I dunno, it's not exactly an easy question or it would be solved already, and bad faith actors will exploit the goodwill of others too.
To me it feels like it's less of "nobody [in the industry] knows who's responsible" and more of "everybody takes responsibility for the earnings and nobody for the evils".
> If you put ads in your app YOU are responsible.
Take that line of thinking one more step. If a user installs a "free" app that is ad-supported, the USER is responsible.
I tell my kids this when they bitch about needing a new phone because theirs is too slow and the battery drains too fast. I say look at all the crap you installed on it. Clean it up don't be so dumb.
Lol, Did we have the same dad you sound like me talking to my kids. It is because we love them we don’t sugar coat it. But the issue I have is why are these ad companies even allowed to siphon information from a tablet my “child” is using. I know one needs to watch the internet that small children use. But if I have a tablet solely used for my kid to watch shows and perhaps play some educational games or coloring, what business does any company have sucking up data from that tablet. Surely just by the list of apps installed, all children’s games, indicates immediately that a kid owned the tablet but I suppose that Is just another data point they have and like.
That is all true but for practical intents and purposes you should probably make ad company responsible. It might seem a bit illogical but from practice standpoint, it is much easier to pursue and punish an ad company than to hunt each and everyone of its clients. Especially that they can just abandon the company and create new one, and it will be just cost of doing business, everyone of those shady players will have an ad shill company that can be replaced quickly in case of trouble.
Is there an ad network that doesn't use JS? You make a call to the ad network server, it returns an image, you display it in a native UIImageView (not a web view), and if the user taps it, you open a URL in a web view.
Unless the user taps the ad, no JS or HTML is involved, which eliminates the possibility of such tricks.
I looked for such a library a while back, but didn't find any.
Yes, you would think it would be that simple, but it’s definitely not.
Advertisers will give you double click (by google), atlas (Facebook), mediamind, etc tags m, to deliver as the ad. They will load in god knows what JS into their little space and (I cannot stress this enough), advertisers love their gimmicky little iteractable/expandable, engagement-filled ads.
To boot, they’re all laden with code to detect what publishers/sites/apps you’re displaying on, how much of the ad is viewable on screen and for how long, every scrap of code they can possibly fit in there to identify the user down to the finest grain they can manage.
You would think that things needn’t be this complex, but ad-tech companies have done a wonderful job of convincing advertisers that “targeted advertising is definitely better, and you definitely invest the extra cost in it, and definitely do all these other things because if you don’t then you’re totally falling behind your competitors, who are totally scraping every bit of data from their users, so you’d be a loser not to do the exact same thing and ~give all that dats to us.~ Sorry, make “valuable use” of all that data”.
Part of what js does in that ecosystem is support independent accounting for the advertiser of whether their ad was viewed and by who/what...which on the margins of course can still be tricked/gamed, but which for mainstream advertising is important.
>> But this mode of thinking makes no sense. If you put ads in your app YOU are responsible. If you use an ad service from a shady company that outsources to other shady companies then you're still responsible.
Then it comes back to the Play Store. They like having all those free apps. It makes users feel like their Andriod phone has whatever they need. Google needs to make apps searchable based on privacy settings. They need to encourage people to pay for user respecting apps. I'd happily pay a buck or two for lots of apps if only they didn't have add or try to get me to buy add-ons. Just give me upfront honesty about what I'm getting and I'll pay you for it. Stop hosting crapware in the app store!
Have you ever tried to convince someone to pay for something they believe they can get for free? The number of people who will pay monthly for user-respecting basic fundamentals like email is shockingly small.
How much do you pay for your email?
> How much do you pay for your email?
$50 year because I actually decided to put my money where my mouth is and actually pay for a service I use. I don’t regret it one bit.
Why would anyone pay for email when arguably the best in breed email service is free?
Why pay more for a worse product?
Gmail might have been best of breed in 2004 on the basis of its superior spam filter, but that's certainly not the case now. In fact, with the recent change to the UI, Gmail now loads incredibly slowly or not at all on Firefox. It's bad in Chrome too, but much closer to unusable on FF.
No other webmail service I've ever used has given me the lag issues Gmail has.
because fastmail is better than the free one. Just as good in the common use cases, they don't make me the product, and when in the rare case where I have a tech issue their support is responsive. There are a couple other paid email providers that I'm told provide services that are good.
I live this everyday. Our ad team blames the ad network they run on our products if malware gets through, rather than taking responsibility and banning the ad network. Or even better, taking responsibility themselves for selecting ad networks that run scams and malware.
To me, if an ad network allows crap through, we have to take onwership and penalize the ad network and move on. But there is no accountability. It's everyone fighting for that next penny.
No one in the supply chain takes responsibility for this. That's how I, someone who works for a company that has ad-supported products, runs an ad blocker at the router level in my home. If people are going to actively try to harm me and my family by hunting for pennies, I am going to seek protection.
And because no one takes responsibility for this whole mess, the whole house of cards will fall. More and more devices are coming with ad-blocking built in. If we can't responsibly create ad-supported businesses, how can we honestly expect people to want to see those ads?
Digital advertising is so divorced from making users happy.
> This fingerpointing points to one of the core problems of the ad industry: They created a system where nobody knows who's responsible for anything, so malware and fraud has an easy time.
They know.
This totally depends on unspoken agreement and assumptions.
- You invited me to dinner, went to shopping, bought some stuff to cook, one ingredient was bad, I got poisoned.
In my opinion, here you don't have responsibility, because you acted with your best knowledge and good expectations from shop.
This kind of stuff is happening on google a lot too, this is not totally about some small shady company, working with another shady company.
> - You invited me to dinner, went to shopping, bought some stuff to cook, one ingredient was bad, I got poisoned.
The difference is due diligence. In picking ingredients and preparing them the host of this dinner has most likely taken care to use what they have good reason to believe a reputable sources and methods.
People placing add on sites and in apps are doing no such thing for the most part - beyond concerns of outrageously illegal adverts or those that might otherwise offend their audience directly, they are simply picking the provider that is likely to pay them the most. This is insufficient due diligence so they shouldn't be able to pass the buck, but they can because there are so many levels of indirection in the industry it becomes difficult to prove who failed most.
There is commonality with your food example: the recent meat source problems in Europe when cheap horse meat was unexpectedly found in many places it shouldn't have been. This highlighted how little due diligence was happening at various points in that industry and the fact that the many levels of supplier supplying supplier supplying supplier made it easy for problems to go unnoticed as no one thought it was them that needed to check.
This isn't specific to ads. It's a problem either supply chain in every industry. It's why your clothes are made in dangerous sweatshops, why your electronics are made by dumping toxic chemicals in rivers, and why your chocolate is farmed by child slaves.
This happens all the time when a website serves malware through ads. The site will claim it isn't their fault, they aren't the ones serving the ads. And then they have the audacity to try and shame people for using adblockers.
The situation will never change for as long as """"""marketers"""""" continue to benefit from the big data collection it facilitates.
> This fingerpointing points to one of the core problems of the ad industry: They created a system where nobody knows who's responsible for anything,
This sounds like a lot of industries...
Nice Scotsman there.
> If you use an ad service from a shady company
And what if they aren't shady? Something large from a well known, non-shady company, like Twitter? Because that's who is mentioned in the article: Twitter's MoPub.
And is the reverse true? If you use these shady companies (Twitter and MoPub) are you contributing to the success of shady companies?
Bad advertisers are real, and they really exist. But trying to say that the person who relies on that software equally responsible as everyone down the pipe is a bit of a stretch. Otherwise, I could make the same extreme arguments about pretty much every tech company, big and small, and all the people that use them.
Even you.
