New York Times Experiments With Ways to Fight Ad Blocking

Old grey lady's attempts

[farmboy]

I just read an interesting article re: the Old grey lady's latest adblocking attempts

The New York Times Begins Testing Ad Blocking Approaches [adage.com]

[edited by: martinibuster at 1:27 pm (utc) on Mar 8, 2016]
[edit reason] Added link to a news report. [/edit]

[trebuchet]

Classifieds died a rapid death from ebay, craigslist, job sites, real estate sites, etc. That's really what gutted print newspapers. Display ads could have kept them viable but they have handled it appallingly. You're right that they should revert to the old system of maintaining a client base and selling direct ad space. They need Alec Baldwin to come in from downtown and shake it up.

[creeking]

They need Alec Baldwin to come in from downtown and shake it up.

coffee is for closers.

:)

[ronin]

One of the smartest approaches I've yet seen is where the advert requires interaction in order for the remainder of the article to be revealed.

Kind of like advertising meets CAPTCHA.

- If you block the ad, you can't see it, you can't interact with it and you can't read the rest of the article
- If you don't interact with the ad, you can't read the rest of the article
- If you do interact with the ad, you can read the rest of the article and at that point, you've definitely comprehended the ad more than the average ad-blind skim-reader - you had to... or else you couldn't interact with it.

Interaction with an ad - reading some copy and answering a question, watching a video and answering a question, answering a 2-question survey etc. - that's more valuable than an impression, in some instances more valuable than a click-through.

And if it's all handled server-side, it can't be bypassed.

[Edge]

For me most sites that I visit regularly have advertising however they not intrusive... When searching and visiting sites I back-out when I encounter any obstruction to viewing the webpage.. When searching for products and services I do find that advertising on review sites can be helpful in finding competitive pricing.

Sites worth visiting do not need to force or have intrusive advertising...

Honestly, I don't find the concerns by some that ALL advertising should be blocked as legitimate or wise... I have to wonder what neighborhoods the're hanging out in...

[ken_b]

Honestly, I don't find the concerns by some that ALL advertising should be blocked as legitimate or wise... I have to wonder what neighborhoods the're hanging out in...

I wonder if they work for free since they seem to think we should?

[edited by: ken_b at 4:43 pm (utc) on Mar 17, 2016]

[farmboy]

Honestly, I don't find the concerns by some that ALL advertising should be blocked as legitimate or wise... I have to wonder what neighborhoods the're hanging out in...

Yep

[toidi]

. I have to wonder what neighborhoods the're hanging out in...

Legitimate, top ranked, name brand recipe sites took my wifes computer down twice with malware ads. That stopped when i installed an adblocker. Adsense rules forbid YOU from clicking the ads on your own sites so those 'neighborhoods' could very well be your own sites that you claim are squeaky clean.

[IanCP]

Legitimate, top ranked, name brand recipe sites took my wifes computer down twice with malware ads

Were you able to identify the Ads [source etc]? Were the advertisers unwitting victims or complicit?

More important? Did you complain to AdSense?

[trebuchet]

As I've said before, installing an adblocker as virus/malware protection is a pretty hamfisted way of doing things. And if a site had infected my computer then I'd be avoiding it like the plague.

The adblocking-as-safety-measure argument seems desperately overwrought.

[toidi]

It was my wifes computer, and they were legitimate websites so i am sure they were not complicit. Once the malware hit there was no way to see who/what served it up as my efforts were spent cleaning up the computer.

The malware made it past the paid subscription of avast so i had no choice but to get hamfisted or avoid the internet. If you have a better way to stay protected, please share. Turning off js is not an option and the idea of a viewer complaining to google is borderline ludicrous.

It is easy to blame the victum, but you all are the ones serving up ads that you can not vouch for. Your site might be crashing a loyal viewers computer as we speak, and you want to blame them for not sufficiently protecting their machines or for hamfistedly overprotecting their machines.

[keyplyr]

Any site, with ads or not, is suseptable to malware infection if not managed properly. I don't use adblockers because they alter the presentation of the page, sometimes oddly, but I certainly don't consider adblockers as security from malware. Maybe they help, but there are more effective alternatives IMO.

[trebuchet]

If you have a better way to stay protected, please share.

Don't visit sites with advertising. If a site shows wanton disregard for your safety by running third party ads, I'm not sure why you would trust its content.

