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OneEightHundred posted:That said, I don't think ad blockers are going to last once sites serving ads start developing countermeasures that aren't terrible. Why aren't there dynamic DOM/content obfuscators to make it incredibly hard to create working filters? Some major companies are working hard at countering ad-blocking. But fortunately, it's hard, because of reasons that will not go away anytime soon: - ads are served from ad servers - they need to be requested by the actual users from their browsers, for various reasons (unique user tracking, dynamic ad matching by user geo/whatever, etc) - companies that want to purchase ad space from you will definitely want you to use an established ad servers So, the requests to the ad servers that must be done by the browser are the Achilles heel, and they can be blocked trivially, no matter how much they try to obfuscate hostnames. There's no way for publishers to embed the ads in the page, not because of technical reasons, but because of commercial ones. quote:Why are interstitial video ads blockable at all, why aren't you just serving the ad in the video stream? This is called ad-stitching and it's coming to the mainstream soon. However, most advertising companies will want the video to be in an ad server, and by the time ad-stitching becomes mainstream, most video players will probably use something like Media Source Extensions, meaning the streaming protocol will be interpreted at browser level, so the adblocker will have access to the segments being played, and could probably block video segments coming from ad servers.
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Aug 26, 2016 07:33
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OneEightHundred posted:Last time I turned my ad blocker off because a (major) site was complaining it, I got served a malware ad by them the same day. I'm not going to wait for ad agencies to do quality control worth a poo poo, especially when ads capable of running code should have never existed in the first place. http://www.poynter.org/2016/ad-tech-is-broken-heres-how-newsrooms-can-fix-it/407800/ p.s. Read Poynter, it's great news about news.
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Aug 26, 2016 11:44
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Samog posted:probably nobody has pointed that out because it is a really stupid angle Nah. 1 Newspapers make their money because of ads 2 People don't like ads, ergo they use ad blockers 3 Newspapers can no longer make (anywhere near) as much money 4 Newspapers have to downsize 5 Downsizing leads to laying off reporters 6 Fewer reporters mean more duties on the remaining ones and lesser quality 7 Lesser quality means fewer readers 8 Fewer readers means less ad revenue GOTO 3 And then the newspaper goes out of business and everyone wonders why there's no statehouse reporting anymore. WampaLord posted:Ads suck, find a better business model. Ok what do you suggest? Literally any new ad tech gets blocked immediately. What I'm getting at is there actually isn't a solution. The entire model of journalism as we know it is going to die because people whine about ads. I think what will rise up from it will be journalism-as-arthouse-theater. With patrons and donors ala NPR. Does that mean a more or less free press? Who knows. FactsAreUseless posted:This is a huge problem, and a former public media person I really like did a great interview with someone on how the ad bubble is hurting people. This is a good article
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Aug 26, 2016 14:07
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Waffles Inc. posted:
Good. E: it actually won't though because it plays a vital role in maintaining systems of power.
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Aug 26, 2016 14:09
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Waffles Inc. posted:Ok what do you suggest? Literally any new ad tech gets blocked immediately. By "find a different business model" I did not in any way mean "find better ad tech that can't be blocked." I meant find a different business model. Paywalls or a subscription based model have worked for other sites. I'm a premium subscriber to Giant Bomb because they put out content that's worth paying for. Obviously, actual news will be disseminated everywhere freely, you can't charge for news anymore, there's no putting that toothpaste back in the tube. You need to develop personalities that people become attached to, opinion writers or other type of long-form thinkpieces, that people value enough to pay for. It won't work for everyone, but it will probably work for some.
