META Autoplay ads
Did anyone else get an autoplay ad for almond milk today? It kept the site from loading for nearly a minute, and then started blasting out of my speakers at full volume. I've tried to keep MGoBlog whitelisted, but if there are going to be autoplay ads, it's time to block all of the ads.
My understanding is that Almond Milk ads only play for people who have a ton of porn in their browsing history.
That's good ad targeting, they need their protein...
No autoplay almond milk ads for me. Besides, I'm with Jim Harbaugh: drink real milk, lots of it, none of that fake almond or soy milk crap. That isn't milk. IIRC, Harbaugh also commented last week that an awful lot of the "organic food" stuff is a scam to part more money from gullible consumers.
On a serious note, I hate autoplay ads, and that affects my computer usage.
The way the ad targeting works, almost no one gets the same ads. Want proof, just open up an incognito browser, and see which ads you get compared to your regular browser.
Also, most ad networks are essentially just mediation platforms for whoever is going to bid the most for your pageview. That means that the site will have almost no control over whether you get a regular ad, an autoplay ad, or an ad in another language. So if you did get an autoplay ad, it's not like it was Brian sitting there handpicking it.
This is true, except sites do have some measure of control over what can and can't be displayed as ads. I've encountered autoplaying ads in the past here and just took a screen cap and let Brian and Seth know on twitter. Now I don't know exactly how much control they have, but generally it seems like they (and other content creators) like to know when they have rogue ads.
They do have methods to control general traffic levels like setting certain advertising profiles and keyword blocking. But there is still a lot of error built into the algorithms as well as the ability for these companies to A/B test advertising on slivers of your audience without specifically notifiying you (it's part of the contract). So 99% of your audience can see what you ideally want them to, but that means 10k of your million views will get something you may not want them to, like autoplay ads.
So this is essentially considered to be cost of doing business
* Used to work in ad tech
but then also contribute to Beveled Guilt.
#WinWin
There was a thread a while back and I used some of the estimates on advertising revenue to calculate how guilt to bevel. Much better than suffering the ads...
ppToilet.
My own insignificant ad revenue is easily dwarfed by a small contribution via Guilt.
Autoplay sound/video is a great way to get me to never visit your site again
We shouldn't be playing ANY autoplay ads but without a screenshot and some more info on the ad it's hard to track down where it came from. There are two possibilities:
-
Google screwed up and fed a bad autoplay ad. We try to flag these whenever we see them but it's an ongoing battle.
- You have some sort of malware on your computer that replaces ads run by the sites you visit with ads run by the makers of the malware. This is a sneaky evil thing that unfortunately has become common. It hurts us and makes more readers use adblockers and reduces the value of content for everybody so some Russians can sell bad ads for super cheap, and drives me nuts.
Pretty sure it must be a google issue. My brother-in-law just cleaned up my computer for me, so I'm 99.9% sure there is no malware on it.
You know, you could always shift to Patreon and just get rid of ads...
AdBlock (or any variation thereof, just make sure to whitelist sites like this one!) plus Disable HTML5 AutoPlay help a ton. Don't have to watch ads before/during YouTube videos and most autoplay ads are either blocked or at least don't get a chance to start.
What's an ad?