Or if you do visit these sites, don't click on the ads, particularly suspicious looking ones. That's part of a learning curve admittedly. I lost a PC back in the mid 90s by installing shareware without due caution and infecting my machine with the Chernobyl virus. Did I push for freeware and shareware should be banned? No sir. But I became more cautious about what I installed.

Your wife's experience notwithstanding, I think the "block all ads because a few contain malware/viruses" is overcooked. It's on a par with a certain presidential candidate's idea of banning Muslim immigration because a few Muslims are terrorists.

[tangor]

Then again, that can be "ban until vetted" ... only problem is, the place/time where the vetting should be done is at the advertiser/ad service level, not the publisher or the public. THAT'S the part which is not happening, hasn't happened, and probably won't happen because it is costly, time and resource consuming, and destroys the profit margin (for the adservice companies, not the publisher or the advertiser).

[jimh009]

One of the smartest approaches I've yet seen is where the advert requires interaction in order for the remainder of the article to be revealed.

Kind of like advertising meets CAPTCHA.

- If you block the ad, you can't see it, you can't interact with it and you can't read the rest of the article
- If you don't interact with the ad, you can't read the rest of the article
- If you do interact with the ad, you can read the rest of the article and at that point, you've definitely comprehended the ad more than the average ad-blind skim-reader - you had to... or else you couldn't interact with it.

Interaction with an ad - reading some copy and answering a question, watching a video and answering a question, answering a 2-question survey etc. - that's more valuable than an impression, in some instances more valuable than a click-through.

The digital edition of my local newspaper did this. When they first rolled it out, it asked for you to answer 1 question. Then it went to two questions. Then five. And the, about a month before the whole thing stopped, they wanted you to answer NINE questions.
I was tolerant of one question - a reasonable price to see the article (if it was any good).
But five questions? Nine? That's beyond ridiculous. And it should come as no surprise that the answer to those multiple questions became false. Basically, I just "checked" the first box I saw - didn't even bother reading the question. Since the answers to those questions I provided were garbage, rather obviously whatever data the advertiser/newspaper was trying to collect ended up being garbage.
Garbage in....Garbage out.

[Edge]

Legitimate, top ranked, name brand recipe sites took my wifes computer down twice with malware ads.

Does her computer have antivirus installed? Is she downloading and executing pushed files? You seem to be having more problems then normal...

I don't have these challenges, my team nor does my wife.. We run Norton on all computers..

[tangor]

The business model needs to fit the marketplace. Print is different than net. One is a tangible product dispensed at a price, the other is an open freemarket from the beginning dealing with an (intangible) product with no price. Moving from one to the other (marketplace) is bound to have growing pains as, if the pay for dispense model is to be applied, your product has best be the absolute best and above all other competitors ... which isn't going to happen.

The only successful version of the "answer a question to view content" I've seen is a site that asks only one question at a time, but uses a rotation of about 100 questions and session cookies to avoid serving the same question time and time again. The popup disappeared upon value click (otherwise remained in place) and the article remainder was immediately served. It should be noted that the successful version was a local government site that contained highly desired and necessary permitting operations and other necessary forms etc. A commercial site tat tried the same saw a loss of 73% traffic after 30 days. I know, I set this up on both. :)

These kind of things work only if the "product" is that dang desirable.

[trebuchet]

I'd like to trial Google Consumer Surveys in lieu of Adsense on one of my low traffic sites. It reportedly pays five cents per question answered. Unfortunately it's not available to publishers outside the US, UK and Canada, which cuts me out.

[toidi]

Does her computer have antivirus installed? Is she downloading and executing pushed files?

Yes, a paid subscription to avast. Not the free crap but the paid for version. I will say it again, publishers who have no idea what the ads on their sites are doing to their viewers should not be blaming their viewers when those viewers become victims. Likewise, exepecting the viewers to jump through hoops to avoid bad ads while the publishers do nothing to prevent bad ads is very self centered.

why does adsense forbid you to click the ads on your own site? They could very easily just not count those clicks towards your account. This way all the publishers would know what is happening on their sites. Currently, publishers have no idea what their sites are doing to their viewers. For the short time i allowed adsense on my site, it annoyed the hell out of me not knowing where those links where taking my viewers. Totally unacceptable from a business perspective.

[trebuchet]

I will say it again, publishers who have no idea what the ads on their sites are doing to their viewers should not be blaming their viewers when those viewers become victims.

