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Insane state of today's advertising part 3

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Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#171

Post by alkonaut »

mangoceylon wrote: post #79
kakarot wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind expanding a bit on this real-time auction thing, like how common it is and what the process looks like, or could you point me in the direction of the sources you used to make that claim? Thanks!

If you poke around AppNexus, you will find what you are looking for. The process is basically: a visitor comes to the site, each connected ad network/buyer has 100ms to provide a bid, the top bidder wins.

What happens with ad blocking visitors? They never become a visitor to bid for?

I'd actually like for my ad blocker to download all ads and pretend to download the ad, and give the impression of an impression. That way someone would have made a bid for that impression.

Otherwise what will happen is that as ad blocking use becomes more and more widespread, the ad viewers become fewer but more profitable (Ironically perhaps more profitable on average than the original set of viewers, because adblock users weren't likely to click in the first place).

If ad blocking is to be a way of killing online advertising in its current form, and not just improving the browser experience (and this is what I think should be the goal) then it needs to cheat the ad networks, they can't just pretend the request never happened.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#172

Post by poopoopoopoo »

richdougherty wrote: post #170

I wish ads were sandboxed and given resource limits. I'd like - network limits (rate limited, bandwith capped), animation limits (low fps), sound limits (no sound), CPU usage limits (not much CPU - maybe a burst at page load), etc. Maybe a sandbox option for an iframe?

Why not resource limit the whole web page? Make it a standard that you have to manually accept a large download, sound, high fps etc like you do for GPS location, camera, etc.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#173

Post by amelius »

richdougherty wrote: post #170

I wish ads were sandboxed and given resource limits. I'd like - network limits (rate limited, bandwith capped), animation limits (low fps), sound limits (no sound), CPU usage limits (not much CPU - maybe a burst at page load), etc. Maybe a sandbox option for an iframe?

If it was in Google's interests, we'd probably have that already.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#174

Post by Simon_says »

rabbitonrails wrote: post #159
oasfboasbfos wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only good ad is a dead one. With very few exceptions, especially in the consumer space, you won't need advertising if you actually need something. You'll search it out or your friends will tell you what to buy. Advertising serves as a way for the capitalist class to exert veto power over other aspects of society by yanking funding at opportune moments (see the current Google snafu or Bill O'Reilly's departure fro…

Have you ever heard of multi-level marketing? Let's all buy what our friends tell us to buy.

Come'on. When your friends don't have any vested interest, it works quite well.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#175

Post by oiboabfljasbfo »

cft wrote: post #156
oasfboasbfos wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only good ad is a dead one. With very few exceptions, especially in the consumer space, you won't need advertising if you actually need something. You'll search it out or your friends will tell you what to buy. Advertising serves as a way for the capitalist class to exert veto power over other aspects of society by yanking funding at opportune moments (see the current Google snafu or Bill O'Reilly's departure fro…

An anecdote from 2010: my company had racks of Rackable Systems servers. Every month a server went dead- power supply, board or some such. Rackable Systems were unreliable. Then on Slashdot I saw a square ad for IBM System X servers (unfortunately they have been sold to Lenovo a couple of years ago). That somehow made me do research- although I was aware of IBM System X before. Between 2010 and 1013 we bought perhaps…

I won't deny this has occasionally happened to me, but look at your example: it's B2B when my claim is primarily for B2C. B2B ads tend to be more targeted, aimed at corporations, and purchases are for higher dollar amounts. The product being sold was also competing based on build quality, a material improvement.

Businesses often make more rational decisions because they can assign someone to do research (like you did of your own volition) who will make comparisons and think about it.

Imagine the same process happening for shampoo. I'm sure there are some people that want "the best" shampoo, but most of the products are going to be nearly interchangeable and the marketing will try focus on various kinds of manipulation to dig that moat. These manipulations aren't what most people think of, like a sex symbol hypnotizing you. Instead they work to increase brand familiarity, social proof, and provide a life style narrative you can tell yourself and show off to other people with.

The capital hiding behind these campaigns funds newspapers, television, radio, and civic centers. It acts as a filter on the public discourse. If you're interested, look up Manufacturing Consent for more information.

Here's a clip from a documentary based on the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTBWfkE7BXU

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#176

Post by Endy »

dhab wrote: post #164

Might be off-topic. It seems a majority of people are against ads. What are the top few reasons why people dislike ads, excluding reasons such as them just being a nuisance? My own guesses are: * People don't like the idea that the platform serving the ads is making money through ads which is not directly tied to the main value they derive from that platform * Maybe people feel that they are also indirectly contribut…

The main reason I despise ads is because I believe in privacy and anonymity. The goal of Internet advertising is to remove that from me in order to shove more impressions at me. I want to know what I'm choosing to download to my computer, what data is being communicated back, and to whom that data is going. In other words, I demand privacy for myself, and I ask for nothing in return, but when you ask something of me, I demand to know who you are. These services do everything they can to obfuscate that.

Beyond that, while this might fall under your "nuisance" category, I don't have a very fast or strong computer; that's why I use Firefox over Chrome (with 4+ processes all running at once, I can barely load Chrome let alone a webpage in it). When ads load, that takes up memory and time that should be spent loading content.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#177

Post by bonqis »

exikyut wrote: post #64

IMO the way to solve this is a single-click "pay this tiny amount to keep reading" UI. Now that Amazon's one-click checkout patent has expired this is actually legally viable. But it won't happen until Chrome is overturned by a new browser because Google will never let such a model succeed :( It's possible Firefox may successfully do the "phoenix re-viral" thing, in spite of the fact that it would be a literal miracl…

I co-founded Flattr and one of the things we learned is that even a one-click is to much effort. So we now have a zero-click solution that measures attention and visits in your browser locally (as Archon810 wrote.) and then your monthly subscription is distributed based on that. Happy to answer anything and or give an invite.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#178

Post by chinathrow »

mangoceylon wrote: post #79
kakarot wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind expanding a bit on this real-time auction thing, like how common it is and what the process looks like, or could you point me in the direction of the sources you used to make that claim? Thanks!

If you poke around AppNexus, you will find what you are looking for. The process is basically: a visitor comes to the site, each connected ad network/buyer has 100ms to provide a bid, the top bidder wins.

So like your IP, browser version, plugins installed etc etc get leaked to 100s of connected buyers? How is that even remotely legal in certain EU countries?

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#179

Post by ccozan »

bzbarsky wrote: post #136
jasonkostempski wrote: post #88

Standards should never have allowed third-party scripts to load without insuppressible user prompts. This cluster-fuck could have been avoided.

Third-party script loading is as old as the tag and predates any applicable standards. That is, browsers added before standards did, and allowed cross-site loading of scripts, just like cross-site loading of everything was allowed at that point. Simpler days, 25 years ago...

Now I have in mind the Terminator scenario, except we need to send it for the guy who though on this tag.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#180

Post by stordoff »

baron816 wrote: post #19

A bit off topic, but something I'm interested in: would it be possible for a website to generate revenue by using client machines to mine crypto currencies? I would rather go to a website that uses up my CPU and network resources doing that than use up my CPU and network resources AND spam me with intrusive ads. Edit: solid answers to my question. Thanks everyone.

What would the legal situation be for that? It seems fairly easy to spin as unauthorised use.
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