Are Intrusive Ads Necessary?

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This is a rant about web sites tactics to increase revenue/profits by offering ads that make sure the viewer sees by:

Having to close the ad before you can see the content you clicked to see.
Adding motion (aka video ad) to attract your attention.
Having to watch a 30 second ad to see a 15 second video clip and watch an ad for each clip you watch.
Invading your privacy present to you “targeted” ad you might be interested in.

I totally understand the need and purpose of ads on web pages and accept that ads need to be present in order for the content of the web site to be available, BUT there is a big difference in presenting ads to support the web site and using ads of a web site to get rich on. It is simply a choice the web site owner makes: The more intrusive the ad is, the more effective the ad will be , and thus the more you can charge for the ad to run. On the flip side: If you make the ads so intrusive that viewers don’t think the hassle of the ads is worth the web site’s content and the intrusive ads are much larger downloads that increase the download of the web page using your bandwidth to download the intrusive ad, the web site’s number of viewers decreases such that the ad buyers don’t think the ad costs are justified.

In the current version of Chrome if you hold the mouse pointer over a web site’s tab that has loaded, Chrome will show the size of the download to load that web site’s page. Most web sites with non-intrusive ads are a 200 – 300 MB download, but a web site with intrusive ads can be as much as 5 times more. Example: The Weather.com web site was a 1.6 GB download with all their ads while the same forecast from the National Weather service web site was a 49.7 MB download and the Fox4Weather web site was 342 MB with all its ads and interactive maps (no intrusive ads). I go to many web sites that are totally supported by ads (non-intrusive) and average 200-300 MB downloads and they seem to function well without resorting to intrusive ads. Intrusive ads are used to get rich and are not necessary to “make ends meets” as the web site owners would like us to believe. Many web sites have a thriving business without using intrusive ads with their large downloads.

Increasing the download 5 times to make more money is just wrong and goes way beyond just making a profit and shows a total lack of care of what their viewers have to endure. Such web site’s should not look for my business.

HTH, Dana:))

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EricB, doriel, NaNoNyMouse, Charlie, WSbobby-p, Sky

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uBlock Origin allows you to whitelist sites that have reasonable adverts, while blocking the adverts on the sites that don’t. That would be my suggestion.

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Charlie, Microfix

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Drcard:)) wrote:

This is a rant about web sites tactics to increase revenue/profits by offering ads that make sure the viewer sees by

What exactly are ads ? Have seen one in years.

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I use the UBlock Origin extension on Firefox and don’t have any problem with ads, and videos.  There are 2 exceptions to this however – some sites have pop ups that want to know if you really want to leave their site (annoying), and the AOL Main Website that somehow manages to get their videos to run even though I have “don’t automatically run videos” in the Firefox Settings.

I recommend UBlock Origin.

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Sky, Myst

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Drcard:)) wrote:

In the current version of Chrome

and..there is your answer, neutered extensions for an extra special ad-blink experience from a company that specialises in advertising.
Try using firefox instead with the excellent unlimited ublock origin and noscript together with about config tweaks for a palatable browsing experience.

Windows - commercial by definition and now function...

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Sky, doriel, Myst

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Microfix wrote:

Drcard:)) wrote:
In the current version of Chrome

and..there is your answer,

I use Chrome 119 beta with 0 ads. Never seen ads in years with any browser at least since Windows 7. Using tailored uBlock Origin and GPT-AdBlocker.

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Ad concern – AskWoody topic
– this should be opt-in, not opt-out. Sad fact.

I second your emotion about ads. Marketing is psychology used agains people to make them buy things. And to wantch 30 seconds of ads to be able see 15 second content is very wrong.
I think users should be protected, instead of forcing them to purchase things.. Sadly browsers tend to support purchases and offer ads right after you bought your new computer. Egde (and Chrome) are not supposed to be a marketing tool, it should be a browser.. Shame on them!

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It’s not really the site owners pushing the spyware ads.

Very few sites handle their own ad sales internally. It’s nearly always done by an ad broker like Google, where Google handles the sales of the ads to the advertisers and all of the nitty-gritty details, and the only bit the site has to do is find places to put the ads and link them to a Google ad server (each with a unique ID, so Google knows what ad on what site is being requested). The site has no direct control over what ads are placed… whatever Google or the other ad broker serves up is what is seen by the viewer.

