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by brador 3721 days ago
It's worth remembering that this is the pain point Adsense and Adwords originally solved for by only allowing a title, 2 lines of text, and a URL. And they did it so well they disrupted/killed a mutli-billion dollar industry of online flash ads practically overnight.

And then they become that problem by taking on flash ads a few years ago.
2 comments
spiderfarmer 3720 days ago
It's not a flash ad problem. I have seen auto-expanding ads on Android phones without flash. I'm guessing HTML5 banners with javascript in them, but it's hard to find out if it happens only once every couple of days and only on mobile, where you can't look at the source of all scripts once it happens.
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55555 3721 days ago
I think their USP was contextuality, no?
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brador 3720 days ago
The contextuality came later once they had built out the backend systems and proven the core idea worked.
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Retra 3721 days ago
I would say no, but then, everything advertisers say works seems to have the exact opposite effect on me, so what do I know...

I mean, the last thing I want out of ads is targeting. Nobody needs to tell me to buy things I already like.

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