Just want to point out that AdChoices is NOT owned by Google, and they do NOT serve any advertising.
It's a program organised by the DAA (Digital Advertising Alliance) which is itself formed of several other advertising associations, the goal of which is to be a self-regulatory program allowing to opt out of online behavioral advertising, so that you do not have to see any behavior targeted ads if you choose not to.
Google's display network is a part of the AdChoices program, but not every ad showing that icon is a Google ad. In fact, from the yahoo.com homepage, only the banner ads seem to be served by Google, sponsored articles are being served by Yahoo! directly. If you click the AdChoices button it will actually tell you who is placing the ad.
I'm not the biggest paladin of Google, but in this case everything points to the ad being served by Yahoo!
EDIT: From what I could find, it's likely the ads are being served by the Yahoo! streamads[0] self-serve platform.
Programmatic is always tricky to properly validate, because it's expensive to fact check every single creative that comes through. It's likely that, if reported, Yahoo will ban the advertiser from their platform.
Facebook uses a whitelist approach where they'll manually validate your first few creatives and then whitelist you for automatic validation, not sure if Yahoo employs the same method.
Yahoo used to use a whitelist approach too; but with RTB (programmatic buying) it is no longer feasible to do that. And unfortunately, the whole world is moving to RTB... :-(
99% of online advertisers give the rest a bad name.
Not only is this why online advertising is ultimately doomed, but it's why we hugely and desperately and badly need to find another way of paying for content.
The alternatives for the moment are gratis, patronage, "native advertising", and subscriptions. Few of these strike me as ultimately scalable.
I've been a fan of Phil Hunt, of Pirate Party UK, and his broadband tax proposal after more-or-less independently coming up with the same idea myself. Hunt's proposal was principally aimed at music. I see no reason why it cannot apply to all content published and distributed online.
> Not only is this why online advertising is ultimately doomed, but it's why we hugely and desperately and badly need to find another way of paying for content.
Another viable option is letting a lot of the content die. I'm sure we can all live without knowing that one neat trick that you won't believe.
In your proposal:
> ... constant challenge for any creative type is making a living.
Well perhaps if that's the case what you do is not valuable to anyone. Over time economic cycles destroy things that were once valuable. There used to be whole industries selling ice from icebergs in London. I bet they were rather upset when domestic refrigeration became popular.
Music as a physical medium is no longer very valuable due to a nexus of the proliferation of arbitrarily reproducible data systems and a decrease in the perception of value of non live performance music.
The suggestions of a broadband tax etc are insane and the work of lobbyists and other socially destructive parasites.
See, the intense irony in your comment is that you are effectively advertising your own content using exaggerated, overhyped claim. If you consider such actions to be a net negative for the society, you are a part of the problem.
I do not disagree with you on principle and your proposal has some merit. The thing is that advertising/marketing dicussion is much more multifaceted and complex than HN collective mind portrays it to be: "advertising bad! mmkay?". The nuances and the opportunities to enact meaningful, real change in the advertising ecosystem are lost when rational discourse is suppressed by claims like "99% of advertisers are bad". Good actors should be rewarded and bad should be discouraged economically. By lumping all of them in the bad bucket, you are encouranging detrimental behaviour.
Harmful,intrusive,obnoxious advertising is a symptom, not a disease. You can't get rid of such ads without changing the underlying structure of socioeconomic reality, at least for limited cluster of audience.
The Pirate Party is supposed to be pro-internet. This is just a perfect example of how shambolic and badly-organised the UK Pirate Party is, and the reason their membership has been dropping since launch. They are basically a joke party in the UK, where in other countries they have emerged as a significant political force with influence above its size.
I think it is more fair to say that a small percentage of online advertisers fill up a lot of inventory with junk that hurt the large percentage of advertisers that run relevant ads.
For most X, you can say that showing ads for X from people who really want to sell it to you makes life better than worse.
The least common denominator behind all these scams is: (i) recurring billing, and (ii) high margin product. An early form of it was the "free ringtone" scam which would hit your phone bill for $10 a month. Today it tends to be nutritional supplements. If you can send somebody an $80 a month bottle of pills that you can get made in China for $5, the net present value of a customer is enough that you can pay Yahoo, affiliate advertisers and others involved enough to keep the thing going.
