Fancy that! Google was keen on 'draining the swamp' in 2013 Faced with a report showing Google’s advertising network allowed big brands' ad money to be spent funding criminal operations, Google welcomed initiatives to “drain the swamp” in 2013 - three and a half years ago. But guess what? The swamp’s still here. And it's feeding a different sort of creature now. Today the Wall Street …
The fake news articles written by the like of the Veles (Macedonia) gang are specifically optimized for adverts which are paid per impression and not just click-through.
In fact, if we go back to the original Google ads which were strictly click-through, no pay-per-impression the problem will mostly go away.
This however will infuriate guess who - the big brands which have 95% of their advertising budget spent in order to "maintain presence", not to induce an actual sale. They and their demand from adslingers to have a per-impression product are the root cause of the fake news problem.
Everyone thinks advertising doesn't work on them but even if you never click on the ads just seeing the fancy brand over and over has a psychological effect on enough people to be worth it. That is why also a lot of big companies always seem to advertise jobs that don't really exist as well (saw that clearly during height of recession). Of course most on here I assume will never see the ad (edge to being IT geek, plus allowing malware flinging ads through is like sex in a bus stop bathroom without a condom) or if the ad network is bogus nobody may see it in which case yeah buyer gets what they deserve.
Quite possibly it doesn't.
However,if an ad is seen on a fake news site, the punter who is viewing the network is likely someone who, on occasion, buys stuff.
So they would be a valid target for the ad regardless of the platform it's on.
That to me indicates that most advertisers would be happy that a punter has been exposed to the ad whether or not the ad has encouraged said punter to buy whatever tat it's promoting.
I don't see advertisers helping in any meaningful way to stop their ads going out anywhere.
I don't click on any advert. Sometimes the barsteward page designer hides adverts as a genuine link. I'd like to tar and feather the lot of them.
I also use an adblocker because... well you know why.
The ad networks are getting more and more devious.
Pages don't wotk unless you enable some frameworrk that is underneath the ad pages. Yes Google I mean you and a lot of others.
Those sites get blacklisted.
And so the war goes on. A game of cat and mouse but with diminishing returns for the ad slingers as more and more people get peed off by the ads.
May all the Ad slingers rot in hell.
I spent 18 months working for an Ad company. Before that I was pretty ambivalent about ads but after seeing what was going on from the inside, I just want all of them to shrivel up and die a horrible death.
"Pages don't wotk unless you enable some frameworrk that is underneath the ad pages. Yes Google I mean you and a lot of others.
Those sites get blacklisted."
Then what happens when you find out you've blacklisted everything? Don't laugh. This will come sooner rather than later. And then what'll you do? Abandon the Internet? Then welcome back to reality. Just look outside. Ads absolutely everywhere. Spam IP phone calls with fake numbers; one-way junk mail (try tor return it and it gets re-returned; I've tried). Heck, Americans have it easy when it comes to ads in sports, as apart from racing we tend keep them to the walls and the TV scoreboard. Elsewhere? Don't be surprised to see them on fields, roads, helmets, bats, uniforms, anywhere there's a surface. And out in the street, on the telephone poles, windows, billboards, windows, bus stops. And let's not start with the airwaves; it's why I gave up listening to the radio. The few minutes of good music aren't worth the deluge of corny and obnoxious ads. And this isn't new stuff. The ad wars have been going on for over a century now; don't think HOSTS files and ad-blockers will be the end of it. It didn't in the real world, and it won't here. You either live with ads, or you don't live at all.
Until idiots stop following these links and buying crap from adverts, this will continue,
Like email spam. Since the costs of participation are so low, it only takes a few idiots to respond to the spam to make it worthwhile. And makes the rest of us invest time, energy and resources to stop the torrent of sludge gumming up our servers..
So does this mean The S*n and The Daily Fail will be rightfully removed from search results for their fake news stories? You know, the ones like "1 in 5 Muslims support Jihadis" and how UK Judges who ruled MP's should vote on whether to trigger Brexit or not were unconstitutional, illegal, and over paid?
Or is it just ordinary Joe Soap who wants to make a few quid saying the Pope endorses Durex that's going to get hit?
Those are not fake news. Those are intentionally distorted news.
"All immigrants girls have 3 t*ts and 2 v*g*n*s and thus out-compete our poor local lasses" would be an example of fake news. That is something you will probably see in the Daily Express though. In fact, I would be surprised if the Daily Express has not published it already.
Advertising and marketing are the lowest forms of communication. Even lower than so-called Hate Speech®.
Still, it's not going to stop me from joining in the fracas and taking advantage of this lovely money stream. I willing profit from something I despise. Fancy that. It's brave new world!
The W3C Do-Not-Track recommendation includes a mechanism (the Tracking Status Resource http://www.w3.org/TR/tracking-dnt/#status-resource) allowing third-party domains on a site, (e.g. belonging to servers that present ads - or anything else), to identify themselves in machine-readable and standardised way. If browsers could be set to block content that does not identify itself in this way, this would go a long way to solving the malware and mal-advertising problem.
And that probably won't work for too long. Bet you pretty soon they'll start masking the domains to block domain blocking (by HOSTS or whatever). Either that or ad proxies (such as via Cloudflare) will emerge so that the ads get priority over the content; block the ad, block the content, and soon it'll be everywhere so that you won't find an untainted alternative. And if you think an honest Joe will appear, expect them to get swamped and bought out before they get too far. Nice Guys Finish Last.
I'm not sure irony is the most appropriate. Thing is, I suspect hypocrisy is about the only word that works there. And I've not figured out how to attach "Sledgehammer to the head" to the definition.
Buzzfeed using the term clickbait.
Trump denigrating a bankrupt.
Putin deriding an African dictator
Any member of the Bush family using the word Warmonger.
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