Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Publishers Are Rethinking Those ‘Around the Web’ Ads

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 96 posts

Re: Publishers Are Rethinking Those ‘Around the Web’ Ads

#31

Post by eikenberry »

mzw_mzw wrote: post #9
_qik1 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mobile users. There just aren't any pleasant ad free browser experiences for stock mobile phone users. Firefox for Android is quite poor and fixing through chrome requires root, something most users are not going to be doing

Firefox for Android works quite nicely, in my experience -- better as a browser than mobile Chrome, which surprised me as I had little faith in Mozilla's products before trying it. And installing uBlock Origin was a trivial matter of downloading it from the app store. It really couldn't have been easier unless it came from the factory already installed that way.

My guess is that you have a higher end phone. I have a Moto-G and tried to use Firefox, but it was noticeably slower than Chrome, annoyingly so. Had to switch back.

Re: Publishers Are Rethinking Those ‘Around the Web’ Ads

#34

Post by viraptor »

_qik1 wrote: post #4
M_Grey wrote: post #3

Honest question: How many people are left without some form of ad-blocking? It seems to have become incredibly ubiquitous, and when malicious ads aren't teaching people to go and get it, loud and obnoxious ads are.

Mobile users. There just aren't any pleasant ad free browser experiences for stock mobile phone users. Firefox for Android is quite poor and fixing through chrome requires root, something most users are not going to be doing

This is also brings weird bias to page visits. For a number of technical keywords in my ads, virtually all clicks are from mobile devices, but from organic search only around 10%.

Re: Publishers Are Rethinking Those ‘Around the Web’ Ads

#35

Post by dashundchen »

eikenberry wrote: post #31
mzw_mzw wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox for Android works quite nicely, in my experience -- better as a browser than mobile Chrome, which surprised me as I had little faith in Mozilla's products before trying it. And installing uBlock Origin was a trivial matter of downloading it from the app store. It really couldn't have been easier unless it came from the factory already installed that way.

My guess is that you have a higher end phone. I have a Moto-G and tried to use Firefox, but it was noticeably slower than Chrome, annoyingly so. Had to switch back.

Do you have Marshmallow? Firefox was almost unusable with the number of crashes I had on Lollipop. I upgraded recently and haven't had a crash since. Performance is much smoother as well.

I couldn't give up background video/music, reader mode and the extensibility I get with firefox over Chrome now.

Re: Publishers Are Rethinking Those ‘Around the Web’ Ads

#36

Post by colanderman »

ericthor wrote: post #22

Oh yes the "chumbox" https://theawl.com/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum-de0b...

That's funny, I got through the first paragraph and thought "wow, that was a short article". To my brain, chumboxes are what mark the end of an article.

Re: Publishers Are Rethinking Those ‘Around the Web’ Ads

#38

Post by mbesto »

chipperyman573 wrote: post #10
detaro wrote: post #2

Surprised it took this long. These things are incredibly jarring and low-quality, and actively try to redirect users away from the publishers sites into a rabbithole of even more links. If they supposedly pay so well, I wonder where the money for that comes from. Just high ad-density?

>If they supposedly pay so well, I wonder where the money for that comes from. Just high ad-density? Probably because ad-networks pay per click, and if you have something SO clickbaity like these ads there's a lot of ad clicks. For example if google ads and Outbrain both pay $7 per thousand clicks (I have never used either so this is just a random number) and google ads bring in 1000 clicks while outbrain brings in 3…

From someone I know who advertised on Outbrain, he said the CTR was way higher on Outbrain than it was on AdWords...so while we may all sit here and talk about how crappy those ads are for general use, they do in fact drive traffic.

Re: Publishers Are Rethinking Those ‘Around the Web’ Ads

#39

Post by reitanqild »

manicdee wrote: post #28
prawn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Google ads takes the long term view and doesn't tolerate shit like that. They are very strict and would rather not take that money and destroy their brand. Result? People still use Google to search for stuff." Are you sure? I've seen loads and loads of some of the trashiest ads through Google's ad network.

And at least Google iAds give you the tiny little logo in the corner for you to click so you can report the ad that tries very hard to look like a download button :(

Only they never seem to quite get it:

Google: here is x dating site,

Me: click, mark as irrelevant.

Google: here is y dating site

Me: irrelevant

Google: z dating site?

Me: nope

Google: lets try an ad for x dating site again then

Me: actually, you got my mail, all my searches for the last 10 years and still you cannot find anything more relevant for a happily married sw engineer?

Re: Publishers Are Rethinking Those ‘Around the Web’ Ads

#40

Post by chipperyman573 »

mbesto wrote: post #38
chipperyman573 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If they supposedly pay so well, I wonder where the money for that comes from. Just high ad-density? Probably because ad-networks pay per click, and if you have something SO clickbaity like these ads there's a lot of ad clicks. For example if google ads and Outbrain both pay $7 per thousand clicks (I have never used either so this is just a random number) and google ads bring in 1000 clicks while outbrain brings in 3…

From someone I know who advertised on Outbrain, he said the CTR was way higher on Outbrain than it was on AdWords...so while we may all sit here and talk about how crappy those ads are for general use, they do in fact drive traffic.

That doesn't surprise me at all. Hell, I've clicked on them before and I could tell exactly what they were. I'd imagine that the average user probably clicks on them significantly more than they click on any other type of ad.
Post reply on HN