There is a group of a few hundred people that could be described uncharitably as a "criminal ring" that are behind this stuff. Seriously, they hang out on IRC.
In the world of multilevel marketing the most interesting development is "Ambit Energy" which gets over the problem that it is hard to get people to buy a $80 a month supplement -- everybody needs electricity. However, electricity is a low margin business and Ambit offers very little benefit to consumers other than getting your friends and family members who are Ambit to shut up.
In the world of "normal" businesses where you are dealing with people who know more about their product or business than they do about the rapidly changing world of online advertising. (I read technical documentation like some people read thrillers, but reading the jargon around AdTech makes my head spin.) Also they don't have 80% margins. People like that often find it hard to make a profit with online advertising so the scammers take their place.
It talks about the BBC as a comparison, and I'm a great admirer of the BBC, but I'm not sure that's a relevant model for internet as a whole. The Beeb is governed by a specific charter covering what it should and shouldn't do. And whilst there's theoretically no government interference in day to day content, there is an explicit understanding that the government could pull their charter if they don't like what they are up to.
Only giving funding to web content that complies with a government-sanctioned charter doesn't seem a great future to me, and it becomes a worryingly small step from there to outright blocking anything that breaches it.
be patient. As I've seen the internet grow since the mid-90s, I've seen the patterns, the fits and starts, the changes that occur. This whole sponsored content stuff will pass. I can't tell you how or when, but it will certainly pass. Will probably have to get worse before it gets better though.
I was originally against ad-blockers, because it provides me with an incentive to look for alternatives and I also want to reward websites that don't do this shit.
However, it's because of scams and malware pushed by means of ads that I started using ad-blockers myself and I recommend it to all my non-technical friends.
It's also the reason for why on my Android I'm now using Firefox. For Google to not provide at least a glimpse of a plan for Chrome's add-ons support on Android is unacceptable, for one because I now expect my browser to have add-ons support and I originally started using Chrome based on this expectation and because on mobile these websites are even more aggressive in pushing their ads. And with Firefox I can use AdBlock Plus on my Android, with uBlock coming soon.
We tell our customers that ad blockers are their first line of defense against malware on the web, and it's true. Web ads have been bad for years and continue to get worse, and content providers aren't doing enough yet to police the advertising on their site.
I am thinking, maybe I should get an ad-blocker. Not tu reward the webistes, but stop punishing poor folks who buy ads and then waste money showing them to me, because I never click them…
Adwords is becoming increasingly bad with these kind of ads lately. Yahoo are lucky that they don't have the automatic redirecting version that simply takes visitors away from your site onto these fake landing pages. Most of them seem to be coming from compromised adwords accounts.
As a publisher it's very difficult to do anything about this since Google apparently let adwords publishers insert arbitrary javascript into their ad code. This makes it so the ad creative and "destination domain" in the review center mean absolutely nothing, and since the JS won't execute from the review center you have no idea which ads are responsible.
I have no idea why ad networks don't have two fields for advertisers: a plain PNG image and a URL to link to. I guess the answer is somehow "money," but I feel like client websites would have enough incentive to switch to the network that works this way to avoid this BS for their users.
As others have pointed, it doesn't look like this a Google ad. However, as a publisher, you do have a fair bit of control. You can choose to only allow text ads, and you can also block specific advertisers, categories & the like.
This is the dark side of the massive shift to programmatic ad buying and selling which nobody wants to talk about. Compliance has largely been tossed aside in search of maximum yield. Sad but definitely the trend for the future.
> “[...]I ordered one bottle of Brain Storm Elite, entered my payment and shipping info, next thing I know, I have been charged $144 for another product “The Memory Plus”. I NEVER gave “MP” any CC information or anything, when I called BrainStorm about this, they say they are affiliated but do not have access to Memory Plus accounts, I asked how Memory Plus got my credit card information because the only website I was on was for BrainStorm. Big Surprise, someone else would have to get back to me on that. Filed report with BBB.”
How do these companies survive having their merchant accounts closed after all the inevitable chargebacks?
