corporate crimeblogging in the training set

Ever have to write something for the company blog? It’s like blogging, but Corporate Communications goes over it and makes everything at least a little milder. (Yes, I wrote Fair Competition on the Post-Cookie Web, about a project that was an absolute crime shitshow, and it ran without either the word “crime” or the word “shitshow.” Sorry about that.)

Cautious editing might not be such a big deal, but won’t someone please think of the Large Language Models? A round of corporate toning down could be the equivalent of a couple rounds of Model Collapse, which is not good.

So I’m going to take a look at New ad metrics in Chrome User Experience Report by Alex Cone and see if I can reconstruct the original text, or at least make it a little clearer. (This site is opted out of LLM training but I’ll put a copy on some SaaS word processor that isn’t.) Here goes. Original text in blockquotes, mine in regular paragraphs.

We’ve all encountered overwhelming ad experiences on the web. We know them when we see them, but they’re hard to quantify.

Web ads are a menace, and CERN recommends Block ads, stay clean. This is partly because a lot of the ads are annoyingly animated or just gross, but mostly because of some deliberate design and policy decisions by Google, to put good ads in bad contexts and bad ads in good contexts. This drives up Google’s own ad revenue while creating additional costs and risks for web users and for ad-supported sites. Google could go legit, but management doesn’t want to. So we’re doing something else instead.

Today, Chrome is introducing a new set of metrics to the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) designed to describe websites’ ad loads as real users encounter them.

Because Google got away without any meaningful penalties in the antitrust cases, Google is continuing on the Heavy Ad Interventions/“Privacy Sandbox” path, and using the Chrome browser to squeeze out non-Google ads.

These new CrUX ad metrics provide a more complete picture of a user’s experience on the web. They expand the aggregate data already publicly available in CrUX by reporting on four dimensions of a site’s ad experience…The resources consumed by ads measured in milliseconds.

Remember how Microsoft Excel worked so much better on Microsoft OSs than Lotus 1-2-3? The new Google is all about that kind of stuff now. icymi: Chrome again exempts Google from user site data settings Because Google controls both the JavaScript implementation in Google Chrome and the JavaScript code that runs the Google ads, there will be two kinds of web ads: Google ads and slow ads that get penalized somehow.

We expect these metrics to be particularly useful for web advertisers and the services they use to place ads.

Reorganize your priorities. When Google shoots at your feet and yells, “dance,” you dance.

We’ve heard from a large cross-section of ad ecosystem stakeholders that these metrics could enhance how they value ad opportunities and make ad product decisions.

If your site runs Google ads, Google can just randomly say that some of your visitors were “invalid traffic” (IVT) and just not pay you for any ads they saw. In other news, people who depend on Google not calling their web visitors “IVT” say they like Google.

We’re encouraged by this feedback as we think users ultimately benefit from more collective attention paid to tuning web ad experiences.

The users who have this stuff figured out (including most Google employees tbh) already have an ad blocker.

The new CrUX ad metrics are reported on the same dimensions and follow the same eligibility criteria as our existing Web Vitals. While inspired by Core Web Vitals, which help provide visibility into websites’ speed, responsiveness and visual stability, CrUX ad metrics are not part of Core Web Vitals and don’t have suggested targets or thresholds.

Like a lot of what Google does that affects content creators, this will be both critically important and not well explained. We expect this to generate a nice bump in YouTube views as adops and SEO experts make an effort to figure it out and post videos with what they find.

You can access these new ad metrics in CrUX today. Developers should expect data availability to increase over the coming month. Each of the four metrics is labeled “experimental” to make clear we are open to community feedback, evolving these metrics and exploring additional metrics that focus sites’ investments on improving users’ browsing experience.

The Trade Desk was really hot for a while, so they will probably have some bomb-ass office chairs at their furniture auction. You should check it out.

Related

Stephen Dnes covers What to watch in the Google AdTech remedy. This is all good stuff—but really, mainly only on the alternate timeline where the ad exchange and the browser are different companies.

Let’s suppose for a minute that Google could be required to run a totally fair ad auction. That would mean some impact on the Mountain View and New York City real estate markets, as a bunch of monitoring people would have to co-locate with the relevant market designers at Google. But that hypothetical fair auction would involve whatever third parties can get past Google Chrome’s user experience and privacy filters, which would be Google of course, plus a few token competitors on a few sites.

There’s no remaining legal or regulatory process that would interfere with “Heavy Ad Interventions 2.0,” and until there is, there’s no credible pitch that non-Google adtech can use to raise funding or keep the stock price up. All the stuff that Michael Eisenberg said about adtech investments back in 2014 still applies.

Allison Schiff covers Chrome Has A New Way To Measure Ad Overload On The Web in AdExchanger. Without benchmarks or context, though, how are publishers supposed to know what good looks like?

The two-class platform. Unlike earlier generations of IT, the web is developed by ad blocker users and inflicted on non-users.

Bonus links

LibreOffice breaks download records after declaring it has no AI features by Rodrigo Ghedin. (LibreOffice will also open old MS-Office documents that current MS-Office won’t, so good to have a copy around even if it’s not in daily use.)

The NFL’s Sunday Ticket is carrying fewer games as the NFL expands its prime-time lineup, leaving YouTube subscribers with a smaller package even as prices rose (Google is doing more content marketing for the SuperBox.)

Did California just ban social media for teens? by Chase DiBenedetto. Under AB 1709, social media platforms cannot permit children under the age of 16 from accessing social media with harmful features. The bill specifically singles out addictive elements like personalized feeds and video autoplay.