
Google Will Help Publishers Prepare for a Chrome Ad Blocker Coming Next Year - relham
https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-will-help-publishers-prepare-for-a-chrome-ad-blocker-coming-next-year-1496344237
======
pythonaut_16
This is somewhat concerning to me. While I'm all for blocking obtrusive and
obnoxious ads, I'm not sure I want Google using it's position as a web giant
and browser vendor to push these standards by default via Chrome.

An open web means I can host whatever (legal content) I want on my website and
people are free to view it or not view it if they find it undesirable. Current
ad blockers play well into this scheme because they protect the end user's
right to view content in the way that they want.

This move by Google on the other hand is telling websites that they have to
play by Google's content rules or have their website broken by default.

I'm not sure that's the web that I want to live in.

~~~
Crontab
This move is mainly about making sure their own ads don't get blocked because
of people trying to escape the bad behavior of others. But like you, I have
doubts about an ad blocker created by an advertising company.

~~~
Animats
_I have doubts about an ad blocker created by an advertising company._

Right. Once Google gets this deployed, watch them remove ad-blocking add-ons
from the Google Store.

~~~
leeoniya
i'm concerned about this as well, but i'm fine letting Chrome function simply
as a dev tool and actually browse with Firefox, Opera, Servo, etc. w/uBlock
Origin & uMatrix

~~~
wbl
Firefox has some pretty nice dev tool extensions.

~~~
Mayzie
It won't for long when they deprecate their extension API and move to
Chromes...

~~~
clouddrover
The dev tools are built into Firefox by default. So what do you base your
claim on?

~~~
y4mi
pretty sure he was talking about the extensions that extend them though.
firebug comes to mind.

~~~
clouddrover
Firefox DevTools was built from Firebug, which is why they no longer develop
Firebug. See the Firebug website:
[http://getfirebug.com/](http://getfirebug.com/)

And here's some more history: [https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/12/firebug-
lives-on-in-firefo...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/12/firebug-lives-on-in-
firefox-devtools/)

~~~
robin_reala
No, Firefox Dev Tools is a completely seperate project historically. Firebug
version 3 and up built on top of it, but that’s the only connection (beyond
commonality in tool function).

------
Akujin
I used to work for a small company that did print (and web) medical journals
targeted at dentists and dental professionals. We handled all the ads
ourselves and hosted the images on our server as any other image. This meant
we were basically impervious to adblock. Except for the occasional iframe
embedded ad that was given to us by the client we basically never had an issue
with adblock.

Same thing on a nightlife website I worked on. Ads hosted by others were
blocked but our own hosted ads were never a problem.

Granted our own ads also had zero chance of being hijacked by a bad actor
since they were simple <a><img></a> ads.

If only everyone did this we wouldn't be having this arms race.

~~~
Houshalter
I wonder if eventually ad companies will just host the content themselves. Or
at least route it through their servers. The ads then get served through the
same domain and can't be blocked that way.

But that only defeats simple adblocks that blacklist domains. It's
theoretically possible to make an adblock that detects ads through machine
learning and removes them. Doesn't matter where they are hosted.

But advertisers can run scripts to detect modifying the web page and stop it.
So adblock would have to move to having a headless browser that renders the
page, and then copies it and removes the ads.

Then the advertisers would have to try to trick the machine learning itself.
Adversarial machine learning is a thing, with neural networks trained to fool
other neural networks. And images that are highly optimized to exploit subtle
defects in other neural networks.

As ML ad detection improves, the only way for ads to get past it will be to
make ads that look more and more like real content, even to the human eye.
Perhaps in the limit, ads and content will become completely
indistinguishable.

~~~
kasey_junk
> I wonder if eventually ad companies will just host the content themselves.
> Or at least route it through their servers. The ads then get served through
> the same domain and can't be blocked that way.

This is already happening. Further, embedding paid for content in the middle
of original content at the server side is also already happening.

> As ML ad detection improves, the only way for ads to get past it will be to
> make ads that look more and more like real content, even to the human eye.
> Perhaps in the limit, ads and content will become completely
> indistinguishable.

This is also already happening. Brand placement deals are nothing new to
advertising and they are basically table stakes to most content purveyors.

The real question isn't if those things are going to happen, its how those
sorts of deals will handle the analytics side of the equation. How will you
prove that your instagram feed is the best place for the yoga pants provider
to spend their marketing budget?

------
redm
Google's official announcement on their blog:
[https://blog.chromium.org/2017/06/improving-advertising-
on-w...](https://blog.chromium.org/2017/06/improving-advertising-on-web.html)

IMO, if Google's goal is to improve the web experience, it would be much
better if Chrome was spun off into a non-profit of its own, and not controlled
directly by Google.

A non-profit not directly controlled by Google would eliminate the major
conflict of interest that is:

1) Google is the biggest ad publisher/network in the world. 2) Google controls
the majority of web browsers today. 3) Google will control how ad blocking is
implemented, managed, corrected, adjusted, etc., as they see fit.

