Other than the volume, one of the issues I have with these types of ads is that you're rarely able to report them as scams. Reddit have a similar issue. You can report an ad, but you have to pick "Other", there's no: "This ad is clearly a scam". That's by design obviously, because by removing the scams, most of the ad networks are left with very little inventory. Certainly not enough to fund all the ad supported service currently in operation through out the web.
When I forget to sign in to YouTube, I see the same pattern, shitty ads that are clearly only allowed because otherwise YouTube wouldn't have sufficient ad inventory to meet their internal KPIs.
It seems plausible that if they can’t tie it to the user they have a batch of “garbage ads” that just run, cheap stuff that the worst kind of folks pay for.
They do select cheap ads if they don't have any personalization data. Companies who pay for targeted ads don't want to pay for impressions on users that don't meet their criteria.
I've been receiving email spam from Derilla, a pillow company, for many years. Once the manifest V3 abomination went into effect in Chrome, I also have to endure it on the frontpage of YouTube.
Who buys pillows because of email spam and YouTube ads? I don't get it. It's probably not a scam, but a very obnoxious company nonetheless.
Well those ads got you to spread the company name here.
Some people are going to buy those pillows based on those ads. Others are going to think the ads are stupid but will remember the brand and are now more likely to choose it if they see it in a store. Ads persist because overall they work.
> Certainly not enough to fund all the ad supported service currently in operation through out the web.
I'm not fully sure about this, an ad network which does that very reliably can probably charge the ad provisioning companies extra due to it being on more high quality sides/locations and pay out extra little due to having "high quality low disturbing" ads.
But with the Google being a quasi monopoly for ad networks on any open platform and most people either blocking all adds or no adds there is just little room for alternatives. I do use uBlock Origin for some custom filters, but I which instead of "on" / "of" there where "on but more like privacy badger" / "on full" / "off" with the first being the default so that users can create an insensitive for better ad handling.
Having worked in the world of e-commerce, there are genuinely good companies run by good people making genuinely good products that no one knows about, and one of the ways they try and get people to know about their products is advertising. In one case, this is a product that replaced something already in your home, it's materially better, and it's materially cheaper in the long term. How do you create an ad for that that doesn't sound like a lie?
If you're making a great product and you choose to make sure you don't get traction by taking this route (assuming you're not in one of the few niches where it might be somewhat viable), you're just making sure you don't succeed and that worse products with better advertising are relatively more successful.
Hacker News does not advertise because it is a gigantic advertisement for YCombinator. This is not some sort of scurrilous accusation, they may not be constantly banging the table about it but it's not a secret.
Hacker News does not depend on me buying products from it for it's survival. If you can't see the difference in why a company cannot depend on word of mouth, then you're just really not trying to have an honest conversation.
Hacker News depends on a constant stream of new users to keep the site alive, just like any other discussion forum. But you're right that unlike the average company this site seems to be OK with a stable but small user base and isn't aiming for unbounded exponential growth.
It's the way it used to be done with paper catalogues. If you're looking for a snowmobile then you go get a snowmobile catalog from a dealer who you looked up in a phonebook. But advertisers don't want to wait for somebody to decide they want a thing, they want to brainwash otherwise content people into wanting something they didn't previously want.
Come on. There is a massive difference between an ad that optimistically emphasizes the best aspects of a real product or service and an ad for a fake product or service that will take your money and leave you with essentially nothing.
It's legal to advertise real products or services that will take your money and leave you with essentially nothing.
For example:
- gambling, e.g. slot machines, sports betting
- healing crystals
- palm readings
- carnival games
Perhaps the right distinction is whether something is legally a fraud or not. But I kind of agree that most ads are scams and also that ad networks don't have the ability to separate legal scams from fraud. So I just block them all.
Yes, these scams have aleays been there. The distinction was that advertisers like newspapers and magazines had a standards body that would reject ad placements that were insulting to their audience's intelligence.
I know television is not newspapers and magazines, but they at least had to have some level of standards bodies (I'm fairly sure they at least did in the early 90s), and I remember Psychic Friends Network ads on tv which is clearly in the realm of palm readings. I guess maybe it wasn't insulting to the intelligence of people watching late night TV in the early 90s?