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Aug 26, 2016 14:21
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even with ad blockers, i avoid some news sites because i know they're unoptimized dogshit with auto-play videos that try to blow up my browser. in the context of the internet most news sites are in trouble because the local paper now has to compete with every other local paper with the same AP headlines or it's just a parade of suburbanite-catering local drugs and violence news from the inner city. i live in atlanta and i check the new york times far more often than the atlanta journal-constitution
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Aug 26, 2016 14:28
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Pochoclo posted:So, the requests to the ad servers that must be done by the browser are the Achilles heel, and they can be blocked trivially, no matter how much they try to obfuscate hostnames. There's no way for publishers to embed the ads in the page, not because of technical reasons, but because of commercial ones. FactsAreUseless posted:This is a huge problem, and a former public media person I really like did a great interview with someone on how the ad bubble is hurting people. The lack of quality control is a big problem, but as far as stopping malware, it doesn't really matter in the end because there's no way for an ad provider to look at an ad and tell what it will do if it can run code. That's starting to become a moot point as Flash crawls into the dumpster, but that sure was a lot of trust to burn just to support "shoot the duck to win a prize" ads. OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 15:31 on Aug 26, 2016 |
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Aug 26, 2016 15:15
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WampaLord posted:By "find a different business model" I did not in any way mean "find better ad tech that can't be blocked." This is the real rub though is that yeah, I absolutely agree with this principle on the large scale. I've referred to it as a sort of "podcast" style in internal white papers where it's a combination of content + delivery + personality that makes people subscribe and listen to certain podcasts, for instance. Or yeah you mention Giant Bomb like, if Gerstmann or a couple key others left the site, it would be hard for them to recover. The difficulty for local newspapers is that: - It's a completely and totally different and radical model for any industry vets to understand. I work with veteran newsroom editors who still can't wrap their heads around things like Facebook - Anyone under 25 (I'm being generous, it's more like 35) simply doesn't have any connection whatsoever to their community's paper, so as a brand the Community Paper Daily has no cache with the next wave of media consumers. What that means is that even if we turned the model around TODAY, those new efforts of local papers will be met with apathy from anyone under 30 and confusion/disdain from anyone over 50. - Looks like Giantbomb premium is $5/month or $50/year. Based on their traffic I reckon that makes financial sense for them (possibly given their overhead as well). A daily newspaper has much much much more overhead due to printing, delivery, payroll, etc. A quick audit of some of my papers and our competitors, the cheapest E-Edition Subscription (on sites with "hard" paywalls) is $8.95/mo or $105/year. Home delivery is around $15/mo or so. Older folks are willing to pay for home delivery of the printed paper, but when an e-edition subscription to the NYT is only $5/mo, why on Earth would anyone under 30 be willing to pay $4 more than that for a local paper, especially when so many local papers are no longer daily and have to get their statehouse reporting from the AP (if at all)? The ~~BIG QUESTION~~ for the last decade or so has been: what do people want from local news? And the answer is always inevitably wholly at odds with what they're willing to pay for it.
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Aug 26, 2016 15:57
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qnqnx posted:lol if you think the mods here aren't biased as all hell
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Aug 26, 2016 16:02
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OneEightHundred posted:Last time I turned my ad blocker off because a (major) site was complaining it, I got served a malware ad by them the same day. I'm not going to wait for ad agencies to do quality control worth a poo poo, especially when ads capable of running code should have never existed in the first place. Thing is, the countermeasure for sites bypassing ad blockers is users avoiding the sites. I know it has made me stop visiting my local paper's site (Gannett-owned), because their whine pages about ad blocker use are a detriment to using their site and I can find the AP wire regurgitated elsewhere for 99% of my print news needs. The actual local reporting is, since the Gannett takeover and resulting mass reduction in staff and reportage, better covered by our local television news teams and sites. I think that's our takeaway here. The future of local-level journalism is becoming the website content team for the local TV news stations, who are network and ad supported anyway so have outside funding. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Aug 26, 2016 |
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Aug 26, 2016 23:44
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Liquid Communism posted:Thing is, the countermeasure for sites bypassing ad blockers is users avoiding the sites. Thing is, ad blockers aren't very sophisticated. A whole industry is being brought down by regexes, which e-mail spammers haven't cared about at all for a decade, and their countermeasures mostly being brought down by regexes too. It's not difficult to bypass stupid regex filters, and it's also completely possible to make drop-in filters that transform sites in a way that their contents are incredibly difficult to analyze, which would make ad blocker development too labor-intensive to be worthwhile. It's much less viable to do that if ads are served from another server, but if the choice is to either get away from that paradigm or lose the arms race with what's driving them to extinction, then it will happen.
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Aug 27, 2016 01:53
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As long as the vast majority of the news is just regurgitated AP wire pieces, there will always be a site with a bypass.
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Aug 27, 2016 01:59
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Waffles Inc. posted:Ok what do you suggest?
