You might be perturbed if somebody calls your business an “extortion racket” or your sales pitch a “ransom note”, or says you have “poor ad blocking practices.” But Eyeo Chief Executive Till Faida, leader of the widely used Adblock Plus browser extension, is unruffled. The way he sees it, he’s just trying to rescue online advertising and the websites that rely on it. The...
Facebook added an additional defense today against the spread of fake news and viral hoaxes. If a Facebook page is found to be repeatedly sharing false stories, the company will ban the page from advertising on Facebook. The company uses third-party fact-checking organizations to flag stories that are false. Under Facebook’s rules, advertisers are already not allowed to run ads that link to false...
For years, Comcast and other large telecommunication companies around the world have injected javascript into your web browsing experience to serve advertisements and account notices. Their ability to do this stems from their upstream position as your Internet Service Provider (ISP). While Comcast is only currently using their javascript injection ability to serve customer account related information, the same message sending vector could be used...
Twitch, the Amazon-owned video streaming platform which is today used by over 2 million broadcasters, announced today its plans to begin selling video ads in its partners’ live streams. These ads will roll out this week, and will be delivered through Twitch’s new SureStream video technology platform, which also offers smoother and more reliable streams, including ads, the company claims. The goal is to offer...
Facebook’s recent workaround for Adblock Plus and other ad blockers is already earning it money. On today’s blockbuster Q3 earnings call, the company said desktop ad revenue grew 18 percent year-over-year this quarter compared to around 9 percent in previous quarters, and that thwarting ad blockers was largely the cause for that boost. While Adblock Plus announced it would circumvent the ban, and temporarily...
When Google bought the advertising network DoubleClick in 2007, Google founder Sergey Brin said that privacy would be the company’s “number one priority when we contemplate new kinds of advertising products.” And, for nearly a decade, Google did in fact keep DoubleClick’s massive database of web-browsing records separate by default from the names and other personally identifiable information Google has collected from Gmail and...
Apple has started showing ads in the iOS App Store for US users. Searching for popular terms like “taxi,” “calendar,” or “to-do list” delivers a banner advert for promoted apps above the search results. The company announced plans for this earlier this year, and a small number of iPhone and iPad users signed up to the iOS 10 beta have already been shown the...
Some Spotify listeners got more than just free music with their ad-supported software. Multiple users report that the streaming service was serving malware-laden ads that would pop up your default web browser in a bid to compromise your system. Reportedly, some of these didn’t even require your input to do damage. And they weren’t specific to any one platform, either — Linux, Mac and...
A new survey has found that 77% of ad blocking users feel “some guilt” about blocking ads. This goes against common stereotypes that ad blocking users don’t care about digital content publishers losing revenue, and suggests that if publishers took steps to make their ads less intrusive and less annoying, users might be more tolerant of their advertising. Gladly, an adtech startup, surveyed 243...
Adblock Plus is launching a new service that… uh, puts more ads on your screen. Rather than stripping all ads from the internet forever, Adblock Plus is hoping to replace the bad ads — anything it deems too big, too ugly, or too intrusive — with good ads, ones that are smaller, subtler, and theoretically much less annoying. It’ll begin doing that through an...
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