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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

#421

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.

I actually did that in my tumblr's theme once, tumblr didn't like it at all lmao.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#422
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people buy Vogue (and all other advertising-sodden media) despite the ads, not because of it.

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".

It is my understanding that a similar publication nowadays, Cosmopolitan, used to be mostly a literary publication in it's early days. I wonder how the contents vs advertising ratio was balanced at the time.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#423
post #145
post #77

If anyone is curious (like I was) what exactly is being shown here, the author initially wrote a post in 2016 describing VPAID ad interfaces[0]. It appears this whole thing got started when the Author (who founded AndroidPolice) got a bug request about an AP site ad[1]. [0]: https://plus.google.com/+ArtemRussakovskii/posts/VgrLdYcoifr [1]: https://github.com/archon810/androidpolice-public/issues/67

This may actually explain why watching videos in the browser sometimes causes the computer to heat up comparably to a new AAA gaming title.

That's more likely a lack of hardware acceleration I recently learned, if you're talking about youtube. They use VP9 by default, which isn't hardware accelerated in most cases.

I installed this recently and the difference in heat and battery life on my Macbook Pro is astounding. https://github.com/erkserkserks/h264ify

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#424
post #411
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...

The only person who cares about that, though, is the audience. Advertisers as a group don't really care that much. Right now, Online Ad Spend is growing industry wide, so fraud like this is just chalked up as an efficiency loss, on growing market. No one else in the chain cares.

The publisher cares because they delivered a worse experience for user for no $

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#425
post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ads are bad. I'm not shopping not stop. I just want to read my article or whatever I am doing at that moment. When I want to buy something I go to a shop and being there I still don't want ads. I want accurate specs, relevant statistics, maybe pictures and honest reviews. Sometimes I could use a guide, when it's not my domain. I never stopped in the middle of something to say "I'd so watch an ad right now".

So perhaps you need to find paywalled news/review outlets without ads. Someone has to pay for the articles being written, servers, bandwidth etc

I don't know why you think I need to do something. Perhaps you need to realize that annoying your readers is not the best way to approach the issue.

Leaving aside the assumption that somebody has to pay just because you did something, selling my visual comfort for how much? a tenth of a cent? shows me how much you value your readers.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#426
post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So perhaps you need to find paywalled news/review outlets without ads. Someone has to pay for the articles being written, servers, bandwidth etc

You're so on-point. All these rants about ads don't think about who'd pay for the content you're consuming if not for the ads. You can't have high quality content and not pay for it - with ads or otherwise. If you want ad-free, keep your credit card ready every time you open your browser I'm not necessarily speaking in favor of ads. I'm just pointing out the shallow analysis which characterizes these companies as gre…

He's not on-point at all. You can find amazing content not touched by ads all over the internet.

Making money is hard but his way of doing it is nothing to admire.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#427
post #96

In related news, uBlock Origin has finally (today) been converted to a WebExtension and is now fully compatible with Firefox 57 and beyond. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin

Note that updating to the web extension version will wipe all your ublock settings, custom filters, rules etc. Back up your settings first

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain why it's a bad thing? From my perspective, I've found various things via advertising that I would have never come across by other means. A lot of people argue that "you'll just search for what you want" except I'm tired of searching for "shirt" and then scrolling for days looking for something that may work. Every once in a while I'm hit with a really good ad, and I'll click it, and maybe even buy.

Fine, then you won't mind installing an extension or enabling an option that opts you in into being served ads while you browse. I'm sure most of us anti-ads advocates have no problem with that.

I /technically/ opt-in by not running ad-block on my laptop, so I guess that's true.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain why it's a bad thing? From my perspective, I've found various things via advertising that I would have never come across by other means. A lot of people argue that "you'll just search for what you want" except I'm tired of searching for "shirt" and then scrolling for days looking for something that may work. Every once in a while I'm hit with a really good ad, and I'll click it, and maybe even buy.

> From my perspective, I've found various things via advertising that I would have never come across by other means. If you want to make a fair comparison, that should be compared to all the things you didn't find because useless ads took up your time and mental space. Also, whether or not you found something through an ad is not the point; one isn't not going to convince a smoker to quit smoking by trying to convinc…

> If you want to make a fair comparison, that should be compared to all the things you didn't find because useless ads took up your time and mental space.

> Nowadays ads just feel invasive, like strangers shouting at me on the street claiming they want to have a conversation while really they just want to get into my pockets.

I understand your point here. But to clarify, if I were to add up the seconds/minutes of time I lose to ads over the course of a month (for example), I don't think I'd spend that regained time on product hunting. My point was less "I save so much time via ads" but more "I don't want to shop." I view it as a time saver (at the expense of perhaps finding "the perfect item") rather than as purely a nuisance. That said, I definitely prefer content without ads.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#430
post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are more parties including the consumer and the ad buyer. Ad fraud almost always means the ad buyer being defrauded by buying digital advertising that is not executed according to contract terms, if at all.

In my comment the content provider is what you termed the ad buyer. When you say consumer, who are you referring to? A person who visits a website with an advertisement? If so, they are not a party involved in an economic transaction. > Ad fraud almost always means the ad buyer being defrauded by buying digital advertising that is not executed according to contract terms, if at all If this is what you mean by fraud,…

Content providers are publishers being subsidized by ad buyers who are served by ad service vendors to show ads to consumers. Consumers are involved since their attention is being monetized, that is an economic transaction.

Civil suits will cost more time and money than it would be worth. Also the supply chain is comprised of people who move between companies and buy from friends and whoever they like the most. Combine that with lack of government enforcement and the easy of forming a new company with a clean reputation and there are no consequences.

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