Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

When you gently shake your phone inadvertently, it jumps quickly to third-party sites such as e-commerce platforms as if it had been licensed. Originally, when the advertisement came out, everyone was lamenting the novelty of creativity, but now they are avoiding it. So, how did Shake ads become the target of public criticism? The author of this article has analyzed this, let's take a look at it.

On the same day of double 12 in 2022, 08:02, click on an APP, the abominable shake open screen ad came into view again. The brain immediately triggered a first-level warning and issued an anti-shaking command to the palm in half a second-come on, that was fast!

But only faster-before the palm responded to the brain's instructions, APP keenly caught the slight shaking of the palm in a quarter of a second and waved the authorized imperial sword and carried me all the way to an e-commerce website.

In fact, this may be the 101st time it has been blackmailed, but this time it is particularly infuriating because it is almost 2023-look what has happened in the past three years:

This is only the work done by the government and associations. It is believed that there are still a large number of enterprises and users who have initiated complaints and reports, but why do they still encounter a pan-open advertisement for the first time after nearly three years of concerted efforts?

01 Origin Shake Open screen ads may have existed for a long time, but they have been rampant since the second half of 2021.

Once upon a time, many App would set open-screen ads to be clickable full-screen, in order to gain a large number of users' unintentional mistouch and get advertising fees, and even draw a hair in the open-screen picture to induce users to make intentional mistouch. these bad practices at the expense of others and self-interest have led to a large number of user complaints.

In response to this mess, from July 2021, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology began to crack down on App open-screen advertising, jointly with third-party testing organizations to strengthen the implementation of restricted click areas, significantly display "skip / close" buttons, significantly display "click jump third party" logo and other requirements.

This makes a large number of mistouch tactics difficult to sustain, a lot of App screen advertising CTR (click rate, Click Through Rate) dropped sharply, advertising revenue also fell off the cliff.

Under the pressure of revenue, the Advertising Alliance and App began to look for solutions, one of which is to increase CTR by raising users' interest in participating in advertising pages through a novel interactive way of "interactive click". One of the specific ways to achieve "interactive click" is to let the user shake the phone, in addition, there are many ways, such as twisting, slipping and so on.

There's nothing wrong with the idea itself and it's a great idea-shaking this kind of interactive click is really more interesting and participatory than traditional clicks. However, some operators have used crooked minds and found that users' unintentional hand shaking can be regarded as a click by constantly increasing the sensitivity of shaking. Some advertising alliances even provide cooperative App with advertising settings options that can adjust the sensitivity of shaking continuously. Since then, the advertisement has been out of control.

02 original sin so that so many people abhor, shake open the screen advertising on earth committed what crime?

If you take it apart, shake the open screen ad = shake + open screen + ad; in fact, there is nothing wrong with the three parts appearing independently.

It is difficult to verify which App first enabled shake, but people on the Internet still remember shake of Wechat. In 2011, Wechat launched the social function of strangers based on shake, which helped Wechat accelerate the accumulation of users from 0 to 1, laying the foundation for future growth as a national App. At the 2015 Spring Festival Gala, the function of shaking and grabbing red envelopes launched by Wechat received a lot of participation. at its peak, people all over the country contributed 810 million shakes in a minute, and WeChat Pay rose from then on.

In the process of promoting Wechat, instead of being criticized by users, it brought users the freshness of cool techs in that era and gained a large number of followers.

Pictures from the data base for open screen are also difficult to trace, but what is certain is that in the early days when the iPhone configuration was not high, Apple also added open screen to the App loading time to tell users, "Dear, I'm still alive, please be patient"-there is nothing wrong with this scenario and purpose, and it also helped users ease the anxiety peculiar to that era.

As for advertising, it has a long history.

Advertising can be traced back to ancient Greece thousands of years ago, and its value has long been proved by human history.

All three parts are innocent, but why are they shouted and beaten after they are integrated? On the surface, it is shaking the hand of the advertisement to open the screen when clicking, but in the deep layer, it is that it usurps the power of the user interaction with the deceptive technique of "changing concepts".

Let's start with "secretly changing concepts".

"changing concepts" is a common logical error, which can be simply understood as "deliberately regarding two similar things as the same". Similar and identical, the difference in one word is very different, just as no one dares to drink "Sprite" as if it were "Sprite".