Of course, the site can attempt to negotiate the kinds of ads that will be placed when they contract with Google to do their ad work, but from what I have read, Google pretty much does what it wants anyway.

There are only a few ad networks left on the web, as Google and the other giants have swallowed all the smaller fish. They all rely heavily on analytics and targeted placement, and if a site owner doesn’t think it is right to subject the site’s users to this kind of spying, he really doesn’t have much choice. It’s “spy on your users” or the highway, buddy! Google will decide what kinds of ads it wants on your site, and Google will decide if your contents are worthy of their ads, and to what degree.

This setup has a lot of appeal to advertisers. They love the idea of one-stop shopping when buying ads… their ads can run on dozens or even hundreds of sites, and rather than having to negotiate the contract each time with each site, and get back whatever analytics the site is willing to provide, they can get the full Google analytics on all these sites at one time.

A site that wanted to sell its own ads would have a hard time competing with the ad giants out there. It might work if the site was truly massive, but those kinds of sites are run by giant corporations who would just as soon farm that out to the ad giants and not have to worry about doing it in-house.

As for smaller sites… it’s pretty much a lost cause to try to sell your own ads. Unless your site is a niche site with a highly niche product that happens to fit in with that topic, it’s not likely that anyone is going to bother to talk to the site owner.

There was a topic not long ago where it was mentioned that not having all of the intrusive ads was a no-go with advertisers. Web advertisers have bought into the mythos of the “targeted ad” completely, and they have come to expect detailed breakdowns of the audience for their ads and the details on which people viewed them.

If you try to sell ads that are not intrusive, it means the advertisers won’t be guaranteed their ads are being shown to people with the right interests, of the right demographics and income level. To ask the advertisers to step back to “we will show your ad a bunch of times on our site, but the only targeting will be that they are on our site, and the only analytics you will get is the number of times the ad has been served” is a big thing to ask, and advertisers are used to being catered to.

This surveillance ad industry did not appear spontaneously, of course. There was a time when ads on the internet were just ads. I believe that these first generation banner ads were usually hosted by the sites themselves, negotiated one small site at a time, but that doesn’t work for big time corporate advertisers. In the beginning, the web ads weren’t really about them, as I recall.

As the corporations began to see dollar signs in the web, there arose a demand for a simpler way to place ads on lots of sites at once. Thus were born ad brokers. Of course, these ad brokers were all in competition with one another, and one way to gain a competitive edge was to claim that your ads are more effective than the other guy’s because ours will be targeted to the right users.

As the costs of bandwidth, storage, and CPU cycles came down, this kind of thing became technically feasible for the first time in history, and the promise of more efficient, more effective ads was too much of a siren song to resist. Back in those early days, no one was really thinking about privacy, so go out and harvest all that info! It’s yours for the taking.

Smaller ad networks don’t have the reach to assemble dossiers on every web user in the world, but the big ones do… so the small ones falter and are bought out on the cheap by the big ones, and all of the big ones compete on features as well as cost for their customers. No, not you… the advertisers!

You may have heard the idiom “If it’s free, you are the product.” That’s not always true (Linux is free, and you’re not the product there), but when it comes to things like social media and all of the various Google services that are free, like Maps, Gmail, Street View, etc., it’s very true. You are the product, being sold by Google or the like to the advertisers– the ad networks’ real customers.

The idea that targeting ads makes them more effective is still one that is mostly taken on faith. In the olden days, when TV, radio, and print ads were the main forms of advertising, there was no real way to gauge how many people saw or heard your ad. That is why newspapers and magazines wanted their circulation numbers to be as high as possible, as that meant more potential eyes on ads to convince the advertisers to pay up. Beyond that, though, the only way an advertiser would know the ad worked is if they saw an increase in sales right after the ad ran.

You’d think that would still be the gold standard, since the goal is to generate sales, not just get the ad in front of a bunch of people, but there is this whole trope that half your ads are completely ineffective– but you never know what half that is. They desperately want to know which half, and Google and the like promise to tell them.

The result of this is that web advertising is completely broken. Sites will complain if you block their ads, since that reduces their revenue stream, but when the ads come served up with a healthy dose of spying, it’s an act of self-defense to block ads. Google and other like them have created a world where there is no advertising without spying, and now advertisers expect the analytics that come from all that spying.

Ads in actual paper magazines were (and are) totally benign… if you didn’t like them, no one made you look at them. Yeah, the magazines have four or five “continued on page 40” type things to get you looking through the ads more, and that was annoying, but the ads never made noise, flashed at you, forced you to wait, blocked the content, or stole your personal information. They just sat there, passively.

