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I've removed all ad network code from my blog

troyhunt.com

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Re: I've removed all ad network code from my blog

#321

Post by kalleboo »

pilom wrote: post #275
rhizome wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patreon doesn't work perfectly Where does patreon fail, aside from adoption and popularity?

Patreon has the problem that I can't support someone with $0.50 per month because of transaction costs. Almost all patreon tiers start at $5/month and go up from there. There is a very small percentage of things I use the internet for that I am willing to pay $5/month for.

I wish Patreon had a model where I could say "I want to pay $15/mo for my internet entertainment" and then just drop in whoever I'm into right now and it splits it among them.

So... the flattr model :/

Re: I've removed all ad network code from my blog

#322

Post by tilt_error »

prawn wrote: post #276
arjie wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...if you really love what you're doing, you'd give it away free. This doesn't make sense. It follows logically that we should all not love what we do for a living. That strikes me as an absurd conclusion.

Sivers had a piece recently about balance in art and work. He suggested having a job that's purely about the money, and art on the side that is untroubled by concerns about commercial viability. https://sivers.org/balance

At some point I realized that my work situation consisted of a combination of "must do", "should do" and "want to do" -- only I never managed to get past the "must do" or occasional "should do" in my day job. So I frequently ended up with doing the things I wanted at non-payable time. It is better to invest that time in something you can carry away with you when you leave, which makes a good argument for having personal side projects -- granted you are not infringing on something.

I chose to switch employer and in the process got better control of the work items on my list -- to the cost of a heightened responsibility but also a better wage.

Re: I've removed all ad network code from my blog

#323

Post by kristianc »

bjterry wrote: post #265
komali2 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, this will lead to us only being able to read the blogs and personal websites of people who are able to dip into their own money and time to make and host a blog. I'd be very interested in reading about the life of exactly not that kind of person.

Many of my favorite websites from the old Internet were exactly this, and I think it's sort of a shame that I can no longer find sites like that with Google. For example, I once read a site about this person's journey for the perfect pizza dough. It was obviously a labor of love and he had tried tons of permutations and research into the topic. The site was very web 1.0, presumably doesn't have great SEO, but the guy…

> Edit: I found the pizza website, it was halfway down the second page of google's search results. I only clicked it because it was the only one without a picture http://www.varasanos.com/pizzarecipe.htm

You can argue that this article is a case of the system working fairly well at surfacing high quality content. When I searched for "New York Pizza Recipe" this result came half way down page one.

Sure, there are other "high domain authority" listings on that page too, but this is an example of Google listing a well researched, in depth original post from a little known site on the basis of the strength of its content, even with quite minimal on page SEO.

You can argue about whether that's the right term to be optimizing for, but it's the term the writer chose to optimize for as it's the title of the page.

Re: I've removed all ad network code from my blog

#324

Post by pmlnr »

AndrewStephens wrote: post #175
jff wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the same philosophy. I have, over the last couple of years, stripped Javascript and other external assets from my site. First I removed Disqus from my blog, because Internet comments are a cesspit anyway. Then I removed Google Analytics because the tracking outweighs the benefits. Then I removed an externally-loaded font. I finally figured out the last thing, a little bit of JS that Cloudflare was injecting to…

I kind of miss analytics but I don't want to force my readers to run Javascript just to satisfy my curiosity. I can go through my logs if I want to see how many people read a page. My old wordpress blog got so few legitimate comments that I never bother to add a commenting system into my new software. Even when a post got hundreds of reads due to being linked on slashdot or whatever, very few people left comments dir…

> I kind of miss analytics

If you have access to your webserver's access log:

http://www.awstats.org/

http://www.webalizer.org/

Re: I've removed all ad network code from my blog

#325

Post by ensignavenger »

trprog wrote: post #294
ensignavenger wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think advertisers need all of the tracking crap they seem to think they do, for many decades advertisers have had much less tacking ability and the industry thrived. Even without ad network JavaScript, you get more tracking ability on the web than any other medium, because you can give each ad a unique URL, and once you have a click from that URL , you have the prospect on you own site and can track the resul…

>prospect buys your product/service- success! I suspect tying payments to actual user actions, in particularly the user buying something, is the best solution. Affiliate marketing essentially. Its easy to verify and very tough to profitably game so the company running the ads can pay their ad network/publishers/marketing staff with confidence. Ultimately the advertiser doesn't really care how many impressions (or wha…

They can still count clicks and views- you know if someone visited your site or not from an ad that uses a custom URL- so if that is what you want to measure, your don't need any JavaScript. If you find a publisher is sending you too much garbage (fake) traffic, you don't advertise with that publisher anymore. Thus it behooves the publisher to do fraud prevention on their end.