I think the poster is lamenting the general quality of all advertised products in general. If it's a brand of good quality (Miele, Henry, DeLonghi) it probably does not need to be advertised, as word of mouth and price point is generally enough.
>If it's a brand of good quality (Miele, Henry, DeLonghi) it probably does not need to be advertised, as word of mouth and price point is generally enough.
what about iPhones? They're ubiquitous enough that Apple probably doesn't need ads to let people know they exist, yet every at launch ads for them are plastered everywhere. Same with soft drinks and cars, just to name a few. Before you say "iPhone sucks", the same can be said for basically all other phone OEMs, and if your theory allows categorizing an entire industry as crap, your theory is basically unfalsifiable.
>and so many people are complicit such that it becomes a self-sustaining problem.
If you're defining "ads" to be a "problem", then it turns the statement into a meaningless tautology. Only crappy brand use ads, because brands that use ads are crappy.
> Only crappy brand use ads, because brands that use ads are crappy.
Hey, you're starting to get it, but not quite.
Only crappy brands use ads, because ads pollute my very valuable time, my very valuable window of vision, my very valuable hearing, and my very valuable sanity in trying to stay safe against malware hiding in advertisements. That's on top of wasting my valuable money convincing me to buy things that I don't want to buy.
If a brand really wants me to use their product, then make a great product and show off its features in demos, at conferences, and it will eventually get to me by word of mouth. One friend showing me how a product has improved their life is worth at least five-figure digit counts of ads shown to me, if not six-figure counts.
In the case of iPhones specifically--which I see a lot more ads for than appliances--people do upgrade phones a lot more frequently than appliances, especially major ones, often for specific capabilities like cameras. So reminding people they don't have the latest and greatest makes a lot of business sense.
I would guess that a company like Apple (or Miele or whatever) pays some attention to the context in which their advertisements appear. I don't think they'd want an advertisement for iPhone to appear online with a weight loss pill on the left and a gambling site on the right.
I should start by saying that I find ads incredibly irritating in any form. That said, Miele and DeLonghi are both more than a hundred year old companies. Maybe they don't need to advertise because they have such solidly establish brand identities, but they do advertise and they have advertised throughout their history as companies. Ads are a way of maintaining brand awareness, introducing new products, and creating demand. Even if you have an incredibly solid product with good word of mouth there is still benefit to advertising it.
This is something people don't credit enough. How many times have you search for something by name and received a direct competitor's product as top result? This is why I put no stock in digital ads for the little guy. The bigger guy will always have a larger ad buy budget and will outbid you at every turn.
Two of the three names are unknown to me. This word of mouth delivery did nothing to make me interested in any of the three though. I have no idea what any of them actually do. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader as how best to internet search "Henry".
All 3 are appliance manufacturers. Miele and Henry are predominantly vacuum cleaner brands.
Henry hoovers are ubiquitous in the professional market in the UK and well regarded for durability, performance and the cute face all their cleaners have. Essentially anyone in the UK will have used, or seen one be used
> If it's a brand of good quality (Miele, Henry, DeLonghi) it probably does not need to be advertised, as word of mouth and price point is generally enough.
Nah, they advertise (probably) for a similar reason as car brands do, to make the people who bought it already feel better and more reassured about their choice.
I'm guessing high-end appliance brands are enough of a niche market that it just doesn't make sense for them to advertise in relatively unfocused ways. You'll see plenty of ads for high-end appliances and cookware if you frequent gourmet-oriented websites and magazines.
I remember back in the good old days (so like 2008) you'd visit the some bigco website looking for specs on some item and then later you'd see their products in your banner ads. Times were so simple back then.
I'm willing to throw that away to get rid of the scammy ads. It would be nice if there were ad networks that were vigilant about who they let use their service, but "money", I guess. So adblockers it is.
Right, the title also doesn't state the bit depth the color values are stored. There could be 64, 128, 256, 1024, 64million shades. Data Inadequate. I'm really surprised this was missed on this forum!
Seems like the ethical way to have ads on your site is to do it the way Costco does.
