The Problem With Ads Part Two

a half now. Um, we recorded that very long episode which we broke up in half. You probably heard the

part one of it. If you haven't, go and listen to it, because we're gonna pick up right where we left off for part two, and we're really going to talk about lots of stuff, including the problems with malware and ads and just some other general thoughts about targeted advertising, ad blockers and how can we fix the advertising system that's out there online so that everyone actually gets something of value out of it, and we you know, spoiler alert, we don't have all the answers yet, So enjoy the

second half and I'll see you on the other side of this episode for the outro that I've already recorded. When this was originally gonna be one episode. This is like weird, this is this is strange. We're outside of time and space right now. Let's let's listen to to past us talk about stuff. So one of the other things I wanted to bring up, so not all people who design ad blockers necessarily feel great about it either.

That's another another element. So we've got like the publishers, some of the publishers and authors admitting to the use of ad blockers despite the fact that they're business model depends at least in part on advertising revenues. That's complicated. But then you also have ad blockers who start to feel that perhaps what they're doing might be more might be doing more harm than good of this. Yeah. Marco Armant who created an ad blocker for the iOS store

for the for iPhones. Uh. It was one of several ad blocker apps that became available as soon as Apple allowed for that in the app store. It's very popular. It got downloaded by a lot of people. It was a pay app, so you had to actually purchase it, and after essentially like a weekend of thinking about it, he began to reconsider the fact that he had made and made available this app and decided to remove it from the app Store and offered refunds to anyone who

had purchased it up to that point. And he said the reason for it was that while he advertising still is kind of broken online or at least is not a ideal experience for most people, it ultimately could really hurt small businesses that really depend on that web advertising. And if that, if that avenue of revenue is gone,

those businesses could go away. He says. Once I start thinking about something I made could literally put a person out of business, it changed things for me and I could not let that be something I had contributed to a Yeah, so, um, you know he decided. He says that specifically says, I've learned over the last few crazy days that I don't feel good making one and being the arbiter of what's blocked making one being an ad blocker.

Ad blockers come with an important asterisk. While they do benefit a ton of people in major ways, they also hurt some, including many who don't deserve the hit. And um, there's an article and Wired which again Wired is one of those companies that says Hey, we know, if you're watching using an ad blocker, would you consider possibly turning it off while you're here? You can still visit our website. I mean, what are we Forbes? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm down the snark No, but we're gonna get back to

former just because I gotta I gotta talk about that. So, um so whyed you know they say, like, this is how we make money, you can police consider turning it off. It worked for me. I turned it off because the ads I come across unwired don't tend to be obnoxious or intrusive or take away my experience. They don't completely cloud my view of whatever it is I'm looking at. Um. They are responsible with their advertising and I I respect that.

So anyway, Wired has this article about our ment and his experience, and one of the things they point out is that ad blockers are too blunt of an instrument, meaning they punish everyone equally. They punish the people who are running tons of ads on their page with very little content. I'm sure you've come across one of those in the past, where like, is there anything here that's not an ad? They punish those where you would argue

it's very there's very little value for your visit. But they also punish the upstanding folks who are just they're doing their best to make a living doing what they love, but they find it very difficult because of this hit they're taking with AD revenue. Um, so yeah, very interesting.

Now they get back to Forbes. Forbes has this approach where if they detect an AD blocker, they say turn it off or you're not going any further right, uh, And they even say, hey, if you turn it off, you can have thirty days to experience the ad light experience with Forbes. And I thought, you know what, that's fair. I will I will see what this ad light experiences. Maybe it's gonna be like wired, and I'm going to

have a pleasant experience. I turn off my ad lugger, I go on in and the first thing that happens is a float over pop up window playing video automatically scrolls over what I'm trying to read. And I think this is ad light. What does ADD heavy look like? Add heavy? They send someone to your house and they're just like, hey, I couldn't help, but notice you don't have rugs over here, and uh, we'd like to sell

you some rucks and we're right outside. It's only gonna take like, uh minutes to one hour for me to tell you about all these rugs. And you hear the sound. Yeah, you close the door and all you hear listen, you close the door. But I'm still here, and I'm gonna talk about the rugs through your door for the next five minutes. You can't block this ad I mean, it's good. It's It's a good point though, because if the ad light experience is still intrusive, then what is the difference?