In 10+ years of Adsense I've never heard of anyone being infected by an ad-disseminated virus, from my site or others. And that includes a couple of years working in a school, where kids click anything and everything. Malware and viruses from freeware, torrents, attachments, exe files, warez, cracks, phishing... yes, yes, yes, yes and yes. Ads, no.

That's not to say that malvertising doesn't occasionally slip through the net, even with Adsense, and hit real people. We know that it does. But the risks from ads appear considerably less than other delivery systems. Claiming that ads render our machines unsafe seems a hysterical argument to me. There is a risk but it is negligible. There are much better arguments for adblockers.

Also, it beats me why someone whose machine was ruined by an ad would return to sites which they believe facilitated it - adblocker on or not. Oh that's right, they want their content. It always seems to come back to that, doesn't it?

[Nutterum]

@trebuchet - I remember the era of IE9 where every third website was trying to highjack your browser and insert its own tools bar and home page and those websites were almost exclusively hidden behing an innocent and often well made adsense banner. I don't know how you missed this, but it was one of the big prerequisites of desktop based "web shield" blockers. Now the same have evolved to become extensions. Hell, companies like Kaspersky got their name on the wall because they were one of the first to introduce such system.

Just become something does not directly affect your users does not mean it is not a culprit.

[tangor]

But the risks from ads appear considerably less than other delivery systems. Claiming that ads render our machines unsafe seems a hysterical argument to me.

See earlier stories here at WW:

Malvertising: How the ad model makes crime pay
[webmasterworld.com...]

Vid malvertising attack lasted two months, not 12 hours
[webmasterworld.com...]

Or, if you'd rather another source than the tangor reported above, try:

AdSense Abused with Malvertising Campaign
[blog.sucuri.net...]
Which contains this paragraph:

Malvertising is a nasty problem. It’s hard to track. Because of ad targeting (e.g. location, mobile vs desktop, 3G vs Wi-Fi, web browsing history, etc), different users see different ads and some ad campaigns are active in different time. Moreover, one third-party ad network script usually loads content from dozens of other partner networks and trackers behind the scenes. For example, recently we worked with a site whose homepage had scripts from 8 different third-parties (ads and widgets) — when loaded in a browser, that single page generated over a thousand HTTP requests to resources on 249 unique domains — 99% of which belonged to various ad networks and trackers. Maybe this is an extreme example, but requests to 30-40 unique domains initiated by ad script is quite typical.

[trebuchet]

I didn't say it wasn't a problem or that it doesn't happen. I said that I think the problem is overstated, particularly in this forum among those who would have us block everything.

Additionally, I think that Google is best placed to handle the problem and to deal with potentially malicious third party ads/networks. I trust Google to do this more efficiently than other ad networks, and indeed most webmasters. They're not perfect but I doubt there's much malvertising on Adsense at any given time.

[tangor]

The ad servicing companies (that includes g) have always been the place to vet the advertising.... but they won't. At present they are operating under a "no fault" scenario wherein they are not at fault because they didn't know the ad was malicious. If forced to take up the vetting process you can bet your bottom dollar your bottom dollar will go down proportionally as that process will involve time and costs which will be passed down the line ... and as publishers, you (not you personally, but publishers) are the end of the line.

[tangor]

What I'm waiting for, since this a NYT thread and their attempt to cajole or force folks to view their ads, is how that is progressing. So far I've not seen any metrics to either success or failure in that regard.

[ronin]

But five questions? Nine? That's beyond ridiculous.

Agreed, jimh009 - five questions is ridiculous, nine questions is preposterous.

However. A (single?) bad implementation doesn't render an innovative concept useless.

Personally, I think one question ought to be enough.

[Nutterum]

@trebuchet - what I was getting at was this is what made people distrust and disgust banners. In the span of what?, 3 years most people developed banner blindness and CTRs dropped from 13% in 98 to 0.5% in 2001/02 . What happened then was publisher seeing the money slipping through their fingers, started abusing these same banners. They started using them exclusively on the top and right hand side, disrupted the reading experience with popups, started accepting banner designs that were mimicking the website design and further irritated the users to the extend where Google made the top heavy algo penalty.

This is not me preaching how bad banners are, this is user experience frustration so big, it made Google change their algorithm!

The greediness of big and small publishers alike made many many people use adblockers and ruined it for everyone. And I say everyone because without money to keep the publishers going, I would not enjoy my daily news stream.

