
Google is banning Flash from its display ads - cpeterso
http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/10/10957570/google-bans-flash-display-ads-january-2017
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Animats
I've blocked Google ads for so long I didn't realize they had been allowing
Flash ads.

~~~
Spare_account
Which ad blocker do you use on mobile?

~~~
kentonv
For Google ads specifically?
[https://contributor.google.com/](https://contributor.google.com/)

~~~
spacehome
Wow. Their highest tier is $10/month to see 25-50% fewer ads? That seems a bit
steep for the minimal reduction you're seeing.

~~~
kentonv
My understanding is that the system literally works by buying out your own
ads, as if you were an advertiser targeting specifically yourself with ads
that have no content. The effect is thus that you pay what advertisers would
otherwise have paid. But if some advertiser bids $100 for one ad (this
actually happens!), then Google is going to show that ad.

As such, the pricing structure, while maybe overcomplicated, is perfectly
fair. Theoretically, in an ad-free world, this is the price you would need to
pay to consume the same content. If you feel it is too high, then what you're
saying is that, for you, ads are worth the annoyance. (Or, alternately, you're
saying that you'd rather pay less and get lower-quality content.)

Personally, I think $10/month is an extremely reasonable price to pay for the
web content I consume, and I'd certainly rather pay it than see the ads.

EDIT: That said, as a matter of product design, I think this pricing structure
sucks. They really ought to offer a flat price that removes all ads. However,
I suspect that would require strong-arming all AdSense sites to agree to new
terms (since it would affect how much those sites are getting paid), and as
we've seen when YouTube did this in order to create YouTube Red, it tends to
create a huge PR backlash.

~~~
rplnt
And they still got to track you. And you pay for that. Great deal.

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tyingq
I suppose this means dropping it altogether (like from Chrome) can't be too
far away.

My only regret with that would be that we use flash as a way to allow one-
button copy to the clipboard (using this
[http://zeroclipboard.org/](http://zeroclipboard.org/)).

We had tried non-flash solutions, but none of them worked.

This sounds like it might work
[https://clipboardjs.com/](https://clipboardjs.com/), so I guess I'll be
adding a backlog item to look at it.

~~~
jpwgarrison
re: dropping [flash] from Chrome -

NOOOOO this is what Chrome is _for!_ The only flash I have is the built in to
chrome flash.

~~~
sparky_
I also do this. Firefox is my primary browser but I have Chrome installed
solely to view flash-based video sites.

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Sophira
I think I'm missing something. Why not just install the Flash player from
Adobe?

~~~
Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd
I'm not the person you asked, but here's my reasons.

I'm on Linux and there no longer is a supported version of Flash by Adobe.
(Apparently there is some NPAPI to Pepper bridge though, to get Chrome's Flash
working in other browsers.)

I already uninstalled before that, because I wanted to force HTML5 for sites
that dynamically switch between Flash and HTML5 and because I wanted to nudge
more sites to support HTML5 by boosting the stats of people who don't have
Flash installed.

~~~
jhasse
> I'm on Linux and there no longer is a supported version of Flash by Adobe

I'm using Firefox on Ubuntu with Flash (flashplugin-installer) and it's still
receiving updates. It's an older version, but it has been working fine with
every Flash site I've visited so far.

~~~
Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd
Yes, looks like I was misinformed there. While there are no more feature
updates, security issues will continue to be released for about another year.
(If I'm piecing the information here together correctly
[https://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplatform/whitepapers/roadm...](https://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplatform/whitepapers/roadmap.html)
[https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/release-note/release-
no...](https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/release-note/release-notes-
developer-flash-player.html))

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pippy
One thing HTML5 lacks is the ability to combine all assets into one file. This
makes Flash particularly handy for advertisements. Safari almost got there
with its .Webarchive format, and Mozilla experimented with a file format but
it didn't get anywhere.

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lukeman
Couldn't you use inline scripts and styles with images specified as data uris?

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dheera
Data URLs for large images are horribly space-inefficient.

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ghayes
Data URLs should be ~1.37x the size [0] of the original file (and generally,
kept in the same format). Obviously, there are issues of caching, keeping the
image loaded in memory, etc, but it shouldn't be all that bad. Esp. when you
consider that ads are inefficient for a variety of other reasons.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64#MIME](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64#MIME)

~~~
dheera
Right, I miscalculated, Base64 isn't as bad as I thought.

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chc4
Silly question: Do people not use Click-to-play? I thought it was enabled in
browsers by default now, or at least Firefox.

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Doctor_Fegg
I do (even as a sometime Flash developer), but unfortunately it's not always
practical. There are plenty of sites, including Vimeo embeds and Vine, which
cover the SWF with an HTML element - making it impossible to right-click to
play the SWF. So you end up disabling click-to-play just to see the video you
wanted.

~~~
pdkl95
Firefox has had a top-of-the-page notification for click-to-play for a long
time, making this a non-issue.

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Rohansi
Chrome has an icon for this in the address bar. The only problem with this
solution is you lose control of which elements you want to allow.

~~~
cpeterso
I think Firefox's top-of-page notification is just for Flash content that is
not large enough for the inline "click to play" UI. It's pretty annoying,
though, because it causes the whole page to shift down. Chrome's address bar
icon sounds like a good alternative.

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0x0
How can they continue to allow "video ads built in flash"? Isn't a video flash
just like any other .swf, that happens to use the NetConnection, NetStream and
Video classes? Or will they supply the .swf part and the advertisers just the
.flv/.mp4 part?

Also, what's to stop a "html5 ad" from inlining swfobject.js? They've fallen
for malvertising before, so how could they not fall for an obfuscated
swfobject.js? :)

~~~
jdangu
This is because video ads use an obnoxious ad API called VPAID [1] that is
mostly used to track viewability of video ads (which in turn conditions the
billing event for advertisers). This is most effectively done with Flash and
so 90% of video ads use Flash if given the opportunity.