This is why I use Brave browser. The internet needs ads but the ads should be whitelisted.
That wouldn't help here.
The problem being discussed here was adverts being run in the background of locally installed apps, not adverts in pages displayed by a browser.
From the article -- which will see more than $20 billion stolen this year.
Think about the number in that article for a minute, $20 BILLION dollars "stolen" last YEAR.
How many places are there in the world where you can steal over a billion dollars from them, and they won't hunt you down and kill your family? A nation-state? Nope they will send their intelligence service after you. A drug cartel? Don't even get me started, this is the same scale of numbers that drug cartels earn[1]
And since there is no "War on Ad Fraudsters", no departments dedicated to hunting down and arresting 'kingpin' Ad hackers, why would you sell drugs when you can make about the same amount, so much more safely? When you figure all the expenses you don't need, the bribes, the security forces, the underground tunnels, even going out and acquiring product. This is so much better way to stealing money.
[1] the estimate, from the Justice Department, that Colombian and Mexican cartels reap $18 billion to $39 billion from drug sales in the United States each year. --- https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/magazine/how-a-mexican-dr...
Keep in mind that it’s primarily the publishers that are hurt by this. Advertisers typically determine what they’re willing to spend on inventory based on the ROI, which is decreased by ad fraud.
As such, the inventory of “genuine” publishers is devalued as well.
Note that in this sense, a publisher can be both a powerhouse like FB or Google, or also smaller outlets.
I completely agree, it is perhaps the greatest source of Google's CPC erosion over the past decade. But the tools available to go after these folks are limited.
It's crazy that ads have reached through point where impressions-without-impressions are lucrative. If I was the type of scumbag to pay large amounts of money for data hungry ads, I'd be furious. But, they don't care? Are ads now just a sunk cost with no ROI analysis? Is it like a gym membership?
I think that the issue here is little to no access to a more detailed portfolio of the ads ran on your platform, as you are generally going through a middle-man, which in this case is the scammer by selling to providers on their front than they are paying you for.
I think the issue is that there are lots of number crunchers out there thinking :
"Well this ad campaign is profitable when we spend $100 on highly targeted Facebook ads, let's spend $10000... Oh they don't have that many impressions to sell us..."
"Where are we going to get all those ad impressions from?"
"Shady Bob's affiliate network has millions of impressions to sell us!"
"Great. That should work. The sky's the limit on this ad campaign! We're going to be rich!"
You say that as if shady Bob is to be less trusted regarding ad impressions than Facebook.
Facebook has untold millions and millions of fake accounts that they are not trying in the least to shutdown. Because they make just as much for an ad served to a bot as they do for a real user.
One of the issues is that there just isn't that many advertiser focused platforms that give the advertisers the data they need to actually do the analysis of that ROI. So they just kind of spray and pray sometimes.
It's not in the best interest of advertising platforms to give accurate data; their interest lies in giving data that makes you believe the money you spend on their platform is giving you good returns.
Marketing/advertising professionals are in the business of persuading businesses of their efficacy as much, if not morose, than they're in the business of persuading consumers to patronize those businesses.
Smooth talking and flashy slide decks about how great their advertising service is can blind business owners to poor results.
This has been the case with ads in adult since the start of internet.
Isn’t the real issue here a technical one with MoPub’s ad platform?
How is it possible that a banner ad can open hidden off-screen views, and play video ads using a different (fraudulent) publisher ID? Can’t banners be sandboxed in order to prevent such activity, or at least detect it?
Or phrased another way, why does a banner need to be anything more than an image, possibly an animated image?
Everything else screams of abuse and unnecessary tracking.
> why does a banner need to be anything more than an image?
Because of exactly situations like this! Say you're an advertiser and you make an image banner. You make a deal with an ad network to show your ad on some pages. Some site makes a deal with the same ad network to show ads on its pages. Your ad is on the publisher page, users are seeing it, everything is good.
Now a scummy publisher signs up with this ad network, and sets the ads to display underneath something else. If the ads are just simple images and nothing more, there isn't a way for the advertiser or the ad network to tell that they're being scammed.
(Disclosure: I work at Google on making ads declarative so they don't get to do this sort of thing. Speaking for myself and not the company.)
Simple: Because video ads are more effective, thus providing more sales for whatever's being advertised and more advertising income. Ad companies are trying to find the limit of annoyance vs effectiveness, and despite most people finding video ads and the like annoying, they're proven to be more effective than static ones.
They reason they're annoying is because they distract from the content, which is the reason they're effective, they steal focus.
The ad companies aren't trying to find the limit of annoyance vsc effectiveness, they're trying to maximise their profit. They don't care about annoyance, in fact annoyance can actually be positive for brand advertising.
In general, ads get to run arbitrary javascript. This is terrible, because once you open the door to a programming language people can pull in anything. Automated and manual review can help, but it's hard to stop technically.
I'm currently working on making ads declarative [1] so they don't get to do this anymore.
[1] Specifically, AMP Inabox, which is AMP ads on non-AMP pages: https://www.ampproject.org/docs/ads/amphtml_ads
I think I have written than more than a dozen times already :)
NoRoot Firewall for android devices. You make a Global Filter (aka firewall rule) that writes: asterisk.XYZ.com:asterisk and you are done with that specific tracker/advertiser. Sometimes they don't use URLs but IPs, in which case I take the extra 30 seconds to check who does the IP belong to on www.ipaddress.com and if it is a CDN, I allow it (only for the app), if it is MoPub, Adjust, etc. they get a royal block on 123.123.asterisk.asterisk:asterisk to get done with it.
NoRoot firewall also has a "Access Log" tab which shows which connections have gone through and which are rejected, so you can fine tune further.
Edit: replaced asterisks with the word "asterisk"
> He also acknowledged removing the photos and names of people, including his cofounder, Tal Melenboim, from Aniview’s website after being contacted by BuzzFeed News.
Streisand Effect. Archived version of their "Team" page: https://web.archive.org/web/20171004134601/http://www.anivie...
I used to date a girl who had a Galaxy S8 from sprint and that phone had most ridiculous ads like online casino ads, everywhere, even on lock screen.
The 'Peel Smart Remote' app came pre-installed on my old Samsung S6, and it did the same thing. Lock screen ads and everything.
https://fossbytes.com/peel-remote-use-remove-smart-remote/
https://www.androidpolice.com/2017/03/29/peel-remote-app-ups...
And their app lies about the scope of devices it can control. For example, it won't even warn you if your target device outright lacks an IR port before you install it.
Worse yet, check out the permissions it demands: Calendar (!), Contacts (!!), Camera, precise Location, microphone, Bluetooth... even body sensors!
A few years back Lockscreen was identified as one of the most underutilized real estate on the mobile phone. So a lot of phone companies started selling it to the highest bidder. While Samsung shouldn't be needing it, a lot of the lower end Chinese companies make razor thin margins on the phones, even if a company offered $1-3 for pre-installing an always running app that would show ads to users, they'd happily take it.
I doubt it's the Samsung launcher/ lock screen showing ads though. I remember a particular lock screen I tried out that was great. Functional, beautiful... Except, you know, when it showed an ad on half the lock screen.
Yeah, fuck that.
But a less tech savvy person might just go "well this is fine, I guess that's just how it is", and live with it.
I don't mind Google or Facebook showing ads in their own products, because that's the only business model that works at their scale and for what their offer. Imagine the world, in which the access to the most advanced search engine or social network was only available to the people who can afford to pay for it.
But I don't support using ad networks in the products that are not big enough to sell them themselves. Firstly, because it makes those products completely dependent on third-parties for their own existence. And secondly, because these products often become proxies for third-party user tracking.
