They had a say. They could have responded to the race to the bottom state of ad display tech. They could have recognized that they were in a tragedy of the commons and formed a coalition for better ads.
They didn't. They continued the race to the bottom.
Each day they continued to push awful ads that harmed the user they were voicing their opinion.
I agree with the rest of your comments, though...
My guess is that the Internet will be just fine.
There were many years when adblockers were readily available but not extremely widespread. The typical user has to hit a fairly high irritation threshold before seeking a technical solution to this kind of thing; I think the rise of adblockers is a direct response to ads getting catastrophically worse. If that can be dialed back a bit and stop the race to the bottom, it may help at least a bit.
Personally, I'd much rather have no advertising at all, but until recently I tried to only block problematic sites, use ABP's Acceptable Ads, and so forth, because I want to support the sites I use regularly even at the cost of very minor irritation. I switched to a scorched-earth policy when it got so bad that many sites were suffering major performance degradation, and many others were plastered with bottom-feeding ads that were actively offensive to me. If things actually improve by some miracle, I'd consider throttling it back a bit.
I spent years as a data scientist in the online display advertising space, and I was shocked at how much of a disconnect there was between advertiser ROI and clicks/impressions/whatever metric is being sold to the advertiser. There are very few parties whose best interests involved clearing up that connection. I heard one story of an ad executive getting fired for introducing A/B testing to their advertisers and proving the negative ROI.
Big flashy ads certainly improve clicks, but it's not clear if they make a customer want to buy a product.
Me: "...and of course the advertisers will want to minimize the price they pay per ad..."
PM: "You'd be surprised"
Apparently marketing departments are often in situations where spending their entire budget is more important than getting views or conversions (so they can request a bigger budget next quarter), and they'll be annoyed if an ad broker spends less than they wanted even if they got more and better impressions.
This. #1 reason for adblocking? Security. Fewer ads does mean fewer chances of malware... but it's still an attack vector.
Obligatory: Forbes proves the need for adblockers by blocking the ad blocker and serving pop under adware.
http://www.networkworld.com/article/3021113/security/forbes-...
However, is security the #1 reason that users choose to install them? Nah, they get installed because ads are annoying.
I say this as a cautionary tale, the most dangerous thing ad networks could do is clean up their act. If ads start being unobtrusive or native users wont be driven to install ad blockers while the rampant tracking and invasion of privacy continues in the background.
https://github.com/reek/anti-adblock-killer
If you use UblockOrigin this is already an option in settings under "3rd-party filters."
This is the interesting part to me. I'm not completely sold that Google's idea of what ads are "the worst" is really true.
Without an ad blocker, I can dismiss irritating popups in a second. But I have to wait for YouTube ads.
I also suspect many people are unaware which things in a Google search result are ads. While the ads Google is calling out are irritating, they are at least obviously ads, and thus...less misleading.
Advertising is not bad or evil per se, it's the "quality" of the advertisement that matters.
Does it matter at all to Google if other ad networks are happy? I don't see any way this could not "go down well" for Google, I don't know about the other folks though, who knows.
The ad networks that aren't Google aren't going to be happy. They may admit that this could reduce the use of full ad blockers but they're going to loathe that they had no say. Plus, these experiences were shitty for the user but they must have worked.
From a publisher point of view, on the one hand, this is likely to bring reduced revenue from the folks who don't use ad blockers, that will be bad for the publishers. On the other hand, there's the hope that users will stop installing ad blockers and revenue should finally stabilise somewhat. Like the ad networks, I think many publishers will be upset about not having a choice.
And finally, from a user perspective, this doesn't go far enough. Many users will install ad blockers to get rid of the ads on YouTube alone and there are a ton of other unacceptable ad formats that the "Better Ads Standards" don't cover (like animated ads, small sticky ads, ads that look like download buttons).
It seems to me like Google's desperately trying to plug the leak on a sinking boat with a straw. It might mitigate things for a while but it won't do anything to solve the actual problem.