Secondly, and arguably more importantly, the way to stop these adverts is for them to cost the advertiser (in either money or time) without giving them the reward of revenue. If the ads stop working then people won't have a reason to make them. By stopping the ads in AdSense rogue advertisers would just change to a different ad network. The problem wouldn't stop.
This is a good move by Google.
... as long as you don't care about browsers which don't run Google's Safe Browsing service.
You know another way to stop these ads? Make available an advertising network which doesn't serve them. Website owners who don't want to install malware on their users' computers - which is probably most of us - would prefer that network to the others. As-is, with even Google's network serving up malicious ads, the choice for a website that wants to run display ads appears to be either build out a sales team & manage inventory itself, or accept that some percentage of its users will get scammed.
The thought is that if "advertising" is actually a feature of a website, then it solves the problem of users trying to avoid being shown ads. If you could hover your mouse over an object on any image on the internet and be taken directly to where you can buy that without all the hassle, I'd see that as a big win.
Note: Just onboarded our first customer yesterday. He's using it to promote iPhone cases based on his instagram feed[2]. Hover over the cases on a desktop, and you'll see what the case is. Click on it, and it takes you directly to the product page.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/43qnen/if_you...
They are paid per length of time, not by click or view, and they are determined by a continuous auction.
The good news here is we now have official admission by google that allowing adsense ads without filtering is dangerous. And those of us who do not have sophisticated techniques that can detect deceptive ads have no choice to but to block the entire network serving them, if we want to be secure.
The cost isn't in money, it's in views. By not letting you click a fake DL button, the malicious ad doesn't lead you to the site it wants you to end up on, which is usually plastered with other ads and sometimes has malware lying around on it. The end result is that the malicious party can't make money off their own site's ads and can't redirect you to download god-knows-what onto your system.
It would stop the problem on every Google's partner that decided to trust it by displaying its ads.
The sites that "everyday folk" browse are much more likely to be running ads from the AdSense network. Forcing the rogue advertisers to place ads on a smaller network serves to cost them (money or time) without the reward of the revenue they'd otherwise get from AdSense-enabled drive-bys.
I run an online media streaming site for public safety communications, and we've noticed that Adsense advertisers often use these exact social engineering techniques to display download/play links that end up having customers install crappy spyware infested "media players" and other software.
My jaw dropped when I saw this blog post.
If all your options are terrible, you might as well use the terrible option with the largest ROI, right?
No, thanks. Does The Deck serve spammy, malicious ads? I know they're tightly targeted at the techy/designy crowd, but they're also a great example of high ROI ads that aren't terrible.
I'm struggling to find one, any idea?
One of the options is "stop running ads". Why is a "site for public safety communications" running ads at all?
Public safety announcement: block all ads to make your browsing much safer. Use Adblock Plus (with so-called "acceptable ads" turned off) or uBlock Origin.
(incidentally, Lindsay, I've used http://www.radioreference.com to learn a great deal about Software Defined Radio, and I occasionally listen to various Illinois streams on http://www.broadcastify.com - thanks for running these sites!)
Thanks for the clarification; that makes more sense.
I'd still echo the comments from elsewhere in the thread about not doing business with a vendor with shady practices just because other vendors do no better.
You get the sense that sort of thing happens all the time at microsoft for example, before Ballmer left it felt like the ASP.Net team were pulling in one direction, the Visual Studio team another and the IIS team had gone rabid and were just trying to bite everyone.
It happens when different products have different priorities.
Of course, all components of a properly-functioning organization are revenue-generating. An idealized business in some respects would be people giving you money with no money being spent. Everyone knows that's not how the world works, but it's awfully hard to justify on a quarterly statement.
At Google, many departments aren't directly revenue-generating. Sure, Chrome and Android help people browse the Internet, where they view ads, but that's quite removed from actually selling the product, and those are very large projects. Search, maps, and gmail can show ads internally to generate revenue, but that's still a layer removed. Perhaps Google Apps and Drive are loss leaders, and maybe Fiber will make money eventually, but Glass? Calico? Driverless cars? Loon? Seriously, where does the money for these projects come from? I suppose you can answer "AdSense and AdWords", but why do those businesses give them money? And the harder question is how do they generate political and cultural capital to maintain these expenses?