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Aug 27, 2016 07:18
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Liquid Communism posted:I think that's our takeaway here. The future of local-level journalism is becoming the website content team for the local TV news stations, who are network and ad supported anyway so have outside funding. I know why you might think this, but because of further cord cutting and radical changes to the local affiliate fee structure from the parent networks, local tv stations are in the "we're super hosed" position today that newspapers were in 10 years ago Ask yourself this: why tune into your local CBS station if they didn't have CBS content and only had bottom tier syndicated shows scattered with what amounts to essentially public access shows? That's the 5-10 future of local TV
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Aug 27, 2016 12:23
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Waffles Inc. posted:Ask yourself this: why tune into your local CBS station if they didn't have CBS content and only had bottom tier syndicated shows scattered with what amounts to essentially public access shows? That's the 5-10 future of local TV The whole idea of a TV station with a full-day programming schedule in general will probably become obsolete as access stops being the main bottleneck and on-demand programming will probably reduce the emphasis on time slot competition. "Local TV stations" are probably hosed, but independent broadcasting is more viable than it's ever been.
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Aug 27, 2016 19:10
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Waffles Inc. posted:I know why you might think this, but because of further cord cutting and radical changes to the local affiliate fee structure from the parent networks, local tv stations are in the "we're super hosed" position today that newspapers were in 10 years ago Given that I literally only watch network TV for the news and sporting events.... but I'm an outlier, I know. It's already becoming a problem, I noticed last week that the weekend morning blocks on half of my local stations are infomercials now, and the same thing is happening on a lot of the Direct TV channels we get at work, where half or more of the 24 hour cycle is just infomercials.
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Aug 27, 2016 19:57
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Popular Thug Drink posted:even with ad blockers, i avoid some news sites because i know they're unoptimized dogshit with auto-play videos that try to blow up my browser. in the context of the internet most news sites are in trouble because the local paper now has to compete with every other local paper with the same AP headlines or it's just a parade of suburbanite-catering local drugs and violence news from the inner city. i live in atlanta and i check the new york times far more often than the atlanta journal-constitution My local paper has an impossible to navigate garbage website for free, and the easy to use site you have to pay for. It almost made my consider paying.
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Aug 27, 2016 20:39
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OneEightHundred posted:The whole idea of a TV station with a full-day programming schedule in general will probably become obsolete as access stops being the main bottleneck and on-demand programming will probably reduce the emphasis on time slot competition. "Local TV stations" are probably hosed, but independent broadcasting is more viable than it's ever been. I totally agree, and I think that's fairly neat. I'm 28 and I find it fascinating that in a few years if I have kids they might not truly grasp the concept of a "tv channel"
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Aug 29, 2016 14:42
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I think blaming the consumers for not wanting to pay is a wrong-headed approach. People respond to incentives, whether that matches one's beliefs on what's right or wrong or not. Trying to incentivize people to pay again has resulted in the clickbait journalism described in this thread. I think that for high-quality journalism to survive, it will have to shift to a non-profit model like Brown Moses's organization or one that is heavily subsidized by the government or both. Not to fall into the fallacy of arguing that the wisdom of crowds can't be wrong, but when I see consumer's lack of desire to pay blamed for the fall of journalism I see the laziness of the average American blamed for the obesity epidemic. People are pretty much the same creatures they were fifty years ago, one hundred years ago. They haven't changed; their environment has.
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Aug 29, 2016 16:58
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Isn't ProPublica another good example of this?
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Aug 29, 2016 19:15
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OneEightHundred posted:That said, I don't think ad blockers are going to last once sites serving ads start developing countermeasures that aren't terrible. Why aren't there dynamic DOM/content obfuscators to make it incredibly hard to create working filters? Why are interstitial video ads blockable at all, why aren't you just serving the ad in the video stream? Newspapers could pull ads back in-house, sell directly. They'd be both harder to block (single server origin) and less important to be blocked - it's much easier to write a rule to block an entire ad network than rules for every loving website that serves it's own, especially non-obnoxious ads. None of the adblockers filter out the SA in-house ads, but you have to specifically whitelist the network ads on the same page to support the forums. Coincidentally, those site ads are about the only ads in the entire world I click on, (when it's not loving agro-gator), because they're site-relevant. Since you're selling directly you're not buying 10x resold ads from the literal russian mafia promoting "silently install this malware and join our botnet". Again - scale. Easier to slip malware into the ad-network responsibility obfuscation chain and hit everyone than to go to every loving website and buy a block of ads with them that goes in their format. Local newspapers could make money locally advertising local businesses to their local readers. Has that ever been tried before?
