advertising

Google has published a blog post revealing just how many bad ads it removed from the web in 2015. Spoiler: they removed a lot.

There can be all kinds of bad ads, whether they’re ads which falsely claim to help weight loss, or phishing sites that trick unassuming web users to submit personal information. Thanks to a team of some 1,000 employees, and some clever computer algorithms, the company was able to remove a ton of ads and ban a huge number of misbehaving advertisers…

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Google today has announced several new services that will enhance the advertising capabilities of YouTube. First off, the company has announced Shopping ads for YouTube. These ads will allow advertisers to show a click-to-buy ad within partner videos on YouTube. Advertisers only pay when a user clicks on the ad, similar to Shopping ads on Google.

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Through this big shift we’re in the middle of to a mobile world where native apps reign king, Google has held strong in its devotion to improving the user experience of the web. Today another example of that is a shift it’s making to penalize those sites which display app install interstitials that hide a significant amount of content.
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There might not be any topic more heated in today’s digital space than advertising. In most cases, no ads is better than any ads at all. The reality right now is, however, that no ads still also means no money to pay writers at sites like this one. With all that said, Google’s AdWords team has beautified its full-screen in-app ads (don’t worry, we don’t use these).

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You might notice that 9to5Google has changed. Indeed so has the network. Long before the page size/speed and advertising controversies, we knew that we needed to rethink how we presented ourselves.

While we were one of the lightest and fastest sites in our field, our feature creep and advertisers were adding complexity and page load times, which is especially crucial on mobile – an ever expanding percentage of our growing audience.

We decided to start over…
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The confluence of several different events – the great shift to mobile computing where there’s little screen real-estate, a spurning of display ads, to name just two – is causing content creators and consumers alike to rethink how today’s media gets funded. Sites like Patreon and Kickstarter remove the middle-man from the funding process for projects which require lots of upfront investment and see slow development times by allowing anyone to contribute any amount of money they want to a project’s development.

Google last year
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Google outlines the updated user consent policy for website and app publishers with EU readers and users:
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Google AdWords, the online advertising service that allows marketers to purchase advertising across multiple platforms and formats (i.e. images, video), has a neat new addition which recognizes that more people are connecting to the Internet from more devices.

Estimated Total Conversions, a larger tool which tracks ad clicks that lead to a conversion (i.e. a sale), can now track the number of display advertisement clicks that occur in a browser and end as a sale in an app, or vice versa. This also works cross-device when the converting customer has at any point logged into their Google account from both devices.
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In a world where we’re increasingly reliant on our phones to navigate the world, online reviews can make or break local businesses. Lawsuits regarding negative reviews show up in the news at least a couple times every year, and these review pages are increasingly becoming the battleground where individuals protest against businesses partaking in practices they disagree with. On the other hand, however, a good rating online can entrench and create a moat around a business for years to come. That’s why Google now
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Advertisers want to know that when they pay for a video ad on YouTube or elsewhere across the web, that the advertisement can actually be seen by viewers. A lot can effect an ad being seen, such as the viewer never scrolling to the part of the page where the ad is placed, or users simply scrolling past the ad too quickly to really catch a glimpse. Taking a look into these things, Google recently published the results of a study identifying the “5 factors of viewability,” or, in other words, the things that impact the chance of a video ad being seen.

Unsurprisingly, YouTube and Google’s video ad strategy seems to be strong compared to the rest of the web…

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As part of the AdMob platform and introducing a new Nearby Connections API for developers.

Using the Nearby Connections API, developers will be able to build a connection between Android phones or tablets and
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[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVYtzF5SemU]

Google along with other tech companies including Amazon, Microsoft, and Taboola, have reportedly reached a deal with AdBlock Plus to prevent the service from blocking ads on their websites.
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[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUsLPPuJhZc]

Lightbox – the scalable multimedia ads that Google first introduced to the desktop brought to mobile devices in September of this year – are now available to all AdWords advertisers globally.

The Lightbox format allows advertisers to quickly and easily combine existing video, images and maps in an HTML5 ad that will scale correctly for all standard ad sizes and devices. Hovering over the ad expands them to full-size no matter what the device … 
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