Just let me pay for your product, if I like it enough. Otherwise, I will just rely on Blokada[1] to protect me from your unwillingness to find a sustainable business model.
[1] https://blokada.org/
Been using Blokada since December and it's now a must-have; battery life has improved somewhat as well.
I don't even make heavy use of my phone for social media apps, yet have close to 300K ad-related requests blocked since I installed it.
> that's the only business model that works at their scale and for what their offer.
Do you have any basis for that claim? Because my impression is that historically there have been and are plenty of other businesses at their scale that did/do not need this at all.
> historically there have been and are plenty of other businesses at their scale that did/do not need this at all.
Have we ever had an internet company with over 1 billion active users not using advertising as its main source of income?
Microsoft? Major ISPs and wireless carriers? Basically any company that has a real product that people need can succeed without advertising.
Maybe the real answer is that Shitbook is just not worth paying for?
What's the definition of a "real" product? Is Google's search engine not real?
Advertising as a business model is perfectly valid and has allowed billions of people to access things they otherwise wouldn't get.
> Microsoft? Major ISPs and wireless carriers?
These are physical businesses, not internet companies.
Bing has ads. Twitter has ads. Reddit has ads.
Yahoo! has had ads since 1990s.
How is Microsoft a physical business? They provide services delivered online, just like Facebook, Google, etc does.
> Yahoo! had ads since 1990s. Twitter has ads. Reddit has ads.
And yet seems like Reddit is the only one doing somewhat good (and even then the community is pissed off and rightfully so, and without the community they'd suffer the same fate as the two former ones).
> How is Microsoft a physical business?
A lot of its income comes from licensing Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office, which are physical products.
And where Microsoft competes with Google directly, it often shows ads just like Google does[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bing_Ads
O365 however does not, in contrast with Google Docs.
Why is that even possible to hijack an active ad feed? It implicates that in-app ads are high risk security-wise. I just can't believe how broken the infrastructure for web services actually is, and why the companies doing and serving ads space only act when revenue is at stake. This and many other things are getting out of hand.
A lot of people listened to Douglas Crockford when he talked about "The Good Parts"[1] of Javascript. Unfortunately, very few people also listened to his warning[2] than mixing foreign Javascript was insecure by design (only proper trust boundary is the page).
[1] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596517748.do
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfBL2sc2zUU
Right. Some ads just serve malware.
My first thought is that this is really Google's problem to fix. How is it even possible to do this on Android? Or is this also possible on iOS?
How? Google's last secret bastion of defence was a common opengl driver glitch that was checked from well hidden webgl shader code. Even that was said to be cracked in no time.
Simple explanation is that people on the other side of adfraud war are the ones getting incomparably bigger money than any ad-fraud specialist hired by ad companies (and they both hire pretty much the same people...)
Imagine, the more Google cracks down on it, the bigger is the monetary reward for cracking the protection. I remember reading mid-naughties era Russian computer journals with pics of "advertising specialists" racing off their new Ferraris in Moscow right at the moment it was said a big crackdown was going on.
I'm curious about this "hidden webgl shader code" you're talking about, but only getting google results for this comment. Do you have a reference for this?
This is irrespective of the OS. Basically, on the webview, they are running a downloading and running hidden video with all the trackers going off.
Not necessarily. You can’t run wild on iOS.
What makes you say that? Ads are generally powered by webviews, and there is little that Apple can do to determine what is desired behaviour and what is nefarious. Unless you are suggesting iAds should be the only game in town?
Web standards are introducing resource limits that can be used to prevent this abuse in the future, but that is not platform specific.
You can continue to believe that iOS is your temple of all great things and nothing bad can happen there.
Or you can wake up and smell the coffee.
It has nothing to do with the OS but everything to do with how HTML works on in app browsers.
It's not clear from the article, but this is only possible when the app is being viewed right?
Google could ignore it but that would make users use their phones less, which would impact Google's bottom line. Users associating video ads with fraud would also be bad for Google's brand. There are lots of reasons why Google would want to resolve this problem.
I imagine Google might even employ risk assessors to figure out the cost impact and decide if it's worthwhile spending time fixing it.
"One of the hallmarks of mania is the rapid rise in the complexity and rates of fraud." -- Michael Burry, The Big Short (Film)
I like how the issue of draining the battery is in title. It indicates that the actual fraud aspect is less important, and that the issue that we're really suppose to be upset about is the battery issue.
Directing angre towards the advertising is a little weird too, if there was less fraud, then maybe the ad buyers be more critical in regards to which ads they buy and how many they run.
It's a three pronged attack.
The advertiser who's paying for fraudulent impressions, the user who's battery life is drained, and the app developer who might be getting reports/bad reviews about the app draining battery life
There is an interesting podcast about ad fraud and different schemes, on Software Engineering Daily.
https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2019/03/12/ad-fraud-eng...
On unmolested Android an app running in the background causes the o/s to display an un-closable icon in the notification bar, according to google so as to help users avoid getting into these background battery-draining situations. This doesn't absolve the app writer from deploying what's essentially badly-behaving fraudware.
I guess the advertisers whose video ads run in the background don't care about ad viewability.
Most of our advertisers require at least %90 of viewability, big brands. But a still significant amount of them use VAST and don't care about any other measurement. When we ask them to if they have VPAID tags many times they just say no, we only have VAST.
Seems like an impossible arms race though (to fake viewable) plus it looks like this fraud was a VPAID container.
VPAID adds a overhead compared to the possibility of a native implemented VAST player. If there was a way to verify & build trust with pubs/networks to run vast tags natively, no JS, I would buy that inventory. Newer vast also has a viewable event, but again is on the pub to specify legitimately hence the verifiable trust. There's a reason FB gets a lot of my $$
Between players, ad network wrappers, third party service wrappers, creative teams getting the spec wrong, more requests for ad blockers to block etc., VPAID is a mess in terms of successful playback though. It's like developer for early 2000s browsers when you have to test in multiple tools and work around multiple quirks. I can see why advertisers might not want to bother.
I'm with you. I would prefer the much simpler VAST (maybe even change to json lol) with trusted/verifiable publishers. It can be natively implemented and not have to call webviews and all kinds of js bloat! I just dont know how to make that happen. In essence it's what FB offers just using their own internal video delivery platform.
You know many programmers are the 1% of the internet, in a way. I think almost every programmer has an adblocker.
I've been browsing without an adblocker for a while. I really recommend it. You will see scam after scam after scam ...
And most people, the 99% who don't use adblockers are falling for all these things.
I am amused that the article detailing a very good reason to use an adblocker asked me to disable mine.
Hey, there are no ad blockers for apps, right? Messing with other apps is a ToS violation for both Google and Apple, as I recall.
Edit: OK, you can. But not with other apps from the official stores.
There are. Google doesn't allow apps that block ads in other apps on play store (anymore, they were on play store some years ago), but you can always just download and install them manually on android.
NetGuard is on Google's store, and (at least in pro version) you could use it to monitor and block individual addresses any app wants to access. It's a bit involved, though I recommend at least the basic functionality: the ability to selectively allow and deny access to Wi-Fi/mobile connection for apps. I don't run any ad-filtering for apps, but I disabled networking for any app that IMO shouldn't use it, and I'm surprised by which apps suddenly start popping up in NetGuard's notifications (especially when I'm not using them).
I use Adaway on Android; it's hosts file based and reasonably effective. It isn't in the Play store and requires root, so it's not exactly aimed at a mainstream audience.
That's the greatest and most underrated opportunity for F-Droid.
On both, you can block the ads at the DNS level. Not quite as effective, but still workable.
What apps do you use? Or do you mean using pihole or whatever?
Edit: OK, I see. Adguard, for example.
Blokada DNS works reasonably well.