In magazines that were aimed at a niche audience, like a certain make or model of car, or off-road trucks, or a certain brand or type of computer, or other things like that, the ads were part of the appeal. You wanted to know which vendors had the thing you wanted and for what price. I would not have wanted an ad free version of Compute’s Gazette (about Commodore computers), PC Magazine, or Muscle Mustangs & Fast Fords.

Ads like that could work, and they could unbreak the status of web advertising, but Google and others like them have conditioned the advertisers to think they need all of that targeting and analytics.

As you probably know, this site used to be ad supported. Lots of others used to be as well, but the whole web advertising thing got to be so big and seedy and out of control that they’re changing strategies, as this site has. Many Youtubers who make videos for a living (often putting in as many hours a day or more as they would in a regular job) have turned to having “Merch” and Patreon-type donors to fund them, since the ad revenue cannot be counted on. Google’s algorithm that loved your content yesterday could decide today that you’re not what advertisers want, often for invalid reasons (like excessive profanity that wasn’t actually there), and suddenly two thirds of your views are gone… and two thirds of your income.

Instead of trying to make content to attract viewers to get more views, they have to make content that attracts the Google algorithm, which is fickle, always changing, and prone to making a lot of mistakes. Videos have to be a certain length, have a certain average view time, have to be released on a certain schedule, have to have a certain amount of engagement with comments, and all kinds of other things, to keep Google from burying your new video so far down that no one will see it in a search or in “recommended” videos.

In Youtube, there’s no big tent that allows all kinds of content creators to find their niche in terms of audience and advertisers… it all has to be what Google considers “advertiser friendly” or it is deprioritized. Advertisers can pick what kinds of content they want to have their ads inserted into, but creators don’t have the luxury of saying they want a certain kind of advertiser that is okay with the kind of content they offer. It’s either advertiser friendly (promoted!) or not (buried!).

That’s what happens when the ad broker is also the one deciding which content gets prioritized and which gets shadowbanned. Having the adbroker also running the search operation, the browser-making operation, the video-serving operation, the OS-making operation, etc., ensures conflicts of interest that invariably harm consumers, and in this case have also ruined the very industry keeping the web ad giants afloat. It may take some time, but this has to bite them in the posterior at some point.

 

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wavy, SueW, Sky

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That’s what happens when the ad broker is also the one deciding which content gets prioritized and which gets shadowbanned. Having the adbroker also running the search operation, the browser-making operation, the video-serving operation, the OS-making operation, etc., ensures conflicts of interest that invariably harm consumers, and in this case have also ruined the very industry keeping the web ad giants afloat. It may take some time, but this has to bite them in the posterior at some point.

they outgrown everything including monopoly courts, states (not only US), laws and they get away with it. Nobody can compete with Microsoft or Google(alphabet). Their true power is uncontested in this world.

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My rant isn’t against all ads. I do not want to block ads as without the support of ad revenue web sites will have to resort to subscription. On Web sites I frequent I help support this ad base by clicking ads (even if I’m not interested or buying) to give the site hits to continue their ad revenue support.

My rant is about some Web sites choosing to allow their ad broker to utilize the more intrusive ads to increase ad revenue at a total disregard of their viewers because they think you want their info so much you will tolerate the intrusive ads (in my case, Wrong). The choice to use the more intrusive ads is with the Web site owners and I know web site owners that refused to allow intrusive ads and publicly state that fact on their Web sites.

HTH, Dana:))

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That’s why I mentioned that uBlock Origin allows you to whitelist sites that have reasonable adverts, because it seemed like you still wanted to see some. Whitelist what you want to see, blacklist what you don’t.

I do, heavily, recommend against clicking on adverts, though. You’re just asking for malware by doing this, as they will often take you to sketchy malware-infested sites. No matter how much you trust the site you’re browsing, they don’t vet the adverts they’re serving, so the trustworthiness of the site you’re on and the site the advert takes you to is unrelated. Really, I can’t stress this enough, you will get malware by clicking on enough adverts. If you haven’t so far you’ve just been lucky.

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pmcjr6142, SueW, Charlie

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IMHO a popup used to solicit sign-on with a Google account is just as obnoxious as any ad!  Yet another unwelcome intrusion.

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SueW, Charlie, Sky

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