> An important part of the QA process is ensuring that not just the creative, but the advertiser is relevant to our audience. Every single ad to appear on any of our sites is vetted by the operations team.* We check copy and content on the ads as well as the landing pages. What we repeatedly ask ourselves in this QA process is quite simple: is this relevant to users?
If other sites did this, maybe ad blocking wouldn't be so prevalent.
Add content relevancy is one part of the equation, but not allowing third parties to track my actions on your site is the other, more important part of the equation (to me at least). Privacy Badger is the only adBlocker I use (besides having flash not run automatically), so I will happily view ads that don't involve tracking me.
The state of website statistics is a sad one. The better site analysis engines were bought years ago by Google (becoming Google analytics) and the like and the lesser ones died. A few are still around kicking, including some quite good ones, but most advertisers, sponsors, etc will only trust third party analytics in determining advertising rates, sponsorship levels, etc.
Essentially, users who block analytics become a net negative for many sites as they add no positive value to the site operator and are just a drain on resources. There are exceptions, of course, in the case of user-generated content participation where submitting content, making comments, etc may be a draw to revenue-generating visitors. But on many sites, that user blocking ads and analytics is only hurting the site operator. If it becomes more popular - say as the default setting in an ad blocker - I'd wager we'll have some sites start to block those users at some point in the future.
I can't help but wonder...how many real-world businesses could benefit from the same type of invasive tracking that online businesses seem to think they have a right to subject us with?
For some reason, though, we don't allow that sort of privacy violation in our actual lives.
However, most real-world businesses manage to do quite well even with our rude dismissals of their desire to track us.
> For some reason, though, we don't allow that sort of privacy violation in our actual lives.
Not so much. Your phone carrier tracks all your movements. Your credit car company knows every swipe. Your bank sells your information to retailers. The leasing you did on that car got you into a database of new car owners. Right after you married you started getting offers from Home Depot. And with your mortgage you started getting calls from brokers, asking if you want to put it back in the rental market...
The "real world" may not track your anonymous movements yet (NYPD cameras, anyone?), but other than that I don't see much difference. In fact it's the opposite; the non-online world is more opaque, harder to opt-out, and much more invasive, as it usually involves PII.
Another difference to consider: the motivations. In the 'real world', we used to pay for goods. In the past you'd walk to your newsstand and buy the NYT edition for $2.50 (with ads). Nowadays, people feel outraged[1] if the exact same goods aren't given away for free (as in beer), and with no trackers, no registration, no ads, no anti-ad-blockers.
Even on paper magazines people were fed up and pushing back some time ago, I remember seeing 'this magazine is less than 50%'ads' or the like as a pride point, so at some point salesmen thought that was a good enough differentiator
> I can't help but wonder...how many real-world businesses could benefit from the same type of invasive tracking that online businesses seem to think they have a right to subject us with?
> For some reason, though, we don't allow that sort of privacy violation in our actual lives.
> However, most real-world businesses manage to do quite well even with our rude dismissals of their desire to track us.
Are you sure you're not being tracked? There are technologies like Prism[1] that allow stores to track people, where they go, how long they stay there, etc. On the lower-tech side, point cards[2] are also used to track purchasing habits.
Um ... it doesn't work exactly like that. If you leave your phone's WiFi turned on, you and your friends will be using Nomi sometime soon (so exciting, amiright?)! You see, the store/eatery/prison/airline/casino/whatever just puts the Nomi WiFi access point on their premises, and when you come in your phone tries to connect to it, and BLAMO, it harvests your MAC address. Now they have a unique identifier for 'you' (your phone's MAC), and they can keep track of how many times you go into the place, where else you like to go, what sections you like to browse (just a few more of the gadgets scattered in the store), if you've been to their marketing events, etc. etc. etc. Oh hey, since it harvests your MAC address, they can also tell who manufactured your phone. 'you' have an apple phone? Sweet! We've got ourselves a (probably) high-end customer.
Also, because no one gives a damn, your phone will also shout out the names and MACs of access points it's connected to before. I have no idea why Android/iOS hasn't disabled / geofenced that yet.
Phones do this to authenticate faster to known access points.
Instead of waiting for an SSID beacon, they just broadcast their known networks and if one of them is in range, the AP will reply. It's all driven by user demand to connect to their WiFi network faster.
Also, AFIAK, this is required behaviour to join networks that don't broadcast their SSID (e.g. "hidden" networks).
I see two solutions to this problem, but neither are really tenable from a user perspective:
1) run the GPS all the time and geotag known APs[1]
2) leave the WiFi radio on all the time and passively listen for SSID broadcasts[2]
[1] doesn't work indoors, or if the location of an AP is changed (e.g. 4G hotspot). Will also have significant impact on battery runtime, and likely to be abused by ad companies
[2] will have significant impact on battery runtime
It's hard to solve this part of the problem using current wifi protocols. I think this is closely related to other problems that people have studied and I'm sure protocol improvements could be made using public-key crypto or HMAC. As an off-the-cuff example, when you join an encrypted network, it could tell you (over the encrypted channel) a shared secret to use when reconnecting. Then you could broadcast HMAC(secret, current time) or (nonce, HMAC(secret time, nonce)) and if the wifi network recognizes one of those broadcasts as directed to it, it could reply. An eavesdropper who doesn't know the secret wouldn't be able to determine which base station the mobile device was trying to contact.