You can with Adguard
Thanks for this, installing this on both me and my wife's phones.
But it's not available from Google or Apple stores.
“I don’t even think about me being ripped off,” Julien told BuzzFeed News. “All I think about is them damaging the app’s reputation. It can cost money to [a user] and drain his battery.
We need more of that attitude in the world. So many companies try to make a buck doing things that ultimately damage their reputation. Once that's gone it's all down hill.
This is why advertisers flock to Google and Facebook Ads. You can call them a lot of things but ad fraud is something they take very seriously. A view or a click on Facebook video ad is most definitively pointing to the real thing. And just that surety is a good reason to pay some premium.
Google is great but I definitely wouldn't put Facebook ad clicks anywhere near the quality of Google ad clicks.
If anything Facebook's clicks are much more reliable than Google's since Facebook shows almost all its ads on its O&O properties where there is 0 potential for fraud. A lot Google's mobile ads are via AdMob which are shown on third party apps which Google doesn't own - which can lead to scenarios where the publisher may be upto some mischief.
AdMob is O&O by Google. I would say mischief is doable on both platforms since it is up to the developer to implement either SDK within their apps. This is why it is important to monitor conversion rates and be selective as to which apps your ads appear on. You could select Google's apps only for example.
You don't know the definition of O&O. Please get a sense of what you are debating about before typing away.
O&O means that the app/site where, in this case, the ad is shown is owned and operated by Google. That is absolutely not true for AdMob.
No, I do know the meaning of owned and operated. What I stated is true as well, admob is O&O by Google. Facebook ads can appear on non O&O content the same as admob via their audience network. Both networks have options to advertise on just their O&O website or apps. Do you understand now?
Comparing AdMob to Facebook Audience Network is like comparing a lemon to a watermelon. Majority of FB's display revenue comes from ads on their own properties. This is not true for Google where their display network dominates their display ad spend.
Anyways, the fact that I have to explain all these things tells me you are pretty new to this and don't understand things deeply enough to have this debate. I will sign off.
You need to readjust your experience meter.
Would be great if ad networks would stop letting random companies embed whatever js they want.
There is no reason a banner ad should have this capability. Twitter's MoPub is showing their negligent greed.
That being said, draining video ads budgets is probably a pro-social 'Robin Hood' kind of theft.
Another reason to cut all ads alike.
"Aniview denies any involvement and instead says the platform and banner ads and code, which were created by one of its subsidiaries, were exploited by a malicious, unnamed third party."
The Bucket has to stop somewhere...
TIL Ad fraud is fine, just don't drain our precious batteries?
Gangsters shooting gangsters isn't fine either, but regular people worry mostly about collateral damage.
Embedded automatically played videos are a scourge upon Internet.
Also amount of ad space on news sites should be regulated, i.e. > 30% of screen space is meaningless pictures/ads/promo - not a news site.
One more reason to use AdGuard on Android.
How are they making money by draining batteries?
The buzzfeed article goes into more detail, but the short answer is that the fraudsters buy a cheap banner ad in an app. They then resell that space for a higher fee, running a video that is hidden behind the banner ad. Because the video just keeps running, the brand whose ad it is ends up paying even more to the fraudsters.
the answer is in the Title of TFA: This Giant Ad Fraud Scheme Drained Users' Batteries And Data By Running Hidden Video Ads In Android Apps
The originally submitted article didn't have that title (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19459834).
The link is blog spam, original article is at https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/in-banne...
Thanks. Url changed from https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/22/18276542/scam-hidden-vide....
Submitters: please read and follow the guidelines. They include: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Sorry about that, will keep it in mind for future posts.
The verge is not blogspam - its long form tabloid
"Blogspam" is more an article attribute than a site attribute. In this case the article was a couple paragraphs lifted from another source, which is usually how people use the term.
Advertising is a scourge upon society.
Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
> Advertising is a scourge upon society.
I understand where you're coming from, but that's painting with a pretty broad brush. Advertising covers everything from the signage stating the name of the mom-and-pop shop on the corner (which is why cities often limit the size of logos/names on building) to billboards on the side of the freeway. It covers movie trailers I seek out ant watch to see what's coming soon to commercials interspaced within a video that interrupts the flow.
I hate some of those, but i actively like, or at least value the utility of some of the others. A specific type of advertising has grown outsized that last couple of decades, and it's causing real problems. But let's not paint with too broad a brush just because we're fed up. That's how stupid laws get passed.
A’s Banksy said:
> ...They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers...
> ...You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
Full quote here: https://trickygirl.wordpress.com/2012/03/01/quote-of-the-day...
So no different than leering self interested political posturing masquerading as altruistic innocuity
This is fair. Both sides of the debate have made this ideological. The pro advertising side make it sound like it is your capitalist duty to suffer ads.
No. Fuck that, I block annoyances in my life if I can. And I still buy crap don't worry.
There's a difference between consuming products that are funded by ads, where you can just it out of the product, and add that pollute public space.
Is a shop an advert ?
Is a catalogue? Yes, I would say so, however it's a fundamentally less offensive, less coercive, format than billboards. I am not made to suffer the contents of a catalogue unless I opt into it. I would only open a catalogue if I've already decided that I want to see what it contains, probably because I want to purchase something that it may contain.
Shops are similar to this, I don't enter a shop unless I've decided to purchase something I believe they might have. One difference is the amount of signage outside the shop, which assaults me whether or not I've decided to enter the shop. (The cover of a catalogue arguably does the same, but is much smaller and that's an important difference.) Thankfully many municipalities have taken a stand against this and have begun regulating commercial signage, if only to preserve the local aesthetic / property values.
Consider the difference between Victoria and Vegas. Both have no shortage of commercial zoning. One is delightful, the other is an blight. A monument to just how bad things can be when we allow commercial interests to run rampant. Cynical, exploitative, and ugly.
So if i want to build a shop with a self contained (non structural or otherwise regulated) frontage of my own design, you think you should have a say over that?
I am more on the position that advertising as a function of product promotion is dying, in all, but the most extreme overkill forms.
Is it possible you just don't notice the non-extreme forms anymore, given how extreme the rest is?
May well be, but that still means that non-extreme-ads are on the way out...
People used to really notice when a movie, TV programme or video game was violent. Blood, graphic death, etc.
As those things became more common and more extreme, people stopped noticing. Now we don't really talk about it at all anymore.
Does that mean non-violent movies and video games are on their way out? (No it does not.)
And yet, the raison d'etre of movies and video games is not to be noticed. For advertising, it is. If the non-extreme forms of advertising are not being noticed, it means they are indeed dying out.
The purpose of advertising isn’t to be noticed, it’s to make people give you their money. It’s an open question whether being consciously noticed is a prerequisite for this or not; can ubiquitous but ignored Coca-Cola logos successfully change someone’s answer to “What would you like to drink?”
Your line of thought here has its own merit
It is in a way, but that's because advertising has become underhanded and is inadvertently being done by the people at large. This is particularly prevalent in the media industry (TV and movies), where things like posters or TV commercials are not nearly as effective as the buzz a movie creates online.
When I checked my Facebook the other day, at least half of the posts made by my friends were in some way expressing how much they like a movie, TV show or game. I mean on the one side that's fine, it's sharing and talking about what they enjoy, but on the other it's a form of marketing / advertising, and I'd rather they talk about themselves or politics or something that matters more.
You are the first person who has said they prefer politics over TV shows on Facebook. I definitely prefer TV shows.
You're right. Advertising is just a symptom of the root problem, capitalism.
"Attention is currency in the marketplace of ideas" as they say. If everyone is supposed to vote with their dollar, you need to make them vote for you. The easiest way to do that is by fighting for your attention.
