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Give Google Contributor a try: Pay to remove ads

mattcutts.com

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

#451

Post by manigandham »

mattlutze wrote: post #437
manigandham wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So half the planet is incapable of learning what clickbait is and only you can resist it? Let's say everyone falls for it once, twice or even a dozen times. Don't you think the traffic would just stop after a while. Are we all so psychologically weak that we cant figure it out? Why do celebrities have the most followers and gossip sites have some of the highest traffic? It's easy to argue that it's not "valuable" or…

Why do serial primetime comedies use laugh tracks? The writing is base and the jokes often not funny, but when we hear other people laugh we're psychologically driven to feel more joy/humor/whatever and join in. Why do people keep clicking obvious linkbait articles? Because there's certain social-inclusion triggers we're wired to respond to, logic and conditioning be damned. The content isn't popular. The forcing fun…

You never put aside the "data". That's how you make smart decisions.

You're talking about basing all this on some rough psychology - however plenty of people don't watch comedies with laugh tracks because they just don't like the show and it's the same with headlines.

There might be certain influences (since it is called clickbait) but in the end it's all up to the user. They choose to click.

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

#452

Post by ionised »

Spivak wrote: post #315
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…

For people that dislike ads the statement, "I have never ever been positively influenced in any way every by one" is literally a definition because if you purchase anything because of an ad you've been made worse off. If you were going to buy it anyway then the ad did nothing, if you weren't then you are now worse off as you bought something you wouldn't have otherwise -- you've been manipulated. From this there is n…

> Also, he didn't say that ads don't work on him, they certainly do but they're not having the desired effect which makes them worthless to the advertiser. Sure, they get brand recognition but if you consciously make an effort to avoid brands which advertise to you and recommend that others avoid the brand too then you've actually cost the advertiser money, making the ad worthless.

This is exactly how I feel ads affect me. If I see an ad, I'm inclined to avoid the company advertising that product or service to me in future.

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

#453

Post by SarahofGaia »

ariwilson wrote: post #401
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem is more that there is not that much good stuff out there. I mean look at Netflix. I like it, but it's either films I have seen, often on tv, from maybe ten years ago, or it's really bad. Really bad. But there might not be enough really good stuff out there. User created content is never going to be like professional globally top notch produced content - or if it is it will take as much talent and…

It's a chicken and egg problem, right? If we want good quality content on the web, we have to be willing to pay people on the web. If we also don't like ads, then one way to support the content is via micropayments. Many other models have been tried to varying degrees of success but didn't encompass all of the web like Google Contributor is trying to do.

Solution: Micro-organisms.

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

#454

Post by SarahofGaia »

cm2187 wrote: post #434
ised wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I shouldn't need to pay every network or affiliate to block ads." And you don't. You can do it for free. DNS is quite effective at blocking ads. It is amusing to see Google trying to push this "contribution" scheme. Clearly, ad blocking is sending a loud signal to the websites that "make you the product". Websites that are "free" through advertising sales but also attempt to make a record of everything you do at the…

The fact that it is free doesn't mean it costs nothing. I am pretty sure that google's datacentre bill is not a tiny amount, and it takes lots of developers to make a gmail. And you won't be indexing the whole of the internet on an old desktop running in a closet.

> The fact that it is free doesn't mean it costs nothing.

I agree. In the sense it's usually meant, "free" just means "monetarily free", but cost can come in more forms than just monetary units. :)

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

#455

Post by [deleted] »

manigandham wrote: post #449
Retra wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not hard at all to get those kind of payments. You already pay your ISP a connection fee. Thats the payment we make to see the content.

You're paying the ISP for infrastructure access. Not for content. It's possible to have a separate "content" subscription but that will mean ISPs have far more tracking and net neutrality issues than now so it's best to have another 3rd party doing this.

[deleted]

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

#456

Post by supercanuck »

manigandham wrote: post #450
supercanuck wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't feed a family on people viewing stuff. Money needs to change hands. The billboard operator charges the advertiser. There is no obligation on the part of the viewer to look at anything. Under your definition, getting up to go to the bathroom during commericials or making a conscious effort to look away from ads is ...immoral? Illegal? Fraud? There is no contract no quid pro quo. The content providers are sel…

You can because this is how many publishing companies are run today. The obligation is to accept the ads with the content. It's actually in the terms and service of many sites and doesn't require a signature. This is completely legal and binding, just not easily enforceable. Sure there might be natural losses due to leaving or not looking at the screen but adblockers are all about your intent to completely remove the…

I have a hard time believing those terms of conditions meets the inquiry notice requirements and would stand up in court against anonymous internet users.