Costco has an entire section of affiliate links to manufacturers they have worked with. The people who go there get special discounts on the products purchased from those manufacturers, and the only ads you get about it are on Costco's site reminding you that this section exists.
Websites could easily add a "shop" page to their sites and screen and curate a selection of companies willing to pay an affiliate link bonus to the site when users purchase through those links.
This would help them generate income while also not enshittifying the site or experience for users.
The ad industry likes to say that their industry is clean and the people who buy ads for scams are the problem, but the truth is the entire industry is complicit with the scamming, and stuff like this shows it. If the ad industry were merely hapless victims of the scammers, rather than willful participants in the scamming, they'd be eager to receive reports of scams.
I feel like there are almost two completely incompatible stories being sold by ad tech people. One is that "you shouldn't use an ad blocker, reputable websites have ads from Google and other reputable companies and they wouldn't be scams or malware". The other is that any time there's a story about malware and scams on reputable websites, they say: "there are so many ads being submitted, Google is doing their best but you can't expect them to successfully weed out every single bad ad".
The reality is, of course, that Google and its ilk doesn't give a single rat's ass about people falling from scams or getting infected by malware. Scams and malware pays better than "ethical" ads (to the degree that such a thing exists). It's a travesty that there are apparently no laws against their behavior.
> It's a travesty that there are apparently no laws against their behavior.
there is in the UK. And likely in most other jurisdictions too. But it's about penalizing the advertisers rather than the platform. Which clearly neither works at scale nor across borders.
This definitely feels like a better use case for an "online safety act" -- but instead we got censorship laws....
Because scams are a threat to the serfs, and people spreading the truth about global events and issues is a threat to the powerful. That's why I really don't bag on "slacktivists" anymore. I'm not saying there isn't SOME truth to the notion that people reliably pick the one kind of activism that doesn't require getting off the sofa, it's a fair critique. However even that kind of activism is now heavily policed around the humanitarian crisis that won't be named.
If it wasn't a threat, they wouldn't police it so hard.
It's been that way a long time with other media. I used to work out a lot during the day and would wind up watching TV in the daypart aimed at people who don't have their own money to spend on things and there were ads running for about a decade that were obviously a scam.
When you heard the vocal equivalent of large type text every real person knew that it was time to get grandma away from the TV but... the people at the TV network didn't, law enforcement didn't, your congressman didn't, anybody in a position of power didn't. And no wonder people feel cynical, hate the media, distrust the cops, distrust politicians, feel "the game is rigged", etc.
It's a travesty that there are apparently no laws against their behavior.
In the USA I’m pretty sure advertising scams - even the more ‘benign’ ones like claiming a product does something it doesn’t do or lying about its efficiency - are illegal. There’s just no - or not nearly enough - enforcement.
*no enforcement any longer. Back when we had Lina Khan at the FTC, she would have enforced it. Now we have a scammer-in-chief only enforcing laws against his political opponents
She started enforcing it against the most egregious offenders, but for every enforcement action, there were thousands that went unpunished. The problem is that FTC proceedings are very process heavy by design, which is what you want in some cases, but doesn't scale to widespread scam. We need to be prosecuting hundreds of thousands these cases every year if we want to make a dent and turn things around to fraud being a rare exception rather than a normal business model.
I agree the current administration is way worse than the previous one in almost every respect, but to argue that the previous one would’ve enforced this particular thing is obviously untrue.
The situation’s been like this for a few years now.
If she had had more time, I could see Khan going after fake ads as well. There's nothing to me that suggests that she was deliberately ignoring fraudulent ads when she was extremely pro-consumer in nearly every other policy.
It's not even that there's no enforcement... you could talk to your state's AG. But their budgets aren't infinite, and the scammers are overseas as likely as not. Unless the scam rises above some (absurdly high) threshold or threatens someone very important/wealthy, it's going to be back-burnered.
The cost of enforcement would break every government's budget. The cost asymmetry is the problem.
Budget is not the issue. When a crime is hard to police all you need to do is up the fines and other punishment so whatever enforcement you can afford acts as a deterrent for the rest.