We're talking digital ads here, and the root cause of that is the cultural assumption that Internet content = free content. Now we know that someone is paying for the content one way or another. But we let the imbalance stick around too long, and programmatic advertising rushed in to fill the vaccuum.
More like, capitalism is just a symptom of the root "problem" that humans are fundamentally self-interested
They are, but they are also also very social beings who sacrifice themself for others.
Also, culture matters.
And capitalism enables occasional charity, if you want. So I'd say it's a pretty good parallel for our nature. Certainly though it's not the "root of the problem" when it comes to self-serving behaviour.
Capitalism "enables" charity in the same way capitalism "creates" products. It doesn't. Wealth enables charity, labor creates products.
Capitalism does however spread inequality, which in turn creates an opportunity for charity that wouldn't otherwise be necessary.
Right, capitalism enables personal ownership which creates an opportunity for charity. Which parallels how humans and other animals behave in general. They seek out personal possessions but also sometimes understand the value of sharing them.
Capitalism has nothing to do with personal possessions. It pertains to the personal holding of production.
And means of production are just one type of possession. I am arguing that humans inherently seek personal possessions, of which one type is means of production.
Have you ever considered that maybe being self-centered isn't human nature but the kind of behavior capitalism incentivises?
Yes, I've considered that and I think it is much more likely that capitalism was shaped based on us, its creators, rather than us being shaped by capitalism.
Have you tried not seeking out movie trailers and seeing how your life changes as a result? Between my television avoidance, adblocking, and theater avoidance, I've not seen a movie trailer in many years. Instead of deliberately blasting your brain with fast paced A/V propaganda for a minute or two, try learning about movies through word of mouth with people who share your general interests.
Yes, but then I miss stuff I would have wanted to watch, or more accurately miss it longer than I would have wanted to. If a show or movie is genuinely engaging or thought provoking then I want to know, because material like that has value to me.
There are ways of becoming aware of what's available other than watching trailers. For instance, reviewing lists of recent releases then reading the wikipedia pages for them. The A/V format of trailers is fundamentally more coercive than text.
Television commercials are fundamentally more coercive than radio commercials, so should we all transition back to radio just to avoid those small additional coercive factors? No, of course not, there are benefits to television that are more important than those factors.
No, we should regulate advertising strongly enough to remove most of the coercion. In all mediums.
When what's left is overwhelmingly truthful and simply informative, the balance and magnitude of punishment and fines are about right.
You should in fact practice television avoidance. It's an awful format in just about every sense.
You should not begin listening to more radio to compensate. Reading more newspapers and books would be more appropriate. Something movie trailers, television, and radio all have in common is the coercive use of music to manipulate how you feel, particularly when trying to persuade you to buy something or vote for somebody.
Try this simple exercise: instead of watching CNN on television, go to CNN.com and read the stories they have there in text. I assure you, anything important they have to say on television will be written down. And in text form, it will have less flashy graphics to daze you, the emotion in the television personality's voice will be neutralized, there will be far less repetition and typically more details organized in a more coherent manner. And perhaps best of all, the advertisements will be much easier to filter out.
Ok, maybe television wasn't the best example of my point. Let me give a different example. Advertisements on the web are fundamentally more coercive than advertisements in the newspaper, so should we regress back to newspapers? You mentioned adblockers but obviously that's not feasible for television, so for the purposes of the hypothetical, assume that adblocking on the web isn't feasible either. Would you stop using the web if that was the case?
> "Advertisements on the web are fundamentally more coercive than advertisements in the newspaper, so should we regress back to newspapers"
Emphatic yes, should adblocking on the web become infeasible. As I said, "Reading more newspapers and books would be more appropriate."
As it stands currently, it's possible to see fewer advertisements on the web of any sort than advertisements in newspapers. Web adblockers are currently very effective. Should that change, then I will change my reading habits and so should you.
(Of course websites that do not contain advertisements would still be perfectly fine.)
I don't get it. Basically you are saying that advertising has a greater negative utility than the positive utility of any technological advancement which could be used for advertising. How could this possibly be true? Would you prefer a world where reading and writing were never invented if that meant advertising could never be invented?
This isn't true in my experience, radio ads are much more intrusive as they hinge on one sensory experience only.
I don't quite agree, but they're very nearly bad if not worse because audio specifically is exceptionally power and very easy to manipulate people with. Arguably people in the radio industry might be more skilled at using audio for manipulation since they're forced to rely on it, but I think that's discounting the hypnotic effect of television, which controls your gaze as well.
Either way, avoiding television only to listen to the radio more is absurd. Like an alcoholic who's trying to quite booze so he starts chain smoking to cope.
I'm not against advertising, but I am against branding. The term was borrowed from the cattle industry, where a hot piece of metal scars the cattle with a logo of the owner. Branding in advertising is meant to scar your brain. I consider it a form of assault.
You mean those laws that allows companies to get a reputation with their clients without a scammer being able to legally exploit it and confuse everybody?
Branding is ok. What I think is not OK but totally normal, is branding combined with advertisement. The name of the brand combined with all the perfect, beautiful and fun things of the world, so your name associates the brand with all the nice things. That is lying to me and I hate that it is the norm.
Oh, ok. You dislike brand advertising, that's reasonable.
I don't know if it's viable to separate good brand advertise (our soda tastes good, our bags last forever) from the bad kind (use our product and get all the pretty woman). Some regulation over emotional tone (and, of course, false info) may be much more successful than focusing on brands vs. unitary products.
I would not regulate it at all. I hope for more people to understand what is happening with their brains. Once you do understand it does not affect (as much). But with kids these days entrenched in their smartphone virtual reality consuming custom tailored ads .. the trend is unfortunately downwards.
I'm pretty sure if you actually look at cattle branding and advertising branding, the thing being branded is the product. Branding is as simple as the BIC logo on cheap pens, and hoping you'll remember the name when you need one or talk about one. I'm not sure how you're torturing the metaphor to get to the brand being applied to your brain.
The term was borrowed from the cattle industry, where it was used to know who owns a thing, thus you know the source and have a reasonable expectation of quality.
Voters are also usually not responsible enough to handle democracy either, and yet here we are.
1) If you don't tell people about your product, they won't know about it and probably won't use it. Word of mouth is ok, but it is surprising how many people are left uncertain and in the dark about what their options are if they aren't directly told what their options are.
2) Without advertising, the internet collapses. Google, in particular, collapses. And takes a lot of unprofitable-without-advertising services with it. Facebook probably goes as well. Most media companies too. Once you lose all those companies I'm not sure how many normal people would agree that the internet still existed.
The internet existed before advertising and it could continue to exist without it. People still desire instant communication and they would pay for it if a free option did not exist.
A lot of garbage like Facebook would fall and real social networks would take place with real interactions not algorithms trying to drive fake engagement.
> The internet existed before advertising and it could continue to exist without it.
It would, but it would be much harder to find content, because the major search engines pretty much only show corporate content marketing pieces that are written specifically to rank well in search results.
The other day, I was looking for some essays or blog posts about a particular TV show. The first 5 pages on Google were all variations of "10 things you didn't know", "this moment made our jaws drop", "How working in an office is like [completely dissimilar situation in the show]".
The only way I was able to actually find a human-written post (completely different style from a conversion-focused copy writer's post) was when I was searching for a screencap from the show on Google images. It's easy to distinguish user-captured images from corporate, licensed images, so clicking on the source link showed me a beautifully written, hilariously annotated season review on a cheap blogspot domain. That reminded me of the early Internet, when the writing felt much more personal and relatable.
Harder to find? Wouldn't a lack of advertising money kill most of those garbage sites?