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Aug 30, 2016 04:49
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I've read an excellent interview with Steven Lee Myers where he talked briefly about how his job has changed since he started working, I will try to translate the part where he talked about the change the best I can( it was published in Czech magazine) . Q: You have been working in New York Times for 27 years, how much has the foreign reporting changed over time? A: Not a lot of people today realize it, but there was a time when there were no mobile phones. And the technology has changed everything. When I was just starting , it was usually that in the morning I got out of office, during the day you were working, and you wrote an article in the evening, usually from a bar. Sent it through telegram to the office and that was it. Editor would either run into you or he wouldn't. But mostly he wouldn't. Today its a never-ending, immediat interaction. Q: For example? A: In the year 1999 American ship was hit by a bomb near the Yemeni shore. I was just sitting at a dentist and he had a TV on. So I asked her to hurry, because I have to go to work, so I was working whole day and I wrote a thorough article about. I even got a correspondent from Egypt, to inform us about situation there. But I had whole day. It was a luxury. To find out who was there, how many people have died, why was the ship there, all these questions. Today I would - no joke - have to call speaker for the Secretary of Defense from the dentist chair and quickly write an article that a ship near Yemen has a problem. And before dentist would pull out my tooth, I would have to write an actualized article. Today, the whole world is reporting live. That's some of it, let me know if it's readable.
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Aug 30, 2016 12:57
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Xibanya posted:I think that for high-quality journalism to survive, it will have to shift to a non-profit model like Brown Moses's organization or one that is heavily subsidized by the government or both.
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Aug 30, 2016 14:35
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Harik posted:Because the number one problem in advertising: Nobody sells their own ads, they buy from an ad network. The ad network doesn't trust you to deliver the content, so it has to come from their server. When it comes from a known ad-server, you can filter it out. Of course, running an ad network sucks, much easier to just bulk-sell to people (who bulk-resell, who bulk resell, who bulk resell...) so nobody has any loving idea what's actually being run. As far as this goes, you make some good points but it's not entirely accurate of the reality for mid-sized local papers. The industry standard for ad serving is a Google product called Doubleclick for Publishers (DFP) and the core concept is you put bits of code (ad tags) on a page and you can then traffick ads to them. So a local newspaper salesperson could sell Bob's Taco Shop a print ad and then 50k impressions in a 728x90 on the home page of the site over the course of three weeks. A member of my team at the corporate level would get that insertion order and then traffick the ad through the ad server to that particular page. Where ad networks come in is when there's any inventory leftover--we call this "backfill". The primary source of backfill comes from another Google product, AdX. AdX basically acts as a middle-man who negotiates with advertisers and brokers to buy/sell impression inventory to them. That's where the quality control comes in. Google does have *some* quality standards and guidelines for ad creatives, but the volume of ads is so huge that it's impossible to catch everything. The biggest problem though, is that if not for DFP or some other ad server, local papers would have to hard code every single ad, which is unsustainable given how ads are currently sold (not to mention the immense cost of in time and brainpower to retrain people in a profession where getting them to sell digital things is already a massive chore). And anyway, adblockers will always be able to block ad servers. Xibanya posted:Not to fall into the fallacy of arguing that the wisdom of crowds can't be wrong, but when I see consumer's lack of desire to pay blamed for the fall of journalism I see the laziness of the average American blamed for the obesity epidemic. People are pretty much the same creatures they were fifty years ago, one hundred years ago. They haven't changed; their environment has. I totally get this, but I think it's slightly more nuanced. I think the fact that people don't read print newspapers anymore means something. Even if it's something as simple as the fact that printed papers need(ed) to be curated, where online content doesn't. But I do think it's deeper than that. The printed paper used to be a shared community touchstone; people could name the local movie reviewer, or good a good idea of the paper's editorial slant, and that allowed for open social discussion. Before people go on about how newspapers have always been partisan and this and that--yes yes I know. What I'm getting at though is that yeah, the environment has changed by bringing people the idea of choice in their news source. Even thirty years ago to learn about an event, you had what, 5 sources?: 1. Local newspaper 2. One of a few large national papers (NYT, WSJ, USA Today) 3. Local radio 4. Local nightly news 5. CNN/Headline News You had to be exposed to the ads because all of those (ad supported) places were literally the only places you could go. It's why newspapers used to make absurd amounts of money. The problem is that once people get a taste of a thing without advertising, they just don't go back. Here's a question to y'all who use ad blockers on newspaper sites: what is your ideal ad experience? By that I mean if you're being honest is there any communication a newspaper can make to you that would make you go "oh ok, I'll whitelist you".
