The Mad Men's monster is losing the botnet fight: Fewer humans are seeing web ads Figures indicate that web advertisement fraud grew significantly in the last quarter of 2015 – and also showed that the UK’s ad biz is one of Europe’s poorest performers. Fraud checker Meetrics measures the “viewability” of online ads. If an advertisement isn’t viewable, one of several things may have happened, none of which …
I love this quote and will be using it.
Before the financial crash, a friend who works in banking was telling me about how he repackaged shitty investments to increase their value.
To my layman's ears it sounded like fraud ... And it was fraud. Then his bank got a bailout.
Yeah, you're missing a bit there, I think. Leaving aside the fact that over 300,000 British savers lost their money when the Icelandic banks collapsed, the Icelandic government almost bankrupted itself compensating its citizens for their losses, and they had to take a $2bn loan from the IMF and another $2bn+ from their neighbours. Consequently, Iceland had incredibly strict austerity measures - second only to Greece - with most people taking a 50% pay cut due to the deliberate devaluation of the krona. This devaluation, in combination with inflation, actually caused household debt in Iceland to increase by around £1bn (hard to get exact figures). The £750m debt relief you mentioned is an attempt to compensate for this, though there are quite a few economist who don't think it really covers the difference. Not quite as rosy as you make it sound.
I've seen lots of people suggesting that we should have done what Iceland did but there are three big issues with that.
1. Iceland's banks had borrowed heavily from foreigners so it was relatively painless for Iceland to let them fail and let other countries pick up the tab.
2. Iceland isn't systemically important. If it fails, the rest of the world carries on. If we had allowed the UK financial sector to fail at a time when there was already a global financial crisis we would have worsened it for everyone. Because we are a large economy, we have more of a responsibility than Iceland.
3. and this is the big one. Look at the results (imf.org)
The UK economy has now overtaken its previous peak in 2007 and unemployment is within 1% of the low.
Iceland's economy isn't expected to reach its previous peak until well after 2020 and seems to have suffered a permanent increase in unemployment.
Nonsense: Less describes a continuous quantity and fewer, something denumerable. It has as long as it's been in the language, and there's no good reason to change what's significant difference. The only possible excuse is laziness, which produces bad speech or writing as surely as it does bad code.
As far as we have been able to discover, the received rule originated in 1770 as a comment on 'less': This Word is most commonly used in speaking of a Number; where I should think Fewer would do better. "No Fewer than a Hundred" appears to me, not only more elegant than "No less than a Hundred," but more strictly proper. (Baker 1770). Baker's remarks about 'fewer' express clearly and modestly – 'I should think,' 'appears to me' – his own taste and preference....Notice how Baker's preference has been generalized and elevated to an absolute status and his notice of contrary usage has been omitted.
Merriam–Webster's Dictionary of English Usage
Given the annoyance that are ads, and the fact they they're spammed everywhere is it surprising at all that normal human behavior causes a lot of them not to be seen? When an ads blink, move and flash I don't want them on my screen. When it starts making noise or shifts my content around the page I block it entirely. I keep the browser narrow so it doesn't load ads on the sides of the page, I scroll past the banner at the top of the page, and don't look at the ones underneath. Everyone can open lots of tabs these days, and you know sometimes you forget why you cared to open them in the first place and close them without looking at them. Then there's the half page of advertising below the page, why would I ever look at that. I'm sure there's some bots involved somewhere, but what percentage of ads not viewed for at least one second is simply normal human behavior?
I've seen good ads on the web, one was a single line text ad from Google telling me about a tech conference in my city I was unaware of, it was an open source one. Another time I was trying to fix a pump and again I think it was Google had a display ad for the exact part I needed. So in both cases a bit creepy, but if I and other people were served more such ads I think we'd be more inclined to have a look at them.
I just don't look in that area of the browser. It's not conscious, as I sometimes find there's a menu bar hiding up there that I need - and it takes ages to find. Website design is mostly very similar though. The top of the page is usually dead space, or worse - is flashing annoying crap.
And I'm not anti-advertising. I'm happy to enjoy an ad that makes the effort to be funny, or even just has a nice tune. Although I do want to punch the people who design the ones that try to stay in your head by being actively annoying - which just makes me dislike their brand.
I even don't notice most ads that appear as boxes within articles now.
I think this is partly because online ads are just so shit. With TV they sometimes make an effort. Online I can barely recall seeing an ad that was anything other than logo+picture+dull slogan. The only ones that are noticably different are utterly obnoxious and launch video without permission or fly shitty banners down over the screen so you can't see what you're doing. And even then, none of those that I've been forced to notice have ever been interesting or funny. And now I employ Flashblock to stop them doing it.
Finally the quality of online ads is awful. Supposedly respectable organisations will accept flashing ads that say, "click on this to win a free iPad." Or "take this illegal and probably dangerous pill to maigcally reduce your belly fat." Shameful! It makes the other advertising look shit by being associated with it, and makes the website owners look like dodgy fucking spivs.
The only online ads I click on are on the phone or tablet, when trying to scroll the screen leads to erroneous clicking.
This is a real problem, as so much of the interent is funded by ads. And yet it's such a hostile environment that the users are coming to hate them more and more.
I've also learned to subconsciously ignore ads. I just don't see them unless it's one of those annoying video ads that start playing automatically, then that's followed by swearing while finding the mute button without ever noticing what the ad was about. Reader mode in the browser is also very helpful.
