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Give Google Contributor a try: Pay to remove ads

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Re: Give Google Contributor a try: Pay to remove ads

#361

Post by kbenson »

Nursie wrote: post #317
kbenson wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that's over, I reject it entirely. The root of this for me is that you don't reject it entirely , you just reject the portion you don't like. You (like most of us, let's be clear) reject the pitch, but take the stuff. I don't really think that's right, but many of us do it anyway. I do object to casting it as positive for the ad companies and the content producers though. I think it's very clear it's not, and makin…

>> The root of this for me is that you don't reject it entirely, you just reject the portion you don't like. You (like most of us, let's be clear) reject the pitch, but take the stuff. There are sites now that block access if you block ads. I am happy for them to do this. But to get technical - on the web I request content and it is sent to me, I make no promises about rendering anything. >> I do object to casting it…

> I'll say again, if sites make it clear I'm not welcome without viewing their ads, I won't go.

Considering a needed mechanism for an ad-blocker to function is to be undetectable, they could be trying ten different ways to detect if you are blocking ads so they can display a note that you aren't allowed to view the content, and you would likely never know.

Or do you think they should put a banner at the top of ever page, inconveniencing every user just so the ones that don't want to view ads and are running ad-blockers have a chance to notice the content producers don't want them skipping the ads, after purposefully blocking their ability to determine if the message applies to them specifically?

Or how about we just assume that if a site attempts to display ads then they intend their users to view them? Is that too crazy to assume?

Re: Give Google Contributor a try: Pay to remove ads

#362

Post by lotsoflumens »

mahranch wrote: post #295
lotsoflumens wrote: post #184

There's another way ... it may sound a bit crazy at first, but I think it's the only approach that will work. * Advertisers must start paying visitors to view their ads * Not just for clicking on ads, but simply for loading them into your browser and looking at them or listening to them. I read somewhere yesterday that the ad business is $40 billion/year. None of that money goes to the people who are being abused dai…

> None of that money goes to the people who are being abused daily by the onslaught of mental pollution that this "industry" produces. Why should it? They're the ones consuming the free content. They get to view whatever content they're looking at, for free. You watch a funny cat video on youtube, that's your "reward". That's the product you're buying with your time. I don't know why people feel so entitled to free s…

I understand your frustration! Everyone wants to believe that what they create has value and that people should pay something to enjoy it.

But we can't escape the reality that the world is being changed dramatically by technology and that the concept of "cost gravity" is unstoppable. Pieter Hintjens has a very good essay on this at http://cultureandempire.com

This is what we're seeing with adblocking - the technology to control which information is allowed to enter our brains is now available to everyone. Your brain is your most valuable organ, and it is highly susceptible to persuasion and influence through positive and negative images, greed, fear and jealousy. All of these can be, and are, manipulated by advertisers for their benefit.

It has always been an arms race. In the "good old days", when everyone watched TV in the evening with their family, advertising was probably necessary to support the content. Then after a few years the ads got louder (the volume was actually increased) so that people would pay attention during the commercial breaks. People discovered that their remote controls had a mute button, and then they had some welcome silence between movie episodes. Commercial breaks started to get longer and people discovered that they could record everything and fast-forward through the commercial breaks, saving much valuable time. A president of the MPAA (Jack Valenti I think) actually said that it should be illegal to skip through the advertising when viewing time-shifted video because that deprived the broadcaster of the revenue to which they were entitled.

Even movie theaters, where the assumption was that you could watch the movie since you paid for admission, started to show advertising at the beginning. At first it was just a couple of quick minutes before the feature, but that soon became many more minutes and now is at about 30 minutes (advertising thinly disguised as games and quizzes).

My simple proposal is that this downward spiral can be stopped, if advertisers accept that people want to control what they see and hear in an increasingly noisy world, and that this is both legitimate and necessary.

Regarding your question about why an advertiser should also pay me to watch an ad in addition to a Game of Thrones episode: Because, if they paid me, I would listen to their pitch. That's much more valuable than blindly displaying ads with the hope that 0.1% or less of the ad recipients would pay any attention.