SEO is SEO. Not all of those sites are ad-supported. You could have a copy writer post an article for that TV show, for the blog of a streaming service that offers it.
There are also plenty of corporate sites offering some SaaS product that will put out semi-technical blog posts that rank high but don't give you the full picture and end with a CTA like "Want to learn more? Sign up for our webinar".
The goal is for you to arrive on their blog page, and "convert" into a customer, or fill out a contact form. The content is a means to an end, which hurts content quality.
> The internet existed before advertising
Advertising has been around for centuries, perhaps even millennia.
I mean, I think you mean "before online advertising", but that's not true either! Online advertising predates the web and even the Internet by decades; We had ads in the BBS days, and people didn't hate it. So what's going on?
China does a lot of "social" advertising and doesn't have the problems with ad fraud that the western world does: The trick is that "publishers" are responsible for what they serve. That's it.
> People still desire instant communication and they would pay for it if a free option did not exist.
People do pay for it. That's why we have slack and Cisco, and they aren't alone! The paid ones predate the "free" ones by decades too, but even the "paid" chat systems needed advertising to get those sales– we have throughout history always relied heavily on some form of sponsorship to bring products to market, so there will always be a channel for advertising.
> Advertising has been around for centuries, perhaps even millennia.
Not really, unless you stretch the definition so much that it does not make sense anymore. The problem here is the advertising industry, not the small sign on a local business, when you stretch definitions, of course the reasoning does not work anymore.
The advertising industry was not merely or limited to "a small sign on a local business" before the Internet. Not in the last few decades, or even in the last few centuries. Moving the goalposts doesn't help anyone.
The internet existed in a major fashion before there was any notable amount of advertising on the internet. The original goalpost was not "advertising did not exist in the entire world".
The discussion of the origin of advertising is a different issue. But I'd say that "advertising" as normally understood didn't really exist before mass-produced newspapers at the very least, so that's less than four centuries and nowhere near millennia.
> The internet existed in a major fashion before there was any notable amount of advertising on the internet.
We got Netscape Navigator, Yahoo! and the famous AT&T banner ad all in the same year. Even still, we had irc, email and newsgroup spam in the preceding decades (even if you can still call that "the Internet"). I would see advertising prior to this on commercial online platforms (like AOL and compuserve) -- but I can accept that this might not have been considered "the Internet".
I was thinking maybe you define the few years between "the WWW" was invented (1991, if you believe some accounts) to when it became popular (1993, maybe) as some kind of "golden era" of Internet when there weren't any banner ads, despite the fact early websites were directly advertising for eachother (a kind of "sign on the local business" perhaps?). This interpretation seems unkind though.
So I'm left thinking you and these couple other people are just wrong.
I simply can't imagine the Internet before advertising, and I doubt most people could. I have been online since the 1980s and I have in that entire time seen ads, so if you actually meant something by this statement, I'll need some help unpacking it.
I'm not counting spam, and I'm not counting sites that link to each other for free. And by "notable" I mean something like 10%, not an experiment or "it existed somewhere".
I don't agree. The internet definitely did not exist in any form that would be today seen as sufficient ever before. The sheer scale makes it impossible, advertising is the only way poor people could afford it and pay for it without paying money at the same time (so the developer now has a new option too). The options these companies that exist thanks to ads gave to all businesses in my country are enormous and have definitely helped greatly to grow our GDP (I live in the country with the greatest number of online stores per citizen). I love Facebook and Google for the options their advertising platforms have created for people (however not being ethical is not cool at all).
There is other ways to see ads. The companies don't pay money for advertising, they pay to make poor people buy things they don't need. If they would pay the site owner directly, maybe they would not be as poor?
Almost every ad is targeted at richer people, not poor people, for obvious reasons -- right her people have money to spend. Most companies would be fine giving their product free or at marginal cost to poor people if they could require richer people to pay. That's how freemium works, when it works. That's how DVD region coding works. That's how international book publishing works. That's why airfare is so cheap in economy class.
I doubt it. One of the interesting things about the ad funded internet is that it is effectively progressive. Rich people have more money to spend which makes their clicks more valuable which means the revenue made by ad funded companies comes disproportionately from the rich and yet poor and rich get to use the same exact internet despite the fact the it is mostly paid for by the rich.
I'm sad a lot of the top tier newspapers in America are starting to enforce their paywalls now because we are back to the state where only richer people can afford high quality news.
> Google, in particular, collapses. ... Facebook probably goes as well.
You say this as if it’s a bad thing. In my personal opinion, both of these companies have ultimately done more harm than good. Maybe Facebook more so than Google, and some Google products have pushed various tech forward, but at the expense of being tracked and watched and having garbage we don’t want or need constantly punch us in the face for our attention. More people seem to be suffering from anxiety and depression and I personally think these companies are a major part of the cause. If they were to collapse, good riddance I say.
> Most media companies too.
Most media companies are garbage peddling clickbait or misinformation, or at least empty-calorie/low substance content. I read a lot of stuff online because I’m just as addicted as everyone else, but the amount that is a truly insightful, actionable or entertaining in an any way memorable way is tiny. Good riddance to these too.
>More people seem to be suffering from anxiety and depression and I personally think these companies are a major part of the cause.
That trend pre-dates Google or Facebook. Before them and Snapchat and instagram, it was text messaging. The basic ability to send messages to your friends in real-time is the problem. Individual services can make it incrementally better or worse, but it's the behaviour that's the actual problem and even very trivial modern technology enables that behaviour just fine.
Communication isn't the problem, in my opinion. Its the empty-calorie idle content consumption. All the people (myself included) in the train or bus or streets who are idly scrolling through facebook or twitter feeds, reading some low-content articles on some clickbait subject -- the kind of stuff that I can spend hours reading, but then not be able to act on or remember any of it. What's the point of consuming content if you don't remember it a day or two later? I estimate that about 90% of what I encounter online makes no difference to my life (both in terms of usefulness and entertainment) other than to consume my time, my energy, my focus and my phones battery ;) All the while, the advertisement is telling me I'm not good enough and don't have the right things.
Back in the early 2000's, I did spend a lot of time with text messaging and I did spend a lot of time on messenger applications/irc etc. The way I communicate with others hasn't changed that much: I use different apps or websites, sure, but ultimately its very similar. What has changed, though, is how much content I consume idly, just to pass the time, because my internet-addicted brain tells me I should, not because I get anything out of it. I'm slowly working on reducing it, at least.
> but it's the behaviour that's the actual problem
Sure, but what we put out there encourages certain types of behaviour and the current norms of internet use encourage an, in my opinion, unhealthy addiction to low quality content consumption.
The basic ability to send messages to your friends in real-time is the problem.
I don't think that is the problem. Sending messages to your friends still has a social contract, and abusing that privilege has repercussions.
Sending messages anonymously to unknown people is much more of a problem (e.g. robocalling).
> Voters are also usually not responsible enough to handle democracy either, and yet here we are.
What a weird way to start off. You should probably elaborate on that for it to make any sense outside of a high school economics class.
Regarding number 1: like what? I’ve never met anyone who looked really happy about seeing an ad for hot singles in their area, that they should feel insecure about how they look in lingerie, that they should go gamble.. would more than 1% of advertising be good? If an extremely large proportion of a thing is bad, then I can agree with someone calling it a scourge.
Regarding number 2: okay
> What a weird way to start off. You should probably elaborate on that
The point I'm trying to get across is that something can be critical to a functioning system even if on its own it doesn't look very impressive. Voters are the scourge of every democracy, they push for all sorts of stupid policies and usually get them.
> Regarding number 1: like what?
