I run few different malware scanners every week or so. All they typically find is a few tracking cookies. I also tend to re-run them every time a problem like this crops up on a site I don’t expect it from. Nothing ever turns up. Unless it’s some wild form of malware that no security software is capable of detecting. The problem is unlikely to be on my end (though I suppose it could be in the router or something…).
This happens periodically at almost every site I read. In most cases I can grab a screenshot of the page. And contact tech support with the URL and time it happened. To ask “is this me or are your ads super jank”. Without fail in each case I get the response that its a bad ad in the pool and they’ve removed it. I’ve yet to run into one where things were clear on their end. I’ve yet to do this with BB because the specific behavior kind of prevents me from establishing which ads were running on the page. Or even which specific page it was on (multiple BB tabs open). So I don’t really feel like I have enough info.
None the less I’m running scans now, and everything is clean thus far. Just like last time.
This is precisely the problem. If you have a website that does vet ads. That you can reasonably expect to be clean. Janky malware ads still crop up. Their ad service gets compromised, bad ads end up in the pool. And most places don’t have the staff or funds to vet every single ad. They contract an ad company to do that. I’m not happy about black listing a site based on a temporary problem at a subcontractor. It can and does happen at every website. At one point or another.
Ad-supported business models happened to work for a while, but that doesn’t mean it was ever a sound business model. It’s like handing out free cashmere sweaters on the street, and then getting the dry-cleaning industry to pay you for increasing their business; if that works, great, but if people start hand-washing their sweaters, that’s entirely your problem. The contract was between you and the dry cleaners.
I could imagine some court ruling that consumers are contractually bound to look at ads – I’d be naive to assume reason or morality would stand in the way – but even with the law on their side, publishers wouldn’t go for that. The whole scam is based on the fantasy of getting something for free. If publishers were prepared to admit it isn’t free, they’d simply charge money for it and cut out the whole sordid complication of advertising.
In fairness, I am sure most content creators would love to charge $1 a year and never have to speak to another advertiser. I imagine most people at Wired are unhappy about how their site behaves, and the ones who aren’t unhappy are probably the ones who sell ads and don’t give two shits about content.
While this statement is technically true, newspapers, television, and the web have survived using this method for almost their entire histories. While it may rapidly becoming non-viable, I think “awhile” is really “most of the history of these mediums”.
Yeah in this case “for a while” means “a century or more”. The current issues with ad based models are largely down to the destabilizing effects of the internet. Web based ad rates are still too low over all to provide the same level of funding that TV/print ads did (and those still command higher rates). Meanwhile the most lucrative and successful thing in web based advertising is spam, scams, and malware. Better regulation and security, higher ad rates, and the development of more successful legitimate ad techniques would smooth the whole thing out. But it takes time for that sort of thing to develop. And not “give me a few weeks” time. Like actual time.
I’ve given the rules where I will accept ads, that simple. It’s not my job or in any other way my responsibility to make your revenue stream work properly. If the model is unworkable, so be it; let it FAIL.
Your anecdotal evidence is proof of nothing but your own circumstances and what makes you happy is not my priority. And that, in fact, is how the world works; get used to it. If your system cannot operate under those conditions, sorry, it’s doomed.
By the by, yes, ads CAN be vetted by people. Bite the bullet and pay for the intern eyeball-hours or disappear; every business stuck on this model can make that choice while I cackle with glee.
Thing is, you have to have the will, as an industry, to make the necessary changes. And that hasn’t been forthcoming.
Blaming the customer for your failure(s) as a business may be momentarily satisfying but it’s useless and doomed to fail. Offensive advertising is offensive, and people aren’t forgiving of screwups that now can not only cost their time and offended sensibilities, which was the worst a failed traditional ad would cause, but with malware and scams, money. Good luck with that strategy, I guess…?
First that’s a relatively impossible standard. Given the way online advertising works. Second it does not solve my problem of wanting to support the sites I read, but finding that increasingly difficult due to circumstances beyond both my and those sites’ control.
As an example I know of precisely one. Just one. Ad network that did not regularly see this problem over the years. The Deck as used over at Kottke. A deliberately small. Heavily curated ad network. Developed to spool ads to a small number of sites. And counter this very problem. It just shut down. Lack of ad buys meant they couldn’t keep operating. The small number of sites that featured their ads meant they couldn’t keep ad buys up.
And even then I vaguely recall at least a few instances where bad ads made it through.
A standard of one mistake, regardless of how quickly or readily they fix it, means you’re black listed. Is frankly speaking a bad one. It’s a bit like saying you’ll never buy a car from any company that has ever once had a design flaw. Or you’ll never eat at any restaurant that ever once made a mistake on your food. I’m far more interested in how sites respond to this and how actively they try to tamp it down. I’ve had a few where I complained about habitually wonky ads. Where the response was boiler plate about “we all know you hate ads, and we hate ads too. But we have to run ads to keep the doors open”. When pressed about how that neither answers the question nor address the problem I got hand waving about how “we don’t have the staff to handle it, blame our ad network”.
