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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

#371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people will always try to influence others, and I don't think advertising is the worst form of doing it. If you say that it's not in the public interest you'd have to compare it to alternatives that are. That said, I think there should be restrictions put on the methods that advertisers are allowed to use. What currently happens in online advertising hurts everybody, including those who rely on ad funded busi…

I'm a libertarian. And putting/enforcing rules on someone who's not aggressing you because you don't like it seems like needing coercion. You're voluntarily consuming ad-based content, no one's forcing you. If you don't like their ad-supported content, shouldn't you use only content which paid for in different ways? Why should anyone be restricted in their actions because of your opinions?

>Why should anyone be restricted in their actions because of your opinions?

Because the rights and protections under the law that advertisers rely on only exist because of my opinion and the opinion of other citizens.

Without the law, the concept of private property would be largely undefined. Corporations would not exist. There would be no limited liability, no chapter 11, no enforceable contracts, no trademarks, no patents, no copyrights, no courts, no police, nothing of the sort.

If we want to enjoy the protection that the rule of law affords us, we will have to accept that there needs to be some sort of social process that determines what our laws should be. It's a negotiation.

And no, using ad-supported services is not voluntary in any realistic sense of the word. There are many essential necessities of modern life that are ad-supported and have no real alternatives.

Also, voluntary is a rather ill defined term when it comes to things that most people cannot even know or understand.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#372

I didn't see any ad blocker recommendations in the comments, so I searched and came across a list on Tom's Hardware of the best ad blockers of 2017. The funny part is that Tom's Hardware was FILLED with these exact kind of ads from algovid and adaptv. Even worse, the list is in a carousel / slideshow format so you have to keep clicking if you didn't GTFO like I did.

If you are willing to do some extra work, I highly recommend blocking javascript, e.g. with Firefox's NoScript extension. Enable only the javascript you need, when you need it.

No harm in using ublock origin and privacy badger on top of it.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#373
post #319
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Electronic engineers face a similar problem, everyday:finding the optimal components to build stuff with. And at least in the case of standard components, they do that via parametric search tools(poring over many details), combined with vendors exposing a lot of details about products. And it works very well. I wish we had that in more fields. Would provide huge value, but it's a hard problem. But i suppose if with t…

Edmunds has a fairly good parametric search tool for new cars.

https://www.edmunds.com/finder/car-finder-results.html

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be an interesting experiment to put out a non-ad-subsidised version of Vogue and see how many people bought it. I would guess at "not that many".

If it’s “900” pages of pure content, rather than ads, hell, even I’d buy it.

Wouldn't that be called a "book"?

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone thinks advertising doesn't work on them. And everyone is wrong.

Eh, I think I've never clicked on an ad on the internet and bought a thing. The only times I've clicked on an ad that I can think of is mobile where I was trying to close something and got fucked. So, advertising models based on clickthroughs definitely haven't worked on me. (Admittedly uBlock has reduced my exposure somewhat) But the magazine style "increase awareness of product and hope that leads to eventual inter…

Lifestyle advertising is far stronger and more insidious as it doesn't appear to us as if it's advertising. When I was growing up all movies and USA television seemed to have Apple computers only, all the stars drank Coke with every meal, all the footballers wore Adidas boots.

We almost always instinctively are attracted to the familiar, so just seeing a product before makes us value it higher, even if it's intrinsic value is less. That hard-wired instinct is hard to control.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#376
post #142
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone feels the pain: Publisher gets paid on a $1 CPM basis while Cedato gets paid $5-10 CPM and pockets the difference. Advertiser thinks they paid for quality video content preroll but it's actually a tiny rectangle normally used for "display" ads. Audience is infuriated. Think about what happens on a 4G mobile plan now that VPAID has been fully migrated from Flash to JS...

And you can't even install ad blockers on the phone.

As others have said, now is actually a really rich time for ad/tracker-blocking browsers:

* Brave

* Firefox Focus

* Ghostery

to name but three.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#377
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. What was the ad about? I'm curious, I like filing away disasters like these.

Ad that redirected my page to some shady hosting site with a red background and scary text about how I had some virus and needed to call "Microsoft" at the number they provided with a bunch of personal information to fix it. (I assume a JS "vuln" to take over the page -- not that they really regulate ads from how often it happens.) ...Which is particularly goddamn egregious for a Microsoft website to be serving. If a…

Oh wow, it was one of *those( scams - and [redirected] from the MS site itself. I'm impressed.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#378
post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Preroll ads are valuable because people are mostly paying attention. eg you went to youtube to watch X, and they show you 15 seconds of swiffer beforehand. Personal anecdote time. Preroll ads are the main force for me behind installing the adblocker. I just can not stand something that manipulates my flow. I call it televication of the Internet. It is unbearable. If for some reason I am not able to block them then…

> If for some reason I am not able to block them then I just do not watch them and I am not listening to them (I look elsewhere, say a lalala mantra in your mind). I've started using a similar strategy on YouTube in order to selectively "protest" against bad ads. Whenever I stumble upon a long unskippable ad or a short very aggressive ad (loud and/or offensive), I mute the video and start reading comments for a while…

Google already pause ad play if you change app/tab focus; my perception is (on Android?) this is a recent change. So you have to have the video ad playing to get to the point when you can skip it. So, like you I turn away - it's really annoying, but that just makes it more attention grabbing.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never quite understood why domain-blocking works so well for ad-blockers. I'm surprised why sites don't just use a reverse proxy or something to serve from those ad domains. What am I missing?

It's the easiest way to serve an dynamic ad, it will require further configuration to get it to go through your own domain, and ad blockers block by element selectors and ad placement, so even those served through your domain will eventually get blocked. To avoid adblocker one would have to actually blend the ad with page moving it in the page to avoid getting detected, which might not be acceptable UX/UI.

Please elaborate. I assumed just the opposite was the case.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not talking about consumers but advertisers who are the clients and the media agencies they hire to produce and execute these media campaigns. The internet has increased efficiency and lowered prices but this also has an effect of amplifying any misaligned incentives - so now agencies which are bonused on clicks will deliver cheap clicks, whether it's actually producing sales or not.

What's your point? If they don't drive sales, they'll stop advertising or go out of business. Not sure what's your concern here

Marketing is a 12 figure industry and billions are spent with little accountability and incentives that drive bad intrusive ads that break privacy and extract data at all costs.

That's my concern, as stated in my original comment describing why this situation exists and why companies working on purely technical anti-fraud measures will accomplish much of nothing.

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