Re: Give Google Contributor a try: Pay to remove ads

#363

Post by TeMPOraL »

manigandham wrote: post #350
TeMPOraL wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They aren't displaying it for free, they're displaying it in exchange for your attention/time on the accompanying ads. > You don't want to buy it because it causes friction to pay the $0.001 it costs to view the page that the ads take care of. Well, current model also costs me that $0.001 (likely more) in electricity costs and exposes me to at best some ugly-looking crap made with adversarial intent, that has nonze…

The electricity costs you mentioned are externalities and not really relevant here. Otherwise you will start blaming everything for every little action you take. If you don't want to browse that site, you can stop at any level from going to that url, starting your browser, buying your computer, living in that country, etc. When you go shopping, it will likely cost you gas, time, wear/tear, etc just like anything else…

> The electricity costs you mentioned are externalities and not really relevant here.

This is very relevant here, because a big part of issue with ads is about dumping externalities on people. When you multiply that small electricity costs by number of people exposed to a bloated, flashy ad you'll see it actually adds up to a decent amount of coal unnecessarily burned. But that's beside the point, I only brought up electricity because it's commensurable to the amount of money ad-serving site makes on me.

> When you go shopping, it will likely cost you gas, time, wear/tear, etc just like anything else but do you tally that and ask for a refund on the purchase price?

I don't ask for refund, but I do tally that and include in my decision about which shop to go to.

> why are you continually going to sites that you consider to have no value?

As I said, if I go to a website regularly, it means that I have some concept of value I may expect to get from it. Bust most of browsing today is driven by a) search results, and b) link aggregators. Most of the websites I visit I visit only once or twice in a lifetime, because there was a link to a particular article on HackerNews, or maybe because it was the first search result for my query. In such situation I do not have concept of value I am about to receive.

> It's very a fair and low-risk trade.

It could be, in principle. It probably would be if the only ads displayed were AdSense ones. But as it is now, getting scammed or catching a drive-by malware is not low-risk trade.

Re: Give Google Contributor a try: Pay to remove ads

#364

Post by chillacy »

yq wrote: post #291
brwnll wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty tired of one of these personalities that appear to be a loud voice in the ad blocking conversation. "Ad's don't work on me and I have never ever been positively influenced in any way every by one" This simply makes you, at best, look naive in your believe that your conscious self is responsible for all (or even a majority) of your actions, and at worst, wrong/lying (who remembers everything they've ever pu…

I am +1 with Nursie. Ad's never work for me, I occasionally turn off ad-blocking to see how google looks like with ADs. None of those advertising will work for fit what I am really looking for. If I want something, I probably know what, where, how, when already. If someone need 24 4tb SSD to setup a Raid, the chance they will get it from an advertiser instead of someone who has well established a logistics channel, r…

When you say "Ads never work for me", you're really saying "I never click on ads". Even if you never interact with ads, they still work on you, because you see them. Modern advertising is built on decades of psychology research, much of it dealing with trust and the importance of repeatedly viewing a brand to build that trust.

The guys with an established logistics channel, reputation, 5 star reviews, all have that in part because they've been advertising longer than the new players. This is how all brands enter our mindspace. Even the titans of today started as unknown brands putting ads in magazines yesterday.

Re: Give Google Contributor a try: Pay to remove ads

#365

Post by agarden »

bduerst wrote: post #233
Nursie wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said, particularly with web advertising, if you've made me notice your brand then I will actively try to remember not to buy from you - I dislike advertising that much. By viewing the ad I'm not ripping anyone off, no, but a page taking money for me viewing an ad would be, as the outcome for the advertiser is getting a best neutral and likely actually negative.

The problem is that you, specifically, are only remembering the intrusive ads that have at one point negatively affected you. Whenever there is a good branding ad, you're not thinking about or remembering how great of an ad experience you're having. There are exceptions, like Superbowl commercials, but it's still a cognitive bias.