Re: I've removed all ad network code from my blog

#327

Post by coldtea »

superkuh wrote: post #130
coldtea wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why does your personal website need sponsorship at all? Why should people pay you for it? This commercial mindset is very weird to me. Because personal blogging can also be a business for some? It's not like every personal blog does it -- the huge majority are their for free, with no ads or anything. But if you devote the time and effort, and have an audience, why not? It's like saying pro dancers shouldn't exist,…

So we should applaud pro dancers when they announce on a public forum that they're no longer selling your dance-viewing habits to marketers? Like I said, it's not good. It's just less bad. This is attention seeking for commercial reasons. After looking around a bit it's clear this is not a personal website. It's a promotional commercial website for this guy's workshop and speaking business that uses the 'blog' format…

>So we should applaud pro dancers when they announce on a public forum that they're no longer selling your dance-viewing habits to marketers?

Whether we should that or not, this is a totally orthogonal issue.

Your "so", which implies that what you ask was somehow suggested by my comment, is a non sequitur.

I responded to the question of why do people feel justified to monetize their blogs.

>I'm not denying the effort or the quality content in some of his posts. I just see no reason at all to celebrate him here.

Well, I never said we should celebrate him. Just that someone wanting to make money from their blog can be justified.

But if you want to hear my opinion on this too, then even if you consider monetizing a blog bad (to which I disagree) or if you consider selling audiences info to marketers bad (to which I agree), what he did should still be celebrated.

Why? Obviously because people should be encouraged not only when they do good, but also when they STOP doing something bad.

That's how we get more people to stop doing bad things: by celebrating those who forgo their bad habits.

Re: I've removed all ad network code from my blog

#328

Post by coldtea »

ryandrake wrote: post #93
coldtea wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why does your personal website need sponsorship at all? Why should people pay you for it? This commercial mindset is very weird to me. Because personal blogging can also be a business for some? It's not like every personal blog does it -- the huge majority are their for free, with no ads or anything. But if you devote the time and effort, and have an audience, why not? It's like saying pro dancers shouldn't exist,…

I don't know--GP post has a valid point of view even if people disagree. I also feel it takes a bit of nerve to think that you should be financially compensated for writing your personal blog, no matter how big your audience is or how much time or effort you devote to it. Just because you CAN monetize something doesn't mean you should.

>I don't know--GP post has a valid point of view even if people disagree. I also feel it takes a bit of nerve to think that you should be financially compensated for writing your personal blog, no matter how big your audience is or how much time or effort you devote to it.

Well, feeling that people should just write stuff that you read and find valuable on their blogs for free, despite the effort it takes them to write them, takes even more nerve.

It also shows that you believe blogging is something unique that should be free for all, and not merely a new outlet for the act of writing, which, can be either a hobby or a job like any other.

Re: I've removed all ad network code from my blog

#329

Post by MikeCharnock »

2ion wrote: post #207
fiatjaf wrote: post #4

Ok, you have a sponsorship model that works because you're probably very famous. That doesn't solve anyone's problem, because almost no one is famous. How can we replace ad networks with something better and saner?

This person for the reason of being famous can afford to run their own personal website based on a sponsorship model. Though I find it hilarious that some people are even OK with paying him anything to begin with as the cost of running such a side project with the salary and benefits of a "Microsoft Regional Director", which has to be plenty, is pretty much coffee-to-go-like small change. Looks pretty greedy to me.

Microsoft Regional Director is a non-paid advisory role. You find it hilarious? I find it disappointing you would make such a comment without even cursory research. http://rd.microsoft.com/FAQ

Re: I've removed all ad network code from my blog

#330

Post by d2p »

fiatjaf wrote: post #4

Ok, you have a sponsorship model that works because you're probably very famous. That doesn't solve anyone's problem, because almost no one is famous. How can we replace ad networks with something better and saner?

Although not as many, there are ways to include ads that are not scripts. My blog has a DJI banner that's just an anchor with an image tag; proper old-skool! :-)

Of course, it doesn't make any money because I'm no famous; but at least I can pretend and I don't need to compromise anything with unknown JS =)

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