The picture comes from the encyclopedia Wechat shake and shake open the screen, both known as "shake", but also with the help of the phone's built-in gyroscope to sense whether the user has made a shake-this is the similarity between the two. however, Wechat's criteria for judging the key features such as acceleration, rotation angle and operation time (professionally referred to as "threshold") are much higher than those of shaking the screen. As a result, "shaking the Wechat is a physical exercise, shaking the screen is just a wind exercise."

Therefore, the two are similar, but completely different, and to confuse the two is to secretly change concepts.

Let's talk about "usurping power".

It is entirely the right of the user to choose the interaction path in the mobile phone and get the expected interaction results. APP can display without interference in the process of users exercising power, or trigger further actions after the user's permission, but misinterpret the original intention of users to exercise rights, interfere with the link of users' exercise of rights, or even interfere with the exercise of rights for users, which belongs to the gross usurpation of users' rights.

Compared with "changing concepts", "usurping power" is the most fundamental mistake of shaking the screen.

In 2021, the Consumer Protection Commission of Jiangsu Province interviewed a number of APP with shake and open screen advertisements, and some App development enterprises put forward some viewpoints, such as shaking is an interactive innovation, and the invoked gyroscope data does not belong to user privacy at present. From an isolated point of view, these views are reasonable, but they are not worth mentioning in the face of "original sin".

The picture is from the evolution of Sina 03. If you put aside the sins on the original starting point and just look at the evolution process, shaking the open screen ad is actually a product of two-dimensional evolution.

The first dimension is to shake and open the screen on the C side, that is, the user side, to complete the evolution.

At the end of 2006, a computer virus called Panda Burning incense swept through millions of personal computers, damaging data files and causing outages.

At the beginning of this century, browser plug-ins represented by 3721 were very popular, although to a certain extent, they could also provide users with some practical functions such as surfing the Internet with their real names in Chinese. however, rogue behaviors such as bundling and installing software and forcing changes to the browser home page far outweigh the value it brings to users.

Use a table to compare computer viruses, rogue plug-ins and pan-open ads:

It can be seen that from computer viruses to rogue plug-ins and then to shaking the screen, the lethality is getting lower and lower, but it is more and more contagious, and the gentleness to users has led to a decline in user vigilance and an increase in tolerance, which can be regarded as an evolution purely from the point of view of the survival of malware.

However, evolution does not cleanse the original sin.

Computer viruses, rogue plug-ins, shaking the screen, without exception, all bear the original crime of usurping the right to interact with users, but in different ways-- computer viruses break in savagely, and rogue software sells dog meat by hanging sheep's head. Shaking is a more covert concept of theft; but it does not affect that the three are essentially birds of a feather.

The second dimension is to shake and open the screen on the B side, that is, the advertiser side, has also completed the evolution.

The complete link after the user is reached by the advertisement can be broken down into four steps: presentation (but the user may not browse), click (often represents browsing), action (such as submitting a form or downloading App, etc.), and payment. Each step can become the basis for the advertiser to settle the advertising fee to App. The settlement by the number of times shown is CPM (Cost Per Mille), by the number of clicks is CPC (Cost Per Click), by the number of actions is CPA (Cost Per Action), and by the amount paid is CPS (Cost Per Sales).

Once upon a time, many advertisers used the CPM mode to settle advertising fees to App. APP can get an advertising fee as long as it successfully shows an advertisement to the user. As for whether the advertisement has moved the user and whether the user has any follow-up transformation, these are not App's considerations.

This model is friendly to App, but obviously bad for advertisers. On the one hand, all advertisers want to spend money on advertising not to stop at the eyeball effect, but also to bring follow-up transformation; on the other hand, compared with action and payment data, advertising display data are mainly grasped by App, and it is difficult for other participants to obtain, but this is the basis for App to charge advertisers, this position as both athletes and referees is easy to cause moral hazard.

Therefore, now many advertisers, especially the e-commerce advertisers who attach more importance to the conversion effect, have upgraded their purchase standards and are required to settle advertising fees in accordance with CPC or even CPA. In other words, what APP needs to do to get the advertising fee expands from the first layer at the top of the funnel chart to the sum of two or three layers above.

From the perspective of the development of the advertising industry, from CPM to CPC / CPA is an evolution of the operation mode, which helps to improve the efficiency of market transactions and the survival of the fittest in App, as well as the participation of small and medium-sized advertisers with limited budget, but for App, it is "more difficult with less money". Some App have started to shake the idea of opening the screen. From this point of view, shaking and opening the screen is a by-product of the evolution of the advertising fee settlement model, but the by-product of this evolution is a deformity.

