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A topic I was thinking of earlier. Ads have been around since god only knows when. Before print people would draw them. They'd pay people to be criers. It's been a part of our lives for god-only-knows how long. Magazine/Newspaper ads were probably the first big foray into making it an industry. I could be wrong but that's when ads seemed to become a business unto itself. Then radio, TV, and now the internet. Radio and TV had a great thing going. People listen/watch for a while, encounter a couple ads, then listen/watch some more. There was no way to get the content without dealing with the ads in some way. The internet comes along and ads are largely still print form. Single images somewhere on the screen, click here and it takes you to a site where you can browse products or whatever. People didn't care much because they were so used to it. But technology advanced and the advertisers took advantage. Browsers handling multiple pages at once led to the advent of pop-ups. High-speed internet led to people wanting higher quality content, and as flash and shockwave helped serve up more interesting content it also helped advertisers turn their simple JPGs and GIFs into interactive ads, videos, and the like. Cookies used to keep people logged into websites and help remember data turned into trackers to help the networks figure out who was going where, viewing what. But it was never like TV and Radio where you'd be able to keep the ads down to a level people were OK with; some websites would be so laden with ads there was no content, it was just to bring in revenue. Advertising content providers had people mixing and matching ads - this company wanted to pay for sound, the other one didn't. Serve that up to the users and you get silent websites which would suddenly erupt into a cacophony of sound without warning. Popunder windows with sound out of nowhere. Ads becoming part of the site, forcing users to hunt for an 'X' to close them to access content. Clickbait style stories designed to bring people in to up ad revenue. 'Promoted stories' on news sites mingling actual journalism with phony articles. Pages loading slow because of ads (In some cases, loading adblockers can result in a 40% decrease in load times). Malicious code being injected into ads and assaulting people with malware. But users got totally fed up. Popup blockers led to ad blockers, which over time become more and more sophisticated. Now the ad industry is facing serious issues - 22 billion dollars worth of ad money is being wasted on people who block ads. Every time the advertisers find new ways to put ads on websites, the blockers find new ways to shut them down. Sites which rely on ad revenue get less and less and less, leading to many switching over to 'subscription' models - pay the site directly for its content, get it ad-free. The number of users who block ads is growing significantly because people are just getting so tired and fed up with the junk they're being bombarded with. Data caps and usage for mobile devices is putting more, and more, and more people into a mode where they're conscious of how much data is being used and when they're told they can cut down on their data by 40% with an ad blocker, it makes no sense to them to put it off anymore. The IAB, Interactive Advertising Bureau is aware they screwed up and they released a statement about new guidelines to try to dial back the problems that are forcing people towards ad blockers. http://www.iab.com/news/lean/ The issue now of course is they have a two-prong war. First, they have to convince all the companies that run ads that the best thing to do is to dial things back to simpler, quicker-loading content. The second is to convince all the users who've already gone to ad blockers to stop blocking and start letting ads happen again. People go online and expect free things - check the weather, check the news, look up a recipe, chat with friends... they already pay their ISP for the internet connection, why should they pay any more? Yet the people who host those weather reports, those recipes, the chatrooms, the forums... they pay for the data. They pay to provide these services and the ads help them keep the costs manageable and reasonable. When we ad-block, they argue, we help eliminate their ability to provide these services for us. So we have two sides. Advertisers and content providers who want the income that ads provide, that want to push products and provide services that rely on ads. The other side is the consumers who have ads inundating them from every angle and turn to technology for relief. DND seems to take these topics seriously and I'm curious about serious thoughts from both sides. What do you guys think should happen? will happen? Where do we go from here? --- For my part, this is how I see things. I use ad-blockers because I feel forced to. Too many sites have ads which irritated me to this end. Auto-play videos. Garbage embedded in the site that forced me to hunt for a black 'X' on a black background to read the actual content I wanted. Silent sites that would suddenly switch ads and start blaring audio. And the articles I read online describing this vulnerability and that malicious code resulting in whatever malware being on the rise. I don't mind ads on many sites but the sites that have the obnoxious, intrusive, aggravating ones have irritated me to the point where I shut them ALL up just to get rid of the worst offenders. I was never all that upset over things like ad tracking and targeted advertisements. I'm a 35 year old guy living alone - I don't feel like I need to see makeup ads, bra ads, feminine products, baby food, toddler clothes, mortgage, insurance quotes, etc. If they tailor the ads to me to show me new cell phones I might like, intel's newly released processors on Amazon, books or movies I'd enjoy, I think that's an improvement over the more traditional advertising. But I do understand people don't want to feel tracked online. They don't want to feel like a company knows everywhere they've browsed and what they like to look at. I can see both sides and I don't know if there's a single solid answer as a result. But it's something I do like to think about and consider. khy fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Oct 17, 2015 |
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Oct 17, 2015 01:22
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I'm just going to kind of scattershot my thoughts on this, sorry for the poor level of organization: The newest trend is "Native Advertising". Charitably these are sponsored articles which provide potentially desirable information to the viewer. More realistically they are glorified ads doctored to look like a useful article. There's huge pressure to move in this direction for the reasons you mentioned. If you can deceive the viewer into believing they are not viewing an ad, or even better that the ad is helpful to them then you have a space where advertising becomes very effective. Many people don't notice this type of ad because its just another listicle with 10 great facts about PRODUCT and I wonder what the saturation point is. When does your average internet user notice and become annoyed by native advertising? It may be preferable to popups and ads containing audio but I dislike the deception involved. There are also plenty of 'walled garden' type platforms where users lack the power to easily block ads, and this is another consideration. If a user can't disable ads on their Xbox dashboard without physically modding the system, voiding the warranty & potentially risking a ban then they are far less likely to do it. On a personal level its something I'm very wary of. When you purchase an electronic entertainment