~~~
polishTar
Google already made Chromium completely open source. Anybody's free to fork it
and move it in any direction they want.

As for Chrome, it's likely worth many 10's of billions of dollars. It would be
absolutely indefensible to throw it away, especially when there are so many
yet unexplored avenues to improve the web without requiring such massive and
unneeded sacrifices.

~~~
xg15
So how do I go about e.g. removing telemetry from Chrome's mainline?

~~~
dkns
Chrome isn't open source. I'd say that if you decide to use Chrome you're
accepting fact that you're using closed source program with Google's
proprietary telemetry baked in.

~~~
xg15
That's basically my point re GP's claims that it is open source (1) and
therefore no split were needed (2)

------
redm
"auto-playing video ads with sound and “prestitial” ads that countdown before
displaying content."

I guess Google will have to block ads on Youtube as well, not only does it
have auto-playing ads with sound, but they block the display of content
(prestitial/pre-roll).

Oh wait, Google standards never affect Google.

~~~
mining
I think there's a clear difference between an ad that plays sound as part of
watching a video with sound, and as part of browsing a website that doesn't
have sound / where the ad plays sound over the actual content.

~~~
robryan
So all you would need to do to make your autoplay video ad acceptable is place
some of your content after it?

~~~
derefr
News websites already do things this way (have a text version of a news
report, with an auto-playing video version of the same report embedded
somewhere on the page, that has a pre-roll ad.) I'm not sure how Google will
view that—I think it might come down to whether the user was _expecting_ the
video version of the news report.

------
manigandham
This is a good thing. Ad blockers as they are today don't work because the
"block everything" approach is not sustainable.

Advertising is a good model, it works, but the implementation leaves a lot to
be desired. Ad blockers, by being selective, can actually act as an agent of
change by forcing the market to move towards the formats people actually
prefer.

Ad Block Plus attempted to do this with their pay-per-play whitelist approach
but that obviously has major issues since it didnt have realistic goals,
wasn't transparent, and clearly let crap through anyway.

I wish the ad standards also included outstream video (the autoplaying video
ads inside of an article) but this is a good start.

~~~
mrob
Ad blockers work just fine. It's very rare for an advert to make it past the
filters, and it will be quickly fixed if it does. The preferred format is "no
ads". The web existed before ads and it will exist after ads. It's not my
problem if you've built a business around the unethical practice of
manipulating people into buying things against their own interests.

~~~
tuna-piano
Wow.

A- Ads do not manipulate people into buying things against their own
interests. Businesses who sell great products that people want don't just
magically find their customers. They find customers with ads.

B- You're free to use an ad-blocker, and websites are free to block your use
of the site.

C- I assume you enjoy the web, and that a lot of effort is put into the sites
that you enjoy. Do you expect all of this for free?

~~~
rdiddly
A - counterpoint: Great products can succeed without ads. The customers find
YOU. Crap needs to be advertised.

B - yup, and bye

C - yup

"Content" of any type is just not worth much anymore. It's plentiful and
cheap. What's worth something is eyeballs.

As the price of content, of all sorts, approaches zero, the work is taken over
by amateurs. Old timers have seen an amateur web and are absolutely not afraid
of its coming back.

~~~
manigandham
> Great products can succeed without ads.

This is exceedingly rare and anyone at a major company will tell you that
marketing and sales is usually more important for success than the actual
product and it's qualities.

~~~
mrep
Prime example: oracle

------
nkozyra
This is such a giant genie to try to put back into the bottle with Adblock
usage growing 30% last year and accounting for 10-12% of total worldwide
users. How do you convince those people to worsen their experience - but only
slightly - toward the noble goal of letting content producers monetize? Or do
advertisers just consider that a lost cause at this point?

The real question is whether Chrome will get more draconian and start
preventing competing ad blockers in the browser.

[1]
[https://pagefair.com/blog/2017/adblockreport/](https://pagefair.com/blog/2017/adblockreport/)

~~~
Houshalter
They don't need to be more draconian. Just like they do now, they make their
adblocker the first option in search results and the webstore.