I really don't get the online advertising market, I've never intentionally clicked on an ad. Do people really buy stuff because of a web ad?
Finally the quality of online ads is awful. Supposedly respectable organisations will accept flashing ads that say, "click on this to win a free iPad." Or ...
This. It's got to the point were clicking on an ad seems about as safe as clicking a link in an email from a Nigerian prince...
In very same way unscrupulous Indian cold callers are placing the livelihoods of their more assiduous and legitimate citizens in peril, the advertising industry has no one but themselves to blame for the world turning its back on them.
I can't answer the phone to someone with an Indian accent and believe a word they say, as all of the calls I get from the subcontinent are scammers. Which when you consider India is offering itself up as a base for international call centres, makes for a very negative outlook.
In the same way, India needs to get tough on the less savoury characters, who are tarnishing the telesales industry, so too, does the advertising industry need to clamp down on the rouges who ruin it for everyone.
"Most ad blockers blacklist the entire advertiser domain, so nothing loads."
Unfortunately with the proliferation of anti-blockers and their increasing hostility to the end user, some of the blockers have moved to pulling down the ad but not displaying them. This is also used to mask activities.
Will the Ad men get smart and stop increasing the number of ads the pump out at us.
Umm... no. In fact, they're more pissed at us than ever for using adblockers. A bit murky on how the ad monies get distributed but I'm donating all the ads I don't see due to Adblock to the fraudsters. Ad guys deserve that.
Even though ads can and do support much free to web content, I'm delighted to see that the industry are being defrauded. With their crappy, intrusive, privacy-invading, flashy, blinky poppy uppy shitty shit, and their persistent attempts to ram their message down my throat, and steal as much of my screen real estate as possible, then if THEY are feeling hard done by then GOOD.
I'm no fan of Google benefiting from the fraud, but that's a separate issue. If the on-line advertisers got their act in order, then they'd also have less of a threat from ad and script blockers.
Sadly, I'm not optimistic this will be sorted out well. Ad companies are too obssessed with glittery, shiney, moving images, and the chances are that we'll see more attempts to force us to watch TV style ads to access content. And still the retards behind web advertising won't see the brand damage done by unwanted advertising.
Yeah, I still fail to understand why "respectable" companies will tolerate being associated with dodgy and intrusive advertising for snake oil, gambling and so on.
I like to unblock adverts from time to time to give the sites their fee. But I do it less than I used to. Because they are so grim.
"I'm delighted to see that the industry are being defrauded."
If I read the article right it's not the ad industry that think they're being defrauded, it's the industries clients, the people whose goods and services are being advertised. For them it should be a rather more complex issue. They're paying the costs of advertising but they're not suffering the downside of annoying potential customers who might otherwise buy from them. As I've said before, the one thing you can be sure the advertising industry is good at selling is their own services.
"And still the retards behind web advertising won't see the brand damage done by unwanted advertising."
They never have, and never will.
It goes way back.
AM radio was full of ads, so when relatively ad free FM came along, everyone ponied up for for an FM capable radio, but the ads followed.
Broadcast TV was/still is full of ads, so when cable TV came along, everyone jumped to that, the ads followed.
Everyone used the post office, until junk mail started overflowing the box, and when email came along, everyone jumped to that, the ads followed.
The early internet was virtually ad free, everyone signed on, the ads followed.
If an Earth destroying comet was heading straight at us, everyone would be looking at a single patch of sky, and the ads would be there.
"Enjoy a refreshing Coke before the end comes!"
"We're all going to die anyway, have a relaxing Boo-yah! cigarette!"
"Carlton loans sez, Live it up with your last days on Earth with a multi-million loan from us!"
"Stay in touch with your loved ones up to the last minute with the all new iPhone Gamma!"
All projected on a screen floating in space, obscuring the comet.
The weasels would be in a meeting when the comet hit, trying to figure out how to advertise in the frikkin' afterlife!
I would beg to differ in the assessment of ad companies (obssessed with glittery, shiney, moving images). They are simply obssessed with money. Yes, we all are, to some extent, but if it's BIG MONEY, then it tends to blunt the intelligence (think shark frenzy where there's blood in the water). So, instead of thinking of NEW ways of funding internet (do they care about funding internet btw? - like fuck they do), they're just more and more desperate to stick to their old ways, as it (I would hope so!) slowly dries up. Alternative image, a monkey with a firm grip on the banana inside a box. They'll NEVER use their brain, they'll just keep squeezing, even if they were to lose that hand. And then they'll squeal that the world is hurting them bad...
"At least 50 per cent of the surface of an online ad have to appear in the visible area of the browser for at least one second (50/1)"
By that measure I haven't seen an ad on any of my personal machines for years. There are, for example certain sites which insist on autorunning video (no, not _those_ sites, sites like cnn.com) and which also insist on running ads before running the video. I've had so much practice at killing the video feed at the first hint of an ad that I'm certain that my average exposure is under two thirds of a second. El Reg is (again!) allowing idiots to show full-page ads which obscure the site (naughty, naughty...) and which I only see when I visit from a system which doesn't have an ad-blocker running. Which means when I visit from a system which isn't mine, 'cause I now run ad-blockers on all my personal machines. I kill the full-page ad before it loads when I visit from a machine which doesn't have ad-blockers, so my ad exposure is zero...
BTW, El Reg: if you want me to whitelist ads on your site, would you for God's sake NOT LET YOUR AD PEOPLE RUN FULL-PAGE ADS? Thanks.
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