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Aug 30, 2016 14:40
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Waffles Inc. posted:Here's a question to y'all who use ad blockers on newspaper sites: what is your ideal ad experience? By that I mean if you're being honest is there any communication a newspaper can make to you that would make you go "oh ok, I'll whitelist you". It's a chicken and egg problem for me. The only sites in general I bother giving the chance to display ads are those I've been convinced to use regularly due to the content I've already gotten used to checking back for regularly, and my expectations for when I do that are that the website has the same functionality it did when I was blocking ads. Unfortunately every time I've done that the page loaded considerably slower. I also prefer fark.com generally for news aggregation over specific news sites, which is probably not the typical consumer a newspaper wants to hear from. Oh and I hate autoplaying video even if it's related to the story because generally there's a transcript I'd much rather read and get through more quickly that the newscaster quickly becomes a distraction from, let alone the websites that load video ads in the sidebar which need to die in a fire. The long and the short of it is that I honestly don't know other than have high quality content that word of mouth can show me is worth coming back on a regular basis for and make the experience painless with or without adblock. Personal appeals from people within a local paper would do the trick too for at least getting me to give that specific website a chance (and feel like I have someone to talk to if it's not as great as promised). Ignatius M. Meen fucked around with this message at 16:19 on Aug 30, 2016 |
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Aug 30, 2016 16:14
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Waffles Inc. posted:Here's a question to y'all who use ad blockers on newspaper sites: what is your ideal ad experience? By that I mean if you're being honest is there any communication a newspaper can make to you that would make you go "oh ok, I'll whitelist you". To be honest, if I'm doing anything other than shopping my ideal ad experience involves zero ads. Sorry. =( edit for more content: I think in general I'm just done with paying (with attention or currency) for a lot of media, at least for my own consumption. I'd be interested to know how Forbes' anti-adblock wall has gone for them because even though it's not hard to get around I just find myself not reading Forbes articles and not feeling like I've missed anything out of my life. wateroverfire fucked around with this message at 20:08 on Aug 30, 2016 |
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Aug 30, 2016 19:59
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wateroverfire posted:To be honest, if I'm doing anything other than shopping my ideal ad experience involves zero ads. Sorry. =( I have a hunch that the average forbes reader does not use and is not aware of ad-blocking.
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Aug 30, 2016 20:16
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Alain Badposts posted:I have a hunch that the average forbes reader does not use and is not aware of ad-blocking. Yeah this is likely the case. Like, I'm overstating adblock for our own sites because at the local newspaper level we're only seeing about 8% of users using an adblocker. To put it another way: ad blockers themselves are not a revenue problem for us (by us I mean local newspaper websites). The larger problem is that young people don't go to local newspaper websites. Ad blockers are a more existential threat In the interest of furthering the discussion, here are some numbers straight from a Google Analytics rollup account of every one of our newspaper sites  It gets even funnier when you look at the mobile vs. desktop breakdown. Our core constituency is literally dying. And I couldn't edit it enough to hide any distinguishing data, but of the 10 pages in August with the most pageviews it looks like this: Homepage URL Homepage URL Obituary Page Homepage URL Obituary Page Obituary Page Homepage URL Homepage URL Newspaper E-Edition Newspaper E-Edition Our readership is dying and all they want to read is the obituaries. Local news is a stark loving landscape, y'all.
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Aug 30, 2016 21:25
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Too pessimistic, the obituary readers are probably creditors.
