[Karunamon]

This is needlessly cynical. At the end of the day Google ads are unobtrusive and sane and have some standards in their construction. No fake download buttons, flashing gifs, and so on. It’s not their fault that most of the ad industry sucks.

[ocdtrekkie]

Actually, I spoke to a Googler about this a couple months ago, and this is actually false! Despite Google's Chrome/Security teams planning to penalize sites with fake download buttons in early 2016 (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/googl...), a Google employee actually confirmed for me that they weren't against the Ads team's policies, which is why they were still prevalent on sites with Google Ads this past year.

Which presumably means one division of Google could make money on a fake download button ad while another division of Google was penalizing a website for displaying it.

The employee in question said he was going to bring up the concern internally and try to get the policy changed, but I haven't heard anything since.

[KGIII]

HN is full of cynics today. Google commits to taking a step in the right direction and people just refuse to believe it. I don't mind the downvotes, I've got karma to spare, but it is pretty silly. They should be applauded and encouraged, and we should be happy they are going this far.

It's in Google's best interest to make ads less intrusive and offensive. That way, people have less incentive to block them. Google can, and will, still profit from ads. However, they need to be good stewards or more people are going to just block them.