There are ways to have comments that are a lot less awful than Disqus.
Which are and which work with a static Hakyll site?
A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic
61–70 of 149 posts
Re: A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a user,I am most offended by ads that target me. I would rather see a completely unrelatable ad. It feels like learning new information that way,as opposed to being stalked and preyed upon.
I would love to see more ads that instead target the content of the page. When I'm reading about machine learning, it should be books close to that topic, and other related things. I can't believe little that happens.
It has the added benefit of having a high probability that you'll be interested in the product, since you wouldn't be on the page if you didn't find the topic interesting. Instead we get tracking networks showing you ads for TVs because you bought a TV last week.
Re: A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic
#63There are ways to have comments that are a lot less awful than Disqus.
I don't like Disqus mostly because the UX is clunky. Are there other things people dislike about it?
Re: A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic
#64What I learned from running hundreds of forums is that: 1. Banners hurt unless they are relevant 2. Filtering for banners that are relevant tends to reduce revenue rather than increase as there is a smaller pool of highly relevant advertisers 3. Removing all banner adverts significantly increased engagement by every metric 4. Some revenue is possible using affiliate links within the content (re-writing existing links…
Thanks for sharing. I really wish there was a general web subscription with revenue-sharing between all visited websites. I hate seeing the ads on my own sites but have no viable way to replace them. And as a user I would like to support several sites, apart from disabling the adblocker.
pbhjpbhj is right to mention Flattr.
Patreon is also a good idea.
Sponsoring is also possible if you can find something relevant and willing: a lot of the podcast and YouTube channels that I follow have audiobook platforms sponsor them.
Re: A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the biggest problem I have with Adsense. Most of the time it seems like they couldn't find an ad that fits me but their system decided to just throw me a random ad for Forex Trading or whatever. This turns their supposedly sophisticated ad system into a random generator as far as I'm concerned. They could fix this by: 1. Just showing blanks if they can't get something targeted to my preferences 2. Not allowin…
Your concerns are typically addressed by: 1. Reserve pricing - if no ad is 'good enough', e.g. no advertiser is willing to bid above a certain threshold for you, then no ad is shown 2. ePCM pricing - Adsense predicts what the likelihood of clickthrough/conversion is for a given ad and user, and includes that in its auction algorithm. Roughly, eCPM bid = cost per click / probability of click. This addresses the typica…
I wish I had a better way to tell Google to raise my reservation price than blocking most ads I see, maybe pay for a higher one?
Re: A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic
#66I would love to remove ads from all but one of my sites. But I have not been very effective at monetizing my writing some other way. I removed them from a bunch of sites and saw a decrease in ad revenue, but did not see some noticeable difference in either traffic or tips. (I only later added Patreon.) There are myriad contributing factors that I can't isolate out. People don't like ads, but many of the people who lo…
> I think I have worked out a couple of models that work
You should write these up in detail and post it to HN. I would read it!
Re: A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic
#67What I learned from running hundreds of forums is that: 1. Banners hurt unless they are relevant 2. Filtering for banners that are relevant tends to reduce revenue rather than increase as there is a smaller pool of highly relevant advertisers 3. Removing all banner adverts significantly increased engagement by every metric 4. Some revenue is possible using affiliate links within the content (re-writing existing links…
Thanks for sharing. I really wish there was a general web subscription with revenue-sharing between all visited websites. I hate seeing the ads on my own sites but have no viable way to replace them. And as a user I would like to support several sites, apart from disabling the adblocker.
I have Patreon and a Pay Pal tip jar. I still have ads on some sites. But I have fantasies that I will someday have enough revenue from other things to justify removing ads from most sites.
Re: A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic
#68I would love to remove ads from all but one of my sites. But I have not been very effective at monetizing my writing some other way. I removed them from a bunch of sites and saw a decrease in ad revenue, but did not see some noticeable difference in either traffic or tips. (I only later added Patreon.) There are myriad contributing factors that I can't isolate out. People don't like ads, but many of the people who lo…
> I think I have worked out a couple of models that work You should write these up in detail and post it to HN. I would read it!
I have written about them and posted stuff to HN. It usually doesn't get much attention.
Nutshell version:
1. Flexible online means to earn money.
2. Genuinely affordable market based housing, such as SROs.
I have several blogs where I talk about such things, like Mic Digs, Project: SRO and Write Pay. They don't get much attention.
Edit: just to prove my point, here is a recent piece on working for pay while homeless. I have submitted it to HN. You can go watch it be ignored:
Re: A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic
#69As someone who has founded and runs an adserver for a living (we deal only with legitimate publications, nothing sketchy), I found this thought provoking. Since I deal mostly in niche/local advertising, I might have a unique perspective. It turns out that the more relatable a banner ad is, the less offended the reader is. That may sound obvious, and it probably is. But the general effect is that users engage with and…
As a user,I am most offended by ads that target me. I would rather see a completely unrelatable ad. It feels like learning new information that way,as opposed to being stalked and preyed upon.
I do not know you, so I won’t presume (certainly not on HackerNews, the least representative sample of the Internet) but I have seen many experiments proving that most people who think they don’t like targetted ads actually prefer them -- until they make a very informed but very wrong guess. Typical examples include:
- advertising for something shameful (underwear and dildo are my go-to examples) or that you otherwise want be kept secret (engagement rings);
- repeat ads for specific and unusual big-ticket items. I have told friends working at Amazon that no one I know ever started a vacuum cleaner collection, but they only response is “You would be surprised…” to which I can only assume the world is either weirder than I thought, or their analytics function has missed something.
What you (and most people) probably would prefer is the ability to edit what the ad engine knows or assumes about you: gone are dildos, rings and vacuum cleaners; come books about programming patterns!
I keep telling anyone close to any of those recommendation engines to allow me to do that, but they mumble things about design, feasibility and hacking that genuinely don’t add up to me.
Re: A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic
#70I honestly couldn't follow most of the math but found this really interesting. I used to do UX analyses at a marketing agency and would constantly link clients to [1]. Page speed is huge, especially on desktop where its easier to navigate away. OP mentions this, but I imagine the effect is massive on a site where users are actively researching a topic and have tens of tabs open and so can easily switch to a similar w…
In my experience that kissmetrics blog is a load of nonsense in practice. We massively reduced load time on the all the key pages from 4 secs to roughly I did a similar thing with their mobile site a year or two later, massively reducing the page-weight and reducing loading times on the devices I tested from seconds to again sub-second load times. Again no discernible bump.
I am wondering how much of that lack of sensitivity could be due to having two types of visitors:
- people who know what they want, know this is not ads or JavaScript and have an anti-advertising or anti-scripting tool; when KissMetric ran their experiment, those tools were not widely available and those visitors went elsewhere at the time;
- people who don’t know and enjoy the browsing and don’t mind the delay; didn’t then, don’t now and have kept on using your competitors’ website.