Google's Graffitti on 'lathes.co'

I tried to find some information on lathes.co the other evening - actually to help responding to another's enquiry on here.

It was plastered in wretched advertisements, some from the engineering trade, but all making an utter mess of the site. They were not in a side-bar like on here, and where they all relevant to us*, but they even obscured areas of text.

Google was the culprit - click on the ad's closing 'X' and it would obligingly replace it with a "Feedback" form - submit that and a new ad would appear. No option to turn them off. No promise to act on your "feedback" and I do not expect any action anyway. Perhaps it's just a Google trick to obtain your own e-post address and to show you a different ad.

I don't seem to have this problem with other sites, so is this due to Google exploiting some weakness in Tony Griffith's web-site, my computer settings, or what?

.

*[Though I could do without that flashing bar at the top, and the too-rapid ads changes. Together they create a distracting para-stroboscopic effect.]

Edited By Nigel Graham 2 on 15/06/2023 08:36:08

Free ad-blocker software solves that problem on all websites. I use Ad Blocker Plus as an add-on to my Mozilla Firefox browser. Not an ad to be seen anwhere. ( I leave it switched off on the ME site to support the forum and its sponsors.)

Thankyou Hopper. I'll try that. I use Firefox too.

I do not have this difficulty with a US-based, general-interest, more "social medium", forum I use, with far more users so potentially far more useful to Microsoft's and Google's real clients - not us, but the advertising-agencies.

Hopper, I also use the same software. It makes a huge difference to the viewability of many sites.

Nigel, I agree the quickly flashing ads under the "support our sponsers" banner is very distracting.

regards

Just think how the site is funded if everyone used add blockers then Lathes.co.uk may not be able to afford to continue without the income the adverts provide. So next time you go looking there may be nothing there.

Adds on this site are also paid for and go some way to supporting the running costs

I agree that many websites are unreadable due to poorly placed ads and indeed lathes.co.uk seems to have gone a bit OTT with ad placement. I would however just wave a bit of flag for the website owners/suppliers who rely on the income to offset the cost of providing the site.

I fall into this category my Journeyman's Workshop site has ads but I hope they don't deter readers, they may even provide the occasional useful link. The ads basically pay for the hosting, domain charges and even help a bit towards the ISP costs. I try to place ads sensibly so that they don't interfere with the subject matter but still may get read and clicked on. Google of course keep asking me to put in more or even worse to let them put in ads wherever they want, no chance of that happening.

Placement of ads is ultimately down to the website owner/creator who has complete control over how many and where they appear. Unfortunately some owners/creators seem to think that they should put in more and more ads just to generate revenue. This ultimately is a bad idea as visitors will just 'click on by' and you won't get any revenue at all. It's all a matter of balance.

John

The problem may be your browser or its settings. Using stock windows 10 stuff it just shows a thin strip less than an inch on my laptop screen. I don't click on it and it doesn't attack me. No text obscured or any problem,,

Just looking at the Adams round bed which had a rather poor picture in the latest ME or MEW so wanted to see more.

I don’t have much objection to text and picture ads anywhere, even if they flash at you; they don’t usually stop you from viewing the content you’ve come to see, after all; they just wave and wink at you trying to get your attention.

Video ads on, say, Youtube are another matter; they do temporarily stop you from viewing the content you’ve come to see and have lately got so frequent and intrusive on most popular Youtube channels that without something like Adblock Pro, which I use, the site would now be practically unusable.

This is entirely intentional, of course: Youtube want to make the ads so annoying that you start paying for Youtube Premium, rather than surf for free. Apparently they are already trialling an adblock blocker to ensure that visitors with adblock software installed who haven’t subscribed to Youtube Premium once again experience the full inescapable annoyance of the ads.

The excesses of website advertising are increasing all the time and will continue to do so as long as people go along with it. Knocking it back to a more reasonable level requires people to say no. One way is to use ad-blockers; another is to quit the site at the second pop-up and hope that the the owner is reading the site-statistics. If that means that some otherwise decent sites go under, then so be it. It's not worth the aggro to me.

I won't tolerate flashing at all.

I don't object to advertisements such as on this forum, that are generally relevant to the site and don't interfere with the contents.

We should remember that lathes.co is a commercial site that offers things like drive-belts and operating manuals for sale, and charges quite high rates for placing private advertisements on it. The impression I had was that Google has basically high-jacked it though, and many of the third-party ads seemed to have little or connection with engineering..

That's likely down to your browsing profile (or lack thereof)...

Almost every Google ad I see on the site when browsing on my phone or personal laptop is engineering related.