device these days the goal is to integrate you into a system and keep your there. The company has a widely scoped set of goals: They want you to buy your products via their digital storefront, serve you ads, charge you a subscription fee and collect as much data as possible about your behavior within their system. We live in an age of proprietary coffee pods. As you mentioned we've entered an era where companies are voraciously collecting as much data about you as they can. Your credit card company / bank knows a huge deal about you and your behaviors - where you live, where you buy groceries, eat out, etc. Whether you play games, use a search engine or purchase products things are no different online and there's huge money in this. If you were considering buying a car & decided to do some research online, how much do you think that information is worth to a nearby car dealership? If they could push you an advertisement offering you a 'special deal' on one of the cars you were just reading about, what would they pay? Say you scoped out a premium skin/outfit for a Dota or LoL character a few times & Valve/Riot know it's your most played character. They could potentially make a sale by offering you a small discount given that information - would you like to know the reason behind this offered discount? What if instead of a discount you were charged extra for content the analytic data indicates you would prefer? More and more our online behaviors are being monitored, collated traded and sold because knowing all you can about an individual can make a huge difference in terms of sales and ad effectiveness. I do not personally feel targeted advertisements are a benefit. They are a regrettable reality of the modern age. There's obviously a needle that online advertising needs to thread to be successful, & it's something I think they are very likely to do. I'm concerned about what happens when they succeed though. Sometimes you'll read about how ineffective advertising is for certain savvy segments of the population. More often you'll hear people claim they are 'immune' to advertisements (heh) but things are far more likely to swing the other way IMO. What happens when people are being bombarded with advertisements AND they're unable to recognize them as such AND unaware of their effect? What if people decide they love advertising? I'm not a huge consumer culture person. Driving our society towards greater and greater levels of consumption by poking their subconscious seems to me to be a potent and destructive force. Its very easy to underestimate the effect of ads have on personal preferences and behavior. I use an adblocker online because on a personal level its all upside: Faster page load times, less clutter, no mandatory commercials before videos and so forth. I still see and hear advertisements all the time though. Native articles are not culled in my experience. The podcasts I listen to typically have a few rotating sponsors they'll talk about. I'll occasionally disable my blocker for specific sites if I want to support them. Various companies are collecting data regarding my online behaviors. I'm in the system like it or not - and I know advertisements affect me. To protect myself I try to avoid making purchases on impulse and reflect on whether I truly need something. I'll consider & research a product I'm interested in, and spend a lot of time deciding how I feel about it based on the information available. But as I noted in examples above, this type of behavior can also be exploited. So yeah, its hard. In conclusion online advertising isn't going anywhere, its just morphing into something a bit sneakier. Our online behaviors are being tracked because of their huge potential value. Consumers unthinkingly enter into enclosed systems and the process of getting money and value out of the consumer becomes that much easier because of it. The future is going to be weird, and while it may not be as in your face annoying as in the past, it will likely be much more effective & damaging to the consumer.
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Oct 17, 2015 03:12
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The past has the answers for the future: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhjCrL40JIM
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Oct 17, 2015 03:58
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Here To Help posted:Charitably these are sponsored articles which provide potentially desirable information to the viewer. More realistically they are glorified ads doctored to look like a useful article. I get the impression that the whole point of them is to evade ad blockers. Apparently the only way to get an ad by blockers is to do it in a way that most humans can't tell the difference either. The other thing that's been happening too though is shifting towards alternative business models A lot of services or types of services that were once free and funded by ads have moved to selling premium content/services instead, especially services with a social aspect that encourages the free users to bring additional traffic to the site. GitHub is one of the most obvious examples, and several large journalism outlets have started moving towards subscription models as well. Essentially, places that used to use ads as a way to avoid selling something are now starting to sell things, so I think there is some resignation that ad blockers may have done irreversible damage.
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Oct 17, 2015 06:58
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As a minor response to prevalent blocking, I've came across sites that will appeal to you to unblock ads on their pages, promising that what ads they do have will be unobtrusive or the like, and/or that "Hey, ads are a minor thing that helps keep the site going, so, maybe we can be pals and share an ad or two?" as a more emotional appeal. In the cases where a site has done so, I may be falling into the trap, but I figure "Well hey, let's see what happens" and give it a try, and almost always, they do keep to unobtrusive ads. So it may be a recognition that site owners in some cases are cognizant of the issues here, and are trying to get the genie back into the bottle with a more explicit pact. I may be a sucker for going with it, but if they're willing to get along and they're happy due to it and things keep working at the end of the day, I have no problem trying to meet the decent sites halfway.
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Oct 17, 2015 10:25
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Moinkmaster posted:As a minor response to prevalent blocking, I've came across sites that will appeal to you to unblock ads on their pages, promising that what ads they do have will be unobtrusive or the like, and/or that "Hey, ads are a minor thing that helps keep the site going, so, maybe we can be pals and share an ad or two?" as a more emotional appeal. In the cases where a site has done so, I may be falling into the trap, but I figure "Well hey, let's see what happens" and give it a try, and almost always, they do keep to unobtrusive ads. I agree with this sentiment. I basically have only two problems with online ads in general, distracting me from the content I actually came to look at and making it harder to load the content I actually came to look at. If the ads a site has don't make that happen I will totally keep my ad blocker off for their site even if I'm still not going to click on any ads. I'm also a sucker for $1/5 no-ads lifetime subscriptions if I really use the site a lot and enjoy their stuff, at worst it's basically charity and for otherwise quality free content that might not exist without the revenue I'm alright with that.