> For some reason, though, we don't allow that sort of privacy violation in our actual lives.
Actually, people do. Take for example supermarket loyalty cards: every purchase is logged. It compounds with online tracking too: when you then login to the online site to check your points or view offers, the information about your purchases can then be linked to web analytics and other profiled data.
> how many real-world businesses could benefit from the same type of invasive tracking ... we don't allow that sort of privacy violation in our actual lives.
We do, but apparently many even on HN don't realize it. Brick and mortar stores track customers through their phone signals (providing unique identifiers and location), cameras that can track where people go in the store and even what they look at, and more. Here are a couple of good resources where I've learned about it (though they cover much more than those issues):
> I can't help but wonder...how many real-world businesses could benefit from the same type of invasive tracking that online businesses seem to think they have a right to subject us with?
Most companies that collect data use it to make money. That's not true ONLY on the web.
> For some reason, though, we don't allow that sort of privacy violation in our actual lives.
Really? Do you have any grocery store loyalty cards? Do you use a credit card? That data is shared and sold. Do you do any activities that show up on your credit report, like pay bills to a utility? That data is shared and sold. That's how the credit rating agency got it. Do you have a set-top box? It's probably selling data on what shows you watch. Do you have a cell phone? Location data.
If you actually restricted yourself to purchases which don't involve anybody who shares your data, you'd be living in a cave.
"but most advertisers, sponsors, etc will only trust third party analytics in determining advertising rates, sponsorship levels, etc."
Then you are losing at the negotiation table and trying to blame "the users". Those advertisers are simply wrong. No 3rd party analytics service can provide more accurate data than server logs. None.
"I'd wager we'll have some sites start to block those users at some point in the future."
And I would wager that it won't help their business increase revenue or decrease expenses.
> No 3rd party analytics service can provide more accurate data than server logs. None
This is very, very wrong. Parsing server logs can give you a lot of data but parsing the data directly from the client (ala Google analytics) can give you so, so much more. Data about the client itself, demographic information (beyond ip address locations) and information regarding their interests when hooked into a system that's present on many other sites.
Server logs are a great starting point but the amount of relevant data a third party service can give you is so great most are willing to make the tradeoff and use them. I'd rather have all analytics in house but that extra data can be invaluable.
Yes, an individual website can't track you throughout the whole web and compile a demographics and interest dosier. Only advertisers have that capability because their Javascript is served up by thousands of websites. But that's the whole conondrum! Advertisers want to track, people do not want to be tracked, thus adblockers.
But it's not just that. Server logs do not give you other information that client tracking can gain such as regional and and client information.
In all honestly I would be fine losing some of the information that only comes from creating a dossier on a user and bringing the tracking in house it's just a lot of work and services like Google Analytics give that to you for free so it's hard to just ignore especially at a start-up.
> No 3rd party analytics service can provide more accurate data than server logs. None.
Google Analytics provides information that goes far beyond what the server logs can tell you. The logs will give you the most accurate view of the requests to your server but that's all. You can't get insights about bounce rate, behavior, goal completion, conversion rate, etc. from server logs. To rely only on mining server logs would be a huge step backwards for a business.
If each request has a session cookie in the log it's easy to track a user's movements through your site, so you can figure out bounce rate, conversion etc no problem. Things like Piwik have pretty dashboards to generate whatever reports you want from server logs.
Piwik looks interesting. I'm playing with the demo right now. It does look like they support goals[1]. I can't know for sure how effective it is but I will concede that log analytics is more powerful than I believed.
Designing good session identifiers for logging is not trivial. More importantly, with a lot of events happening in javascript, a lot of user interactions are occurring beyond the visibility of your server logs. Tracking js events is also clearly possible, but again, non trivial. I've been in more than one situation where we trusted GA more than our own logs.
Some stuff, but if you want to emulate GA events you'll have to also implement some additional frontend code and a backend to log those events. I hope this is the direction that we see analytics moving. The information analytics provides developers is great, but I don't like the fact that this information is usually given to multiple third parties by using their analytics engines.
No they're not. As an example, bounces are commonly the last page where the user left without doing anything. How can you tell that from a simple server log line that says the page loaded? You cant see if they clicked on something or how long they read the page or what other actions they took.
Most sites today also go far beyond basic pageviews and track all kinds of events on the page like scrolling rates, reading time, what other headlines you clicked or hovered over, etc. This is not possible without JS tracking.
This is naive. You can't use raw server logs without filtering out bots.
Also, advertisers don't trust site owners to report what's in their server logs accurately, when there is money on the line. It would be easy to cheat.
So that's why you need an independent third party.
It isn't so much a technical issue as it is one of trust and efficiency. GA is familiar, and easy to compare across different sites without worrying about how exactly they're mining their logs. At best, they have to figure out how to make efficient comparisons. At worst, they have to worry about sites inflating their numbers--either through fabrication or just optimistic tweaking of how data is presented. With GA, they don't really have to worry about outright fabrication or reliability. And while there's a ton of data to be teased out of server logs--especially if someone tries to correlate it with other user data they already have--for most advertisers, that doesn't really matter. They don't want to invest the time it'd take to make use of it with all potential properties they want to advertise on.
Say what you will about GA and privacy issues, there's a reason why it's become so common place. Not just for site owners, but advertisers as well.
> No 3rd party analytics service can provide more accurate data than server logs. None.