Google Tag Manager is a malware vector. It's very design is to distribute non-Google code through a supposedly trusted source. They are part of the problem and JS blocking is the only dependable safeguard.
It'd be relatively easy for Google to screen out and filter ads... Charge enough when creating an account or starting/changing a campaign. Then you can pay staff for manual review. They could charge $1000 for account creation (half of which you get back after the first year), then they charge even $20 at campaign creation/change... They can even provide context/feedback, "Sorry, but this seems misleading, doesn't relate to what you are linking, is scammy, etc." And have an additional "check" of each ad and target after a day, a week and a random point within each month. Charge an additional minimum of $20/mo per ad for (re)validation.
For the bulk of legit advertisers, this won't affect the bottom line of a given campaign and will keep out the scammers, etc. Leading to a much higher quality ecosystem. It would also give Google the potential for a higher percentage share of profits in the system. It would also likely reduce the CPM pricing though, possibly to a larger extent than profits from the validation system itself.
My mail server easily gets the most phishing attempts from gmail. This is due to my unwillingness to blacklist Gmail. I report the abuse through there abuse page. The results in a slowdown while the abuser reformulates their sending process. I know this by watching the changes to the sending path in the header of the phishing attempts. The content and subject often don’t change but the header does.
I bet that if you were using gmail, those phishing mails would end up in your trash ... which raises the question: why does Google allow people who Google's own spam-filter can detect are sending 99% spam to keep sending e-mail?
While it has gotten around the "logical fallacy community", for lack of a better term, in the last few years, it could still stand to be known by more people. It's become very popular. I think there are many who have subconsciously picked it up as just how things are done.
The whole point of ads is to mislead and manipulate people into acting against their best interests. They are not colluding with scammers, they are the scammers. The whole business is inherently rotten and that's before getting to second order effects. It's a travesty that ads are tolerated at all.
> One is that "you shouldn't use an ad blocker, reputable websites have ads from Google and other reputable companies and they wouldn't be scams or malware".
But I don't care* about that, I care that they're visually obnoxious and sometimes slow.
* Well, usually. Way back when, there used to be occasional news about browser sandbox escapes.
I agree, I would be using an ad blocker even if all the ads were "only" annoying attempts at manipulating my behavior rather than scams and malware. But pointing out that ads can damage your computer or scam you out of money or information is a stronger pro-ad-blocking argument.
Genuinely curious: why do I always get scammy ads in iOS apps and Google products but I don’t see anywhere near the same amount on Instagram or TikTok?
Are Meta and TikTok better at filtering scammy ads out? Maybe their ML recommendation systems realize I’d never click on such an ad and the other platforms can’t figure that out.
IG, TikTok, Meta have a lot of data they can use to do good ad targeting that is harder to apply to Google/iOS apps. Also has to do with the ad format, placement, etc.
Some formats are better than others. The Meta products comparable to GDN (audience network, various banner ad placements in its platforms) also kind of suck. Google wishes they had a feed based website, thats where people respond to direct respond ads in a big way.
> One is that "you shouldn't use an ad blocker, reputable websites have ads from Google and other reputable companies and they wouldn't be scams or malware".
When google switched off uBlock origin, it took less than a week for my grandmother to call me in a panic because she clicked on a malicious Facebook ad.
Google disabled the Adblock, Facebook let the ad run on their site, and Microsoft hosted the malicious site on their cloud provider. Shoutout to Microsoft for taking the site down within the hour after I reported it- more than I can say for any of the blatantly illegal or scam ads I’ve seen on YouTube. but still, 3 big tech companies that could have definitely stopped this is they really wanted to.
> When google switched off uBlock origin, it took less than a week for my grandmother to call me in a panic because she clicked on a malicious Facebook ad.
What did your grandmother need Chrome for? You couldn't find the 5m it would take to set her up with Firefox?
She uses a super cheap Chromebook. Unfortunately I don’t think Firefox can be easily installed on it? I don’t think it’s even x86. It’s a very limited device, but all it needs to be capable of is loading Facebook and a few other specific sites- so it “works”
Medical supplements or plans that make claims that clearly aren’t real, financial scams (crypto or get-rich-quick schemes), or product scams (this new device that ‘they’ don’t want you to know about can heat/cool your house in minutes for pennies!).