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Oct 17, 2015 11:26
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I don't really understand what would be philosophically bad if the entire advertising industry went under and the websites supported by it did too.
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Oct 17, 2015 11:36
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I generally don't have a problem with the unobtrusive ads that at least aren't obnoxiously animated. The goon ads on here I don't have a problem with until some moron uploads one with "FAG LOL" plastered all over it and somehow that's allowed to go through. A lot of companies are getting pretty desperate with even non-internet ads. I was on a Delta flight a while ago, and while everyone was sitting in their chairs, buckled in waiting for takeoff, an video ad with sound for Jeep Cherokee came on that monitor in front of you directly in your face with no way of turning it off. No one wants to be a captive audience for ad garbage. There needs to be standards set for ads so they're not obtrusive or annoying. If advertisers agreed upon a set of guidelines and companies had some sort of "seal of approval" for their ad content, I would probably let the blockers automatically whitelist those because I would have a good idea they weren't going have fullscreen porn flash ad with sound right in my face. Or trackers. Or viruses. I already use that option on adblock that allows unobtrusive ads because I figure some sites I like need the revenue to exist, but I don't see many ads appearing at all even with it enabled. I don't know how that feature works, but even sites that I know don't have annoying ads are getting blocked so it's not working real well or the people behind adblock have even less tolerance for ads than I do. That IAB initiative posted in the OP seems like a good start, but somehow I doubt a lot of advertisers will be able to control themselves and submit to the scrutiny necessary to guarantee their ads aren't poo poo. If not, then I don't really have a problem with the end result being what the poster above me said for those companies. Mercury_Storm fucked around with this message at 12:18 on Oct 17, 2015 |
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Oct 17, 2015 11:43
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How many users would even click annoying ads? How many web owners spammed for pageviews just to milk ad revenue? It was a broken system. I see ad blocking and people moving to subscription based content as an improvement. Everyone hated those things; offer people the choice to remove them and noone would choose the ads. The payment model is used in this very forum and it seemed to go well? wiregrind fucked around with this message at 04:56 on Oct 18, 2015 |
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Oct 18, 2015 04:51
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I used to study advertising a lot back when I was in college. The one thing that I always found curious about advertising, especially the online variety, is how it only really works as a self-sustaining business model in monopoly-like conditions. Media buying used to be a somewhat scarce resource, since each town probably only had a few newspapers. I really only think people got used to the "commercial" media because since there were usually less than ten major broadcasters, and access to their airtime could be charged at a relative premium -- it was done at the broadcaster's preference, and the public reaction towards "is advertising good or bad" has always been mixed. People hated it at first, then there was some novelty towards the creation of a consumer society, then there was the backlash against it, followed by the "just try to ignore it" we sort of have now, and some jurisdictions in the world have even begun regulating and limiting public advertising simply from the annoyance they've caused. (Quebec doesn't permit advertising to anyone under the age of 13. Vermont has banned billboards. A lot of places have government-managed do-not-call lists against telemarketers, and one Latin American country whose name escapes me has managed a ban on all public-space advertising period.) What online essentially did was take that scarcity away and make all forms of media infinite. That invariably made everything cheaper, but so cheap that it cratered the entire market. Cost-per-thousand is no substitute for the old cost-per-million in terms of being able to run a business. If I were to just have Ghostery go on an ad list for me all the ads blocked, and all the trackers active trying to profile against my privacy in the vain hope that I might someday buy some odd product in the future, and not to mention all the security hopes for trojans and spyware that find their way through those additional connections (patched or not)... all so I can operate on a shoestring of a budget? Even if I really love writing and publishing, that doesn't sound like my idea of a good time. (Also: consider Youtube's model of advertising. Some Youtube LPers have to put out somewhere around 3 to 4 videos a day, while still managing 10000 views on each, just so they can also operate on a shoestring budget. It's a lot of work and for not much payoff.) The online models were never entirely perfect, either. The only ad I've ever clicked on, fully and knowingly, was an ad for the Excoboard BBS service I saw while using a Proboards forum. Because of advertising, Proboards lost me as a user towards one of their competitors with (at the time) a superior service. Apparently that used to be a problem with old Google Adsense: in their attempts to try and generate a "relevant" ad for a site, it would usually end up advertising for one of the site's competitors. I don't remember when they fixed that, but I think it would've been in '08? Shame really. That was only useful kind of online ad. It's gotten to the point where only exceedingly large corporations are now able to salvage absolutely anything out of advertising -- and despite their reach, there just aren't that many of 'em. I'm not surprised a lot of new ventures, or at least some of the smarter ones, are just ruling out advertising altogether. If you're not important enough to actually do the media buying yourself, then it just isn't worth the trouble anymore. Morroque fucked around with this message at 00:02 on Oct 19, 2015 |
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Oct 19, 2015 00:00
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Here To Help posted:I'm just going to kind of scattershot my thoughts on this, sorry for the poor level of organization: Is this the reason for the insane amounts of Brand image galleries on imgur/reddit all the time? At this point I'm genuinely incapable of separating advertisements from people's genuine (and creepy) brand loyalty toward Costco and all those other meme companies. I always assumed they were astroturfed like when companies would post threads about their products on relevant forums, but I was never completely sure.