Is it again, a hierarchy of types? Yeah, and that's a good question. I don't know the answer to. I mean, it's and and I know I'm slamming Forbes a bit with this discussion, but I under again, I understand the position they're in. It's not like I don't appreciate that,

of course I do. I just feel like the whole approach to ads online has been broken since day one, and one of the things I keep hoping for is that the ad block issue will force companies, including really advertising companies, into coming up with ways where advertising works. Not that we're advertising sneaks in that's not working. That just creates more resentment. You've got to find a way to make it work, or you have to find a

different way to make money. So you could go the route of like a paywall that some sites have gone to, where you have to pay to get access to the full site, or you could go with something like a Patreon approach where you develop a loyal audience and then you say, hey, I love making the stuff for you. I hope you love the stuff that I'm making. It's a model, right, help me make the stuff you love by giving me a little bit of money each month that will cover my costs and I can keep doing this,

and I can give you some perks. Yeah, and there's somewhere it will be parks as well. And honestly, I I I'm a Patreon for like three or four different things recurring monthly, and in every case I don't care about the perks. The perks were not the reason why I did it. I did it because I appreciated and respected the content I was getting and I wanted to support the stuff I love. And I'm in a position where I can afford to do that. Obviously, not everyone is,

and in fact, there's some people out there. Tom Merritt great example, Tom Merritt stand up guy does the daily tech news show Amazing program, and he says, look, I get it. Some of you. You know your your every dollar counts and I totally understand that, and I appreciate that you listen to so thank you. You are just as important to me. But for people who can afford to maybe throw a dollar or five dollars a month

to help me produce the show, uh do that. And the more people who do, the more shows I can produce. I can go to six days a week, which is what he's trying to do right now. The stuff too

higher production value. You get what you get what you people exactly and it and again it keeps the show ad free, so uh, you know, he might have a sponsor for an episode or two, but generally speaking, the shows are pretty much had free um, which is very refreshing compared to some other shows online where you're like, they've been talking about this ad for three minutes, remember how do you? And this goes to other video as

well that's not necessarily personality driven. Do you remember the uproar that Hulu created when people would pay for a subscription what was it nine ten dollars or whatever paper a subscription that also still had ads in the video. People were saying, why am I paying to watch to watch these ads? I thought that the paying was so that I wouldn't have to watch ads anymore. Hulu also has the AD blocker detector, so that says, like, you have an AD blocker on, you want to watch an episode,

turn it off. We are unable to provide the ad viewing experience due to your applock. You can wait him out, though, you can play the poker game with them the screen long enough and it starts to play. Yes, doesn't really. Yeah, if you just leave it alone long enough because I'm busy, I would have it on in the background or something, you just like suddenly you just hear like an episode of a Sudden And to be honest, it frightened me

and my cat. Yeah. Uh, it's It's strange though, when we see these different strategies used to address targeted advertising,

I have a question for you regarding this. So one of the big concerns of privacy advocates is that targeted advertising takes this user, uh, this user generated data, and builds a profile off of that we have in the past, or you have specifically on tech Stuff explored the search bubble that that past results predict what you were shown when you ask a question, and it's supposed to be

stuff that rather than the objective truth. The more of a profile you build, the more likely that you're going to find it's going to give you stuff that it thinks you like. It's essentially a stepping stone to the semantic web, where the web anticipates what you want and gives you your version of what it is you. Uh. The downside of that being that you could create an Internet version of the Echo Chamber and you only see

the stuff that reinforces what you already think absolutely. And I think that this is I think the dangerous thing about targeted advertising like that is, especially because it is

automated and it's based on this precedent set. What can happen is that eventually, through some error in the code, through some misinterpreted series of visits to some other website, it could just decide that Jonathan Strickland must like diapers, and because he hasn't bought them yet, is only an indication that Jonathan Strickland needs more advertisements for diapers until he gets it, And that that can happen that can

happen to people. So I, um, you know, one of the most I think you used this example before, one of the most in my mind, egregious examples of how to do targeted advertising in the worst possible way is Facebook. Yeah. Yeah, Facebook. The way it works is that you'll end up seeing stuff inserted into your feed that can end up being kind of creepy, especially, like you said, if it's something that pops up where it's related to a search that you did when you weren't even part of Facebook in

the first place. Yeah, you get these promoted uh entries into your feed that looked like the same sort of stuff that a friend might have left, but it wasn't left by any of your friends. It was just left by your friends at Facebook and whatever advertising agency they're working with. And then, of course there's all the stuff that appears in the right rail that looks like it's news articles but it's not. It's more advertising. Um. And and in fact, all of the clickbait stuff that shows

up on Facebook. Not that this is Facebook's fault, but a lot of the clickbait stuff that ends up getting shared to Facebook and then re shared by tons of people who aren't necessarily thinking critically, it's really just thinly veiled advertorial content, or it links to a site that has ridiculous advertising space on it, and it's a tiny bit of content. And also, you know, this goes to

a bigger thing. This is the first instance in human civilization of the capability to block advertisement, right, so it's something that we forget. We tried a very daunting and ambitious task on stuff they don't want you to know. My co host Matt and Nolan I said, you know what, let's pick a day and let's count every advertisement we

see from waking to sleep. None of us could do it successfully because our day to day physical lives are so embedded with advertising already to your point, you know, and it makes me wonder, what if there were some sort of physical analog to that, would people do it?

