"Viewability" is an ad industry metric of "did your ad actually appear on screen, or was it below the fold?"

It's actually pretty hard to detect except through indirect means, one of which was to use a flash object to monitor for framerate changes. On-screen objects would render with a higher framerate. Google seems to have built out an API so that you can just explicitly check.

For marketers, this is actually a big thing because it means a key success metric (did people actually see your ad?) can be measured more reliably.

You can disdain advertising or marketing in general and you'd have a point, but what you quoted is actually describing a well thought out solution to a common industry problem.

The negativity is really uncalled for. You could simply say "I don't understand, and haven't bothered to Google for 5 seconds what some of these confusing terms mean--can someone please clarify?"

This stuff is all geared at advertisers who want better tools for designing ads and landing pages, and publishers who want to create ad supported sites more easily. So they are using industry jargon that people in the space (like myself) will be familiar with. Yes it is "marketing to marketers" (not sure about the lesser remark), but that doesn't make it any less specific.

I'm not sure which specific page you are referencing, but this is all technical advertising jargon that means very specific things.

"Viewability" is a technical term referencing whether an impression is viewed by a user. As advertisers increasingly demand more transparency around ad inventory quality from publishers, viewability is a newer metric that the industry looks at. Here's a good starting point from the IAB for how they classify it [1].

Determining whether an ad has been in view has some technical challenges which you might be familiar with if you know much about front-end stuff. At a quick glance of your quote, this references improving the way a pages viewability of ads is measured on mobile by removing the need for Flash for sites to signal "hey, this ad impression is viewable (and thus more valuable)!" Flash bad, this good.

Here's some further reading[2] on the technical challenges from a company that handles inventory where these metrics are a factor.

Look, we get it, you don't like marketing. And yeah, my industry can lay it on thick sometimes, but this is about as poor an example of that as it gets.

[1] https://www.iab.com/guidelines/state-of-viewability-transact...

[2] http://productblog.appnexus.com/evolution-of-viewability-mea...

So since you're either a marketer or someone who works closely with them at least, I have a serious question. Why can't you guys be happy with simple, unintrusive text ads on websites? Why do you need to bombard people with autoplay video, audio, etc. and annoy them to death? I have never heard of a single consumer who enjoys this experience yet it's employed by everyone.

I'm no marketer but nobody want to read an ad for fun. You have to shove it onto their face. Even if you are angry, now you know about the product and the idea of buying it might get to you later on. I guess it is something along those lines.

See now I disagree with that, when it comes to for example, podcast ads, I don't mind them. They're usually read by the host of the podcast, it's done in a very clear "this is an ad, this company is helping us make this thing," it's not an attempt at trickery, it's not a lie, it's just there. And it's over and done with and I'm %10,000 more likely to follow up on one of those products (not to mention they're usually pretty relevant to the audience of whatever podcast).

Advertising itself is not a bad thing, it's a critical part of any capitalist society. I just don't understand how we got to the point where seemingly every ad is as annoying as it could possibly be, that every ad company is just in a race to the bottom of "how can we be as intrusive and unsubtle as possible."

There must be some kind of reward for doing this. Maybe there's a study about this kind of behaviour.

But I get what you're saying. I feel the same. But like I said, there must be a reason.

Nobody enjoys getting email spam, but it is still very popular.. why? Because it still works.

Marketers aren't dumb.. they wouldn't invest so heavily in this if it wasn't effective.

>Marketers aren't dumb.. they wouldn't invest so heavily in this if it wasn't effective.

So they're just unethical? Your logic can be used to justify a bunch of terrible things.

>Nobody enjoys getting raped, but it is still very popular.. why? Because it still works.

>Nobody enjoys getting scammed, but it is still very popular.. why? Because it still works.

>Nobody enjoys getting robbed, but it is still very popular.. why? Because it still works.

No.. this is an unreasonable argument. Whilst you might think garish adverts are unsavoury, I don't think you should compare it to illegal and terrible things such as rape.

To be fair let's make a distinction between spam (scattershot bullshit emails that nobody has ever asked for) and actual marketed targeted advertising, which both my employer do (with double opt-in) and I myself respond to pretty regularly. In fact it got so bad I had to unsub from a few amazon emails because this time of year I'd see some silly thing in their email and be like "oh my mom would like one of those" and I racked up like $400 on my credit card over a week.

Those are two different distinct forms of marketing, one of which I have no issue with, other than my impending financial ruin.

I also want to add page 13 of http://www.iab.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/VAST4.0_Update... to your list. I had the pleasure of reading all of the VAST specs recently, and right now viewability is a mess. Often people will pay IAS for a flash client that supports viewability for VAST 2.0 because that's what most publishers support. Being able to do this without that extra request for a flash container that then later grabs your actual video xml is going to help a ton.

Given the current state of the web, are you sure a little negativity isn't called for?

I think the general trends we're seeing need to be course corrected, and that publishers by and large have dug their own graves.

That said, this is largely about decrapifying the web (getting rid of Flash is a good thing right?) and the parent also crapped all over a profession and industry while proving to be rather uninformed about it. So no, a little negativity isn't called for.

I think people like the poster above don't really understand what marketing is. It's essentially impossible to create something for other people and not involve marketing to get it out to people, even if you don't realize you're taking part in marketing activities.

What happens is people only associate advertising with marketing, which is really only one piece of it. Furthermore, they take one type of advertising, with data-hungry and sometimes intrusive online ads, and extrapolate their negative feelings towards that to ALL of marketing. Thus, anyone involved in marketing is a lesser person than them.

It's pretty clear what "viewability" means, and why people like you want it. It's also unclear to me that you should be allowed to have it. The reason most mail clients don't load remote content by default is to prevent spammers/marketers from getting "viewability" information. It's sort of a bummer that Google is apparently trying to push it into the HTML spec.

I normally use Firefox, but is there a way of blocking this on the occasions I use Chrome?

> The negativity is really uncalled for. You could simply say "I don't understand, and haven't bothered

Well... That didn't last long.

My guess: if one had to run it 100% JS it would drain viewers' batteries faster and slow down their browser more than if one uses that new native API. Not that I want to be somebody analyzed by that sw. I'm sticking with other browsers and keep blocking tracking js scripts.

View ability measures if an ad was actually viewable. An ad might load fine but the user doesn't scroll down the page far enough to see it. Accurate viewability would take that into consideration.