Literally everything? You've identified 3 product categories for products that border on scams, but literally _every_ product category advertises. I just flicked through my open tabs, and the first ad I see is for forex (www.icmarkets.com). There is no way I'd ever have heard of them without that ad; in fact thanks to this HN thread I know know how easy it is for me to get involved in forex trading :P. The 2nd is for a retail energy supplier offering me new deals. Honestly I think your 99% figure just suggests you are browsing the wrong websites. Maybe visit parts of the internet that are less sketchy.
> The point I'm trying to get across is that something can be critical to a functioning system even if on its own it doesn't look very impressive. Voters are the scourge of every democracy, they push for all sorts of stupid policies and usually get them.
I'd love if you could expand how this applies to advertising. Voters are critical to democracy. Advertising isn't critical to society, it's mostly a way for a lot of people to waste a lot of time, man-hours and natural resources on zero-sum game, while polluting the physical and mental space around us. If it were to suddenly disappear (a wide ban, perhaps), it wouldn't make much difference to anyone except people working in ad/adtech space. Sure, the Internet would get leaner, but I strongly believe that what would disappear is mostly just garbage that's just contributing to information noise.
I go further than the OP: to me, advertising is - quite literally - a cancer on society.
> Voters are critical to democracy. Advertising isn't critical to society
Advertising is absolutely critical to society. Without advertising we can't figure out what companies are selling, because they can't tell us. That puts a real crimp of having a functioning economy.
I don't have statistics handy, but I assure you that if advertising were generally banned there would be a lot less, say, smartphone owners. If you think the average person is capable of figuring out what is available from word of mouth you are grossly overestimating what a normal person is capable of.
> Advertising isn't critical to society, it's mostly a way for a lot of people to waste a lot of time, man-hours and natural resources on zero-sum game
It isn't a zero sum game. It is value add. People can't exchange money for goods and services they want if they can't find a vendor selling said goods and services.
That's motte-and-bailey defense. Technically advertising is about informing consumers what's on the market. In reality, it's everything but. Real-world advertising is near-universally dishonest and manipulative. Getting rid of that would not preclude companies from making available (note the pull, not push, approach) information on what they're selling.
> It isn't a zero sum game. It is value add. People can't exchange money for goods and services they want if they can't find a vendor selling said goods and services.
It is. People can trivially find any goods and services they find through catalogs, phone books, trade shows, and Internet search engines. Advertising spending is mostly about shouting loud enough to get heard over shouting of your competitors - which is a zero-sum game of ever amplifying noise.
> In reality, it's everything but.
Well, if you have evidence of that then my interest would be piqued. But I must admit I suspect you're just being cynical. By far and away most of the ads I see are honest but with an agenda.
Manipulative is a debatable term. Advertisers are manipulating you in the same way I'm manipulating you right now - I have an opinion and I want you to agree with me. I don't really see how you can justify getting unhappy about that. It seems pretty reasonable given that they are ultimately funding whatever it is you are looking at at the time.
> catalogs, phone books, trade shows, and Internet search engines
Those are literally compendiums of ads, except search engines. But in this instance, the consumer is proactively searching for ads. Clearly the ad is providing some value to consumers. And the idea that consumers should attend trade shows to work out what their options are is patently absurd.
And working out exactly what search engines would look like if they were not ad supported is beyond me. I assume you'd be paying some sort of subscription free for the pleasure of basically googling ads. Seems a bit backwards.
> People can trivially...
No they can't, decisions about things outside a person't domain of expertise aren't as easy as you want to pretend they are. What the consumers really want is (a) cheap and (b) one of what everyone else has. Advertising isn't going to help with (a) but it is fantastically good at (b).
Figuring out what everyone else is doing is hard work. That is one of a couple of value-adding opportunities for an ad.
"I assume you'd be paying some sort of subscription free for the pleasure of basically googling ads. Seems a bit backwards."
Back in the day, many better mail order catalogs cost money to receive. Mostly to offset the cost of mailing them out, but partially as a form of filter, on the theory that someone sufficiently interested in a catalog to pay to get it would be more likely to actually order something.
> if you weren't allowed to advertise, say, smartphones there would be a lot less smartphone owners.
That would certainly be a net benefit to societies mental health.
Not necessarily. Mobile phones are hugely important economic enablers and poverty is bad for every kind of health, not just mental.
Mobile phones, sure. Smartphones? That's a bit more debatable. At the very least, a cheap smartphone is probably fine for most "economic" needs. What we need less of is idle high-noise-low-quality content consumption, which is also the thing that's most supported by advertisement.
Smartphones, cheap or not, are not a problem. The core benefits they bring to poor people are mobile data connection, web browser, phone connection and IMs bundled in a single device. None of that is "supported by ads". The problems of smartphones (that are beyond mobile phones) start with the application ecosystem, completely disfigured by the cancer of advertising.
Fair point. Most of us here on HN don't require smartphones for that, but I take your point. Everything you list as a key benefit for poor people doesn't require an expensive smartphone, or at least, wouldn't if adverts weren't sucking up the compute and battery power when using a web browser ;) More seriously, though, beyond those basic capabilities, which we (ie not poor people) have had as long as I've been using the internet and while crappy adverts have always existed (punch the monkey and win a prize!) online, the amount of low quality content we consume has increased substantially, largely due to social media imho, which is supported by ads and is what I'm arguing against. I don't disagree with what you said here at all.
How many work/social hours are lost to mobiles.
I know for myself a huge amount are gained, or saved. Being able to check email, keep in touch on Teams and SMS, track my meetings, etc save me a handful of hours every week. They're some of the most valuable hours too.
Imagine if literally the only way to get a phone, or even find out what phones there are, was through a carrier store.
Take away advertising and the only way someone could find out about a product is word of mouth, or walking into a shop. Functionally everything would originate in shops. That means looking at the available options would be very time consuming, involve a lot of travel and be dominated by very powerful gatekeepers who would control you access to goods and information. It would revitalise the high street, that's for sure, but in a very controlling, rent-seeking way.
> That means looking at the available options would be very time consuming, involve a lot of travel and be dominated by very powerful gatekeepers who would control your access to goods and information.
You make it sound like ads are purely informational and designed to help us make an informed decision. Remember the iPhone ads touting "fastest iPhone ever" with the bottom text "sequences shortened"?
Did you buy your last computer with no research, just the ad? Do you go to McDonald's because the burgers look exactly like the ones in the commercial?
There are ways to optimize access to this information. Trade shows that display new products. Mail-order catalogs for companies or industry groups. Companies would find a way to make information - not ads - available for interested people to peruse. The core difference would be "pull not push", i.e. people with a problem would go looking for solutions, and very little space to compete on product information - preventing runaway zero-sum games.
Of course there are workarounds, but they are time consuming and therefore expensive, but also less efficient and reliable. It would be going back to the 80s, but even more locked in to physical outlets as gatekeepers. You're really just exchanging an inconvenience for a tyranny.
Trade shows and catalogs are forms of advertising.
Also, regarding "pull not push", people sometimes don't know there is a solution to their "problem" (where "problem" might not be a real problem, per se, but maybe simply not even knowing that a given option exists).
You can define anything as advertising if you try hard enough. That's not very helpful for trying to strike a balance, though.
Of the ads I see, if we exclude the drug ads that really should not be allowed, I'd say that an extremely small fraction are telling me about solutions I didn't already know existed. The "useful" case should not be so rare.
I agree that a world without advertising or news or reviews would be bad.
Your thought experiment isn't very useful for picturing a world that only lacks advertising.
> Honestly I think your 99% figure just suggests you are browsing the wrong websites. Maybe visit parts of the internet that are less sketchy.
This is not true and I'm gonna provide some evidence:
I am a conservative christian[0].
I get those ads as well.
