Pay Google to stop seeing ads
contributor.google.comBlocking ads motivates some people but many others are motivated by the desire to not be tracked. When I read a paper magazine, nobody knows what pages I flip through, what ads I read, no profile is being built, etc... Why can't ads on the internet be as dumb?
For the past 20 years, I've been hearing how ads will be less annoying once advertisers can target more effectively. I think the exact opposite has happened. Look at some shoes on Zappos and the next week or two they are going to follow you everywhere. For me, that's far more annoying than random untargeted ads.
I agree completely and your Zappos example is spot on.
A few months ago, I was thinking about buying a new truck. I was sitting out on the deck with my iPad and Google'd the name of the local Dodge dealership, found a truck I liked, then Google'd some specs on it. A bit later, the girlfriend and I drove over to the dealership and I ended up driving a new truck home that day.
For roughly six weeks afterwards, everywhere I went on the web (on the iPad) I saw presented with ads about new trucks. The majority of the ads were for the specific dealership that I bought it from (that I had Google'd) and the others were mostly for other dealerships in the area. I got to where I'd click on them every time I saw them just because they annoyed me so much. At some point, the ads stopped because I haven't seen one in a while.
Just google rare gold coins and visit one of those sites. No more trucks!
This is true. But ads are more targeted not to make it less annoying for you, but because people who sell stuff think they'll get a higher conversion rate the more targeted they get.... and that's hard to argue with.
But I do think legislation to make you be tracked less would be awesome, but it'd be fighting money.
> people who sell stuff think they'll get a higher conversion rate the more targeted they get.... and that's hard to argue with.
Is it really? For me, targeted ads come up for either a) products I have already purchased or b) products I've looked at and then decided not to buy. I got my wife an espresso grinder for Christmas, ordered on Dec. 10, but AdSense is still showing me ads for grinders. There is exactly 0.00% chance of me buying another one.
Campaign A: Show 10,000 random people ads for espresso grinders.
Campaign B: Show 10,000 people who recently looked at espresso grinders some ads for them.
95% of the first group didn't know espresso grinders were a thing people bought. The remainder probably aren't actively shopping for one.
In the second group, some portion of the audience has already bought an espresso grinder, or decided they don't want one right now after all. But it's also guaranteed to include thousands of people actively shopping for one right now.
Which campaign do you think is going to result in more espresso grinders sold? The one that doesn't include you, or the one that does?
What about campaign c: show 9,900 people who recently looked at espresso grinders an ad for one, and 100 people who actually bought one an ad for something related that they might need. If you're harvesting that kind of data anyway, at least use it!
As a matter of interest, is someone who has previously purchased an espresso grinder more or less likely to buy one than someone who hasn't?
Of course you're correct, but the problem is Campaign C requires a far higher invasion of privacy. Now, not only do you want the advertisers to track the sites you visit - you're also proposing they somehow get information about everything you purchase?! No thanks.
It wouldn't be that hard to handle without any further privacy invasion: online shop waits O(12) hours before reporting to AdSense, and if visitor bought the product within that time, reports other, related product instead.
(If the ads in the first 12 hours are important, it makes little sense that they keep advertising for a whole month.)
Your anecdote is not emblematic of the whole. Many people do not immediately buy big ticket items they look at online; but there is data that shows repeated marketing of a product works, and works especially well when the merchant already knows you were looking at a specific product.
Yes, this means they end up wasting ads on people who already purchased, but that is outweighed by the other portion of people who didnt already purchase the product.
I agree with you, but for a different reason.
I work for a company uses these targeted ADs. 100% of the ADs I see are for what my company sells. Well 98%, sometimes I see ADs for services we are already using.
It would be cool if when I am reading an article about how do X, there was ADs for goods and services that help me do it. That would at least make me think about clicking. Instead, I only see my companies product, which is worse the useless.
My company is paying to advertise to itself. And if it is happening to us, it must be happening to others.
People who purchase something online are magnitudes more likely to purchase it again than someone who hasn't made the purchase.
Surely it depends on the product - e.g. USB stick versus engagement ring.
I doubt there is a huge market for online engagement rings, coffins, or other once/twice a lifetime purchases.
For gifting espresso grinders, it's not unlikely that purchasers will buy it as a gift again for their parents, friends, etc.