------
cosinetau
This sounds like a conflict of interest.
[http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/020515/busine...](http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/020515/business-
google.asp)

On the other hand, I feel like we've been here with Google before, and they've
generally done The Right Thing[tm]. How do we generally feel about people
using this? Has Google done enough right that we might feel comfortable with
them doing this? The general sense of other comments looks fairly bleak.

~~~
ReverseCold
Why would it be a conflict of interest? They're probably going to block all
ads that aren't their own/"approved" or something similar to that.

~~~
matt4077
It's impossible for them to treat competitors' ads different from their own.
That chrome update wouldn't have time to download before they got dragged to
court by every ad network, the European Union, and the Department of Justice.

~~~
awalton
_maybe_ the European Union.

The DOJ has clearly given up the ghost of even _attempting_ to regulate US
companies, and the current political news is just more evidence in that
direction.

Google can draw out these lawsuits for decades while continuing their
practices with impunity. They already have two _incredibly well studied_
playbooks to draw from: Microsoft v DOJ and SCO v IBM.

------
janitor61
I think the next move will be disabling other ad-blockers from the chrome
plugin store with an excuse that it "will interfere with native chrome
functionality"

~~~
superflyguy
There are no plugins​ available for mobile chrome anyway, which is where I do
90% of my surfing. If anything this half-assed ad blocking will drive people
to Firefox where you can block ads (and trackers and auto delete cookies etc)
properly.

~~~
Sommersonn
You can use system-level addons that will filter a web traffic, providing that
you can trust the publisher.

------
ThePhysicist
Considering Chromes market dominance I think this move is highly problematic
from a legal point of view, as it will allow Google to effectively ban certain
ads from the web at its own discretion. While this might be a great idea if
it's really targeted at "obnoxious" ads, it also gives Google a perfect handle
to force publishers into their ad ecosystem (because surely Google ads could
never be obnoxious) while driving down impressions and revenue for its
competition.

I would be highly surprised if this will not incur a swath of class action
lawsuits and another anti-Trust investigation by the European Union and
possibly the US.

Again, ad blocking is good and important, but the people who build the ad
blockers should not run an ad business on the side.

~~~
a3_nm
I agree but I wouldn't be surprised if nothing happens in terms of anti-trust.
Google has a monopoly on search in EU, and is leveraging this monopoly to gain
a monopoly in other areas (e.g., ads on the Google Search homepage telling
people to use Chrome), which I think is clearly problematic. This has been
going on for years but nothing happens about it...

------
webuser321
Ad-supported tech company employee#1: Users are blocking ads.

Ad-supported company employees: Uh-oh.

Ad-supported tech company employee#2: We can use this as an opportunity to
block our competitors ads!

Ad-supported tech company employee#3: We might win some goodwill with users,
too!

Example tech companies: Apple Brave Google etc.

Naive user: Oh well, I guess we just have to accept whatever the tech
companies give us.

Real answer: No, users are actually the ones in control. That is why ad
blocking is causing these companies to take action.

------
ocdtrekkie
As was previously discussed when this was first rumored, this is just begging
for an anticompetition lawsuit of gigantic proportions as Google is using
their dominant control of web browsers to block their competitors' ads from
working.

It is one of the most clear examples that the only way to remediate the
differences between Google and a law abiding corporation is to break it up.

EDIT: I think the strong feedback from everyone I've seen when this was first
rumored was that this idea was concerning and likely illegal, and yet Google
is proceeding anyways. I feel that should dismiss any notion that Google or
the industry as a whole has the ability to self-regulate.

To detail, I think Android and Chrome need to both be legally/forcibly
detached from Google. Android could easily operate on funding from the OEMs
that use the platform and the Play Store, which would go with it, and Chrome
could use Mozilla's model, including letting companies like Google and Yahoo
bid for the default search. (And obviously, would be prohibited from picking
Google Search if it isn't the highest bidder.)

