I've taken numerous conscious and subconscious decisions to eliminate ads from my life. I don't watch broadcast television and I don't listen to broadcast radio. I don't regularly visit sites that whore out their pixel space (and even the content pixels with floating ads). It's easy for me because I know where to get good content without these media channels. I like to believe the net result is less fatigue at the end of the day.
Ask HN: How Can Ads Not Suck?
31–33 of 33 posts
Re: Ask HN: How Can Ads Not Suck?
#32Ditch automated ads, ads that try to steal our focus away from the content, and ads that hog up our bandwidth, screen space, CPU time, etc. They're annoying, usually irrelevant, and serve no good.
When you write, include in your writing very brief endorsements for products related to your subject. Don't just randomly interject with "oh by the way, go buy Product X!", but if Product X is a brand of hard drive and you're writing about hard drives, take a sentence or two to talk about the advantages of that particular brand. In plain text, just like the rest of your article.
There are TWO important parts to this equation. Many people only seem to realize the first. 1) Make your ads not so obvious that machines can tell they're ads. 2) Make your ads not so annoying that people will update their ad blocking rules to remove them.
In other words, working around the ad blocker to present annoying ads is just going to annoy even further. Your ads have to be seen AND they have to not be immediately blocked again and/or just ignored, and that means they have to be manually inserted so that they are intertwined with the content from both a technical and a writing standpoint.
You might even get away with static banners, that don't stand out too much, at the top and bottom of a page (where we can scroll it off the screen), and text links next to the content area. Just not IN the articles, unless it's part OF the article.
Why did I install an ad blocker in the first place? Because ages ago on gameshark.com, an ad popped up, demanding I join the US Army. I've never left Canada and I was maybe 13 at the time. This ad, for 30 seconds, played an animation with loud sound effects, hogging up all my CPU time and bandwidth (now I knew why the page had loaded so slow), and centred itself under the mouse cursor at all times so I couldn't click anything. It was a Flash layer of some sort, rather than a window, so no keyboard shortcut would be able to do anything either. When this ad finally disappeared, I IMMEDIATELY looked up and installed an ad blocker, and never again went to gameshark.com. If I'd had any interest whatsoever in joining the US Army, that also would have killed it permanently. This is the perfect example of how to do EVERYTHING WRONG with online advertising.
PS: one of the worst comment systems I've ever seen. Requiring registration? Fail. Not stating this until AFTER the comment is submitted? Massive fail. Not stating the requirements on the form until they're violated? Cherry on top.
Re: Ask HN: How Can Ads Not Suck?
#33My concern with asking "How can ads not suck?" is the limitation of the answer. If I take one step back from the question, my view of the problem shifts and the potential solutions grow. Your concern isn't about ads and ad-blockers, it's about generating revenue from a site. You think that ad-blockers are affecting your revenue. They aren't. How you're advertising is affecting your revenue.
I'd start with the question "How can I generate revenue without using ads?" Others may have better questions.