I think the answer is, of course, because people want to feel like they're not being continually pitched to, right, and in fact we've um you know, this kind of brings us the whole idea about privacy and and using an ad blocker to protect yourself, and then the counter to ad blockers, where you you get the ad blocker detectors essentially what they're detecting, by the way, is they're

just saying was the ad served to the browser? And if the answer is no, then the assumption is the person has an ad blocker program running on their machine. That leads us to the discussion in Europe where there is this, uh, this ongoing battle about whether or not ad blocker detectors are in fact illegal or um at least violating a policy about privacy. Uh. And it's it's a pretty interesting and weird kind of um uh story.

So there's a guy named Alexander Haunt who has put forth this argument saying that because a website is capable of telling you have an ad blocker on it, that violates your sense of privacy, therefore is illegal to have an ad blocker detector on a service. Uh. And ad blockers should not be punished or there should not be this this detection system. Uh. And it was because of a pretty broad reading of the the European privacy law, which says that that a company cannot record information about

you without your consent. And the argument was that is the ad blocker is the detection of that is that actually recording information about a person? Because if so, then there should first pop up a little message saying, this website wants to find out if you're using an ad blocker,

do you allow it to do so? Uh? And it gets really to a question of practicality, like does the Internet work in such a way that it would be possible to implement a policy that's akin to that or would it just mean that we have to rethink the way these laws are framed because they don't take into account the way the Internet works, and because of that, they are passing laws that are hm counter productive or

in some cases just would never work. They'd be they'd be unenforceable, and they would be they would just cause a massive mess um. And so that's an ongoing discussion as we're recording this podcast that has not been decide did yet, but there are arguments on both sides about whether or not these ad block or detectors are against the law or if they're totally illegal, and if if they are legal, that people can that a company can say, hey,

turn your ad blocker off. Yeah, you know, you vandal physigoth trying to think of trying to think of European marauders at this point, you're viking um and uh, and so it's that's an interesting thing to see. Now. We don't have anything like that in the US because privacy is something we long since give up on. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, we're still doing the song and dance every so often. Uh, you know, it's it's one of those we we make

hallmark card level statements about privacy republic sphere. And I guess I guess the really the place to kind of end this discussion. The really the kicker, the reason why it would be very difficult for me to argue with any sincerity against someone's to vision to use an ad

blocker is the safety issue, the malware issue. So earlier this year, UM, there was a story about how this uh, this malware group managed to infiltrate advertising companies that served ads two places like uh, the BBC and other major outlets like MSN, a O L like the New York Times. Yeah, these are huge outlets that are to have advertising on them.

And what the malware designers had done was they had injected malware into ads that were being served on these so they didn't have to they didn't have to hack into the New York Times or the BBC. They had to hack into the actual advertising server and insert some malware and disguise it really well so it's not easy to pick out. That malware gets served up as if it's a legitimate ad, and then it could convince one to install some code that ends up encrypting their hard drive.

This is called ransomware. So this is when, uh, you get a message out of the blue and it says, hey, guess what, sucker, your computer is encrypted, and we've got an encryption key and we'll sell it to you. So you've got to pay us and we'll give you the key so that you can get back into your computer. If you don't pay us at such and such a time, we will destroy your encryption key and your computer will permanently be encrypted. And there's nothing you can do about it.

Ha ha ha. It's essentially the way the message goes and and so your your computer is held hostage and unless you pay for it, then you're kind of stuck. And because it was it was the malware attacks were coming from these major trusted outlets. That's a huge problem, right, It's not like it's not like the people were going to, you know, some back alley website that has already got a terrible reputation like freeze an x and adderall dot biz.