Dominant platforms being tied to dominant services is just too large a
conflict of interest.

~~~
matt4077
It will be illegal only if and when they actually treat competitors' ads
differently than their own.

A good case study is AMP, which allows embedding ads and was, from the
beginning, made to be integrated with competing ad networks.

The potential for anti-competitive behaviour is so obvious, that Google
probably takes a lot of care to crossdot all its legal i's and t's.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
But bear in mind: They're largely responsible for setting the standards by
which these ads will be treated. Therefore, the standards will obviously be
set in a manner that all their own ads will comply, and other businesses must
change their business to suit Google's expectations or be blocked.

Bear in mind, ads are like over 95% of Google's business, they would not be
doing this if they thought it would impact their own ads _at all_.

And since, by design, the standards will never go after Google ads, as a site
owner, your best bet to not have your ads blocked will be to 'just' go with
Google as your ad provider.

------
45h34jh53k4j
Companies that sell both the poison and antidote are not remembered fondly in
history.

------
cocktailpeanuts
I don't care about "popup ads". I already use adblockers so I never see them.

What I want to really see is blocking those popup "sign up for newsletter"
modal.

~~~
visarga
What's even worse is that special Chrome feature where the site asks you to
allow it to send you notifications. It's a tiny window with a single button
"accept" and a minuscule "x" for closing it that is light gray on white (hard
to even see). What is missing is an option to reject all site
subscription/notifications and never have to deal with that kind of intrusive
offers again. They're not even popups or in-page popups, they are part of the
browser UI. So it's an officially allowed way to send "popups" and pester
people for subscribing. Many newspapers in my country use this shit technique.

~~~
yohui
Doesn't the "Do not allow any site to show notifications" setting cover that?

chrome://settings/content#notifications-section

------
dingo_bat
News like this makes me glad I've moved entirely to edge. It has ublock and
lastpass and RES. It's as fast as Chrome and much more responsive than
Firefox. There are some bugs but Microsoft is doing a good job of gradually
ironing those out. That's enough for me.

------
real-hacker
I think the ad-based business model for internet companies could possibly be
toppled in the next few years: 1\. The ads are becoming increasingly
ineffective, the CTR keeps falling, even as the ads are being personally
customized. People are growing biological ad-blockers that block ads
subconsciously. There is an interesting theory of "Peak Advertisement":
[http://peakads.org/](http://peakads.org/). 2\. The value of digital
assets/services are being recognized, and people are more willing to pay for
online services.

So maybe in the future internet companies will rely more on customer's
subscription fee + ads that are more transparent (sponsored content).

~~~
real-hacker
Also, this is a video that argues for ad-blockers from an ethical perspective:
[https://youtu.be/bltoTMJZetc](https://youtu.be/bltoTMJZetc).

------
combatentropy
From the article:

    
    
      > While blocking pesky ads is appealing to consumers,
      > it also threatens a vital source of revenue for publishers
    

Are "pesky ads" really "a vital source of revenue"? Is there any data?
Everyone I know hates them, especially the autoplaying videos, animations, and
pop-ups (the "pesky" ones). Are you saying that there are people who see these
things and say, "Oh, that's interesting," and clicks the ad? Furthermore are
you saying that there is a "vital" number of these people in the world?

I believe that if anything, depeskifying ads will bring advertisers more
success. I have always believed that intrusive ads were a lose-lose
proposition. Not only do readers lose by being bothered, but advertisers lose
because such ads make people just look away. Furthermore it makes people hate
your website, tarnishing the brand. I, for one, am starting to remember at
least some websites that are especially rude with ads, and I won't click the
link if there is a choice (like on Google News).

I remember many years ago when Google first insisted on text-only ads,
relegated to the right side of the page so they were clearly advertising.
Everyone thought Google was crazy. Billions of dollars later, people think
Google is on to something. It was the most tempted I've ever been to click an
ad (I still don't think I did, though). Because they weren't flashing, I
didn't immediately ignore that whole area, an automatic response that most of
us have developed. And so some of them I actually read. And because they were
narrowly targeted ads, based on the words in my search, they were more
interesting.

In other words, if publishers switched to text-only ads, I bet their click-
rate would go up. Maybe a tasteful still picture would be okay. I'm thinking
of what is in newspapers and magazines. I actually used to look at some of
their ads (back in the ol' paper days). I even enjoyed some of the more
artistic or clever ones. The only times they annoyed me is if there were too
many of them or it was those loose-leaf subscriptions cards in the middle of a
magazine (pre-internet pesky ads).

~~~
manigandham
Yes, those "engaging" ads as marketers say tend to have better metrics
precisely because they're designed to.

All these autoplaying videos have more video starts, completion rates and more
time in view - which is obvious since it's forced and not voluntary - but add
in layers of agencies and clueless CMOs and you have the situation today where
this kind of format takes over the market.

Also not every or even most advertising is about sales or direct response.
There are billions spent on general awareness and top-of-funnel product
consideration so clicks and other actions beyond viewing the ad are not
necessary.