[1]
[http://www.iab.net/guidelines/508676/digitalvideo/vsuite/vpa...](http://www.iab.net/guidelines/508676/digitalvideo/vsuite/vpaid)

~~~
cpeterso
The NY Times' recent post about their transition from Flash to HTML5 video
highlighted VPAID as one of their big challenges. It sounds like they had to
pull the ad vendors, kicking and screaming, into the HTML5 world.

[http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/02/08/flash-free-video-
in...](http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/02/08/flash-free-video-in-2016/)

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manigandham
This is great progress. Google being the biggest ad network and going with a
complete ban is probably the only way to move things forward but glad to see
it finally being done.

~~~
ktRolster
It sounds like great progress.......until you realize that Google uses Flash
everywhere in their own APIs

~~~
manigandham
Progress = forward movement towards something. This is still great progress,
regardless of how much there is left to do. Chrome was even the first browser
to stop playing lots of flash ads months ago.

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codazoda
I've never installed Flash since it was an ad on (or maybe I just disable it,
I can't remember). It's ONLY used for ads these days. I avoid the few video
sites that use it.

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lsalvatore2
Nope. The Superbowl was streamed with Flash Player on CBS own website. Hulu
still streams with Flash Player. Zynga and King use Flash player in all their
multi-million dollar earning Flash games. It's not going anywhere.

~~~
amdavidson
> ... It's not going anywhere.

Yet.

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obelisk_
I haven't had the Flash plugin since 2012 and only a few couple of times I've
encountered something I wanted to use which required Flash since when I
stopped having Flash. In every case where Flash was required I simply Googled
the relevant keywords and found what I was looking for provided by other non-
Flash sites.

~~~
luxflux
Twitch is the only thing keeping Flash on my system, and as soon as they make
the switch to HTML5 video I'll be uninstalling it completely.

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AlphaSite
Twitch has run over HTML5 for the better part of a year (maybe longer).

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Survey_Sez
The controls and chat were upgraded to HTML5 last year but the video will not
be converted from Flash to HTML5 until Q2 this year.

This was one of the major announcements made during CEO's keynote at
TwitchCon. [http://blog.twitch.tv/2015/09/twitchcon-2015-keynote-
product...](http://blog.twitch.tv/2015/09/twitchcon-2015-keynote-product-
round-up/)

~~~
Steko
OS X and iOS streams use HLS (append /hls to url) and you can get the html5
video in various ways (append &html5 or [1]).

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Kappa/comments/3l01q4/complete_twit...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Kappa/comments/3l01q4/complete_twitch_html5_player_userscript/)

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stanley
Surprised to see this in the news now. As an advertiser, we received notice
from Google around July of 2015 that our flash ads will soon be disabled.
Something like a month or two later the change went into effect.

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smaili
I wonder if people may begin to go back to older browsers for surfing once ads
have completely transitioned to HTML5 :-)

~~~
mschuster91
With people shifting their layouts over to Flexbox, relying on "box-sizing:
border-box", "display: table-xxx" and friends, older browsers will mess up the
layout beyond belief. IIRC some older browsers even failed to apply an entire
CSS file if they couldn't parse a single rule - good luck with ::before,
::after, ::nth-child and friends.

CSS, unfortunately, isn't really backwards compatible unless you invest a LOT
of effort into testing and development.

~~~
wlesieutre
Good riddance. Those older browsers are also going to be full of unpatched
security holes, and if websites don't work people will eventually quit using
them.

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Outdoorsman
I don't look at ads...that's remiss of me, as some ads probably contribute to
my salary...

When I see a three column layout on a client's page, with the right column
"blinking" I think, usually, that they're probably barely holding on...just
from experience...

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spacehome
I beat them to this a loong time ago.

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beedogs
Good, and good riddance. The less Flash on the Internet, the better.

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k-mcgrady
Anyone else see this and think "Why the hell didn't they do this years ago?".
I was really surprised it was still allowed.

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eveningcoffee
They should also bad video ads (including their own).

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dredmorbius
Ironically, one of the very few places I find Flash still used, that I miss
it, is in Google Finance pages.

They're desperately wanting a rewrite.

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diminish
Flash ads were a good way to target desktop office day time users for some
conversion needs. Anyway had to go ..

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eyeareque
I use firefox at the moment and do not have flash installed. In the rare
occasion that I cannot view a video because I need flash I will fire up chrome
to watch it.

Also, I use adblockers.. so I haven't seen a flash ad in ages.

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sandworm101
Google does ads?

Honestly, it has been a very long while since I've seen ads. Adblock aside, my
phone is so old that any significant ads effectively causes a crash, total
non-responsive phone. So I still don't see them.

~~~
finnn
How do you think Google makes money if not ads?

~~~
sandworm101
How do you not get sarcasm?

~~~
jamespo
Normally there's an element of humour

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kmfrk
Just in time for the launch of AMP.

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ksec
( What took you so long? James. )

The sentence that came across my head when i read the title.

* Quote from the 007 movie Spectre

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phpsupport
Google main focus is ADS

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arrty88
ive been blocking flash since 2012. no biggie.

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module17
woohoo!

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bikamonki
Flash is like DLLs. Enough said.