Of course, for top APP, the incremental advertising revenue generated by this kind of cheating is a small profit, and it is important to increase the frequency and duration of App users to generate more sustainable and larger revenue, so top APP is basically not obsessed with shaking open-screen ads, which have been hard to find in most top APP after the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology cracked down in 2021.

However, for the tail App, which has a small number of users, small revenue and highly uncertain APP viability, these incremental advertising revenue is really difficult to give up. At present, this kind of tail App is the hardest-hit area of shaking open-screen advertising.

04 annihilation I wonder if you have found that in recent years, there is no need to install antivirus software for computers, and once popular antivirus software such as Kaspersky and rising seems to be moving away from us.

Is it because the virus has disappeared?

No, the virus is still there.

On the website of the National Internet Emergency response Center (https://www.cert.org.cn), we can see dynamic warnings of intensive updates on network security, which proves that the virus has not disappeared.

Then why do we perceive fewer viruses?

It can be understood with the attack and defense picture below.

As can be seen from the picture, in the view of hackers, a number of defense measures on the PC side have greatly increased the development cost and risk, while the input-output ratio of attacking personal mobile and enterprise servers is significantly higher than that of the PC side. The former is blocked, the latter is sparse, under the two-phase effect, the personal computer, once the worst-hit area of the virus, has luckily become a pure land.

The annihilation history of computer viruses can provide some ideas for the management of shake and open-screen advertising.

First, to solve the problem, we must first define the problem. Shake the open screen advertising can openly change the concept, the root lies in the lack of authoritative, quantifiable, strong industry definition of the form of interaction.

Fortunately, the industry is aware of this problem. The shake standard issued by China Information and Communication Institute and Telecommunication Terminal Industry Association at the beginning of this month is aimed at the determination of "threshold". Although its authority and enforcement remain to be observed, but after all, it has completed the industry standard from 0 to 1, which helps to eliminate the hotbed of the concept of secret exchange.

The picture is from the second on the official website of the China Academy of Information and Communication, trying to block and sparse, with a multi-pronged approach. The root of the existence of any black-gray industry is "profitable", so changing the input-output ratio of these industries is the key to governance. Strong interception is necessary, but relying solely on interception is easy to fall into the dilemma of as virtue rises one foot and vice rises ten, and the combination of thinning and blocking will be more conducive to changing the situation.

In terms of dredging, we can guide the healthy competition between advertising alliances and App operators, such as encouraging effective advertising filling, accurate crowd orientation, material content optimization, advertising linkage and other technological innovation that can take into account user experience and CTR.

Third, encourage multi-party participation. The government and the association have a strong authority, but it is necessary to supervise the mass App alone for 365 days without dead ends.

A better way is to be led by the government and associations, through mechanisms, standards and rules, to give full play to the audit ability of App Store and the ability to clear the flow of illegal App, to open up user reporting channels and provide a legal basis, and to encourage advertisers to jointly resist false data created by secretly changing concepts.

In this way, we can unite all the forces that can be United to form a seamless regulation of shake screen advertising, effectively deal with the practice of evading governance, such as shaking screen in a small amount of top APP, but frequently in a large number of tail App, rarely seen at ordinary times, but frequently before and after the shopping festival, shooting a shot in different screen openings of the same App, changing places and so on.

05 self-destruction on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi and other islands, there is an animal called the deer porpoise, which has the only vertically upward tusks of all mammals, which looks really majestic, but unfortunately, the deer dolphin's tusks are bent too high. as a result, if the porpoise is lucky enough to live to an advanced age, its long tusks will grow straight to its forehead until it is stabbed to death.

Many animals have fangs, and tusks are effective self-defense weapons that can significantly improve the competitive advantage of individual animals, but when they come to deer dolphins, they lead to self-destruction because they go awry.

Shake the open-screen ad, which combines excellent technology based on gyroscope, excellent operation idea based on user fragment time, and excellent advertising settlement model based on user interaction. At first glance, it seems equally majestic. It could have explored a longer-lasting and healthier mode of operation, but it was burdened with the original crime of changing concepts and usurping the power of user interaction. Like the deer dolphin, it will eventually become its own natural enemy and move towards self-destruction.

This article is from the official account of Wechat: everyone is a product manager (ID:woshipm), author: wilderness Quantum Bear

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