I’m pretty sure none of this is legal, and Google obviously doesn’t care.
FWIW I have ad personalization off - perhaps it’s a bit better for those who don’t?
From when I worked in the video ad industry, the industry standard was that an impression was binary and seeing a single frame of the ad counted. IDK if YouTube follows the Interactive Advertising Bureau guidelines, but they probably do. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/xandr/industry-reference/i...
Quite a bit - I get ads for septic tanks because I have looked at them several times and tank companies continue to advertise for me because I might buy. I get ads for robot mowers because, again, I looked at them. I still see "the bottom of the barrel" ads occasionally, but it's very rare. Ad blitzes on the other hand ... (no, I don't want to build an app just-by-thinking-about-it) ...
At one point a few months ago, YouTube seems to have gotten the idea that I have some kind of bowel problem, and I'd constantly get ads about my "stuck poop." WTF? I'm watching a woodworking tutorial, I don't want to fucking hear about poop! Total bottom of the barrel.
Several months ago, my wife bought several bottles of pureed pumpkin babyfood, because small amounts added to catfood can treat some feline stomach issues.
Now, we're getting diaper commercials all over youtube. I assume we're flagged in some database as likely having a new child, but you can't ever know for sure.
Just remember, advertising is responsible for the rage economy. It's responsible for platforming misinformation. It's responsible for screen-addiction in children. It's responsible for online scams. Just think of all of the proposed laws and regulations around the world that are trying to counter each of these problems and remember that the root cause, and enabler of all of them is advertising. It's truly an amplifier of enshittification, and one of the worst conduits of bad social behaviour ever invented. If you're in the ad / ad-tech industry, please seriously consider the effect you're having on the world.
I'm happy to pay for media, news, social networks etc. I don't purchase things based on anything other than personal recommendations and research. I have no use for advertising, and I have no desire or need for ad-supported platforms. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone. People say advertising works, and that justifies it. The thing is, advertising only works on enough people to justify it. Everyone else hates it with a passion, or studiously avoids it. I'm not sure if we're a majority or a minority, it doesn't matter, but we suffer advertising and wish it were gone.
Advertising needs to change. It would be nice if it just went away, but realistically that's not going to happen. It needs to be recognised as harmful and regulated as a harmful product.
It also doesn’t help that so many creators - even legitimate ones - now use injected ads that they don’t verify at all.
I remember listening to an episode of Better Offline a buddy sent me and anyone who knows about Ed knows that basically half his crusade is against bad AI implementation/“slop”/etc. He’s broadly against the current LLM rush.
First ad when I fired up the podcast episode was yet aother injected ad for yet another AI agent company as generic as the rest. Literally the organizations he’s railing against and calling wasteful. It was clearly because he handed off the advertising to one of these injection services.
Sidebar: these ads tend to perform terribly. Actual ad reads by the host(s) are the only thing that lead to meaningful conversions in podcasts.
Cool Zone Media podcasts kinda famously get farmed ads that run counter to their content. they claim they do what they can to influence that (ahem... Washington State Highway Patrol and all the gold scams come to mind) but i wonder if signing their souls away to ihm removed a lot of their agency in that regard.
and if you've ever listened to one of Robert's (CZM executive producer and host of some of their flagships) other podcasts you might understand why companies don't want him doing ad reads.
I’m not even against pre-recorded spots by whoever the sponsor is if that’s his deal though the conversion rate on those are not as good. It’s just the completely random ads that the podcaster(s) don’t even know are playing on their show. The entire reason advertising on podcasting was more effective in the 2010s and early 2020s was because there was a little more trust with their listeners, there’s a relationship at play even if it’s parasocial. If they were actively reading on air, I assumed that they vetted the company and it at least passed the smell test (though plenty sure didn’t, I would say the bar was a little higher than other media formats).
where are the ads injected? I use a couple of podcast "apps" and neither inject ads, all ads in podcasts are explicitly put into the audio file by the people making the podcast, even pre-roll and post-roll ads.
