HACKER Q&A
📣 tambourine_man

Are full-page Google Ads more frequent now?


They seem to be everywhere and it’s terribly disrupting to me. I don’t remember seeing them aside from very scammy sites before. Now they are even on reputable ones.

Is this related to a decrease in Google’s payment to site owners? Can they choose to enable it or opt-out?

If you told me the small, tasteful, text-only Google Ads of the early 2000s would morph into something that obscures the entire page while still dominating the ad market, I’d call you crazy.

Together with the pricing increase of Google Workspace, (doubling in just one year, in my case), drastic reducing the reCAPTCHA free limit, etc, it seems reasonable to me to assume that Google’s profit are declining to an unsustainable degree. Or is it just confirmation bias?

  👤 summerlight Accepted Answer ✓
Ad formats are controlled by publishers so it's their choice and Google/advertisers don't have a technical way to enforce it. But they may find full page ads more monetizable hence give publishers more incentives to promote more of it.

Unfortunately, there are only little things for users to move this dynamic as we typically have no way to pay for most of those free web sites in the current business model. Publishers are usually taking more money from ads than from subscription or micro transactions, so I'm not surprised if they decided to show more and more full page ads...

👤 anigbrowl
I'm seeing more and more of them, and am now adding adblockers to devices where I didn't have them before. Google is turning into Clear Channel, becoming the ugly billboard kings of the Internet.
👤 dougb5
Google AdSense calls these "vignette ads". If you're an AdSense publisher, it's your choice whether to opt-in to this ad format, but Google strongly encourages it by constantly telling you how much money you're missing out on. If you do opt in, it's dead simple to add these page-level ad tags to your site -- simpler than trying to design the ad layout yourself -- so I imagine a lot of publishers opt-in reflexively.

If you opt in, Google gives you a knob to control the ad load, and a way to run A/B experiments, but there's nothing reported in the results of these A/B experiments that lets you make sensible tradeoffs about the quality of your website. The system encourages you to turn the knob all the way up.

👤 onos
Can someone post a screenshot? Haven’t seen one but am curious.
👤 NanoYohaneTSU
Google continues to make record breaking profits each year. It isn't unsustainable, it's never been better. Ad companies keep paying Google for serving their ads, and it's working great.

Consumers can't really go anywhere else. All search solutions are terrible right now. All ad serving solutions are equally terrible. The best solution is to get an ad blocker and if you're trying to serve ads then target your audience yourself.

👤 lobito14
Why don't you install an adblocker?