For raw pageviews, sure, but try tracking a SPA with server logs, or seeing what the most common screen resolutions are, or seeing what percent of your visitors have Flash installed.
Server logs are easily faked. There's a lot of mistrust in the industry (well-earned, due to many scams in the past). Third-party web analytics providers, implemented via plain-text JavaScript anybody can audit, are fair.
(That ignores of course that server logs are virtually useless for determining a user's behavior on a single page app. It's not the ONLY reason server logs aren't used, but perhaps is the most important reason.)
Piwik, certainly when self-hosted, is considered completely fine by most people concerned about these issues. It's still blocked when privacy tools are set to max, which is understandable. But it's viewed as perfectly ethical.
Self-hosted Piwik is _probably_ privacy compliant for most people. But it's a steaming pile of shite. Try Snowplow Analytics instead and host that yourself.
None of the things you listed would be things most consumers care to block. In fact most are things they either want or could benefit from (analytics.)
most consumers want analytics, profiling, retargeting and tracking?
The only time I've heard "normal folks" talk about these sorts of things, its about how creepy they are, never once about "how that great ad was exactly what they wanted". Thats assuming any awareness on their part at all.
Silent ignorance/indifference isn't consent, apporval or desire. People who pretend it is are almost certainly making self serving arguements.
I like the fact that Privacy Badger blocks analytics scripts and CDN cookies
I don't want to send my StackOverflow activity to multiple different third parties. I am fine with each website operator having my traffic info for that site. I am less fine with them sharing that traffic info with third parties who can easily aggregate that information across most sites that I visit.
Whenever you post an image on a question or answer, and it's not already hosted somewhere else, i.e. you're uploading from your computer, that image is hosted on imgur. Stack Exchange has a deal with them like that. You can see this on the image upload dialog.
I think the dirty not-so-secret of advertising is that for most content on the web the ads are awful, poorly targeted (or at best basic retargeted). Many content producers want to focus on building great content, so advertisers go for low CPMs and spray and pray. This is why the brands are so interested in Facebook and other platforms that seem to be able to deliver great content and are, increasingly, willing to pay the differential.
It's impressive to see StackOverflow putting this together in-house and I imagine it'll continue to be a competitive differentiator for companies that can pull it off going forward.
Try the "this was a gift" checkbox in order history. I've been hesitant to share this as I don't want it to stop working, but it's magic for me. Allows you to select what you want ads for in the future.
Yeah, the algorithm behind that is insanely stupid for a company with so many technical resources. No, Amazon, I don't want to buy three more $1,300 SLR cameras.
I think that's why I find it particularly inexcusable. No company pulling in that much money, with that kind of tech muscle, should have a recommendation system that poor.
Once in awhile it will reanimate old purchases too.
I took a class in college many years ago to meet a diversity requirement that involved reading a bunch of books about gay Latinos. I'm neither gay nor Latino, but something refreshes that connection -- every couple of years they decide to hit me up with books on the topic, including books that I bought for the class.
Maybe their algorithms is trying to any nostalgia you might be having for some old topic? In your case they figured wrong, but I can see how it could work for old games, movies, music, tv shows, etc.
It's the worst when ITEM_X is a large TV. I wonder what percentage of TV buyers will impulse-buy a second TV because of "you might also like.." recommendations. Can't they make a list of products compatible with my TV and sell me that?
I wish there was a way to tell an advertiser "I Bought it, stop bothering me".
I don't want to completely block ads because I understand how they bring in money, but there has to be a way to interact with them a bit to make them less annoying.
Had the same thing happen to me with a monitor. I neglected to install an ad-blocker right away on that freshly installed computer. Not making that mistake again.
Targeting is pretty difficult unless you have a well-defined audience or type of content.
My site matches office furniture ads against photo tours of office spaces - fairly is easy to see why they would work. StackOverflow attracts a specific type of person so it seems like the targeting is built-in.
I don't envy a general news site like CNN where you're trying to target specific types of people who read CNN as opposed to an industry vertical.
Just a quick note of gushing praise, OfficeSnapshots is one of my favourite sites, I've been a reader from being a teen to a twenty-something, I never expected the creator to show up on HackerNews!
Reminds me of Penny Arcade's ad policy. They made the ads themselves, with their own art, for games they loved. You can't get much more relevant than that.
The problem with selectively un-blocking individual sites is that it poses a management problem, plus it wouldn't take many bad ads to come through to cause me to go back to just blocking everything.
I'm sorry, but this really is a case of "this is why we can't have nice things." I would rather give up all premium Internet content than to have to actually manage the problem or any of the purported solutions to the problem.
YouTube would be the hardest to give up, but most of my favorite producers have Patreons and their own video-hosting sites anyway, and I might even be able to eke out a profit helping the rest move too if they needed it. I can simply curate individual "super-premium" content creators and patronize them, leaving the likes of Wired and WSJ to their fates.
I already use TheBrowser and use their micro-payment service, but I only ever put $5 on it, there just isn't that many paid articles. The content industry is extremely insistent on forcing advertising on me, sorry but no. Especially for high-volume news sites, the PITA factor far outweighs whatever insight I get from the news articles themselves.
Most sites that have ads are really just entertainment for me, even news. And there's lots of other entertainment.
It would be a shame if $FAVORITE were to disappear, they have great journalists, but I don't read $FAVORITE regularly, so if I never see a link for it on HN I probably won't remember it existed.