No, that's incorrect. Not one of the podcasts i listen to re-master their mp3s, the checksums stay the same. In fact, most of the podcasts i listen to have no ads at all. I wonder if there's some misunderstanding, here. If i go watch like an LTT video where they had a sponser, 5 years ago, that same "native ad" will be in the video. I'm specifically saying that the podcast apps i use do not inject ads, but podcasts themselves will do native advertising, i consider these completely different things.
Just to be clear, are you just saying the shows you listen to don’t do DAI, or are you doubting that DAI exists at all? I only ask because of your comment before the one I’m responding to here. It almost sounds like you think it isn’t possible or that no one does it.
Hosting services drop them in. You sign an agreement with them and they have agreement with advertisers who drop their spots into your show using DAI. Often it’s a straight up bid-system but the podcasters are not part of the process, or the podcasters can do the read and hand it over to be inserted. This means that podcasters in a lot of situations don’t actually know what ads are being run on their show.
These ads are not just not baked into the audio file, they are legitimately a mystery to the people running the show sometimes. And I think that that’s kind of unconscionable tbh. Podcasts (especially early on) owe a lot of their success to the feeling of “authenticity,” they feel more personal and less “corporate” generally. Whether that’s reality or not we can of course debate, but it’s how audiences perceived them. The reason on air reads have been generally successful for podcasts is because of the trust between the podcast and the audience that has been built over time. This runs directly counter to it.
when i use either of my podcast apps, it fetches an mp3 file (or streams it) and there's no additional ads (read this as "no additional non-native ads") that "change" when i listen again in a year. This means the podcasts that i listen to, i suppose, are not hosted on hosting platforms that inject ads. Because, as i think needs to be reiterated, podcasts are just mp3 files. you can host them with caddy, or nginx, or apache, all pointing at some file(s) in ./www/html/mp3/ One does not need to host it on "Acast" or other "podcast hosting providers", a podcast is just an mp3 file, which can be automatically fetched by anything that can download both rss and mp3 formatted files.
at a certain point, one has to ask themselves if whatever media they're ingesting is worth the scum.
a "podcast" is just an mp3 file, usually fetched by finding the URL via an rss feed. I am asking, perhaps a bit cheekily, "who is putting ads in", because that isn't a "feature" of podcasts. Stop getting podcasts from places that put ads in, support "podcasters" that don't do this scummy crap.
It's just an mp3 file!
edit: I should point out that i pitched, to Apple, the ability to dynamically insert ads sometime around ipod 5th gen, 2005-2006, but not for podcasts, but for downloadable videos, like "last night's TV show". I'm sorry i did this. I don't mean i had the idea and said "hey this is an idea", i had the entire infrastructure documented, it was drop in and go. Whoops.
I know what a podcast is, I have produced them for clients. I am honestly unsure what our discussion is about at this point.
DAI is a thing and my initial point several comments ago was that too many podcasts implement it, let advertisers drop their stuff in (not their own read), and never check what’s actually being run on their show. That’s all my point was about.
That’s a (good) choice by the shows you listen to. There are plenty of ad injection services for podcasting, pretty sure Acast (popular hosting service) has it built in for instance. Search “DAI podcast” or “dynamic ad insertion podcast.”
The biggest giveaway is when the ads are dropped in the middle of someone talking. Pretty much any hits that are manually added are led into by the hosts if it’s mid-show.
i can write that in like 2 minutes in any language you want.
`pseudo
main(
return True
)`
There's a difference between "Need a tree cut down? I am licensed and bonded and cut down trees; call ###" and the sort of things that we all consider "ads". If someone can't see a difference, then that someone probably receives money from advertising.
One of the few sorts of ads I'm okay with are those sort of ads for local businesses on the paper placemats at local restaurants. Those stick around and are seen by countless people so if it's a scam word will get around.
This is the other side of ad tracking. Good ad tracking means much more relevant ads. The only advertisers that can afford to run on untargeted ad inventory are lowest common denominator products like teeth whitening and weight loss.
When I forget to sign in to YouTube, I see the same pattern, shitty ads that are clearly only allowed because otherwise YouTube wouldn't have sufficient ad inventory to meet their internal KPIs.