I have noticed this in myself. Generally, I find ads terribly annoying and frequently offensive. And then on occasion I see or hear on ad for something that actually interests me. Maybe it is for a service I did not know existed. At that point, I don't think of it as an ad. I think of it as useful information I discovered. Only later do I realize that the "useful information I discovered the other day" was really an ad.

Re: Give Google Contributor a try: Pay to remove ads

#366

Post by bargl »

sago wrote: post #292
bargl wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is interesting because of how many people mention that adds really only contribute a small fraction of that. From what I can find $1 per 1000 impressions seems to be about average for ad revenue. That means that if I go to 1000 websites in a month I'd expect to pay about $1. I'd be interested to see how many impressions I make per month and find out how much money I actually generate for these websites. I'd als…

If there are 6 ads on a page, do you visit 5 pages on average a day? I don't think that is many. These things multiply quickly.

Ha good point. I'm going to circle back to the comment above mine though. I'm going to change his $20 to $15 because that is the highest amount listed on their site.

I'm also going to factor in that this only removes at most 50% of the ads. we are talking about vising something like 166 (15000/30/6 *2(for the 50%)) pages on an average day. And those are pages with google ads only.

So do I visit 166 pages with 6 google ads on it a day? I don't honestly know but I doubt it.

Now if I could pay $15 a month to remove ALL ads, I think that would be worth my money, even though I still doubt that I visit 166 pages a day.

Re: Give Google Contributor a try: Pay to remove ads

#367

Post by softawre »

RodericDay wrote: post #359
greiskul wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what if you weren't going to buy it because you were not aware it existed? When you see an ad for an interesting movie and decide to check it out, you go watch it, and love it, are you really worse off? Maybe you see an ad for a new restaurant and decide to check it out. Are you worse off? Aren't these examples of positive ads?

What if you see the ad, and decide to check the movie out, and it's terrible - a waste of your time and money? What if you see a slick ad for a restaurant, and it turns out the restaurant spends more money on ads than on being a good restaurant, and it is a waste of money? Are you better off?

Wow. He was saying they could be positive. Of course you can come up with a counter-example...

Re: Give Google Contributor a try: Pay to remove ads

#368

Post by freehunter »

Animats wrote: post #265
untog wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Much of the web is noise and regurgitation. Much of it is, yes. Meanwhile, publications like the New York Times still depend on online advertising to continue to exist in the way they do. Not that I have any answers here - I think your DVR comparison is fair.

"Meanwhile, publications like the New York Times still depend on online advertising to continue to exist in the way they do." Not any more. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Economist are all paywalled. Those are some of the few remaining newspapers with sizable reporting staffs. Most other US "newspapers" have a few reporters, but mostly regurgitate wire services and press releases. The "fluff" se…

NYT has tons of ads, even for paying subscribers.

Re: Give Google Contributor a try: Pay to remove ads

#369

Post by freehunter »

gambiter wrote: post #279
austenallred wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Topical subreddits And how is reddit funded?

https://www.reddit.com/gold I've paid for it, personally, and I know others who do. Yes, the ads are probably a larger portion of their income right now, but there's certainly an easy way to support them directly.

I was under the impression that their biggest source of funding was VCs, and that ads + gold aren't enough to keep them around.

Re: Give Google Contributor a try: Pay to remove ads

#370

Post by Nursie »

kbenson wrote: post #361
Nursie wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> The root of this for me is that you don't reject it entirely, you just reject the portion you don't like. You (like most of us, let's be clear) reject the pitch, but take the stuff. There are sites now that block access if you block ads. I am happy for them to do this. But to get technical - on the web I request content and it is sent to me, I make no promises about rendering anything. >> I do object to casting it…

> I'll say again, if sites make it clear I'm not welcome without viewing their ads, I won't go. Considering a needed mechanism for an ad-blocker to function is to be undetectable, they could be trying ten different ways to detect if you are blocking ads so they can display a note that you aren't allowed to view the content, and you would likely never know. Or do you think they should put a banner at the top of ever p…

>> Considering a needed mechanism for an ad-blocker to function is to be undetectable

That's just not true. Lot's of sites can and do detect them just fine, and display custom messages.

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