I pay for three outlets: NYT, Economist, Guardian. Nothing else in the world has seemed important enough for me to pay for it, and I won't miss them if I'm blocked.
The management problem is why ad block plus started their acceptable ads initiative. Websites register with ad block as having acceptable ads only, and ad block puts the sites on your whitelist automatically.... And of course, periodically verifies the website is still following the rules. There's a registration fee for organizations that get more than 10 million ad impressions per month on browsers with adblock installed. The ad industry calls it extortion.
... but it ensures your money goes to only the top tier of YouTube creators, and not the people who made the videos you enjoy. (Unless you only enjoy the top tier of creators, that is.) I hope you like PewDiePie, because if you're paying for Red, that's where the money's going.
I would never even consider subscribing to Red until YouTube promises that the fee you spend goes to the creators you actually watch.
That's the problem. 99% of the free users are middle-schoolers watching PewDiePie on their cell phones during recess. There's 100 of those for every adult subscriber to Red.
If, and only if, Google divvied up the Red money by the creators Red subscribers actually view, then that scheme might appeal to me. As-is, it does not.
StackOverflow does not have to pay editors, they have users that contribute for free. Somewhat tacky of SO to not mention this fact.
Just like traditional writers have publishing statistics, online writers use analytics to calculate how much reach their pieces have. It is sad, but writers count on pageviews, which is why you see many clickbait titles.
But they do have to employ moderators, admins, marketing, sales, software developers, IT... as well as paying for hosting, bandwidth, office space, equipment...
What does missing one specific class of employees really matter in the broader scope?
Good creative content is difficult to incentivise for.
Case in point: SO incentivises for it without payment. Largely through providing an "interesting things to work on" dynamic, with rapid review and improvement of naff responses.
But answers to technical problems (many quite trivial) are a different class than, say, deep investigative reporting, or solving really hard technical problems.
On that last, there's an essay written a few years back on how the current iteration of the Internet seems to incentivise for trivial things, featured on HN. I'll see if I can't track it down.
I won't disagree with anything you've said there. Creative types are always harder to incentivize (just look at us programmers).
But stepping back for a moment and looking at it from a purely financial point of view - if you're working for a company with 500 employees, how will it matter to the bottom line if a portion of them are editors instead of moderators; instead of software developers?
If your goal is to directly incentivise and reward editorial content, then ipso facto, you're failing at your goal.
More broadly, the problem's nontrivial. Good true talent is rare, and even then, inspiration often uneven. It's quite possible for someone to turn out prodigious amounts of content (see Isaac Asimov, say), and even relatively high-quality content (his was good, though IMO uneven). But there are others who produce very few works -- Harper Lee, Margaret Mitchell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein all come to mind.
Incentivising technological creativity has also been quite rocky -- VC-backed startups, IPO exits, patents, state-granted charters, and patronage are among the models attempted. Many tremendously innovative individuals died broke, and the inventors of many of our most valuable creations (fire, agriculture, weaving cloth, smelting metals, writing) are entirely forgotten. Even the roster of great inventors launching the Industrial Revolution, about 200 years ago, shows few who actually prospered by that work -- several died in poverty, others were granted government awards or made money elsewhere, a small handful actually profited directly.
I've just run across Joseph Needham's absolutely stunning 27 volume History of Science and Civilisation in China, which tells the story of Chinese invention dating back literally thousands of years (don't ask for details, as I said, just discovered it, though Needham and the work's Wikipedia pages offer substantial background, and Simon Winchester has a biography of Needham giving more detail). One question I've in mind to take to it is what motivated China's inventors?
Needham himself asked what's eponymously called "the Needham Question": why didn't China, with its tremendous head start, industrialise before the West.
Nit-pick...."moderators" (the ones with the diamonds next to their names) are not employees, they're elected from the community and are unpaid volunteers (I used to be one on SO). There are staff members who have mod diamonds, but they're employed to do other things such as development, community management etc.
Because those things are at different scales. I'm sure there are thousands of hours put into IT and moderation, but there are millions of hours put into content creation. The value of SO almost entirely comes from unpaid volunteers who produce the actual content.
I'm not trying to imply that this is morally wrong. I think parent comment is just trying to say that it puts them into an entirely different class of websites than journalism. They can afford to run on less ad revenue, because the amount of content they produce per employee is much higher.
One of the things I've started doing is having a generic title for a post/article on the actual website (Facebook Offices - Menlo Park) and then using a more editorialized title for social media sharing (Tour of Facebook's Sprawling Menlo Park Campus).
Because I do all of the editing on the site, I remember a time when I just felt hollow trying to editorialize every post title published when some just didn't need to have any particular aspect of them highlighted.
I guess that we, as a society, could all contribute valuable information and things, and then the overhead will be less and the need for obnoxious ads less. It's a win for everyone. Best example is Wikimedia with zero ads at all.
Because the quality of the output is directly related to it. Employing writers means they can remain objective and focus on what they actual do - writing. It also includes the other support costs they would need (for example in doing investigative work). You're not going to have the same kind of journalism without compensation.
A lot of people write books, in most cases, they aren't worth reading.
The value of a creative market segment isn't measured in the average but the by the maximum. Who cares how many crap movies there are if you're watching The Godfather tonight?
This addresses a lot of complaints people have with ads from a UX perspective, but misses some of the technical reasons that a lot of folks (probably disproportionately represented on sites like SO) have for blocking ads and tracking scripts, which is that they're fucking intrusive, not just on a given experience but into one's life. Since most ad impressions are coupled with some persona creation and event linking these days, it's not as simple as "we want to make ads more relevant and high-quality".