~~~
CuriouslyC
The problem here is that marketers are only measuring click through. If they
measured other metrics in addition I wouldn't be surprised if these ads had
negative value. I personally put any company that engages in annoying
advertising on my mental shitlist, and avoid purchasing anything by them
whenever possible. Unfortunately, that behavior doesn't show up clearly on
analytics.

~~~
manigandham
They're not, as I mentioned in my comment. Clicks are common but not the only
metric. Plain old impressions are still widely used and with video it's
usually time played or views (completed play through).

Annoying advertising shows up great in metrics because it gets so much
attention (which is what makes it annoying in the first place). It's a self
fulfilling prophecy for advertisers and agencies and a result of a major lack
of proper oversight, incentives or regulation in this industry.

------
jasonmp85
I feel like "Help" and "Ad Blocker" need scare quotes around them.

------
erikpukinskis
I'm trying to understand Google's new rules... From what I can tell they have
published the set of prohibited practices here:

[https://www.betterads.org/standards/](https://www.betterads.org/standards/)

It weird language... they say things like "Included ad experiences tested:
Auto-playing in-line video with sound" and "The Better Ads Methodology has not
yet tested video ads that appear before (“pre-roll”) or during (“mid-roll”)
video content that is relevant to the content of the page itself."

I _think_ that means pre-roll is OK if it fits into the content, but auto-
playing inline video with sound is not.

It would be nice if they could just say explicitly what the rules are. Instead
I guess you are supposed to use the Ad Experience Report tools:
[https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ad-experience-
deskto...](https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ad-experience-desktop-
unverified?hl=en)

~~~
ajnin
> The Better Ads Methodology has not yet tested video ads that appear before
> (“pre-roll”) or during (“mid-roll”) video content

Funny that they would have a special rule for this kind of ads, that's exactly
what Youtube does ... (Except that for me it usually is completely irrelevant,
like ads for cosmetics or video games in the middle of a chemistry video.) I'm
not expecting them to include this type of ads in the methodology any time
soon except to find that they are totally fine.

------
ww520
Google can use the ad-blocking thing to stamp out ad-network competition.

------
lvillani
I don't know.

On one hand I applaud Google's decision[1] to put its weight against autoplay
videos, prestitial ads, and huge above-the-fold ads that are the main driving
factor for me and many others to install an ad blocker in the first place.

I would love to live in a world in which ad blockers are not necessary,
everyone displays tasteful ads and every party involved gains something in the
end.

On the other hand advertising companies are still hell-bent on tracking and
profiling people by whatever means necessary to target them better with ads.
They amass huge amounts of information that, if put in the wrong hands, could
lead to a disaster.

This is what still makes (and will still make) blanket ad-blocking a
necessity, IMO.

\---

[1] I'm ignoring the _huge_ conflict of interest for the sake of argument
here.

------
pfooti
Nice ad you've got there. Be a shame if someone came along and blocked it.

------
chenster
I would love to switch to Firefox if it only could run a little faster.

------
a_imho
That is not adblocking, it is enforcing Better Ads Standards in Chrome.

It might be useful to detect and block clickfraud sites.

Imo it will be very hard to sell it as pro user change. I would not be
surprised if few would even go further and call it insulting to think people
are that gullible.

For reference, the _companies_ that make up the Better Ads Coalition
[https://www.betterads.org/members/](https://www.betterads.org/members/)

------
bobajeff
It's kind of crazy to hear that the first mainstream browser to have a built-
in adblocker turned on by default is going to be Google Chrome.

~~~
eli
Only a dominant player could pull it off. Detecting ad blockers is kinda hard,
but sniffing user agents is easy. If Edge blocked ads by default some sites
might choose to block Edge users entirely.

~~~
ry_ry
Not really - detecting ad blockers is pretty straightforward, try to insert a
DOM node that triggers their ad pattern matching then check if it's been
blocked.

Not to mention spoofing your user agent is very easy! It's built into the
devtools of most desktop browsers (including Edge), or can be modified by a
proxy like Fiddler.

I wouldn't ever want to rely on useragent to identify a browser if the idea
was to completely block that software from accessing your site.

~~~
eli
Disagree. As blockers actively try to thwart ad block detection. Especially
for popular sites, it's a losing proposition. And Microsoft is never going to
ship a browser that completely steals another browser's user agent.