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Oct 19, 2015 07:15
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RE: Native Advertising. I've been watching these ads and am waiting for one of the products displayed to become popular because the second they do they'll become the next 'Airborne supplement'. By which I mean that the products will become popular based on false claims and the lawyers will immediately smell blood in the water and hit 'em with a class action lawsuit. Airborne is probably the most widely-known instance of this to date but I can't help but feel like every 'miracle drug' advertised online is skating extremely thin ice with the claims made in their 'articles'.ReagaNOMNOMicks posted:I don't really understand what would be philosophically bad if the entire advertising industry went under and the websites supported by it did too. That would be a pretty brutal hit to a lot of widely-used sites. Sites that host video game mods, for example, host pretty drat huge quantities of data they don't charge for. Ads are their #1 method of staying afloat; donations can help but tend to fluctuate too much to be able to rely upon, while ads are generally fairly constant in their revenue. Then there's sites like wikia which allow free hosting for a wiki about drat near anything. A lot of news websites too; CNN, MSNBC, etc. I don't view them very often but I'm told other news websites such as WashingtonPost are moving to a 'X amount of free ads then you gotta pay' type model. How popular is IMDB? Could IMDB exist without ads? I honestly don't know. Should these sites move to a subscription-based service? For mod sites like the 'nexus' sites (Very popular with Elder Scrolls fans) it might end up destroying them, especially if Bethesda and other companies feel that modding is being put behind a paywall and take action against it. This may lead to a rise of individual users hosting mods on their own, which we saw a LOT of during the Morrowind days, but people may argue that is a huge backslide from having everything in one centrally-located, convenient site. Or by forcing people to pay a subscription for news, people would be more likely to pick a single news source instead of having multiple available; which, in turn, may lead towards people being biased by that news site. A good example is about a year ago a kid was shot during a traffic stop where he flashed his headlights at the police officer. I'm neither condoning nor condemning his action, but when I read about it some sites put heavy emphasis on his being unarmed, the stop being illegal, etc. Other sites put emphasis on the cop having been assaulted by the kid, showing the cop's face all bloodied up, etc. Put the news behind paywalls and people are less likely to compare stories from multiple sources to see these kinds of perspective differences. The question I have is, should the ad industry go under how do people think it would affect the internet in general? As I stated back in the OP, a LOT of people expect free access to content; if advertising does go under would people still expect to go online and get free news, free weather, free social media, etc? How would that affect new websites? Would facebook have ever managed to supplant MySpace as the dominant social media platform if both sites had to rely upon subscription fees? khy fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Oct 19, 2015 |
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Oct 19, 2015 17:14
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And since I just did a huge block of text about how ads are good and helpful for websites, let me add some more fuel for the fire on the opposite side. Actual measured statistics regarding page load times for ad-heavy sites with and without different adblockers! https://www.raymond.cc/blog/10-ad-blocking-extensions-tested-for-best-performance/2/ quote:The results show that on average an ad blocker can reduce the time it takes to load a page with ads by around two thirds. Most averaged 3.6 – 3.8 seconds with a time to display the untouched page of 10.5 seconds. Individually that extra 6.8 seconds of load time is insignificant. For a user who hardly browses at all it's literally nothing to them. For a user who browses hundreds of pages per day? Then it becomes noticeable. It adds up rapidly. For a user on a limited data connection it's costing him time AND money (in the form of available bandwidth). khy fucked around with this message at 17:41 on Oct 19, 2015 |
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Oct 19, 2015 17:34
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khy posted:The question I have is, should the ad industry go under how do people think it would affect the internet in general? As I stated back in the OP, a LOT of people expect free access to content; if advertising does go under would people still expect to go online and get free news, free weather, free social media, etc? How would that affect new websites? Would facebook have ever managed to supplant MySpace as the dominant social media platform if both sites had to rely upon subscription fees? If there was an "Ad Crash" I don't think it would last for too long. It would be painful to a lot of businesses, but so does any other type of crash or bubble bursting. If it does happen, hopefully it would move businesses into action to realize they need to have non-lovely ads that don't eat up Bill's 100 megabyte data cap for his ludicrous phone plan within a single day. It will probably end up being a cyclical thing, where ads become amazingly lovely and annoying and people turn to ad blockers, then they get better so people stop bothering to install them when it calms down after a crash, and so on. Honestly though, I don't think there will be a serious crash. It will probably just keep chugging along as it is now, with a sizable portion of users taking advantage of ad blockers, and others who don't know how or can't use them, or who just don't care. The whole issue seems like a lot of advertisers just screaming about how they can't take perfect advantage over a medium anymore. Mercury_Storm fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Oct 19, 2015 |
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Oct 19, 2015 17:48
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As a person in media planning and who had to sift through reports on this topic it feels like how pop up blockers killed pop-ups so nee types of ad content and media got created. All that will happen is there will be a continued shift in spending to new methods digitally rather than some wholesale collapse and other media types that are harder to ignore in the physical world will get more spending.