It's really great to see that people are paying attention to the problem of low-quality ads.
But I don't want to see ads. Of any quality level, high or low. Ever. I will never turn off my ad blocker, for any site.
I just don't want my day-to-day to be influenced by random companies trying to sell me things. Certainly, I can't avoid it: I live in a city, and walk everywhere I can, and it's impossible to avoid seeing billboards and the like. If I could wear a pair of contact lenses that would blank out real-world advertising, I would. But online ads I can avoid.
I buy things when I want to. If I feel that I have a specific want or need for something, I'll seek it out, and select the brand and model based on research pulled from the most unbiased sources that I can find. Perfect? No, of course not. But advertising is an abomination.
I feel that there is this collective idea that since you can't block out advertising from your vision while walking around, then you shouldn't be able to block advertising online either. As if our computers are letting us cheat the "natural order" by having ad block.
Stack Exchange also reduces the amounts of ads for all users that have more than 200 reputation. This is a pretty easy threshold to hit, and after that only the ads in the sidebar remain. So many of the active SO users will only see a small amount of ads anyway.
"Our belief is that if someone doesn’t like them, and they won’t click on them, any impressions served to them will only annoy them-- plus, serving ads to people who won’t click on them harms campaign performance."
^^^ so much this.
there's this implied assumption that everyone using an adblocker is lost revenue, but a lot of that is going to be shitty ad impressions that never lead to clicks.
like it or not, advertisers can't actually put a gun to my head and force me to click on an ad and buy anything.
even if its a targeted ad that manages to engage me (coincidentally this did actually happen this morning with an ad from one of the rare newsletters that i've allowed to be sent to my e-mail inbox) then it probably doesn't work the way with me that advertisers want it to. i managed to find a product that i was interested in, but it was too expensive for me. so i did a "brandX vs ..." search on google to find brandY and now i've bookmarked the product their competition sells which seems to be more in line with my budget...
if you want to 'game' my purchasing habits you'd be better off not advertising at all in the classical sense, but instead send your product to review sites and/or just buy reviews in order to saturate google results. however, when all i see is obviously bought off review sites i'll go looking for relevant forums and look for user threads. by far the best thing there is to have a social media presence and have a staffer that surfs through forum sites and answers questions.
plus, you know, just have a good product for a good price to get people talking well about it... i realize that's some fucking crazytalk there though...
Most advertising is just general brand awareness. They don't need you to click or to consciously decide "hey that looks cool."
They want you to be standing in the soda isle of the grocery store when you are going to a party and someone asked you to pick up a drink. You don't have a strong preference. But you buy Coke because you know it. Just knowing about it is a huge advantage.
That's why a lot of advertising is priced in "per impression."
A lot of people will claim advertising has no effect on them, but that's BS. It does.
So using adblockers costs the website roughly .2 cents per ad impression.
I don't think you have some moral duty to view the ads, but they don't have some duty to give you a free website either.
This stuff works. Sometimes it seems to me that TV ads must be ineffective. Unlike a Web ad there is no direct link between the ad and a buy. So why does the advertiser bother?
Then I was buying life insurance. So I go to some lead generation website. I see a whole bunch of companies I had never heard of. Then I see Prudential. Rock. I see Metlife. Snoopy. I see ING. They sponsored the NYC Marathon that I ran in.
I didn't get Metlife, so much for Snoopy...but I didn't get a company I had never heard of either. For a few I said "never heard of them" and for others I'm sure my eye just skipped right over them.
Ads work and I bet they do work even on people who say "ads NEVER work on me." Really? When you are buying a new product, all the ad impressions you have had make absolutely NO difference? Are you sure?
"Most advertising is just general brand awareness... you buy Coke because you know it"
Very much true. I worked in a grocery store during my school summer and even though I didn't watch TV, I could know what products were being advertised on it just by watching people's buying habits. I even did a test -- named some products to my friend that watched TV and it was spot on.
Web conversations like this are terrible. Clicks are a very small part of what advertisers are buying, even if that's how it's measured. Just like sometimes when you're at a cafe you buy a cup of coffee, but actually what you want is the nice space to work and an internet connection for a couple hours.
(Some) advertisers are actually smart. They do extensive, scientific research around attribution and effectiveness. Even if you don't click on ads, you're influenced by them (yes, you, too). They can track that, and it's a large part of what they're paying for. Just like TV ads.
That also strikes me as insightful. Even if I were forced to view ads, I would never click on them. Or even hover. If it's something that interests me, I might search in a different window. Basically, I just don't trust ads.
Kudos to StackOverflow! Especially the sentiment recognizing "scantily-clad women selling flight deals" as a low quality ad. I'm a married man, I don't need that sort of noise and nonsense in my life. This blog further deepens my loyalty to the StackOverflow community.
I love what Daring Fireball does; simply a paragraph describing some sponsor: who they are and what they do. I find myself reading it every time and even being interested. I can say with 100% certainty that I have never had that reaction to any "traditional" ad however.
Our belief is that if someone doesn’t like them, and they won’t click on them, any impressions served to them will only annoy them-- plus, serving ads to people who won’t click on them harms campaign performance.
and you know what, it's not the ad so much that bothers me, it's the 27 trackers added to the page by three ads in adsense and all their roundtrips and javascript lag
I wish we could bring back the days of text ads that were interesting.