I've worked primarily on the publisher side and observed such advertisements, but where to point the finger can be really difficult. There are so many affected parties here.
Should Yahoo be held at fault by the consumer? What does that even mean, a boycott? Does Yahoo have a direct relationship with these scammers, or how many connections away are they? Is this a network or programatic placement? Do discovery magazine and CNN go after this company for trademark issues? Does this former homeless man go after them for endorsement issues? Does it even have a US point of presence at all?
This is great detective work, and hopefully Yahoo steps in and fixes this.
Online advertising has become and more vicious - on all my computers, I run adblock/no script, etc, but on my phone, browsing sites like retractionwatch or theatlantic, I've been redirected to full page ads for subscription services where the automatic subscription button is about 1mm where the 'close window' button appears.
and Forbes, CNN, Discover Magazine, etcetera sue both the company for plagiarism, as well as copyright and trademark infringements. They should probably sue the advertising company behind it too, those organizations have the moral obligation IMO to ensure the quality and legitimacy of the companies that buy advertising with them.
It has been way for a while, but it has gotten worse.
I used to check out Yahoo Finance once a day because it used to have real financial news but now if you look at the front page template about 60% of it is allocated to the same scam ads that run over and over and less than 40% to real content.
Needless to say I don't use Yahoo Finance regularly anymore.
Whereupon their creators it seems walk away and start the next dodgy company. Glancing at the Atlantic article "Jesse Willms is doing just fine financially—and he has a new yellow Lamborghini to prove it" and is advertising "just $1 for a vehicle-history report" and then billing $199 to peoples credit cards. Methinks the laws could be tightened a tad.
But it won't help much, because they're all shell companies intended to be cheap to dispose of whenever the backlash strikes - and before that happens, they will already have whisked any proceeds away.
mpeg|11 years ago
It's a program organised by the DAA (Digital Advertising Alliance) which is itself formed of several other advertising associations, the goal of which is to be a self-regulatory program allowing to opt out of online behavioral advertising, so that you do not have to see any behavior targeted ads if you choose not to.
Google's display network is a part of the AdChoices program, but not every ad showing that icon is a Google ad. In fact, from the yahoo.com homepage, only the banner ads seem to be served by Google, sponsored articles are being served by Yahoo! directly. If you click the AdChoices button it will actually tell you who is placing the ad.
I'm not the biggest paladin of Google, but in this case everything points to the ad being served by Yahoo!
EDIT: From what I could find, it's likely the ads are being served by the Yahoo! streamads[0] self-serve platform.
Programmatic is always tricky to properly validate, because it's expensive to fact check every single creative that comes through. It's likely that, if reported, Yahoo will ban the advertiser from their platform.
Facebook uses a whitelist approach where they'll manually validate your first few creatives and then whitelist you for automatic validation, not sure if Yahoo employs the same method.
[0] https://streamads.yahoo.com/
troymc|11 years ago
I'm surprised they fact check any ads. Many publications don't have the budget to fact check their news, features, or editorials, never mind the ads.
discardorama|11 years ago
Yahoo used to use a whitelist approach too; but with RTB (programmatic buying) it is no longer feasible to do that. And unfortunately, the whole world is moving to RTB... :-(
dredmorbius|11 years ago
Not only is this why online advertising is ultimately doomed, but it's why we hugely and desperately and badly need to find another way of paying for content.
The alternatives for the moment are gratis, patronage, "native advertising", and subscriptions. Few of these strike me as ultimately scalable.
I've been a fan of Phil Hunt, of Pirate Party UK, and his broadband tax proposal after more-or-less independently coming up with the same idea myself. Hunt's proposal was principally aimed at music. I see no reason why it cannot apply to all content published and distributed online.
http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-fo...
My own sketched proposal: http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest... http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2h0h81/specifyi...
easytiger|11 years ago
Another viable option is letting a lot of the content die. I'm sure we can all live without knowing that one neat trick that you won't believe.
In your proposal:
> ... constant challenge for any creative type is making a living.
Well perhaps if that's the case what you do is not valuable to anyone. Over time economic cycles destroy things that were once valuable. There used to be whole industries selling ice from icebergs in London. I bet they were rather upset when domestic refrigeration became popular.