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Oct 19, 2015 19:05
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khy posted:The question I have is, should the ad industry go under how do people think it would affect the internet in general? As I stated back in the OP, a LOT of people expect free access to content; if advertising does go under would people still expect to go online and get free news, free weather, free social media, etc? How would that affect new websites? Would facebook have ever managed to supplant MySpace as the dominant social media platform if both sites had to rely upon subscription fees? We might as well be acting as if this is already the case and people just haven't realized it yet. Social media is a giant black hole of investment; a lot of money might go in, but nothing that comes out can explicitly be measured in monetary terms.  Advertising was the last casualty of the Dot-Com Bubble, but it just took a while for people to realize what happened. Despite that, we still have traditional and elite media in the form of old newspaper organizations, largely as constructs of political expediency. Just because their funding basis is entirely gone doesn't mean the old companies won't still try to desperately cling to existence. When it comes to large and disperse systems like these, (even when highly centralized,) any changes tend to unravel in slow-motion. One of my old textbooks in uni was "The Business of Media" by Croteau and Hoynes. It was a thing that described the pre-internet media business models and how functional-yet-barely-subsistent they were. A lot of media companies had reached a sort of upper-limit on how much revenue they could pull, which led to a craze of bailouts in the form corporate mergers just to keep the broadcast system alive. Before the Mass Communications Act of '96, the entire mass media of the United States had consolidated into less than 70 companies -- which was already sort of small for a country the size of the US. After the '96 act deregulated the limits on media holdings, that number rapidly tumbled to 20, then 10, then 6, now 3. Media is a form of shadow work -- something that isn't really profitable or employable in and of itself, but is necessary towards the function of any information-based system. Since media was never really functional in that capitalist sense, most major media companies had to use corporate synergy or vertical integration as a costs-savings mechanism just to stay afloat. When one company began failing, it offered itself up to its competitors, and a merger would allow one company twice the amount of market reach while pre-existing synergies from their old company would allow them to operate the second company at a reduced cost -- creating a margin of elusive and fast-diminishing profit. The cyberpunk-esque Mega Conglomerates we have today are only half a function of corporate greed. Every one major corporation we now have is a function of ten to fifty other companies that proved decent in their work, but weren't capitalist enough to stand alone. It's a cyclical engine of failure. I noticed a similar thing mentioned in the Silicon Valley Bubble thread; it seems a lot of small tech startups these days are geared towards being bought out by a larger player like Amazon or Google as a very specific endgame -- so much so, that there is some wonder if there are signs of an unsustainable bubble forming in the tech industry around it. Google may be large, but how much bigger can it exactly get? The puck will have to stop somewhere. In the meantime, tech startups begin the appearance of operation by using Advertising Futures, which are not ads in and of themselves, but promises of future ad revenues which can be used to seduce possible investors. (In that sense, the ultimate form of targeted advertising!) But again: how long is that gonna hold up before the venture capitalists begin to realize that ads have shittier and shittier returns? The Croteau/Hoynes book was largely against the old broadcast business models because of their supposed threat to democracy, but at the time the book was written, the only viable alternative was the "Public Sphere" model of communication that at the time only had PBS around as an example. While it was noticeable in its philosophical difference to the commercial media, it was at the time so untested and so sparse in the realm of broadcast that even Croteau/Hoynes' depiction of it sounded like it ran off of rose petals and fairy dust. I've noticed since Patreon took off, there have been popup News Orgs that have been using it to fund themselves. We're likely going to see how far that model can stretch itself quite soon. (I'm hopeful, at least. If I want to be in business, I'd assume it is because I like doing something enough that I want to make it available to other people, not simply because I want to make money. That latter approach seems like it would just kill the joy out of things.)
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Oct 19, 2015 19:10
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The problem with internet adverts is that it turned into a competition to see who could scream the loudest. There's also one major, fundamental difference between TV and internet adverts. Radio and internet, too. The biggest difference is that on the internet the adverts, to get your attention, would sometimes actually interrupt the content or get int he way. A TV or radio show was explicitly designed with interruptable parts. You didn't get crap like a commercial clicking in in the middle of dialogue. A scene would finish, ads would happen, then another scene would start. You'd get ads between shows. Then the internet decided that the best way to get somebody's attention was to wait long enough for the viewer to read a paragraph, darken the page, and slap an advert in their face. Personally I'm significantly less likely to go back to a site that does that. More importantly if an advert annoys me the company paying for it goes into the "company I will not give money to for a while" category if it's possible. Hey, you decided to read this article? Here's a few sentences now BUY THIS loving TRUCK HELL YEAH LOOK AT THIS TRUCK A MAN HOLDING A POWER TOOL IS STANDING NEAR IT THIS TRUCK IS SO MANLY WOW LOOK AT ALL THESE MANLY THINGS LIKE THERE'S TREES AND poo poo!!!! That advertiser has guaranteed that my next vehicle will be made by some other company.
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Oct 21, 2015 04:07
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This thread is brought to you by:
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Oct 21, 2015 04:38
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Morroque posted:<snip good stuff> oh man, a clue, that just made the first fewresponses worth trudging through link us to this good patreon stuff I think you're exactly right that most people are way over focused on how this will affect a few listicle sites. The real conclusion here is that newspapers are finally done-done. They will *never* be able to move to an internet ad strategy even at a tenth of their former selves. I think you're right that advertising futures were a thing but the moves to take over (apple news & fb instant) are the sortof natural end to that playing out. Hot vc money has almost all been in saas stuff for a while now.
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Oct 21, 2015 05:03
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ReagaNOMNOMicks posted:I don't really understand what would be philosophically bad if the entire advertising industry went under and the websites supported by it did too.  Advertising and anything that relies on it can burn, and I will do everything in my power to shut it out of my life. I encourage others to do the same, regardless of the consequences.