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Aug 31, 2016 06:33
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quote:Sam Allardyce used his position as England manager to negotiate a £400,000 deal and offered advice to businessmen on how to “get around” FA rules on player transfers, The Telegraph can disclose. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/26/exclusive-investigation-england-manager-sam-allardyce-for-sale/ This story has recently broke in the UK implicating the England coach in a scam that was unearthed by investigative journalism. There was a lot of talk in the beginning of this thread about how investigative journalism is becoming less common, so thought this would be a good place to bring it up, as there was an undercover operation here to expose football officials and their dodgy dealings which I think is noble, even if it does smack a bit of entrapment. One of the main arguments of this thread has been about how investigative journalism doesn't sell newspapers, but this type of headline has captured Britain's imagination and I wouldn't be surprised to see this reflected in Telegraph sales and ad clicks over the last 48 hours.
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Sep 28, 2016 16:39
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I think what we're seeing is that advertising doesn't actually work, or barely works, at least traditional commercials like TV & radio spots, banner ads, billboards, and so on. The people who use ad blockers are savvy enough that they were always going to ignore every ad anyway. They're null and, frankly, never should have been included in the calculus in the first place. But, then, any adult who's not a gibbering halfwit (which I'll go ahead and say is almost all of them) was never going to have their purchasing decisions consciously swayed by a drat advertisement. That's commonly cited as a reason spam email scams are so blatantly incoherent: they're only targeting the very easily-fooled, because they're the ones that CAN be fooled. When's the last time you can recall actually buying something because you were inspired by an advertisement? Was it when you were an actual child, begging your parents to buy you that cool thing you saw on TV? For all their clever turns-of-phrase and celebrity cameos, I don't buy pistachios, I buy sunflower seeds, and I've never seen one ad for those. Even if you weren't someone who was going to instinctively discredit any advertisement on the basis of its inherent, transparent bias, we are supersaturated. When one viewer sees or hears maybe a hundred or more ads in a day, how effective can the average ad be on them? At that point, it's even worse than a straightforward fractional or exponential dilution: you've fatigued your theoretical rube to where they tune it all out despite their inclinations. If they didn't, they'd be a lunatic! Can you even imagine somebody who goes through their day just wholesale believing any and all advertisements that come their way? There are outliers, particularly effective and memorable ads, but those are by definition few and far between, and even there their statistics don't break through to even half a percentage point. Despite Apple's famous and remembered "1984" commercial, the original Macintosh was still a miserable failure grand enough to lead to the canning of Steve Jobs. The most you can say for it is that it made more people simply aware that the Macintosh existed and thus that the ceiling of possible success was raised, since you can't consider purchasing an item you don't even know about. But it hasn't been for long that we HAVE been able to measure the effects of advertising, and we still aren't really. It's the classic problem of economic analysis. The Nielsens and subscription numbers will only tell you how many viewers you got out in front of, and sales figures are just too noisy to single out any one factor. Advertising makes intuitive sense: You've got a money-losing proposition, the value of which lies in social intangibles, such as art or journalism. I have a profitable proposition, but I'm only the supply half of the supply/demand axis. I subsidize you, you endorse or raise awareness of my product to your audience in exchange, they go out and buy my poo poo, the money moves in a circle and we all get stinking rich. That certainly seems like something that could work, and maybe the issue only comes in with the massive upscaling. So, we established not just one massive industry on top of this concept, but also laid many other industries on top of that industry's bedrock. Now that we're in the era of Big Data and internet cookies, we're getting a reality check. Step 3 in that sequence doesn't fire like it's supposed to, and we know that mostly thanks to the votes of no-confidence that are ad blockers and DVR fast-forwarding. The model, and thus the system, is bogus. People try to talk like it is enough just to raise the profile of an item (and I'll concede that sometimes it may be,) or that commercials have deep, subconscious, borderline-mystical effects, but these explanations strike me as desperate rationalizations along the same lines as that jerk that always says "you're talking about it and that means it's working." The fact is that more effective marketing travels through different channels than bastardized patronage, be they novel or classic (changing the label on the bottle, rearranging the items in the store, old-fashioned salesmanship, word-of-mouth.) We're just kinda lucky that there's so much institutional inertia on all sides of the equation here, and that it's not as obviously broken as it could be or could become. The status quo will hold as best it can while we keep lying to ourselves and everybody around us, but it's all downhill from here on out. There is ultimately no salvaging the advertising-based model. It's business, not charity. To compound the issue, what IS a new development and not just old facts coming slowly to light is that people are less willing to pay for media than ever before. The subscription or purchase-once-and-own model won't work very well either