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Problems coming for online publishing

blogs.harvard.edu

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Re: Problems coming for online publishing

#41

Post by forapurpose »

packet_nerd wrote: post #29
gcb0 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you don't see users getting smarter about ads. trust me. you see your close circle of acquaintances getting smarter about ads. the general population is going downhill, by all metrics we have access to. In one case, people were trying to access a (fake) bank site, which had ads. it was an ad scammer that bought mistyped domains and cloned the homepages, in an automated way. and very badly. yet it had millions of impr…

Almost everyone tech savvy that I know runs an ad blocker and I've installed one for all my family members who aren't. At family holiday gatherings they've even started asking me to "do that thing you do" to clean up their browsers. Regular people are getting very very tired of so many obnoxious ads, and even though they don't think about it much, no one is like "hey, I have WAY to much privacy! I need to give away m…

> Almost everyone tech savvy that I know runs an ad blocker and I've installed one for all my family members who aren't.

How do you provide support to them for websites that malfunction due to the adblockers? IME, they often don't recognize that the problem is the adblocker much less have the patience to call me for help - and if they did, I don't always have time to help them when they need it.

Re: Problems coming for online publishing

#42

Post by elorant »

osrec wrote: post #36
exolymph wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What doesn't add up is that you and your circle are not typical users. Try talking to advertisers doing direct response on Facebook — they keep a very close eye on ROI. Brand advertising is less trackable, but advertising does and has always worked. If it didn't, businesses that didn't spend on advertising would outcompete those that do.

Then why are companies like P&G cutting digital ad spend significantly? And why is this actually having a positive impact on their bottom line?

Because advertising for big companies is all about brand awareness and has little to do with sales per se. You can't follow a P&G add and end-up in a page where you can buy the damn product, 9 out of 10 times you'll end-up in an info page.

It's the little guys that get the most out of digital advertising, especially e-commerce sites where they can link ads to products.

Re: Problems coming for online publishing

#43

Post by osrec »

elorant wrote: post #42
osrec wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why are companies like P&G cutting digital ad spend significantly? And why is this actually having a positive impact on their bottom line?

Because advertising for big companies is all about brand awareness and has little to do with sales per se. You can't follow a P&G add and end-up in a page where you can buy the damn product, 9 out of 10 times you'll end-up in an info page. It's the little guys that get the most out of digital advertising, especially e-commerce sites where they can link ads to products.

I would have agreed with you 5 years ago, but currently, I don't see the same in my business, nor in the businesses of my close friends or relatives. It could of course just be that we're in a niche where ads don't work too well!

Re: Problems coming for online publishing

#44

Post by packet_nerd »

forapurpose wrote: post #41
packet_nerd wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost everyone tech savvy that I know runs an ad blocker and I've installed one for all my family members who aren't. At family holiday gatherings they've even started asking me to "do that thing you do" to clean up their browsers. Regular people are getting very very tired of so many obnoxious ads, and even though they don't think about it much, no one is like "hey, I have WAY to much privacy! I need to give away m…

> Almost everyone tech savvy that I know runs an ad blocker and I've installed one for all my family members who aren't. How do you provide support to them for websites that malfunction due to the adblockers? IME, they often don't recognize that the problem is the adblocker much less have the patience to call me for help - and if they did, I don't always have time to help them when they need it.

I install Firefox + uBlock Origin and tell them that if they have specific issues they can hop back to IE.

That being said, I'm trying to think, and I honestly don't know that I've ever seen any sites break due to ad blockers (it may be that I'm guilty of not recognizing the source of malfunctions myself). Regardless, the web is a big place and life is short. If a site can't get it right I just move on. Mental bandwidth is a limited resource and (IME) ad-blocked pages consume less overall, despite possible issues.

Oh, I have seen the ones that throw up anti-adblock walls. I hate those.

Re: Problems coming for online publishing

#45

Post by criddell »

dqpb wrote: post #35

I would like to mention that I find it extremely irritating that despite paying for a subscription, the NYT still collects data on me and serves me ads. That's the worst of both worlds.