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Oct 21, 2015 05:07
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ReagaNOMNOMicks posted:I don't really understand what would be philosophically bad if the entire advertising industry went under and the websites supported by it did too. Most the poo poo you enjoy is supported by advertising. Ever use google, google maps, youtube? In response to the OP, google spends a lot of money to find ways to advertise in a way that is mutually beneficial to both parties and does a fairly good job of it. Neo_Crimson posted:
OK grandpa. Better cut up your credit cards and throw away your phone so they don't track you. Morroque posted:We might as well be acting as if this is already the case and people just haven't realized it yet. Social media is a giant black hole of investment; a lot of money might go in, but nothing that comes out can explicitly be measured in monetary terms. Ah, yes the fabled social media "bubble", I think there's already a thread to ramble on about that in. wiregrind posted:How many users would even click annoying ads? How many web owners spammed for pageviews just to milk ad revenue? It was a broken system. SA's userbase is an utter fraction of advertising based sites, you kinda destroyed your own point there. I mean how many people here actually willingly pay for content? How many newspaper / magazine subscriptions? People already made the choice a long time ago that they'd rather have poo poo for 'free' than pay for it. tsa fucked around with this message at 06:44 on Oct 21, 2015 |
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Oct 21, 2015 06:30
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Morroque posted:We might as well be acting as if this is already the case and people just haven't realized it yet. Social media is a giant black hole of investment; a lot of money might go in, but nothing that comes out can explicitly be measured in monetary terms. Except for all the money, that is.
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Oct 21, 2015 07:05
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StabbinHobo posted:oh man, a clue, that just made the first fewresponses worth trudging through I hope that will end up being true, oddly enough. It sucks to know that some newspapers with over 100 year histories will inevitably end up failing. Local newspapers, like outfits that are the only ones in town, will also die too. Considering the internet kind of sucks at doing good local stuff, that'll be an active loss for most people. On the other hand, most of the remaining newspapers are primarily delivery points for government policy (as Chomsky/Herman proved) or just mouthpieces for their often ultra-conservative millionaire owners. I certainly won't be missing them. As far as how that will happen, I have no idea. The conglomeration is such that each newspaper is inexorably linked to other news paper through their hold company ownerships -- meaning... outside of management decisions to close down one specific newspaper or another, all newspapers will only die when their parent company dies too. It is possible that a mass extinction of newspapers will happen suddenly and all at the same time when each parent company goes under. As it stands, any one holding company right now can have at least 50 possible properties, which in turn may have their own subsidiaries. On the other hand... If the political uses of newspapers remain so useful as a means of propaganda dissemination and as a safe rendezvous for a country's political elite, it's also possible that the cycle of corporate acquisition and mergers can continue indefinitely, husbanding the media outlets to other industries that can make the money to support them. As an example, Newscorp just bought out the National Geographic, both because NatGeo was about to go under naturally, and because Newscorp wanted to distill the science and environmentalism to be more industry-friendly. (No more climate change stuff, for example.) There is theoretically nothing stopping them from continuing with this if the political and ideological wins are effective enough, even if there is absolutely no business case for it whatsoever. So long as their other non-media businesses remain profitable, well-circulated newspapers can remain loss leaders for as long as elites require. Given how utterly ineffective actual advertising has become, one of these two absolutely must become true. It's just a question of what route will overtake the other first. As far as Patreon News Orgs go, in Canada there is Canadaland which is currently acting as a somewhat ineffective media-policing functionary. They're running it essentially just as PBS would -- they just finished their first pledge drive and everything. And even though it's not Patreon-based, the National Observer is currently the most successful crowdfunded news org in Canada too. Really, since commercial media models are in the gutter, the Internet has been unusually kind to the old method of "public service broadcasting" -- even government-owned public broadcasters like TVO have improved marginally just because they can ask for donations whenever and not just risk everything on annual televised pledge drives. It's just that since public-funding was so rare in the United States beforehand, not many are people trying to publish online using it -- they think they have to fail at being businessmen first just to get their skin in the game. The only real barrier to entry towards being an effect crowdfunded or noncommercial news org is getting enough money to afford liability insurance. Once you have the ability to lawyer up your stories, the effectiveness of your reporting goes up massively. tsa posted:Most the poo poo you enjoy is supported by advertising. Ever use google, google maps, youtube? In response to the OP, google spends a lot of money to find ways to advertise in a way that is mutually beneficial to both parties and does a fairly good job of it. This is a good point! Google is probably the one exception to most of this. They are so unbelievably large that they are the only ones able to salvage anything out of digital advertising at all. I've read about a few times, but I'm probably going to screw up this explanation... It's mostly a result of their costing mechanism, where they are the only ones able to make the usual Cost-Per-Thousand work in their favor while the once-lucrative Cost-Per-Million just doesn't exist outside of broadcast anymore. (And probably won't exist for much longer.) Google managed to run the CPT in bulk, allowing them to offset the cheapness through massive reach alone. The game is such that you really need to be an exceedingly large corporation to salvage anything out of advertising as a business model. The only thing about the common wisdom that is wrong is that the Internet did not do this to "the media" -- it was already the case when the Internet came around due to how badly managed the old mass broadcast system was. The industry pressure for the Telecommunications Act of 1996 proves that -- by the time AOL became the first newfangled Internet browser, the old media had already screwed themselves into a corner that they needed to deregulate the upper limit on company size just to merge themselves out of impending failure. The old media just like to blame the Internet for their downfall to avoid the fact that it was kind of their own fault in the first place. tsa posted:Ah, yes the fabled social media "bubble", I think there's already a thread to ramble on about that in. I don't think there is a social media "bubble," oddly enough. I just notice that the same problems newspapers are currently having also effect social media in the same way. Even if their costs are lower and their content is using what is equivalent of legal free labour, bandwidth use will eventually kill them. I've seen it in the NSA and Internet Surveillance thread that Facebook and Twitter might very well just be getting subsidized by the American taxpayer just because of each site's usefulness to both the NSA and to the lobbyists trying to get data on consumers. It sounds conspiratorial, I know, but I doubt it would surprise anyone if it came to light. Frankly, I have no idea how else those companies operate independently given how necessary Adblockers are becoming. Cloud computing and server clusters ain't cheap. They're in the same sort of sinking boat, but social media got the lifejacket.