I view a website and someone says I owe them my first born, does not make it so.

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

#458

Post by kbenson »

mdpopescu wrote: post #445
kbenson wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct, in that currently it's a feature of anti-adblock killer and some other scripts/plugins with a similar goal, and I was conflating some comments about an adblock detector[1] and it's inability to detect ublock initially (most likely because it wasn't trying). My apologies. That said, I don't think we're that far away from ad-blockers blocking detection. As soon as some large sites detect and bypass ad-…

One of the reasons technical people use ad-blockers is because they don't want to download 10 MB of crap for a 300-word page. "The customer hasn't downloaded our crap" should be trivially detectable.

The people displaying the content (the site) and the people providing the "crap" (the ad company) are often different entities, with different servers. This is why ads are often served with javascript. Since the scripts that load the ads can change, as they are deployed by the ad company, there's not always a definitive way to know what you can expect to exist. Additionally, since there are exchanges and aggregators, you can't always be sure the same ad company is providing the script. This could be normalized, but anything that makes it easy to detect that the ad has been loaded form the page is probably also easy to detect from the ad-blocker, and trace back to something that needs to be removed.

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

#459

Post by kbenson »

Nursie wrote: post #311
kbenson wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It doesn't have to be more boring without advertising, in nearly all media now there are ways to enjoy great content without letting the sales pitch in. I hope we find good ways with the web too. My point was that it's more boring if you forego the content that has ads, and I think your use of an ad-blocker to access this content supports this position. I also hope we find good mechanisms to pay for content without…

>> My point was that it's more boring if you forego the content that has ads, I dunno, I might get more done actually and have a more interesting life, but that's something of a philosophical point. >> I think your use of an ad-blocker to access this content supports this position. I think that if I didn't have one I would use the web much less, as I do find advertising that intrusive and awful now. >> I also don't w…

I agree it we would be better off overall with the ability to choose whether or not we wanted to see content if it requires ads, as that would make the choice clear to many people who I think it isn't clear for now. Ideally, I think we would be well served by a choice where we could choose to see an ad, or choose to pony up a small amount from a list of services that escrow these small amounts for us (Google Contributor for example) with the cost clearly defined, and the option to forego seeing the content entirely. Being able to set defaults for this on browser and per-site basis would make this really smooth.

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

#460

Post by kbenson »

Nursie wrote: post #440
kbenson wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not accept that advertising is manipulative. I accept that many forms of communication, it can be. > Advertising is manipulative and it's not immoral to block these attempts at manipulation. My argument has never been that you shouldn't be able to control what's presented to you, just that if it's part of an exchange, if you reject one part, you shouldn't get the other. and I think casting yourself as actually h…

Well I disagree, because I take against advertising so much that by making me see it they would be doing themselves a disservice, and costing themselves money in the process. And I'm sorry but I do think advertising is manipulative through and through. That's pretty much the whole point.

> And I'm sorry but I do think advertising is manipulative through and through. That's pretty much the whole point.

So is all communication. That friend you tells you about his morning, or some current event? He's expecting to elicit a particular type of response. We don't generally care too much, because we attribute good, or at least harmless intentions to their communication. We manipulate the emotions of those around us as a secondary communication channel.

Advertising is communication as well. The difference is that we often adopt an adversarial stance when dealing with it, because while most advertising is about the company selling you something and mostly harmless (if annoying) it's still informative of the product, but some advertising is outright misleading and can confuse the issue. Advertising isn't bad because it tries to manipulate you, but it can be bad when that manipulation is to get you to do something that isn't in your best interests (otherwise it ranges from helpful, through useless, and to annoying).

Advertising can be useful and helpful. It helps people determine what is available in the market and make a decision on what to buy or what to research. The name of a store on it's exterior, and the name of a site at the top are both advertising, and useful. You may have decided that you think this trade in information is not worth your time, and that's fine, but I reject any argument so simplistic as to say advertising is bad and possibly immoral because it's manipulative. It's too simplistic to have a meaningful relation to reality in this case, and thus has no place in this discussion, IMO.

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