The vision Google founders had in 1998 about the relationship between their search engine and advertising is, years later, quite ironic: Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For

Although the negative impact of conspicuous consumption has been discussed for more than a century, the link between advertising and individual is not well understood. This column uses longitudinal data for 27 countries in Europe linking change in life satisfaction to variation in advertising spend. The results show a large

Lenny is a bot which plays a set of pre-recorded voice messages to interact with spammers. You might be surprised just how simple Lenny actually is (though a lot of thought has gone into what he says), yet he’s proven to be very effective at keeping spammers talking for

We’re surrounded by advertising. Every single day, no matter where we are, thousands of auditive & visual stimuli are force-fed to our brains. (...)The thing is, recent advances in psychology, social science & cognitive research have demonstrated that humans’ decisions are far less conscious that we thought they were.

Google, a data mining and extraction company that sells personal information to advertisers, has hit upon a neat idea to consolidate its already-dominant business: block competitors from appearing on its platforms.The company announced that it would establish an ad blocker for the Chrome web browser, which has become the

Adblock Plus is launching a new service that... uh, puts more ads on  your screen. Rather than stripping all ads from the internet forever, Adblock Plus is hoping to replace the bad ads — anything it deems too big, too ugly, or too intrusive — with good ads, ones that are smaller,

This site will make crazy google search requests from your computer and put you on surveillance watchlists across the planet. As a bonus, you will get funny ads from google from now on ;)['how to appear funny', 'why are my thumbs uneven', 'am i lack toast and tolerant', 'your youre

AdBlock Plus just announced that they’re working with startup Flattr on a new product that allows readers to pay the publishers who produce the content they read, listen to and watch. https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/03/adblock-plus-teams-up-with-flattr-to-help-readers-pay-publishers/

The UK’s culture secretary John Whittingdale described adblocking companies as acting like a “modern-day protection racket”. [The Guardian] asked [its] readers why they use adblocking software when browsing the web, and what they thought media companies should do to fund content in the future. ‘Familiarity breeds contempt’ - Lorrie

The new Brave browser automatically blocks ads and trackers, making it faster and safer than your current browser. Soon, micropayments and better ads will give users and publishers a better deal. We know and respect that content on the Internet is largely advertiser supported, so our goal is not to

Adblock's whitelisting scheme for advertisements also acceptable, Munich court says. Using Adblock Plus to block ads on websites is legal, a German regional court has ruled. The suit, brought by the company behind the leading German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, is the fifth such case to be decided in favour of