Music as a physical medium is no longer very valuable due to a nexus of the proliferation of arbitrarily reproducible data systems and a decrease in the perception of value of non live performance music.
The suggestions of a broadband tax etc are insane and the work of lobbyists and other socially destructive parasites.
vdaniuk|11 years ago
See, the intense irony in your comment is that you are effectively advertising your own content using exaggerated, overhyped claim. If you consider such actions to be a net negative for the society, you are a part of the problem.
I do not disagree with you on principle and your proposal has some merit. The thing is that advertising/marketing dicussion is much more multifaceted and complex than HN collective mind portrays it to be: "advertising bad! mmkay?". The nuances and the opportunities to enact meaningful, real change in the advertising ecosystem are lost when rational discourse is suppressed by claims like "99% of advertisers are bad". Good actors should be rewarded and bad should be discouraged economically. By lumping all of them in the bad bucket, you are encouranging detrimental behaviour.
Harmful,intrusive,obnoxious advertising is a symptom, not a disease. You can't get rid of such ads without changing the underlying structure of socioeconomic reality, at least for limited cluster of audience.
im3w1l|11 years ago
It is easy to see how they would try to ban porn, non-mainstream ideology and other inconvinient content from the system.
blueskin_|11 years ago
>broadband tax proposal
The Pirate Party is supposed to be pro-internet. This is just a perfect example of how shambolic and badly-organised the UK Pirate Party is, and the reason their membership has been dropping since launch. They are basically a joke party in the UK, where in other countries they have emerged as a significant political force with influence above its size.
bambax|11 years ago
So true; remove "online" from the sentence above and it's even truer.
> it's why we hugely and desperately and badly need to find another way of paying for content
Not sure about that.
Here are the ways I can think of we gain access to content:
- by directly paying for it (books, movies, etc.)
- by indirectly paying for it (ad supported newspapers articles and such)
- by paying for it via taxes (your proposal)
- because it's free.
The best content is undeniably that which people will specifically, directly buy with their own money[1].
And the second best is free.
All the other content distribution schemes produce bad content, either hollow or click-baity or just plain dumb.
My point is that AdBlock is saving the world.
1: For the purpose of this discussion, pirated is in the same category as paid-for.
PaulHoule|11 years ago
For most X, you can say that showing ads for X from people who really want to sell it to you makes life better than worse.
The least common denominator behind all these scams is: (i) recurring billing, and (ii) high margin product. An early form of it was the "free ringtone" scam which would hit your phone bill for $10 a month. Today it tends to be nutritional supplements. If you can send somebody an $80 a month bottle of pills that you can get made in China for $5, the net present value of a customer is enough that you can pay Yahoo, affiliate advertisers and others involved enough to keep the thing going.
There is a group of a few hundred people that could be described uncharitably as a "criminal ring" that are behind this stuff. Seriously, they hang out on IRC.
In the world of multilevel marketing the most interesting development is "Ambit Energy" which gets over the problem that it is hard to get people to buy a $80 a month supplement -- everybody needs electricity. However, electricity is a low margin business and Ambit offers very little benefit to consumers other than getting your friends and family members who are Ambit to shut up.
In the world of "normal" businesses where you are dealing with people who know more about their product or business than they do about the rapidly changing world of online advertising. (I read technical documentation like some people read thrillers, but reading the jargon around AdTech makes my head spin.) Also they don't have 80% margins. People like that often find it hard to make a profit with online advertising so the scammers take their place.
prof_hobart|11 years ago
It talks about the BBC as a comparison, and I'm a great admirer of the BBC, but I'm not sure that's a relevant model for internet as a whole. The Beeb is governed by a specific charter covering what it should and shouldn't do. And whilst there's theoretically no government interference in day to day content, there is an explicit understanding that the government could pull their charter if they don't like what they are up to.
Only giving funding to web content that complies with a government-sanctioned charter doesn't seem a great future to me, and it becomes a worryingly small step from there to outright blocking anything that breaches it.
zby|11 years ago
sixQuarks|11 years ago
bad_user|11 years ago
However, it's because of scams and malware pushed by means of ads that I started using ad-blockers myself and I recommend it to all my non-technical friends.