At most of the companies I have been involved with, these projects would have been cut, outsourced, or consumed by the AdWords and AdSense teams. But there's little question that the world is better and the Internet is used more because of projects like Search, Gmail, Android, and Chrome.
How does Google generate this culture? How can other companies replicate this process?
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-21/google-s-a...
Why? Isn't that precisely why Google invested so much in Android?
In short, the company's founders have the ability to steer where the company's money goes, nobody has the authority to tell them otherwise, and so far benevolent dictatorship is working. To give a concrete contrasting example, Apple ousted Steve Jobs when his leadership became fiscally risky; because of Alphabet's stock structure, there's no legal way for holders to directly oust Larry Page.
This is the second case in a month of Google punishing web publishers for using Google products. (The previous case was Google punishing non-https search results, when in fact many of Google's own web publishing tools don't support https.)
Maybe they'll just give this "malvertising" detection software to AdSense who can then filter their own content before it hits websites. I'd be more willing to bet this will be the beginning of Adsense cleaning itself up than what you suggest.
It is really common actually on most game content or videos that are geared towards the youth. These Adwords spammers target this category specifically.
Also, if these ads are rejected immediately (or nearly so) by Google, it will provide that much more feedback that malicious advertisers can use to "improve" their ads that much more quickly.
This may be a very stupid question, but are there no ad networks that are more trustworthy?
Actually, never mind. I just looked and their top 5 sites are all well under 1,000,000 page views - and 4 of the 5 are webcomics plus Omegle which I think is one of those random chat sites that popped up a few years ago.
It was amusing to run that. Ad quality was much better on some sites than others. Ads on Business Week pages were generally legitimate. Ads on entertainment sites were awful.
Totally deleting ads seems to have won out over merely thinning them out.
First, it's positively perceived and accepted by end users, which is good for Google and end-users.
Second, it punishes ad networks that don't spend the time to vet what types of adds are allowed. As an end-user, I'm in favor of this.
Third, it boosts ad networks that do spend time vetting ads to prevent malicious ones. Presumably Google, and other networks, that spend time and resources doing this will see a return on that effort. This is good for responsible ad networks, and as an end-user, I'm in favor of this idea to the extent that it should hopefully reduce these malicious ads overall.
It's easy to see this as a way for Google to boost their own ad network, but I think that's too cynical of a take. They aren't boosting themselves specifically, they are punishing bad-actors and boosting good actors overall.
It punishes the sites using those ad networks directly, the networks themselves are indirectly punished.
On one hand it's unfortunate that the site is being punished, on the other hand maybe they deserve some responsibility for not being more selective. I'm not sure.
The publishers aren't innocent at all. They decide to place ads right above, below, and all around the real download button. Because they know that a good percentage of their consumers will be tricked, and so they get payed.
Not really all that clever. Same old story. They take users for fools. Maybe users will stay dumb re: ads, but then maybe not. It's amusing to watch the companies that must jam the ads into your pages to make money claiming they can "make the internet faster" (a previous ploy) or "safer" for users. These companies are part of the problem, not the solution. Unless they find a new "business model". But why bother when this one - being a middleman to people's use of the internet, selling ads and jamming them into every page they can - works so well?
Do you report the deceptive ads to Google? https://support.google.com/adsense/troubleshooter/1190500?hl...
It also seems like a very different tech than trying to determine what an ad script will actually show a user. So it's not easy as if they can do A they can do B. Still doesn't excuse the fact that they should be doing their best to block those kind of ads in their ad network.
Google AdSense is pay-per-click (or some algorithm, based on clicks against and the subject matter's value). In the context of adware rubbish, we are probably talking about AdSense. So no, Google doesn't pay per impression.
DoubleClick (part of Google for some time) may still offer an impression-based product. My experience of them a few years ago was that they'd negotiate on anything if you have enough traffic to make it worth their time.
This would negatively affect Google's revenue... which is probably why they haven't done so.
Since Google clearly has the tech to detect this they should be implementing it at source on the advertisers (malvertisers). Instead they are pushing this down to the publishers and hitting them with penalties.
It's a clever ploy in some ways - Google gets the revenue from the ads and also the kudos from Joe Public for "being on the side of the consumer".