Stack overflow has an interesting difference to most websites: their users provide their content. Users that run ad-block are still potentially valuable.
Honestly, I never wanted to enable ad-blockers. I started doing it because of ads that flash, make noise, slow down the site, obscure content, ect, ect.
I really wish ad-blockers would default to an "block annoying ads only" mode; or some kind of whitelist mode; or even some way to crowdsource so that only annoying ads get blocked.
I make my living from advertisements but have had to enable blockers on certain sites which are not just aesthetically unusable but actually unusable because of ads. I'm talking to you Bon Appetit and Epicurious!
I just have stopped visiting sites with annoying ads like that. Which really means I have stopped visiting a lot of the free Web.
News? Economist and NY Times. Recipes? Cooks Illustrated.
Of course the Web is still useful to buy things from a merchant; there, the site obviously has no incentive to be annoying. And sometimes for free stuff it's better to go to the site of someone who is already selling you something. You mention Bon Appetit and Epicurious. If you want free recipes, go to food manufacturer's website or to a grocery store's website. They are loaded with free recipes and there are no annoying ads...of course, the whole site is an ad. But it has what you need.
I understand if sites have a business model that needs annoying ads. I just don't visit them. It seems hypocritical to me to visit the site while not respecting its business model, especially when there are other sites out there whose business model is more aligned with your needs. I would rather support them with my money or clicks rather than visiting annoying places and then installing more software to suppress annoyances.
Good points. We have actually recently started to just check cookbooks out from the library which is even more cost effective than a subscription to a site.
It selectively blocks add based on if they are tracking you, but I would imagine that most annoying adds are tracking you. You can also individually re-enable scripts/cookies on a third party domain per site basis.
> I really wish ad-blockers would default to an "block annoying ads only" mode; or some kind of whitelist mode; or even some way to crowdsource so that only annoying ads get blocked.
This is what ABP attempted to do, and the reason why you see people advocating forks or alternative adblockers these days.
Most of StackOverflow's income comes from their job postings. When I posted a job on SO a year ago, I asked them about Ad blockers. The salesperson told me confidently that they were not concerned because only 'around 5% of visitors' or some other small number used an Ad blocker.
I was, and still am, quite sceptical about that claim. (At any rate, I don't know how to feel about a web developer who does not use an Ad blocker in this day and age.) It began to make more sense to me recently when the Jobs section was added to the SO front page and the new CV was introduced: Their approach now is to help developers and employers actively look up ads/CVs when they are in need of them.
"At this point, it’s pretty clear that ad blocking is a big deal. A recent study suggesting the advertising industry is set to lose over $22 billion in 2015 alone as a result of ad blockers is setting off alarm bells. That is a LOT of money."
This line of thinking makes me livid. They aren't losing money if they never were entitled to it in the first place. Get used to seeing my adblock, and if you or anyone else is interested in getting any money from me, then your only hope is to focus your efforts on coming up with an awesome product.
One of the things ad-blocking will force people to reconsider is deals of the form "Person A pays Person B for the time and attention of completely unrelated Person C, who is not only completely unrelated to A and B but who is not even known to them beyond the most generic statistical demographic concepts."
There's obviously nothing legally wrong with that contract, we're just forcing a re-evaluation of the moral rights Person A has over Person C given the above transaction.
>we permit users to downvote or close ads that they don’t like.
Before I used an ad blocker, I noticed that they had a thumbs up/thumbs down icon you could click and choose from why you didn't like the ad. I did this literally dozens to hundreds of times on the same "Azure" ad, and it never stopped showing up until I installed an ad blocker. Is that what he's referring to? If not, what does he mean?
>> Bret and the ad server team dug in and investigated screen size of every user across the Stack Exchange network and concluded that only about 2% of users would be affected by the change.
While no users might have cared, the meta thread was pretty controversial.
> Our belief is that if someone doesn’t like them, and they won’t click on them, any impressions served to them will only annoy them-- plus, serving ads to people who won’t click on them harms campaign performance.
Okay, so why not then make ad-blockers unnecessary by providing a "don't show ads" option?
As stated in the full comment thread here we limit ads for users above 200 reputation. That puts it right between "Vote down" at 125 reputation and "View close votes" at 250.
People who use AdBlockers already have that button. Seriously, they have very non-intrusive ads; If you want to block those you'll definitive be wanting to block others.
People on SO can be reasonably expected to know how to get that button (i.e. can you google how to install AdBlock).
Some web sites have this option, but you have to pay for it. I believe that is a fair compromise. If the site is worth it, I'll donate. If not, ublock stays on, and then it won't really bother me if they go under having relied solely on advertising to stay afloat.
a) people would self-host ads or b) the target of the ad would host them (but not a third party). You could randomize ad source code and layout such that an ad blocker would have no chance removing it.
An alternative would be c) if there was much more diversity on the advertising market, and every site would serve ads from multiple competing agencies (with different formats and different URLs). This would also make it harder to block, and also make it harder for advertising agencies to create profiles (one of many reasons people block ads).
It's true that if a person just doesn't like them they won't click on them.
However, if Adblock becomes a default install, you will have more and more people never clicking on the ads because they never knew about them in the first place.
I hate annoying ads, but this will eventually make it impossible for small business owners to make a living through ads.