However, the adverts are random and a little bizzare if I visit on my work laptop.

The difference being that my personal devices are connected to my Google account where I have given them limited permission to collect profiling data to serve relevant adverts (If I'm going to be subjected to them either way, then they might as well at least occasionally show me a thing I might actually want), whilst my work laptop isn't logged in to a google account and has advertising trackers blocked by the security settings,

Hi, while adverts can be annoying, they do provide revenue to maintain the site, but you could send Tony a big donation to help with costs, which might reduce some of the them. However, the one advert that I find most annoying, is the one that creeps up from the bottom every time you switch to a new page. I don't know when Tony first had this site, but I did contact him back in 2004 about the lathe in the photo below, as well as a few other lathes of around the same time period, and he was very helpful. The photo below shows the name RandA cast into the lathe bed, which Tony at the time was not sure if the name was ever cast into the bed, although averts showed it to be so, but maybe this lathe was the only one that had the cast in name, which was used for the adverts, but probably not.

Regards Nick.

Unlikely that Google hijacked it, though it is possible that the site was hacked. Just tried lathes.co,uk to see where the ads were coming from and although my blocker zapped 51 links, they don't appear when I turn the blocker off, though the layout isn't quite normal. Could be because the site owner is busy fixing the problem!

Two basic ways a web-site can host adverts:

• It can store and serve them just like any other content. Forum Members ads are managed this way, as are most of the commercial ads on screen right. Site admin controls these, but behind the scenes there will be an administrator selling space, collecting fees etc. Could be a part time job on a small site, or a big team on a popular website. As admin is expensive and unpopular, it's common to outsource it, with some loss of control.
• Most web advertising is served by third-party specialists, not by individual websites. The website attracts people by publishing something of interest and because this costs money, there is usually some way of recovering the costs, often advertising. Instead of the website owner hosting and administering adverts himself, he embeds links to a third-party ad-server. When the link is activated by a user, the ad-server dispenses an advert, counts clicks, does all the admin, and dispenses the money. As it services many websites, it can track users, and sell or buy similar data from other ad-vendors.

So an ad could be:

• provided by the website owner, or.
• dispensed by a third-party:
  • randomly, or
  • targetted on the individual based on cookies left on his system by other websites, or
  • targetted on the individual based on a profile built over time by tracking his internet activity over a long time, probably from multiple services.

There are layers of sophistication in ad-serving. For example, advertisers will pay extra to get themselves promoted on a popular web-site used by the sort of well-heeled people who buy their products. As there is hot competition to advertise on popular websites, it's possible for ad-servers to auction ad-space on the fly, getting the best price per click for the website owner. Done by software: those wishing to place an ad run code to analyse the users profile and calculate how much putting an advert on his screen is worth to them. Highest bidder wins. For example a US vendor would pay more for an advert if user's profile revealed previous enthusiastic buying in the US, and might not bid at all with an casual cheapskate outside the US.

Another approach is to shotgun blast users with adverts in the hope that one of them will hit the target. This approach is extremely annoying and it's probably the main reason most people install ad-blockers, and only enable ads on sites they approve of. (I'm using Firefox with AdBlocker Ultimate)

This being an imperfect world, these systems aren't 100% effective and they can be abused. In the past I mentioned lathes.co.uk emitted a clue that security of its information section wasn't top-priority, and such simple clues attract evil-doers looking for an easy score. (The shop part was better secured.) Maybe Tony decided to make money by advertising and allowed too many, maybe he's the victim of a cuckoo hacker using him as a free advertising springboard. There are other possibilities, we may never know...

Dave

Agreed, and fair enough, but the trouble is, some sites have so much advertising that they render the site extremely annoying or unusable for some people, who then go elsewhere.

An aviation site I use, puts videos - that start playing automatically - in the body of the text that I am trying to read, or sometimes obscuring the actual text !!

If I click on the little cross to get rid of it, the same ad pops up again slightly further down. I use an Ad Blocker for that one.

I would urge website owners not to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs: Don't over-advertise, or allow intrusive or annoying adverts, or you will drive people away, or simply make them use ad blockers.

The only advert I've seen on lathes.co.uk is one at the bottom of some pages for a ski school. Which I thought was an odd choice for machinists and, given the current heatwave, rather optimistic.

Using Firefox with Facebook Container, Malwarebytes Browser Guard and uBlock Origin add-ons.

As an aside, a thread I posted on the other day seems to have completely disappeared - it was started by Michael Gilligan and just pointed people to the Youtube channel of Chronova Engineering. Just wondered why it had gone, but not bothered enough to start a completely new thread asking about it

Rob