Google is illegally monopolizing online advertising tech, judge rules

I would love to see a company compete in the ad space with the goal of making ads less intrusive. If ads didn't attack me and cause the viewport to jump and become obscured while reading, my first impression with the products would be better, and the sites the ads are on would get more viewership.

Quality ads would be at a huge premium.

If we must have ads, the best quality ads I see online are dumb ads. Just an image as a link. The most effective ads I see are ones on blogs where the blogger sells ad space (side columns) and they're just images that directly link to the product. The ads are relevant to the blog and readers. 99% of other online ads I see are visual garbage and irrelevant. The "targeting" is abysmal.

Convincing all of these sites that Google, Meta, or other services, are "superior" for ads genuinely seems like incredible marketing. They've siphoned up enormous amounts of money and in return put in place a miserable user experience while making media companies wholly reliant on them.

Exactly.

Sell "dumb" ads with effort made to make the ads simultaneously stand out and fit into the theme of the site. Like how quality newspapers do it sometimes.

The exact company you're asking for existed already, almost two decades ago. It was called Project Wonderful, and initially focused on independent blogs and webcomics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Wonderful

It never managed more than modest success and never expanded far outside its initial sphere. It shut down in 2018 because it was unable to compete with all the monopolist walled garden ad spaces.

There are various small projects that could claim to be successors to that ethos -- but (to a rounding error) no one has heard of them because, contrary to your claim, the revealed "premium" that users place on "quality ads" is dwarfed by the premium that advertisers place on aggressive attention vampires (and the latter are the ones actually paying)

I think at the beginning Google was the good one keeping display ads high quality, so that even some ad blocking lists didn't remove them straight away. But yeah, today it is impossible to browse some sites or use apps without being tricked into endless maze of close button. And when I see Temu ads I throw up.

I think the deed is done. We are never going back to "good" ads anymore. The market's greatest revenue makers are those who are dumb ad clickers. We need more intrusive ads to get them on board now. The smart ones can still use adblock.

Web ads are bearable for me most of the time, but I'm dismayed by ads in mobile games my kids play. Unskippable 30 second videos that peddle poorly made F2P games.

I manage to keep them mostly out of it by paying for worthy games and deleting the rest.

However I would in fact happily welcome _some_ ads. Ones that would simply inform me of existence of masterpieces like Tiny Bubbles or Monument Valley rather than peddle anything. This idea of a tiny ad network with curated content comes up in my head often. Sure it won't make any money it would do some good.

Can you share some names? Would be interesting to check them out.

I understand why such a company will never make big money, but I don't see why it couldn't operate and survive. Running a small-scale ad network incurs small-scale costs. I guess the problem would burnout of people maintaining it.

I'd use the web more without an adblocker if this were the case.

Turning that on its head, maybe you want something like a 90s shareware lost, curated by someone. Then the games you'd play for free are now ad free (the game is its own ad to get more levels). And you get that curated list. But yeah less money than dialing up ads to 11 while trying to find the whale who'll spend 1000 a week.

Check out this Geiko ad: https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/

Buffett is a rare gem

The fact that mobile gaming is so plagued with scams and bullshit ads is a serious problem. Makes me bot want to engage at all.

This is where Apple Arcade is an excellent value IMHO.

People like to disparage Apple Arcade as some sort of failure for not having enough "AAA" titles, whatever they are supposed to be.

But yet, Apple constantly adds new titles to the catalogue, and you can play them all for a reasonable cost without vile ads for gambling, casino, adult and microtransaction games!

Also, in my experience the games all seem to run fine on old-ish hardware like the iPhone 11.

You might be interested in The Trade Desk and their Sellers and Publishers 500. It focuses on only quality content and quality ads. https://www.thetradedesk.com/resources/what-is-sellers-publi...