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Oct 21, 2015 07:07
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tsa posted:OK grandpa. Better cut up your credit cards and throw away your phone so they don't track you. You misunderstand. I don't care if they track me. I just never want to see the results of their precious user data. There is no such thing as a "good" ad as far as I'm concerned.
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Oct 21, 2015 07:54
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StabbinHobo posted:I think you're exactly right that most people are way over focused on how this will affect a few listicle sites. The real conclusion here is that newspapers are finally done-done. They will *never* be able to move to an internet ad strategy even at a tenth of their former selves. It's probable that falling circulation will do for that though. And obviously you don't need as many journalists if all you're doing is feeding wire articles through The Sunomatic Bigotry and Lies machine.
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Oct 21, 2015 11:21
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Google ads are meant to be mutually beneficial to the advertised and advertiser? What a strange notion.
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Oct 21, 2015 11:39
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tsa posted:Most the poo poo you enjoy is supported by advertising. Ever use google, google maps, youtube? In response to the OP, google spends a lot of money to find ways to advertise in a way that is mutually beneficial to both parties and does a fairly good job of it. Yeah. I don't care much for these tbh.
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Oct 21, 2015 15:29
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Google harvest all my data anyway, I don't think I owe them anything else.
XMNN fucked around with this message at 16:26 on Oct 21, 2015 |
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Oct 21, 2015 16:24
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tsa posted:I mean how many people here actually willingly pay for content? You, along with almost everyone else on this site, paid  (or more!) to read and post on an Internet forum.
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Oct 21, 2015 17:55
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Here's an article on the topic: The Case For Micropayments Ultimately, those who pay for something control it. Currently, most websites that don't sell things are funded by advertising. Thus, they will be controlled by advertisers and will become less and less useful to the users. A veritable arms race has already started with more and more annoying advertisements that intrude on the user's attention in an attempt to survive ever-declining click-through rates. Annoying ads are ultimately self-defeating since people will avoid sites that do not give them a positive user experience. The Web is a user-driven phenomenon, where people go online for a purpose. Quite often, that purpose will be to buy something, so there is a great future for commercial sites that sell or support products and services. Traditional products can be charged to credit cards, but many Internet services will require incremental payments rather than large one-time payments. I predict that most sites that are not financed through traditional product sales will move to micropayments in less than two years. Users should be willing to pay, say, one cent per Web page in return for getting quality content and an optimal user experience with less intrusive ads. Once users pay for the pages, then they get to be the site's customers, and the site will design to satisfy the users' needs and not the advertisers' needs. Some analysts say that users don't want to be "nickeled and dimed" while they are online. In fact, the problem is being dimed; not being nickeled. Unfortunately, some sites that currently charge for content do so at a level of a dollar or more per page. Such pricing is obviously unpleasant and will only be acceptable for highly value-added content that users can predict in advance that they will benefit significantly from buying. Regular articles (like this column) cannot be that expensive. Long-distance telephone calls and electricity are both metered services. Many people do feel a tension while they are on the phone, at least while making an international or other expensive call. At the same time, very few people worry about powering a lightbulb, even though doing so costs a few cents per hour. Electricity charges mainly serve to make people turn off the lights when they go to bed. The difference is clearly in the level of pricing: less than a cent per minute and people use as much as they need (electricity) 10 cents per minute, and people ration their usage a little (long distance phone calls) 40 cents per minute, and people ration their usage a lot (international calls) On the Web, users should not worry about a cent per page. If a page is not worth a cent, then you should not download it in the first place. Even as the Web grows in importance in the future, most people will probably access less than 100 non-free pages per day (in June of this year, heavy users visited an average of 46 pages per day). Most users will have $10-$30 in monthly service charges for Web content. During working hours, it is easy to calculate the value of a user's time. If we assume that various overhead costs are about the same as a person's salary, then somebody making $35,000 per year costs their company a cent per second. In other words, every time you access a Web page, it costs your company ten cents just for having you sit and wait while it downloads (assuming that the page design obeys the 10-second response time limit). Add time to actually read the page, and we are looking at a cost of 25 cents to a dollar every time an employee accesses a Web page (with proportionally larger costs for highly-paid staff). In this context, paying a cent (or a few cents) for the content is nothing if it ensures higher-quality pages. Simply waiting for a typical banner ad to download costs about 3 cents in lost employee time, so that could be a possible value of ad-free pages. Of course, much Web access occurs during off-duty hours where people's time is harder to value. But if people value their free time at a third of their working time, then even leisure browsers should be willing to pay a cent to avoid an ad. Subscription Fees Fence You In Acknowledging that Web advertising is not a sufficient business model, several famous websites have announced that they will start charging subscription fees later this year. Unfortunately, subscriptions are not a good idea on the Web. The main problem with subscription fees is that they provide a single choice: between paying nothing (thus getting nothing) and paying a large fee (thus getting everything). Faced with this decision, most users will chose to pay nothing and will go to other sites. It is rare that you will know in advance that you will use a site enough to justify a large fee and the time to register. Thus, most people will only subscribe to very few sites: the Web will be split up into disconnected "docu-islands" and users will be prevented from roaming over the full docuverse. Micropayments lower the threshold and do not require a big decision before users get their initial benefits: thus users will be encouraged to view more pages and spend more. Of course, there will almost certainly be discount schemes for frequent users of a site such that nobody would end up paying more than they would under a subscription plan. It would also be reasonable to make repeat viewing of the same page by the same user virtually free since doing so would discourage pirate copying. Subscriptions work