Facebook has announced that users in the United States, including those on Instagram, can now opt out of seeing certain types of advertisements on the social media platforms, including ones related to politics. Users may still see some of these types of ads even if they opt out, but Facebook is giving users the ability to tag advertisements that made it past the filters.
![YouTube adds (mid-roll) ads to long videos by default [UPDATE: how to opt-out]](https://cdn.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/outubeuupagawe-1280x720.jpg)
YouTube video creators will soon need to opt-out of mid-roll advertisements in videos that are 8 minutes or longer. Today, only 10 minute videos (or longer) are eligible for mid-roll ads. By the end of July, 2020, YouTube videos with content that's 8 minutes or longer will have mid-roll ads by default. This goes for all the videos that've been up on YouTube for years, and years - they'll have mid-roll ads too, unless their creators opt-out manually.
Sony's PlayStation is the latest major company to ditch Facebook and Instagram, at least temporarily. The company has joined an ongoing boycott that will involve suspending advertisements on the platform during the month of July. In this case, PlayStation has confirmed that it will suspend all of its activity on both social media websites, including sharing non-paid content.
The Coca-Cola Company has made the decision to 'pause' all of its social media advertising, one of the biggest moves in the growing boycott movement. The decision to pause advertising is joined by similar announcements from other big companies, including Verizon, Mozilla, Honda, Viber, Hersey, and more. "There is no place for racism in the world and there is no place for racism on social media," Coca-Cola Company Chairman and CEO James Quincey said in a statement.
Ads are the bane of many people's Internet lives but they are also the lifeblood of many companies. Striking a balance between those two parties without resorting to shenanigans and illegal practices has become an almost never-ending quest for the likes of Google. From third-party browser extensions to premium subscriptions, there have been different methods of removing ads on web pages and videos. The simplest, it turns out, is to just add a single dot after the ".com" of a YouTube URL.
Ads have become a nuisance on the web, forcing both users and even browser makers to take heavy-handed solutions to fix that problem. More often than not, these involve blocking ads and third-party tracking cookies that, unfortunately, also deprive legit sites of a source of income. While Google is working on making well-behaved ads more trustworthy, Firefox maker Mozilla is taking a different approach and has partnered with Scroll to offer an ad-free experience but at a small price.
Apple has published a new commercial in Japan that shows its MacBook in various animes scene -- the AirPods also make an appearance every now and again, though without a logo, of course. The company also included scenes with MacBook-esque laptops that include other generic logos like hearts, pears, and twice-bitten apples. The video highlights how common and easily recognizable the MacBook has become.
Google recently boasted that Google Play Store has netted $80 billion in revenue for developers. Those figures are, of course, only from the legitimate ways app developers earn money, either from outright app purchases, in-app buys, subscriptions, or even ads. The last source of income, however, is rather problematic even for Google who manages the sanctioned apps these apps can use. This is mostly due to less than savory advertising methods which the company has now given the boot from Google Play Store.
With Windows 8, Microsoft changed the Windows Start menu so drastically that users were up in arms about it. It never truly backed down from that tile-based design even if it made concessions along the way. With Windows 10 and its successive feature updates, the company is transforming that menu into an advertising dashboard for its apps and services. Unsurprisingly, not a few users are quite peeved by it but, fortunately, it's not that hard to "fix" once and for all.
Google is in a rather ironic but favorable position when it comes to Internet ads. It derives a huge chunk of its revenue from them but also makes a web browser that promises to protect its users from malicious agents, most of which operate through ads. Its solution was to help form a coalition that will develop industry standards that sift the good ads from the bad ones. That coalition's latest focus is on misbehaving video ads and its new rules that Google has chosen to implement in Chrome will, again ironically, force it to change how YouTube ads behave as well.
Today Google updated the way Google Search results appeared in web browsers on desktop computers after a similar redesign earlier this month. The most visual bit of this update - the most prominent, easy to see, and central element of this update - is the favicon. As it was with mobile UI for Google Search results updated in May of 2019, so too shall it be for Google Search results on desktop computers - or at least that's what Google suggested on the 17th.
Google seems to be putting its products on a sugar diet. First, it gets rid of Android's dessert names, now it wants Chrome to go cookie-free. Granted, web cookies have gone beyond being useful to the point of being a liability. And Google should know, considering how close it is not just to the Web but to the whole advertising industry that corrupted those cookies. Now it's making rather bold moves that will shake up that very industry by removing support for cookies from one of the world's most used browsers.