Yeah exactly. They were going to the New York Times for goodness six and so uh, if you have an ad blocker, it blocks that stuff because it identifies it as an AD and you never get it, so you are safe from that kind of a malware attack. So it's very difficult to argue, hey, ad blockers are wrong when people who don't use them are potentially going to fall victim to this ransomware attack. And this was a

very specific incident. It's not necessarily ever going to repeat, or it may not repeat on a scale as large as it did before. But it drives home that fact that ad blockers are not just for people who are tired of being sold to. It's for people who are like, no, I want to be able to surf the web, like I'm very careful with the way I surf the web. I want to make sure that I don't get hit by something despite how careful I am. And I'm getting

it from what I thought was a trusted source. Um, so you know, it's it's hard to make any kind of argument against that. In fact, one of the things I read about was about Forbes being one of those sites that you go to Forbes dot com and you get the message, hey, you need to turn off your ad blocker if you want to have access to it. But Forbes was also victim to a ransomware attack, which means that you know, you're like, well, I want to read that thing on Forbes, but then you make yourself

vulnerable to being attacked by malware. Great work they do, and that's the thing is that you know, we're again it sounds like we're really bashing on Forbes, uh, but it's largely due to the problem with advertising, not the problem that Forbes wants to get paid. I totally respect that, of course, and I know I've said it multiple times, but I just want to drive that home is that as someone who I make a living off this, I

want to continue to do so. And part of that means that I have to be you know that my work is going up pages that have advertising served against it, and I want those pages to do well, and I want those advertisers to do well. But it requires that we have an advertising system that works and that isn't predatory or damaging. And currently we're still trying to we as a species are still trying to find what that thing is. We're we're kind of in a pioneering wild

West state right now. Well, and it's weird because advertising has been around for ages. Ages. Some of the earliest advertising actually goes back to Greco Roman times. Did you hear about this? There were so? Well, I might actually I think you you know what I'm gonna say. So, are you talking about houses of ill repute? Yes? Archaeologists found that prostitutes would wear sandals with arrows imprinted in the soul of the sandal, so that they would a series of arrows as they walked to as you so

fittingly put at the house of ill repute. Advertising is ancient. I can do you one better than that. Pompeii, the city of Pompeii. They're still paving stones and Pompeii that have the image of a fallus raised raised like it's actually carved in the stone like a relief. Yeah, pointing in the direction of the brothels and and if you get the tour guide I get for Pompeii, he delights in pointing all of them out and explaining this and uses the pronunciation of peose pose has a peose on it.

I don't know if you're doing me one better though, because these are just these are clearly like it sounds like prostitution advertisements are the pepsi and coke of early ads. Well, and to be fair, like you know you were saying making tracks in the dirt, I'm talking about putting forth the effort. Yeah, I guess there is that. Well, maybe maybe they're brought Those were just more stable places, well

at least until the volcano erupted. Sorry sorry, well that that volcano though, one hell of an ad blocker, So too soon, Yeah, yeah, I should have wait a couple more millennium. We're having a lot of fun now. This is when when we're like, hey guys, it's fright afternoon. I guess who's getting loopy? Um. But no getting back into the modern day discussion of this and and and

and the concerns that are there. Um, you know. I I've also read a piece, uh that was written I think in zd net about how you should not The author said you shouldn't give sites that uh require you to disabled ad blockers your clicks because of the safety issue is that if they say that they value money more than they value your safety as a customer. Then that's a message that tells you you should not be

a customer of that company. And I thought, well, that's a very hard argument to oppose, right, Like, I don't want to go to a store where they're like, listen, buy some of our stuff. And then I look up and I see that ceiling tiles are about to fall down, or there's a sparking wire that's just laying on the ground. There's a kid by himself in a puddle, just screaming. There's a guy in a hockey mask just pacing back

and forth. And in the shadows back in the section that I need to go in, there's there are a lot of like there's a lot of warning flags that are popping up, and I'm thinking, clearly, this this shop proprietor doesn't care about my safety and just wants me

to buy something out and I don't. I don't necessarily mean that websites or shop proprietors for that matter, need to fall over themselves and say, listen, you're welfare is our chief concern, but at least show some concern, right right, Yeah, exactly exactly, because the audience, the audience ultimately should be the primary concern, right yeah, And and again, if your goal is to make money by selling to those people, or if your goal is to make money so that

you can continue creating content and you're doing it through a partnership with an advertiser, then part of that means you definitely want that audience to be well because otherwise you don't have someone to sell to. Right. So it makes it's so easy to see how it makes sense that the best possible approach is to find the one that is not going to irritate your viewer base. Because if you can figure that out, then you are good

to go. If if you are uh, if you're able to do it with pushing away your audience, then things are working. The weird thing and I know where I was going with before I talked about the ancient the ancient advertisement. The weird thing is we've had advertisement for so long, but no real way of seeing how effective it was, right right, yeah, no, no metric so television, radio, newspaper, magazines.