Again it's not the user's fault that he will go at great lenghts (trust me installing an extension for a browser is a GREAT LENGHT! for the average user) to enjoy a content piece without being bombarded by junk ad banners and non-optimized re-marketing campaigns.

[AMC4x4]

Forbes asked me to shut off my ad-blocker in order to view content. It promised an "Ad-Light" experience. I figured OK, I'm game. I don't expect something for nothing, just trying to kill the Taboola crap really, and speed up some sites that are horribly slow once all the ad stuff is loaded. I run Ghostery as well as an ad blocker, and some sites pull up a list of 30-40 different add-ons. No joke. The Ghostery screen just keeps scrolling with them.

So I whitelisted Forbes, and what I got was NOT an ad-light experience. There were blinking ads in the top, right and bottom of the screen, and Taboola-type links at the bottom. I turned it back on and decided I could live without Forbes' content.

A couple weeks later, a Forbes author I follow on Twitter wrote an article I wanted to read. So I disabled my ad blocker and went to the site. Unfortunately, the site still thought I had an ad blocker activated. I thought maybe Ghostery had tripped it up, so I whitelisted Forbes on both Ghostery and uBlock. Forbes still claimed I had not whitelisted their site. I temporarily uninstalled uBlock just to make sure it wasn't something else I had installed. Nope, it was uBlock. So even whitelisting wasn't good enough for Forbes.

I don't mind a few ads. I really don't. But the Taboola links have got to go, as do any ads that BLINK at me, or - god help me - ads that START UP LOUD AUDIO without my having done anything on the page. Sometimes you scroll over a point and they START UP. Other times, they start 10 seconds after you load the page and then you spend another minute looking for the damn box that is playing so loudly so you can mute it.

There's a reason most of us started using ad-blockers, and I'd bet for a good 50% of us, it had nothing to do with not being tracked. It had to do with some executive somewhere making a marketing decision that utterly ruined the user experience for us, probably over the objection of the coders in his or her organization. I don't feel sorry for them. If you want me to whitelist your site, just ask me. But you better damn well have your user experience SOLVED before you ask, because you'll only get one shot. I gave Forbes two, and they failed twice.

[IanCP]

@ AMC4X4

There's a reason most of us started using ad-blockers, and I'd bet for a good 50% of us, it had nothing to do with not being tracked. It had to do with some executive somewhere making a marketing decision that utterly ruined the user experience for us

That is exactly right - so why the hell do they not learn lessons, are they thinking users are stupid?

As Tangor quoted above:

For example, recently we worked with a site whose homepage had scripts from 8 different third-parties (ads and widgets) — when loaded in a browser, that single page generated over a thousand HTTP requests to resources on 249 unique domains — 99% of which belonged to various ad networks and trackers. Maybe this is an extreme example

Extreme example or not, it is certainly representative.

Fair dinkum, many publishers, advertisers, and marketing types are ruining the internet for all of us. It wasn't all that long ago when the internet was a nice, pleasant experience. Plenty of useful information, news, "how to' sites - all with a few ads or affiliate links most people appreciated were funding the site presence.

In Tangor's example above, I would dearly love to know how much bandwidth that consumed for folks on limited WiFi packages. Years ago I banned .jpg and .gif files on my email forums not for security reasons, but because of bandwidth constraints, and costs for people in third world countries. Users could offer to send those files privately on request without ruining it for others.

Then the big end of town suddenly discovered the internet and stuffed it up for everybody. It will not end very well.

Any publisher who asserts "You want to read my content then you must accept my accompanying rubbish. Not some reasonable number of ads, but a plethora of ads with tracking and junk"? That publisher is doomed.

And for heavens sake, don't ever fantasise your site is so valuable that you are completely indispensable. Arrogance, like stupidity usually provides its own generous rewards for those who fail to learn.

[trebuchet]

@trebuchet - what I was getting at was this is what made people distrust and disgust banners.

Somewhat OT considering I was discussing the quantity of malicious ads on Adsense. The impact of ad bombardment on UI is already well founded and agreed upon.

[Nutterum]

The problem with what you said about Adsense however is that it started in 2003 when the damage was already done by C-suits that think they can get away with anything on the web. Adsense started because Google found out a huge market hole dug up by idiotic publishers who ruined the banner marketplace. So Google made it right (for the most part). That did not change people's perception though.