I don’t visit those sites anymore. Most places open a tech support ticket to identify the issue, nuke the ads. And in places where its an obvious problem, switch to a better ad network.
Your approach basically says “handle that shit and don’t ever let me catch a whiff of it, even once”. It doesn’t acknowledge that there is a massive ass industry (often legal) with the will to slip bullshit in even on the very best, most attentive, and careful folks running ads. Into ad networks explicitly predicated on blocking that shit. Any place running ads needs to be reasonably active about tamping it down, but users (to a certain extent) need to actively participate in that to keep it working. I’ve little sympathy for places that simply wash their hands of it, blame it on ads being inherently morally wrong. And continue to run infectious crap knowingly. Otherwise I feel its more interesting, and probably more effective to provide feedback, and work with people. To get those bad ads out of circulation on the better sites. So they aren’t affecting people who don’t know any better. I really feel ad blocking should be a last resort, but its definitely part of that process. The more untenable it gets the more users will block ads. And the ad companies (and venues working with them) will have to adapt or see their business disappear. The down side is simply checking out leaves all that nasty to run rampant on anyone who doesn’t run an adblocker, or doesn’t know any better. There’s been a huge uptick in crazy ass infectious and intrusive ads everywhere since ad blockers became a regular thing. Its the other side of that whole “arms race” they keep talking about.
To riff off the headline. Ad blockers will win. Because Spam has already won. And increasingly on the user side blockers are kind of the only practical option. But that leaves content providers hanging in an uncomfortable way. Even when they actively work to solve the issue, they’re losing money. And often left with short options in terms of actually directly controlling the issue itself.
Again, no. If you cannot satisfy the standards of the customer base you are attempting to serve, stop now and choose a different profession. Attempting to force users to view ads WILL NOT WORK. If it’s too noxious, they simply leave; advertisers were never going to win that competition.
I’ve tried relaxing my stance more than once. Each time, I saw similar problems. I get pretty tired of cleaning PCs for free, for my extended family.
Your feelings are yours, that simple. If the entire net collapses in a smoldering heap, c’est la guerre. I have exactly zero sympathy for the industry that has so very well-made the deathbed it’s now lying down in. Sweet dreams!
Let us give figures, because many people are under the impression that advertising is less money than it actually is.
Google average revenue per user is 277$ per year. That is per user, so for a family of 4, it is 1108$ per year, significantly more than the cost of internet access.
Facebook is a distant second, at about 60$ per user per year.
Total media advertising spending in the USA is 220 bn$, or for each of the 320 millions US citizens, 690$ per year, 2760$ for a family of 4. This is consistent with statistics showing that Internet advertising is about a third of the total at 66bn$ per year (behind TV with 84 bn$). This money is per user (including infants and the elderly), while google users are only counted amongst Internet users.
Obviously, some people are less susceptible to advertising than others, so some uses will bring in considerably more than 690$/year. It would seem that the uneducated poor are amongst them, increasing inequalities.
These 690$ per year make each product you buy more expensive and, because companies buying advertising want to make some profit, the total markup is higher than 690$.
We investigated an alternative approach to stealth that works as follows.
Create a shadow copy of the DOM tree. Create a mapping from each element in the shadow copy to the corresponding element in the original.
Apply ad blocking to the original copy.
Execute every API call on both copies — in the original copy, map inputs to their corresponding elements in the unmodified shadow copy. Return responses only from the unmodified copy.
This solution elegantly prevents publisher code from learning about the existence of ad blocking, since all responses returned to it come from the unmodified shadow copy of the DOM. It avoids the need to identify API functions that involve writes, because shadow execution is applied to every API call. Yet it ensures that all page functionality will be applied to the original copy which the user sees.
Soooooo just create a copy of the page, modify and display the copy, the server provided JS only sees the original copy it served.
Essentially doubles the amount of work the browser does, I guess.
I don’t mind a few banner adverts on a page (though I’ve never bought anything after seeing one, and don’t click on them, because I am a bad consumer), but I really don’t like pop-up ads and wish they would just go away. They are too annoying and to potentially loaded with malware to do anything other than drive me away from sites that use them.
They are, that’s the whole point. Granted, Boing Boing’s at least have the “Boing Boing Store” byline and the obvious ad-copy writing, but the Next Big Thing in internet advertising is paying bloggers, streamers, etc. to talk about how much they love product X without ever mentioning the endorsement. Nobody wants to see ads, so they hide the fact that they’re ads at all.
The discussion on Hacker News said that that’s not the technique featured in the paper, just another one they investigated. I haven’t read it yet myself, though.
You should read our terms of service. We will never present ad copy without identifying it as such. You’re right, other sites do that, but Boing Boing won’t.