The playing field will be only big corporations, because they can handle ad blocks. The same thing has happened with the music industry over the past decade and it's just repeating in a new industry.
I feel like the new generation is pushing for more government and corporate control.
>this will eventually make it impossible for small business owners to make a living through ads
You say that like it's a bad thing. If a piece of content or a given website cannot survive without ads propping it up, was it ever worth anything in the first place? Ads are far from the only revenue-generating method available nowadays, they're just the easiest/laziest.
When online advertising-as-we-know-it finally chokes to death under a mountain of its own waste, maybe we'll see a drop in blatant linkbait lowest-common-denominator garbage that drives up the S/N ratio. There may be less content overall, but I suspect the content that survives will be much higher quality as a result.
Not that I particularly care which way things go, I run adblockers on all of my machines from a security standpoint as much as anything else.
This is Ycombinator, a site for supposed future business owners. Yes, it's a bad thing.
"If a piece of content or a given website cannot survive without ads propping it up, was it ever worth anything in the first place? Ads are far from the only revenue-generating method available nowadays, they're just the easiest/laziest."
Sure. Instead, we will now have fully integrated advertising that can't be blocked.
Would you rather see an advertisement or an entire article on a blog centered around a product? The average consumer isn't going to take a stand on things like this because they just don't care. It will only pollute the content that you actually enjoy even more.
"There may be less content overall, but I suspect the content that survives will be much higher quality as a result."
Higher quality content doesn't pay the bills alone. I don't mind because my business doesn't rely on ad revenue.
However, when I see more and more people clamoring for something like a 'basic income', I really start to shake my head...because things like this are quickly destroying many jobs.
It's not the first time the tech community has dug their own salary grave and then cried out to everyone when they can't pay the bills or they lose their house.
This is why I'm not on the other side of this: I would rather take advantage of this foolishness than be forced into it.
> Would you rather see an advertisement or an entire article on a blog centered around a product?
A site that mixes ads in content won't be popular for long (it's bad content). It's also often illegal without disclosure in many places. And once you are producing this kind of ad-injected content you already have a personal connection with an advertiser and make non-targeted advertisements!(everyone sees your same blogpost about the same shoes).
If a website can afford to do that they didn't need ad networks to begin with! They could have "magazine ads", I.e dumb images served from the source domain. Thats exactky what I'm hoping for - Internet ads being just like magazine ads.
>A site that mixes ads in content won't be popular for long (it's bad content).
But what if the site is the ad? For example, a lawyer's blog would have lots of blog posts about law, but the whole purpose of the blog is to advertise the expertise of the lawyer and encourage you to buy the lawyer's service. Or maybe an artist wants to showcase his portfolio of his work online, in the hopes of later securing juicy contracts or donations.
Or what if the site is simply a forum for people to "network" and self-promote themselves (i.e, LinkedIn, HN's Show Me, etc.) Those sites can indeed be popular (as people may go there to willingly consume ads), but they're all basically vehicles for advertising.
an entire article on a blog centered around a product
This is why I'm liking the slow rise of tools for blocking sponsored content as well. (Particularly when combined with FTC requirements about labeling, since if you can't tell the difference enough to block it, there's some investigators who'd like to have a word with you.)
I encourage sites who feel like they need to to block adblocking users. Their demise will be that much quicker and better alternatives can rise in their place.
I am leaning towards this view. Advertising has existed since pretty much the advent of writing and commerce but technological advances have made it increasingly sinister. Through targeting, automated split testing and other advanced methods the advertising industry seems to exist to weaponize psychological research.
Nobody is proposing it per se, but many companies and people are installing it on every browser. The average person probably didn't even care about seeing ads in the first place.
Forcibly removing revenue streams in the tech industry is not really going to help any future business owners.
Sure, Ad revenue isn't the only way to make money, but when you have $0 startup capital, it's many times the only way.
This only pushes out the smaller business owner and average person that wants to make some extra money and gives more power to big companies and venture capitalists.
Nobody seems to think long-term, only in their own self-interest.
If advertisers thought about long-term, we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place. Thinking short-term is actually a staple of business. And so advertisers have for ages been burning trust to boost sales metric, and now they are surprised people are rebelling when they finally have means to do so?
The problem with advertising, on-line and off-line, is that it's user-hostile. It's manipulative and abusive even before you add trackers and malware on top of that. Maybe there was a time when advertising existed to inform people about available choices. I don't know when that age was, but it's not what's the focus of advertising nowadays. If you're acting hostile to me and my friends, I have a right to defend myself, and to instruct my friends on how they can defend themselves.
So what are we, as customers, supposed to do? Lie down and give up? Businesses have strong incentives to get as much money from people as they can get away with. In a competitive economy there's no leaving money on the table - if you don't pick it up, your competitor will. The only limits are those we impose ourselves - whether through laws or through just saying "screw this" and installing an ad blocker.
> Wasn’t the whole movement aimed at helping these sad artists that were being screwed over?
And who screwed this up? Not piracy, really, but labels. That and clinging to business models that don't make sense in a digital economy. The reality is not obliged to cooperate with whatever money-making idea you like - you have to find a one that works. In the digital world, content is cheap and copying is free; everyone needs to learn to deal with it. But alas, companies are more willing to destroy the Internet itself than change their practices. That's why people retaliate.
Frankly, the Internet is more important than some artists not getting properly compensated because of it (even if it's really all because piracy), and it's better to lose them than to have everything DRMed up.