Criteo told in an interview that the click rate was 500% better with their tracking.
What's the gross click rate? If I run a site that has ads on it, almost all visitors have to download and execute kilo- or megabytes of javascript. Very few users click on an ad.
When an ad impression leads to a sale of something, that's great for that user and the vendor. But how many megabytes of javascript was downloaded and executed by all the users that saw the ad and didn't buy anything? The burden on the rest of us to support those two parties seems excessive.
You would have to rely on ad websites to respect laws and regulations and for legislations to be consistent in every country. Ain't going to happen. I'd rather keep blocking ads.
The ad network will only have to comply with that for websites that operate out of said country, a US website doesn't have to comply with EU cookie policy for example unless it's operated by a company from within the EU.
Yes right now the website will serve a script from a third party ad network, which itself serves a script from a fourth party ad network, etc, etc. When you visit a US website you would be lucky that all the companies that help themselves on your browser are all US based.
What you're describing is typically considered publisher fraud and not unique to this situation. Ad networks will revoke that website or any of the parties in between that serves their ads fraudulently.
There are dumb ads on the internet, look for "The Deck" network. They claim they make decent money without targeting neither tracking users.
Let's consider this for our non techy friends and family.
Can we expect our mothers to pay Google a monthy fee to view less adverts on webpages on the Internet? How will their ideas about what the internet-as-utility mean to them change? Will they consider the money they pay to their ISP as already covering this? Would not paying imply that they should be happy to see advertising? How would this model apply to other paid services? Should people pay more to their taxis to be able to shut off the in cab monitors showing ads? Should a monthly additional payment be made to their email client to stop spam? Would they consider it okay to not get advertisements sent to their postal mail by their utility companies if they paid some more?
Would we see a Facebook Premium account where for 10 dollars a month no ads are shown, or a Twitter premium account where no sponsored tweets are delivered?
Now think about this from the point of view of a company or marketeer. Wouldn't those consumers who could afford to pay extra to not see ads be worth more to you? Would they imply that they had more purchasing power?
I buy apps so I don't see ads in them all the time. This is the web equivalent of that. Why is that complicated?
They should have negotiated a contract with all the ad networks that have a name, and licensed an adblocker for the rest. They should aggressively support the adblock detection => annoying reminder that has been slowly gaining traction lately. "Fewer ads on million of sites" (there is ~ 1 billion sites worldwide[1]) is not a selling point. "No more ads, ever" is.
[1] http://www.internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/
I don't think Google licensing an ad blocker for ad networks that won't sign a contract with them would have gone over well with, say, the Department of Justice.
Heh, can you imagine the uproar over Google selling an adblocker that blocks competitors' ads?
I imagine the FTC/DOJ might have something to say about that too.
That won't happen (and is one of the issues with Contributor) because of antitrust issues. Google already has too much power in the ad ecosystem.
For example, this could work both practically and legally:
Google could lead the industry to implement a protocol, whereby third-party adblockers could implement a subscription service by which the user bids on impressions the same way as advertisers do now. If the user wins, no ads are displayed and a micropayment is deducted from their balance.
The necessity to mediate payments would provide an opportunity for adblockers to generate per-user or per-transaction revenue, which would incentivize them to support the system.
The added revenue would enable adblockers to devote sufficient time to blacklist maintenance for revenue-generating customers, further strengthening the pressure on sites that don't participate in the system, and providing added value to participating users.
I suspect this system may not work, because the auction mechanism would be vulnerable to manipulation by the advertisers, or because the price to the user would not be commesurate with the perceived benefit. But it is plausible, and would be legal.
Why do I get the impression that I'm paying protection money to the mob?
These ads wouldn't exist in the first place if it wasn't for Google.
Um, the internet was full of ads before Google.
The main way Google changed things was AdSense, which for a while at least replaced horrible "punch the monkey" type ads with text ads.
Unfortunately text ads don't seem to be so popular these days.
Correspondingly, if there were no ads there would be many fewer small websites.
Absolutely true. Fewer, but better quality.
With money as a motivator, we have ended up with a lot of keyword-spammy poor quality content.
Why better quality?
A whole lot of the sites I spend most time with are ad supported. It's not clear to me why less money == more quality, in your eyes.