in that environment, sadly, even in conjunction with each other and the above. What is left is to admit that many activities and goods of value and importance are almost completely devoid of profitability and need funded without the expectation of returns in cash form, which is... a remarkably hard concept for our culture to embrace. There a number of options along those lines, none of which are ideal: public funding (which, for journalism especially, comes with its own hornet's nest of issues that easily outstrip the Clickbait Menace,) donations, large and small (which seems to work okay, but necessitates a great scaling-down and leaves you extra-susceptible to economic downturns,) or turning it into a hobby (another hornet's nest.) That, or we exempt journalists from the need for money. Show a legitimate press badge, you eat free, you don't have to pay rent, and people will give you all the necessary equipment you need with a nod and their sincerest gratitude. Somehow, I don't think that model's likely to catch on. edit: Or alternatively, advertisements will never go away, because They Live is a documentary and the aliens need to get the "OBEY", "THIS IS YOUR GOD" signals out to Rowdy Roddy Piper somehow. That's your best-case scenario. Chwoka fucked around with this message at 20:57 on Sep 30, 2016 |
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Sep 30, 2016 20:24
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Chwoka posted:To compound the issue, what IS a new development and not just old facts coming slowly to light is that people are less willing to pay for media than ever before. The subscription or purchase-once-and-own model won't work very well either in that environment, sadly, even in conjunction with each other and the above. What is left is to admit that many activities and goods of value and importance are almost completely devoid of profitability and need funded without the expectation of returns in cash form, which is... a remarkably hard concept for our culture to embrace. There a number of options along those lines, none of which are ideal: public funding (which, for journalism especially, comes with its own hornet's nest of issues that easily outstrip the Clickbait Menace,) donations, large and small (which seems to work okay, but necessitates a great scaling-down and leaves you extra-susceptible to economic downturns,) or turning it into a hobby (another hornet's nest.) That, or we exempt journalists from the need for money. Show a legitimate press badge, you eat free, you don't have to pay rent, and people will give you all the necessary equipment you need with a nod and their sincerest gratitude. Somehow, I don't think that model's likely to catch on. GMI and go whole hog on citizen blogger/jouranalists.
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Sep 30, 2016 20:44
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I'm very dubious of dismissing the entire field of advertising. Maybe no one would have their decision "consciously" influenced by ads, but that's also not the point. I don't use an ad blocker because I'm somehow immune to ads already but because ads are annoying.
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Sep 30, 2016 21:42
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Badger of Basra posted:I'm very dubious of dismissing the entire field of advertising. Maybe no one would have their decision "consciously" influenced by ads, but that's also not the point. I don't use an ad blocker because I'm somehow immune to ads already but because ads are annoying. The old joke that "half of all advertising spending is waste, but no one knows which half" contains a lot of truth, imo.
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Sep 30, 2016 23:18
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I've definitely been influenced by an ad when it brought to my attention a brand I wasn't aware of yet for something I was already seeking to buy, so advertising isn't completely useless, but its efficacy is definitely not captured too accurately by current metrics.
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Sep 30, 2016 23:57
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Xibanya posted:I've definitely been influenced by an ad when it brought to my attention a brand I wasn't aware of yet for something I was already seeking to buy, so advertising isn't completely useless, but its efficacy is definitely not captured too accurately by current metrics. To paraphrase a great ad man, Dave Trott in the talks he often gives: "Let's say it's a given that we see about 1,000 advertising messages a day, on the TV, the bus, in the newspaper etc. As a show of hands, how many of you can remember 1 from yesterday?" At this point, about a dozen people will raise their hand. "So if there are a 100 people in here, and only 12 ads are remembered, that's 12 out of 100,000 ads that are being remembered. Now you see the scale of the problem". He says this to illustrate not that advertising itself doesn't work, but that it's being done badly. It's boring, it doesn't engage with people. It doesn't jump off the page and get into the language like good advertising does. In the case of Adblock, it's annoying and it stops us from using the websites we want to use. Unfortunately for Advertising, it's going to have to work harder if it wants to stay relevant. There's one example of an ad that made me act as soon as I saw it, and this is brilliant. It's 10:30pm, I'm out with my partner in Bristol and we're about to get the bus back to our friend's house. I don't know Bristol, so I open Google Maps, I type in the address and it gives me all the bus options (which are slightly daunting, but I fancy the challenge and I can't go far wrong), and underneath all those options is an Ad for Uber. It tells me how much quicker it will be than the bus, I know I'm not going to get lost, and I feel confident that an Uber driver isn't going to kidnap me, and the cherry on the cake: your first ride is free. Brilliant placement, great timing, great offer. I'm sold. Most modern advertising could learn a lot from that.