~~~
ry_ry
It's a catch 22 really - If adverts are modified or removed, the dom will
reflect that. If you completely spoof that you effectively break the dom for
everything else.

If you only spoof the advert's own properties, you can infer state from other
inline elements.

If you block domains you can check for their response on the client.

If you proxy the incoming asset before it hits the browser and replace it's
content is harder to detect client side but the ad provider will be able to
see what happened and would most likely not display your modified content,
taking you back to the conventional detection strategies.

------
amauta
Blockchain will destroy ads as we know it. Can't wait for Google and FB to go
downhill :D

~~~
malikNF
But how? I am genuinely curious.

------
konart
Yandex.Browser (also Chromium base) already has one. Works perfectly well, but
at the same time you can't block ads from Yandex.Direct network at all.
uBlock, Adblock or whatever - they will just reappear after you apply a new
rule.

------
yuhong
Is that the main problem with GA or are there others:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14441740](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14441740)

------
ausjke
what about porn sites blocking for kids? can chrome have a parent control mode
somehow that kids can use chrome "safely" on android and on the PC these days?

~~~
Eridrus
This exists for Android:
[https://families.google.com/familylink/](https://families.google.com/familylink/)

------
jasonkostempski
If ad revenue wasn't based on impressions and clicks no one would want to
shove them in their users faces. Ad networks like Google's​ are the cause of
the problem.

~~~
quadrangle
Google's tracking can be a terrible thing and we can still acknowledge that
advertisers unrelated to Google do awful shit and always have. Advertising can
be unethical even when payments aren't tied to clicks. Click-driven
advertising makes it _worse_ but isn't _the_ cause of all problems.

~~~
jasonkostempski
Regardless of how they are presented, all ad networks do awful shit. It's an
entire system built on distrust and the users machine is responsible for
fixing it. It's an absolutely insane business model. Show me an ad network
that doesn't work that way and I might consider it acceptable, until then all
of them need to be universally disabled.

~~~
quadrangle
I agree with you 100% there.

------
revelation
So we've come full circle. The biggest ad peddler on the world and a
predominant distributor of malicious ads (because ain't nobody got time to
check that stuff) is now integrating an ad blocker and offering tools for
publishers to check their sites for the bad ads they themselves offer.

~~~
jonathanyc
Why is this person being so vehemently downvoted? Anyone who has ever tried
browsing the web for more than a couple minutes on a computer without an ad-
blocker has run into fake download button ads. As they point out in a later
comment, getpaint.net has them: I literally just went on there right now and
what do you know:
[http://i.imgur.com/Ygjyn3H.png](http://i.imgur.com/Ygjyn3H.png) . If I go to
Sourceforge, another malicious Google ad for "antivirus" software that at best
just scams people out of their money then does nothing:
[http://imgur.com/a/WlcQB](http://imgur.com/a/WlcQB) .

Once while visiting my family I happened to be at the dinner table with my
parents when my mom mumbled something about a message prompting her to update.
Just out of curiosity I walked over and saw her about to click on a completely
fake Java update message that would have almost certainly installed malware...
served by Google.

It's counterproductive to live in denial of this massive problem. The original
commenter has posted evidence; if you want to deny this claim, you ought to be
prepared to supply some of your own.

~~~
yohui
Eh? I don't see much content in revelation's comment?

As for the images you posted, I checked out EasyPhotoEdit and
thetop10antivirus.com and neither site appears actively harmful (the former
looks like an online photo editor and the latter an antivirus comparison
page), so while the ads may be distasteful I'm not sure they should be called
malicious ads since that's usually reserved for actual malware.

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ransom1538
This will hurt professional journalism. Print is gone. Journalists survive on
ads - and the only ones that work are quite obtrusive. Removing these annoying
ads and moving to standardized google ads will just tighten the journalist's
budgets. This will help the fake news blog outlets spread like the cancer they
are. Sad.

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a2decrow
There are other ways to monetize without (intrusive) ads. Produce quality
content and people will be happy to support it. If your entire business model
only revolves around ad-driven revenue and it doesn't work any other way, then
perhaps that business model simply offers nothing of value.

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s73ver
If it means good ads, without tracking, without popovers/unders, basically
without all the bullshit that most ads do now, it'd be a good thing. Content
creators need to eat too, you know.

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ocdtrekkie
This is Google we're talking about. "Without tracking" is definitely not part
of the equation here. Tracking is their entire business model.