I dont know if i agree (im on the fence), but he did mebtiob spammy click bait titles.
There would be a hell of ablot less of those if there were no ad revenue(as ads are loaded when you enter they authors dobt care if you read those spammy articles, just load the damn page).
I would like to velieve this is true, but im not sure it would be(in the case of getting well written articles without ads).
Google and many websites wouldn't exist in the first place if it wasn't for ads.
So true!!
I would pay Google to use search, if it came to this, because I find immense and irreplaceable value in Google Search that no other company seems to be able to replicate.
But paying anyone to not see ads on websites? That's absurd. I'll use adblocking while I can, and when/if those websites find a way to reliably block adblocking-using visitors, I'll just stop visiting.
What about paying to not see ads in search results? Website ads are a little different than search ads.
Pay Google to stop seeing some Google ads.
Meanwhile, websites will code around this and display more ads from other sources, and reap the rewards of getting paid by Google for not showing Google ads.
No thanks, I'll keep using Adblock.
It's unfortunate that all the pricing schemes are non-deterministic. If they can't know for sure, they should just have an additional pay-as-you-go style plan with rough estimates. Maybe let people decide how much maximum they are willing to pay each month. It actually sounds like that until one hits the pricing page.
It looks like as an average case, looking to spend $25 or above should get one 100% AdSense free Internet. But that option isn't there. Given how much value a typical power user gains from Google and the content websites combined, $25 a month is a bargain.
You choose how much you're willing to pay per month. The non deterministic part is what percentage of advertising will be blocked (either due to not being on Google's ad network or because you ran out of spend in your monthly payment).
I think they're on the right track with a wide pay-for-content subscription, but I think they're missing that what people don't like is being tracked, not ads themselves.
Ads can be ignored easily enough, especially with a blocker. Why pay for a service that you can get with an ad blocker?
What's needed is a Spotify premium-style model, where a monthly subscription is paid by the user, which is distributed to the content producers. (Or perhaps a tiered or capped system, where payment is tied to amount of content consumed). Such a system would also enforce better content being produced, with linkbait and sites designed for users to erroneously click on ads becoming non-viable.
Single-source subscriptions (like a newspaper would be) don't make sense for the internet. Distribution costs are negligible compared to print, and ease of accessing content is not tied to geography.
> What's needed is a Spotify premium-style model, where a monthly subscription is paid by the user, which is distributed to the content producers.
Remember flattr? IIRC it failed because a lack of adoption and because micropayments are expensive (fuck banks for this one).
Hadn't heard of them before to be honest. With a quick look on their Wikipedia page, perhaps they were too early for post-Wikileaks concern around privacy?
Bank payments may be better now too, with more competition and greater use of non-traditional currency (ie Bitcoin).
If I'm going to pay for content, I'm going to pay the creator directly, not some middle man (here being Google) in order to reinforce their ad based model. Sorry, no dice.
The money is still going to the creator, the same as the ad model.
Pay Google? Pay a billion-dollar company to not do something?
So, going forward, it will be in Google's interest to make ads ever more annoying and creepy so that people are pushed into paying to end the pain. That is not a world in which I want to live.
How about this: Google pays me for watching their annoying ads. Given that I have the upper hand on the tech front (adblockers) and am the one buying the products, shouldn't I be the one being paid?
Don't forget that Google is a billion-dollar company primarily because they sell a lot of ads. Why do you think Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps, etc. are free to use? Because they make a lot of money (from ads), so they can hire the best developers to build awesome tools that (almost) everybody loves. They could stop doing ads altogether and instead just ask money for using all Google products directly, but it'd just be really expensive, and people usually don't like to pay for stuff they think should be free.
No, some people think every company on internet owe them free service. I use ad-blockers too; but I do not whine out of entitlement. This is the reason I hate ad related discussions - full of entitlements and whinings.
would seriously consider it if there were a "100% fewer ads" option.
I think that's to cover the cases where a site may be using other ad providers in addition to AdSense.
But in that case, the percentage of lesser adds would be highly unreliable.
Googles ads usually aren't worth blocking.
It's that clickbait Taboola and Outbrain crap that's annoying. If a Google ad is clickbait, I can report it. Can't do that with those clickbait ones.