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Oct 3, 2016 16:59
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A lot of advertising isn't based on being active, but being the first thing you think of. For example: car insurance. Insurance is in all likelihood going to be about the same no matter where you go. So how do people decide where to go? Usually by the first company they can think of. That's why you have a million Geico, Nationwide, and Liberty Mutual ads everywhere.
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Oct 3, 2016 17:50
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The DPRK posted:There's one example of an ad that made me act as soon as I saw it, and this is brilliant. It's 10:30pm, I'm out with my partner in Bristol and we're about to get the bus back to our friend's house. I don't know Bristol, so I open Google Maps, I type in the address and it gives me all the bus options (which are slightly daunting, but I fancy the challenge and I can't go far wrong), and underneath all those options is an Ad for Uber. It tells me how much quicker it will be than the bus, I know I'm not going to get lost, and I feel confident that an Uber driver isn't going to kidnap me, and the cherry on the cake: your first ride is free. Brilliant placement, great timing, great offer. I'm sold.
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Oct 3, 2016 19:11
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Waffles Inc. posted:Here's a question to y'all who use ad blockers on newspaper sites: what is your ideal ad experience? By that I mean if you're being honest is there any communication a newspaper can make to you that would make you go "oh ok, I'll whitelist you". Mostly I just want ads that don't cripple my ability to actually see the content I'm there for. *Maybe* something brief like those "skip after 5 seconds" YouTube ads is tolerable, but don't play pop-up hell or cover my drat screen with an ad with a tiny little x that can't be clicked or make the page take 5 minutes to load, 4.5 minutes being all the ad crap. Really what turns me off on online ads is there's a culture of outright deception and trickery behind them, feels like. Not counting the whole "is this gonna infect my PC?" roulette (which is bad enough to perma-sour me on even innocent ads really), there seems to be a lot of ads designed to trick you into clicking on them somehow. The tiny little x to close ads I mentioned above for example seem tailor made to force you to accidently click on the rest of the ad and get dragged to the page, and there's all sorts of other "cleverness" people come off with that infuriates me. I literally want to strangle the rear end in a top hat who came up with the Santander Bank ads on YouTube which were designed to register the "skip after 5 seconds" click as a click to go to the website, and there's always something else people come up with as a way to force you to view their "optional" ad. Why the gently caress does anyone think this is a good way to do business? The only thing those kinds of ads convince me of is that the advertised company/product is being offered by a manipulative and downright unethical rear end in a top hat who I should never trust; how does this encourage me to buy from them? It's really worse than TV ads; there at least it feels like a regulated "agreement" of spending X amount of time waiting for content with reasonable conditions. Sure, I PREFER to see TV without ads, but it doesn't feel unfair to deal with them. But if TV advertising worked the way Internet advertising seems to, you'd have to deal with having your channels being flipped without permission, getting tied to your chair so you couldn't get up, and every so often some criminal prick would blow out your speakers or run up your cable bill with very little you could do to stop it. Internet ads aren't just a business with a bad product, they're a business outright hostile to me. How could I possibly trust them? And since I have absolutely no way of knowing who has reasonable advertising policies before I allow ads (or will keep said reasonable policies, especially since sites rarely have full control of their ads), how can I justify whitelisting any site really? I realize people need to make a living, but I'm not going to let myself be abused so someone can make $$ no matter how much I like them. Maybe tighter regulations would help build the trust, but don't see how you promulgate or enforce those over the whole Internet, even assuming they weren't abused for censorship.
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Oct 4, 2016 07:29
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Waffles Inc. posted:Yeah this is likely the case. Like, I'm overstating adblock for our own sites because at the local newspaper level we're only seeing about 8% of users using an adblocker. To put it another way: ad blockers themselves are not a revenue problem for us (by us I mean local newspaper websites). The larger problem is that young people don't go to local newspaper websites. Ad blockers are a more existential threat What would you say is the value add of local news? Like...from the inside perspective, what do newsmen think is going to attract people?
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Oct 4, 2016 13:43
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