My browsing habits:
- stuff linked from hn
- local news
- one mainstream newspaper
- fringe political papers from the left and right (mostly don't agree with any of them but it makes for interesting reading, a better understanding of why people are mad etc)
- christian podcast
- technical stuff (both related to work and to my technical hobbies)
- repair videos, childrens videos (when they get to borrow one of my devices)
And still I get ads for singles in my area. Extremely stupid ads. E.g.:
- when I'm at work in the middle of nowhere and I get ads with a picture of someone who is supposedly desperately looking for someone like me, supposedly living in the valley next to nowhere where there are nobody except old farmers. That kind of stupid.
For a while I tried to hit that micro x in the corner of those ads and mark them as irrelevant. Only got equally stupid ads for other equally irrelevant sites.
I don't want to remove ad income for honest writers but I've given up now and I'm ad blocking like many others here.
I've also come to the conclusion that tracking doesn't work, it is just a thing they do to scam marketers.
And I've concluded that if I were to place ads for a product I would place them based on the content of the website, -like Google used to do. If anyone wants a proven business opportunity here it is :-]
[0]: No, not embarrased by it, but I do not want to discuss that here, this is a technical forum. Just pointing out I don't visit what I consider sketchy web sites at all.
> I get those ads as well.
Yeah, everyone does. Are you suggesting you see almost literally 100 such ads for every ad advertising something legit? Because for me they are the 20% dross for 80% potentially useful ads I see.
Honestly, the businesses in your region of the woods are truly woeful at advertising, and should probably spend more money on it. Realistically, if what you suggest is true, something has probably gone wrong and your demographic has been caught in a bubble where no-one serious is advertising to you. Because those ads should be in the minority.
> Because for me they are the 20% dross for 80% potentially useful ads I see.
Lucky you. For me it seems way below 50% useful.
The closest I get to relevant ads are if I search for something like x hosting, then I'll maybe see ads for that for a while.
Im not against ads:
In fact I'd like if local shops informed online whenever their deal of the week came out (they sometimes do and that is a click from me if for some reason the ad isn't blocked).
Same goes for other interesting ads if I see them, which means max twice a year.
Oh, ok, so it’s his/her fault for seeing the “wrong” ads? Gotcha.
> Honestly I think your 99% figure just suggests you are browsing the wrong websites. Maybe visit parts of the internet that are less sketchy.
Those are the kinds of things I see mentioned on Twitter. I use iPhone, so I don't see why I would see internet ads myself. Obviously as I am someone who doesn't like ads, I'm one to block them.
There's adblocking in mobile Safari since 2015? So there's very few ads that I see since then (the digital ads in the last month I've come across: "powered by x", "powered by y", and "you can subscribe to z at url" - I'm happy with those). Comparing life before mobile adblocking and after, I don't see that since then I've missed out on anything. People, without an interest in the success of ads, who come across an ad on their devices seem to find it irritating; haven't found anyone who didn't seem happy and kept using uBlock after showing how.
> The point I'm trying to get across is that something can be critical to a functioning system even if on its own it doesn't look very impressive. Voters are the scourge of every democracy, they push for all sorts of stupid policies and usually get them.
Eh.. am I living in some kind of singular utopia then?
> Without advertising, the internet collapses.
I just can't wait for it. There are just few steps left:
1. Ads are served from same domain as content (this is now in progress)
2. YT integrates ads with main video stream, sites experiment with server side "render to canvas".
3. Adblock is using ML/AI
4. Laws are made against undisclosed sponsored content.
5. Online advertising is dead, clickbait is dead, free (now ad supported) content is dead. There are only subscription services left.
The Internet would not collapse. We pay our ISPs for a connexion. They don't give a crap whether we're using Google or not.
The new technologies behind ads are really terrible, but I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with a full-page Rolex ad in the WSJ. Dude in a fancy suit wearing a watch that looks great, and a quick description - that's a very simple, easy to understand model. If I like that watch, I can save up for it. Rolex doesn't know I saw it and doesn't care.
New technologies behind ads, tracking users wherever they go and hounding them relentlessly and using their personal communications to harvest more data - that's the scourge. I'm fine with ads, but I block them on every website because I'm not fine with tracking.
Advertising is like cancer. It starts small but eventually consumes the entire product/company. Seems like there is no "safe" amount of advertising, it becomes bigger and bigger and ends up swaying the entire company into doing unethical and anti-user things (like optimising for "engagement").
What if people were directly paid to view adverts?
Introduce ad viewing apps where people voluntarily sign up, provide information about themselves, and use attention-tracking etc. to reward them with some money based on how many adverts they watch or surveys they answer.
Maybe go further and ban all other forms of advertisement that takes up space anywhere, classifying them as vandalism.
Everybody wins (unless this idea is fundamentally flawed):
• People only see ads they want to see, when they want to see them.
• Companies know exactly who is watching and what they’re interested in, instead of going through third-parties and overly roundabout, sometimes illegal, ways to acquire that information.
• And the world becomes less uglier and noisier.
"What if people were directly paid to view adverts?"
One of the "problems" with that it is that it would reveal just how little money these things make. A page full of busy ads that annoy the heck out of you may still make well under a penny, only breaking a penny if you actually click on something and possibly even then only if you buy something.
Facebook's approximate revenue in 2018 is about 34 billion, it seems [1]. Facebook's user count in 2018 [2], call it two billion for math convenience and a fudge factor for fake & dead accounts. Simple math shows that even if 100% of their revenues are from ads, they're making $17 dollars a year from their average user. Revenue, not profit. And they're one of the big money makers in the ad industry!
Converted to daily terms, that's about 4.7 cents per day. That's what they're trashing your feed for, rearranging it so you see more ads and less of your family, rearranging it to drive "engagement" by putting more rage- and stress-inducing controversial content into your feed, and carefully managing your experience for. 5 cents a day, average.
Advertisers aren't just crashing our society, driving our news industries into death spirals, invading our privacy at scales that would make the Stasi blush, and annoying the hell out of us on almost every web page we visit, they're doing it for almost no money. They can't afford to pay you to view advertising. Even someone making minimum wage would find the offer they could make laughable, because your offer would be coming out of their profits, not revenue, so if Facebook wanted to pay you to view ads they'd be slicing up something like a $1/year with you.
(This is why I've proposed as one solution something like a 1cent/impression advertising tax. It would annihilate everything but the absolutely most profitable portions of the industry. Even a 0.01cent/impression tax would probably kill 90% of it. And I think there's a perfectly justifiable case to be made that such a tax would simply be internalizing externalities and perfectly justified under both left and right wing theories of economics.)
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/544001/facebooks-adverti...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
why not? https://www.techeblog.com/rare-look-inside-an-app-review-far...
lol, no. I think you just invented the black mirror 15 million merits episode.
Advertising is what makes the web accessible to billions of people in the world for free.
Most apps offer the option to make an in app purchase and turn off ads. Why don't you do that vs. giving your unqualified opinions on what is good and bad for society?
Does facebook offer that option?
Facebook is not the app you associate with fraud imps & clicks. Stay on topic.
FWIW I see more fraudulent ads on Facebook than anywhere.
Stripping the conversation of all nuance isn’t the intellectually honest way to have this conversation.
Here be postin all the little göbbels there made up stories on why they do good.
I would rephrase as "fake advertising is a scourge on society" with "fake" specific to artificially generated "impressions" that, by design, no user ever actually selects or sees.
Nah, that's actually slightly positive in so far that it hurts the advertising industry.
The problem is with actual ads. The ones that distract, cajole and coerce people to do things against their best interest.
Yes, I'd be interested to see what would happen if misleading/mis-impressioning ads were made illegal.