in the physical world because people can sample single issues of publications through newsstand purchases before they have to decide on a subscription. Also, limitations on the physical distribution of printed materials make the magazine or newspaper a reasonable unit of packaging: it would be too difficult to assemble a daily reading list of twenty articles from ten different magazines and ten newspapers. On the Web, it is no problem at all to browse the best pages from many different sites, following recommendations, search engine hits, and cross-references. Subscriptions break the basic principles of the Web: the linking of information and user-controlled navigation. Charging subscriptions is like building a city wall: you keep people out. Authors who want to link to other sites for background information will rarely chose to link to subscription sites because they will know that the majority of their users will not be able to follow the links. Similarly, search engines will not be able to index subscription sites, so users will not find pages that relate to their interests on such sites. Even if authors and search engines do link to a subscription site, users will never go there because the cost of signing up for a subscription and the time needed to do so cannot be justified for the sake of a single desired page. Thus, the site never gets visited by the user; it also never gets the chance to prove its value to that user and convert him or her into a loyal, repeat visitor. In contrast, charging a micro-fee will not prevent links. Presumably, there will be a way for reputable search engines to spider a micro-charging site for free since most sites want to be found. A human author would not be deterred from linking to a fee-based page: if you don't think that a page would be worth a few cents to your readers, then you should not recommend it in the first place. When deciding on what pages to recommend, an author would certainly consider the pricing: cheaper sites would have an advantage, though somebody who had really great content could get away with charging more. A site need not charge the same for all its pages. An opinion piece or a news story might carry lower fees than a thorough review of an entire product category. It is likely that there will be mechanisms for pre-paid links. If, for example, a movie site wanted to refer users to a particularly favorable review on a certain newspaper's site, then it could use a special, digitally signed, link that would authorize the newspaper to charge the micro-fee to the movie site and not to the user. Users would thus be encouraged to follow the link and read the favorable review. In general, it will be necessary to develop a spectrum of user interfaces for micro-payments such that users can follow cheap links with no overhead and without having to register, and yet still be protected from being hit with a large charge without knowing it. I forgot to mention one thing: this is from 1998
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Oct 21, 2015 18:18
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^ imma read that later NK, but had to come post this (edit: that was a poo poo read dammit) http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/21/youtube-red quote:YouTube Red, A $9.99 Site-Wide Ad-Free Subscription With Play Music, Launches Oct 28 google themselves going subscription and cutting out advertising... the reckoning is nigh StabbinHobo fucked around with this message at 19:59 on Oct 21, 2015 |
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Oct 21, 2015 19:49
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Nintendo Kid posted:I forgot to mention one thing: this is from 1998 well, of course, it doesn't mention bitcoin
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Oct 21, 2015 20:50
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If a website that charged a cent per page-load got stuck in a redirection loop or something similar it would be terrible.
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Oct 21, 2015 22:25
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You want to support your favorite websites and see fewer ads? Ask the online ad giant and ye shall receive: Google Contributor My contributions Also, yeah, YouTube Red is pretty awesome. Evil Robot fucked around with this message at 07:53 on Oct 22, 2015 |
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Oct 22, 2015 07:48
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wiregrind posted:If a website that charged a cent per page-load got stuck in a redirection loop or something similar it would be terrible. also, 
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Oct 22, 2015 09:02
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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wiregrind posted:If a website that charged a cent per page-load got stuck in a redirection loop or something similar it would be terrible. I don't think people will go for this, even if the cost is trivial, particularly given the inconvenience of having to sign up and provide payment information individually for each site using the model. I think people swallow charging to get rid of ads a lot better when it's an added value on top of something else, like websites that offer subscriptions that give access to (regularly released) premium content and also happen to remove/reduce the number of ads served. I also wonder how much of an impact ad-blockers are really having, given that the demographics likely to have one installed probably track closely to the demographics that never click on advertising anyway. Wallet fucked around with this message at 15:30 on Oct 23, 2015 |
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Oct 23, 2015 15:28
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Its a weird topic to me because like most of this stuff the individual costs aren't that bad but the issue lies in volumes. If you take SA as an example it has too much volume to be run for free but why is that? It largely comes from various stages of infrastructure extracting a use fee. Someone has to keep the servers up, if you don't want the software to crumble over time you need at least a part time tech, the bandwidth at that scale is sold for sizeable profit for the telecom and is probably equal an expense as anything else. Advertising (and I am deeply.not a fan of it) is a bizzare gentlemen's agreement based on likely use that makes it so a pay structure with true data and accountability doesn't have to be constructed. Honestly its one of my deep reservations about the current capitalist system because if the Ad market ever became less than an assumption of value, if people actually doubted if ads were worth while to spend on the whole system comes down as a house of cards.
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Oct 23, 2015 17:00
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Note that Youtube Red is not the same as RedTube.
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Oct 24, 2015 05:27
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Youtube Red sounds like a good idea until you notice this in that article posted above:quote:Still, there’s bound to be some creators who feel slighted by the deal or coerced into it. And any creator who doesn’t sign the deal for YouTube Red will have their videos on the ad-free old-school YouTube hidden from view. That’s pretty harsh.  That's hosed up.
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Oct 24, 2015 19:16
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| # ? Apr 25, 2024 22:50 |
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A big company strongarming people? Unheard of.
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Oct 24, 2015 20:45
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