The businesses started this war, and now they're complaining people are defending themselves and it gets harder to take their money? Cry me a river.
I use it, but I wouldn't want it to be the default option. I prefer other people to watch ads. To a willing person, injury is not done. If they can't be bothered to install an adblocker, so be it.
Firefox does. I recently see an, ironically, advertisement on Caltrain, sells me that. Guess they might use TV ads to promote their ad-free browser, when this becomes the norm?
A good proportion of HN, judging by comments, thinks all advertising should be illegal in all circumstances because trying to persuade someone to do something is immoral.
Edit: "A good proportion", not all. Probably 20%? The other 80% indeed are just against tracking/privacy/bandwidth/security, and the last 10% are fine as is.
> trying to persuade someone to do something is immoral.
It depends on how you do it. If your ad takes up a lot of bandwidth and processing power, to the point where by the time the article loads on my phone I can't scroll through the actual content because my CPU is busy trying to render your pretty little ad, then you've fucked me, you've fucked yourself, and you've fucked the content provider.
It's the equivalent of a local pizza chain sending someone to play a vuvuzela outside my bedroom window.
The problem is that I don't know whether ads coming in are a person politely handing out flyers, or a vuvuzela-playing jackass - and that's assuming he's not trying to literally pick-pocket me - so it's easier to just rub my magic ad-block lamp and tell the Genie to disappear everyone.
That's really not the impression I get around here. I think it's clearly the intrusiveness with which ads are displayed and all those strings (trackers) that come attached with them.
I think most people on HN would agree that ads which don't require huge amounts of scripts, show video, play audio, connect to 17 tracking networks or make up 70% of the page weight would very much be tolerable.
Yup. I'm total ad hater, and yet I'd be totally fine with plainly marked, non-intrusive, simple ads, that don't waste bandwidth and CPU power. E.g. what AdWords originally was. If they don't distract, I'm more willing to actually read them, even out of curiosity.
If ads aren't obtrusive, irrelevant, insulting, distracting, inappropriate, or malevolent, I have no problem with them. But until at least those last two still exist, even infrequently, I must strongly recommend an ad-blocker to all friends and family for their own protection.
I don't have a problem with ads, I mostly object to tracking, profile building, and the sharing of that profile. When I read a People magazine in my doctor's waiting room, nobody knows much about me in particular. There are online ad networks that serve dumb ads and those I generally whitelist.
You have that option - you can relinquish your citizenship. Otherwise, taxes fund public goods and services you benefit from, such as medical care, infrastructure, education, crime prevention and border security.
Wait until Adblock blocks your 'Jobs near you' ad and your other job ad links which is StackOverflows main revenue stream—paired with 40% Adblock desktop users.
Is there any point to running ads on a small site / blog any more?
It's a lot of work to curate your average stream of garbage coming from AdSense etc. I really want to find a targetted ad network from a smaller company who might actually care about individual customers (if anyone knows such an ad network for {food,cooking,photography,travel,restaurants,health} let me know).
And importantly.. add servers brought this on themselves. If they had catered to users and given them the tools they needed to tailor their experience, they wouldn't be in the situation they are now. Salty tears...
I share the dislike of and militancy against ads evinced by some of the posts here.
I started reading the piece thinking "Oh, another marketing guy who's drunk the 'relevant ads are good for people and everyone apart from a few contrarians really likes them' kool-aid.
So I was surprised to read what seems to be a rare example of sane thinking in an advertising person:
The truth is: we don’t care if our users use ad blockers on Stack Overflow.
More accurately: we hope that they won’t, but we understand that
some people just don’t like ads. Our belief is that if someone doesn’t
like them, and they won’t click on them, any impressions served to them
will only annoy them-- plus, serving ads to people who won’t click on
them harms campaign performance.
Yes! I will never click on an ad that somehow gets past my ad-blocking stuff, it is just a big fat waste of money serving me the ad that I will never click on.
Isn't it a bigger waste of money, though, serving me the page that will never monetize because I will never click on the ads?
Let's assume that the only reason for the existence of the site is to make money. Then by blocking ads, I'm signaling my intent to frustrate this purpose. Shouldn't the site just not serve me any pages at all since my intent is clear?
Interestingly, the site-owner's view of the intrinsic (i.e. non-monetary) value of their site figures into this calculation, it seems.
If the site is (at one extreme) disposable click-bait with no substantial content that can't be found at a dozen similar sites, then it's a reasonable assumption that if you disable access for ad-blocking users, they'll just go and get their meaningless content elsewhere rather than enable ads. Since their ad-blocking ways are a good indicator that even if they enabled ads for whatever reason, they'd probably never click on the ads anyhow, it makes economic sense in this case to just dispense with the users.
At the other extreme, if your site is (let's say) a premier source of useful information in some sizable field, it's a good bet that if you force ad-blocking users to enable ads they will often continue to visit your site, either participating in an ad-blocking arms-race that makes it increasingly expensive for you to circumvent the blocking, or capitulating by loading the ads but just never, ever, clicking on them, costing you more money either way.
So even from a purely financial POV, the strategy of just not caring about ad-blocking looks like a win, without having to invoke the nobler-but-woolier considerations about wanting to "make the world a better place for developers."
Other ad-ops people in charge of intrinsically valuable web estate would do well to follow SO's thinking, IMO!
If other sites did this, maybe ad blocking wouldn't be so prevalent.