I mean, you could see after an ad campaign if sales increased, and you could argue, well, some of that sales increase must be due to the advertising, and you're probably right, But you can't get to the point where you can say how much of that increase was due to the advertising. Uh it may be that advertising had a small but ultimately not tremendous impact on sales and something else was responsible for the spike. It's it was

impossible to say. The real weird thing about the Internet is you can track all that, right, You can track if people click on an AD, and once you get that information, instead of making it more value, double it

somehow made it less valuable. And possibly they made it less valuable by people saying, you know, advertising not as powerful as I thought it was, which meant all the advertising companies in the world said, oh, all the Don Draper's of the world said that that opening part of the credits, where a silhouette is falling from a building is starting to look pretty prophetic. Right now, of course, we all know that's not how it turned out. I have never seen that, neither of I have just read

a lot about it. It's a lot like, yeah, that's a lot of it's exactly like Looper. Uh So, anyway, that kind of wraps up our discussion, and and uh, again, this is a weird thing to talk about on a podcast. That occasionally has sponsors. That also again as part of a company that does web that well, that makes money at least in part through web advertising. But we thought it was an important one to talk about because as as people who create content, we want to see this work.

We want, we want to have a job. Then I I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I like what I do for a living. I'm here for community service. Actually I got you. Yeah, that explains the orange vest that you just have to wait. Yes, but then we have to report you because we're told you yeah. So yeah. We love our jobs and we want to keep doing them. But as consumers ourselves, we completely understand the plight of people who are tired of

these bad experiences. So if I were to leave you with anything, dear listeners, it would be put all the house stuff works domains on your white list so that I can continue to have a job. But also if anyone out there is in the advertising world to really give hard thought like how can we create a better system that serves everyone more effectively? Because we we do. We need that, we want it. We need it for multiple reasons. The content providers needed, the viewers needed, the

advertising companies needed, the the vendors needed. We just have to figure that out in a way that has not really worked yet. With some exceptions. There's some online ads that may be extremely effective, and we need to study how those work and what was it that made them special and perhaps create more appropriate best practices stuff. Yeah, you know, it's way more effective currently. It seems to

be our our Twitter accounts from uh companies. Yeah, that talked directly to it with a sense of humor and uh in these weird rivalries like fast food company twitters are hilarious. I don't know who they put in charge of it, and I don't know great well. And and for me, like, I subscribe to quite a few services

as well, including YouTube Bread is one. And because I subscribe to YouTube Bread, I don't I don't worry about ads that doesn't happen, but um, it means I'm paying a certain amount per month to have access to that. And in fact, I didn't even subscribe to YouTube Bread. Technically I subscribed to Google Music, which then converted into

a YouTube Bread subscribe, which is awesome. I don't have to subscribe to two different things now, Um, but that approach I also like, like I like the choice saying, hey, you know, you can go the route of watching the AD supported content, or if you pay a little to us each month, you can get the AD free version. Um. And I'm fine with that too, because it does give

you a choice. But but even better than that is to find this responsible way to serve up adverage rising where the viewers are safe, the audience is safe rather and that you know, no one feels like they're being attacked or no one's actually getting attacked case ransomware. Ben, thank you so much for joining us. Please let my listeners know where they can find all of the things that Ben Bowland does. Yes, all of the safer work things.

Absolutely will always Thanks for having me on board the show, Jonathan and listeners. You can check out some uh, some conspiratorial or darker sides of tech on our show Stuff They Don't Want You to Know, which comes out in audio and video each week we have a new episode on both of those platforms, and you can catch your host here, Jonathan on several of those, uh, several of

the shows we've we've had some different cameos. You can also see Jonathan and I on our video show brain Stuff and We're also on a show called What the Stuff yep, and Uh, there's another show of yours that I always want to mention because I'm a personal fan of it. If somebody wants to know more about future tech, where can they go fw thinking dot com or go to YouTube dot com and search for fw thinking that's

forward thinking. Uh. It's a show that's gone on for four seasons so far, and really proud of it done some great work with Joe and Lauren have been writers on that series as well. I've been writer and host. They have written for it. We also have an audio podcast that goes along with that, so you can check that out. If you weren't already aware of it, you are now, so yeah, thanks so much guys. If you have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, please let

me know. Once again, I finally figured out that all of my listener mail was going to the helpful clutter folder Microsoft heltbook, and now that I know that, I fixed it, So feel free to write to me that email addresses text at how stuff Works dot com, or you can drop me a line on Twitter or Facebook. The handle at both of those is text Stuff H s W and I will talk to you again really soon. For more on this and bathands of other topics. Is that how stuff works dot com