It's also the reason for why on my Android I'm now using Firefox. For Google to not provide at least a glimpse of a plan for Chrome's add-ons support on Android is unacceptable, for one because I now expect my browser to have add-ons support and I originally started using Chrome based on this expectation and because on mobile these websites are even more aggressive in pushing their ads. And with Firefox I can use AdBlock Plus on my Android, with uBlock coming soon.
thaumaturgy|11 years ago
Did you happen to see the recent link about the AdSense redirects? e.g. http://blog.sucuri.net/2015/01/adsense-abused-with-malvertis...
astrodust|11 years ago
This sort of ad is all too typical. They mash up some creative, add some annoying animation, and carpet-bomb the ad channels with it.
Sorry, if you can't screen your ads more effectively (The Deck, for example) I'm blocking you.
unknown|11 years ago
[deleted]
yuhong|11 years ago
rimantas|11 years ago
r1ch|11 years ago
As a publisher it's very difficult to do anything about this since Google apparently let adwords publishers insert arbitrary javascript into their ad code. This makes it so the ad creative and "destination domain" in the review center mean absolutely nothing, and since the JS won't execute from the review center you have no idea which ads are responsible.
coldpie|11 years ago
wdr1|11 years ago
https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/180609?hl=en
nugget|11 years ago
vdaniuk|11 years ago
DanBC|11 years ago
How do these companies survive having their merchant accounts closed after all the inevitable chargebacks?
bhartzer|11 years ago
mbesto|11 years ago
As as a user, I've never seen these as remotely valuable.
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/taboola
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/outbrain
dredmorbius|11 years ago
I block both within CSS (I use a stylesheet manager) and may well block the hosts / domains they feed from.
They're absolutely worthless.
jarcane|11 years ago
RedneckBob|11 years ago
brokentone|11 years ago
Should Yahoo be held at fault by the consumer? What does that even mean, a boycott? Does Yahoo have a direct relationship with these scammers, or how many connections away are they? Is this a network or programatic placement? Do discovery magazine and CNN go after this company for trademark issues? Does this former homeless man go after them for endorsement issues? Does it even have a US point of presence at all?
Fede_V|11 years ago
Online advertising has become and more vicious - on all my computers, I run adblock/no script, etc, but on my phone, browsing sites like retractionwatch or theatlantic, I've been redirected to full page ads for subscription services where the automatic subscription button is about 1mm where the 'close window' button appears.
Cthulhu_|11 years ago
and Forbes, CNN, Discover Magazine, etcetera sue both the company for plagiarism, as well as copyright and trademark infringements. They should probably sue the advertising company behind it too, those organizations have the moral obligation IMO to ensure the quality and legitimacy of the companies that buy advertising with them.
martinko|11 years ago
shawabawa3|11 years ago
slipstream-|11 years ago
PaulHoule|11 years ago
I used to check out Yahoo Finance once a day because it used to have real financial news but now if you look at the front page template about 60% of it is allocated to the same scam ads that run over and over and less than 40% to real content.
Needless to say I don't use Yahoo Finance regularly anymore.
hellbanTHIS|11 years ago
Example: Yahoo News, brought to you ad free by Nationwide Insurance
Then people think "I like Yahoo News, I like Nationwide Insurance" instead of "I hate that scummy ad, I hate Yahoo News".
GhotiFish|11 years ago
That said, I wouldn't expect much that is trustworthy coming from yahoo anyway.
owly|11 years ago
dnlmzw|11 years ago
blumkvist|11 years ago
Yes, they do. The FTC takes them for every penny they got. At least the big ones.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/01/the-dark...
tim333|11 years ago
GFischer|11 years ago
I missed the original submission and discussion which was here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6972139
Cthulhu_|11 years ago
sixQuarks|11 years ago
razzaj|11 years ago
RandomCode|11 years ago
[deleted]
GregoryGrookett|11 years ago
[deleted]
adamdeloach45|11 years ago
[deleted]
chatman|11 years ago
argc|11 years ago