I wouldn't know. It's been a few years since I've seen one.
Given that Google Ads are mostly used on third-party sites, does this mean they will be sharing some of that revenue with the sites that now loses their ads?
If not, why should we give Google money to take potential income from smaller companies?
The sites make more money with Contributor than they would have with the ads, due to the ad auction:
https://support.google.com/contributor/answer/6084026?hl=en&...
You're effectively bidding on our own ads. If you outbid the advertiser that would have otherwise won, the ad is removed
This seems like a good idea. Well, there are numerous people using ad blocking software. The percentage of blocking ads is really high. So, why not have another plan for people that uses blocking software.
Some people use blocking software that I know like blocking software so they can block all the other terrible ads that come from other ad providers. Those other ads are really intrusive. So, if some of the funds are going to the contributors of a site. Why not have another plan meant for blocking higher amount of ads.
Google's attempt at dealing with the increasing number of people using Ad Blockers which as sky rocketed with the push from Apple. So they are trying their best to curb the growth. While there will be some noble people like a lot of us reading this, the rest of the world will simply install and Adblocker to block all ads for free rather than pay money to block some ads.
By these numbers, does this mean Google makes somewhere on the order of $20/month/person from AdSense?
There was a few articles on value per user a few years ago, can't recall anything recently. Probably a bit less for an average user, but someone driven enough to opt out is probably more valuable than an average user
http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2013/11/07/a-twitte...
Can't imagine this will last long.
I don't have adblocker/ublock/etc installed because I dislike adsense or adwords. I can ignore them just fine, but every blue moon I'll find something worth clicking.
It's for 99.999999% of the other ads that drive me insane. Or did I completely miss something?
You're paying the site hosting the ad, at least indirectly. They get a portion of your money.
If this is popular, it will probably increase ad revenue, so more sites are likely to want to show Google ads, which means people not paying into this scheme will see even more ads as a result.
I don't really get how it would cause that to happen.
Right now sites are being paid by advertisers. Under this scheme they're being paid by users. It doesn't say they're being paid more (or less), so I don't see why this would have any effect on whether sites use ads or not.
Well, YouTube was the same way. Video creators being paid by advertisers. Then YouTube Red came along - pay a free, see no ads, and your money goes to the video creators.
But under YouTube Red, revenue for creators went up. I would imagine the same thing would happen here.
I don't see why we should pay website owners through Google, who will presumably take a cut of the money, when decentralized digital currency exists. I'd like to see a Bitcoin based system in the form of a browser plugin.
Do you want people to click to donate every time they show up on a page? People will never click that button.
This system is great because it's a) seamless (you just get one bill a month), b) based on usage (you visited these pages) and c) is a market (the price you pay is based on competitive rates that advertisers would otherwise be willing to pay).
You can cover all of the points you made by loading a Bitcoin wallet and having the plugin deduct fractions of a BTC when you visit these web pages, and when the wallet is empty ads are loaded instead. The main loser in this situation is Google, since the site creators get all of the money. Users may have privacy concerns since BTC transactions are on a public record, but you can keep creating new Bitcoin wallets automatically to mitigate this concern.
How much do you pay per visit?
A user's client should respond with an accept/reject response to the price offered by the website. Everything else would be determined freely: Clients can be created with price range configurations as desired (perhaps per website, in a probabilistic way, and/or some cost-concious settings), and website owners can analyze their visitor's accept/reject rates to determine how much to ask for before falling back on ads.
Honest question, how much does an ad cost per 1000 impression(i think thats how its costed?).
I would imagine its that cost.
That is how much their being paid by the advertisers to keep the information open(as opposed via a paywall).
Im not sure how everyone else sees it, but thats my impression.
Google is not a disinterested party here, of course. A better solution for the non-Google stakeholders would be to do this through a neutral third party organization where publisher lockin to an ad platform would not be an issue.
I have often wondered - why can't there be a subscription model where Google says: Pay us $5 a month and you will not be 'tracked'. If all I want is to not see ads, why will I not just use an ad blocker?
I really want to sign up for this but I'm clicking on "Sign up Now" and it's not working...
Five clicks to see I'm not eligible. Google, I'm disappointed.
What is the eligibility criteria anyways?
A credit card registered in the US.