Yep. I'm not anti-advertising, but I am anti-tracking. Serve me ads, but please don't personalize them.

Re: Problems coming for online publishing

#46

Post by shiftoutbox »

IAmEveryone wrote: post #4

This is a rather asinine line of argumentation. (a) The New York Time's newsroom and editorial staff are rather well-separated from their business department which makes decision about ad tech on their website. If you don't believe me, see this paragraph from a recent article at The Atlantic, which operates by the same principle: As you read this article on The Atlantic, roughly three dozen ad trackers are watching y…

Having worked at nyt I worked on nyt_cookie.so an Apache module for parsing and forwarding some of the early tracking systems . So back on the topic over hacks . The source for it was in a cvs repo hosted on this guys second office laptop , running FreeBSD 3.2-STABLE . So one it was 2009 and 3.2 was incredibly old ; as was the laptop . One day the laptops disk dies and no one had backups of the repo . Nyt_cookie.so was kept on the prod web servers for another 4 or 5 years before it was abandoned. We used to binpatch the binary to fix it up .

Re: Problems coming for online publishing

#47

Post by Moru »

IAmEveryone wrote: post #4

This is a rather asinine line of argumentation. (a) The New York Time's newsroom and editorial staff are rather well-separated from their business department which makes decision about ad tech on their website. If you don't believe me, see this paragraph from a recent article at The Atlantic, which operates by the same principle: As you read this article on The Atlantic, roughly three dozen ad trackers are watching y…

It's pretty annoying when you pay (a lot) for local newspapers and still have to see advertisement.

Re: Problems coming for online publishing

#48

Post by krrrh »

exolymph wrote: post #31
osrec wrote: post #10

I am rather skeptical of the effectiveness of online advertising, despite all the tracking and profiling. I see companies like Google and Facebook post bumper profits, yet I see users becoming smarter at avoiding ads. Something doesn't quite add up, and because the validity of clicks is shrouded in mystery, it's not difficult for the platform owners to play dirty. I have had very little success with online ads for my…

What doesn't add up is that you and your circle are not typical users. Try talking to advertisers doing direct response on Facebook — they keep a very close eye on ROI. Brand advertising is less trackable, but advertising does and has always worked. If it didn't, businesses that didn't spend on advertising would outcompete those that do.

I think that the pie of attention is still increasing which offsets the crisis, but the percentage of people running adblockers is rapidly approaching “typical user” in many countries. See the most recent PageFair report, percentage of users running adblockers increased 30% YoY:

https://pagefair.com/blog/2017/adblockreport/

Re: Problems coming for online publishing

#49

Post by gcb0 »

packet_nerd wrote: post #40
extra88 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're still the exception. I don't use an ad blocker, of my two immediate IT staff coworkers, only one does use one. However, I do do things that mean I see fewer ads, especially obnoxious ones. I spend a lot of my time in RSS feeds, not often venturing to the actual sites. When I do go to those sites, if ads are burdensome, I use Safari's Reader View and I have enabled the "always use" option for a few sites (e.g.…

> You're still the exception Depends in the measure, I guess. Recent versions of Chrome have started blocking certain obtrusive ads by default. That's getting pretty mainstream.

Google is the source of most of those ads. think about it.

Re: Problems coming for online publishing

#50

Post by adventured »

purple-again wrote: post #7

If the backlash lasts long enough to really change the landscape of non explicit permission data gathering then an opportunity for hacker news one million jobs may arise. How much is my data worth? I’ll sign a buncb of revenue sharing agreements with YouTube, Google, Mozilla, Facebook etc if the price is right. I know that HN has a lot of really heavy pro privacy advocates but I hope you can recognize a lot of people…

> How much is my data worth? I’ll sign a buncb of revenue sharing agreements with YouTube, Google, Mozilla, Facebook etc if the price is right.

That's not how it would work.

In that scenario, you'll have a choice of paying $N per month for the higher privacy version of Facebook, or you can use the advertising supported low-privacy option.

They are not going to pay you. Your other choice will be to not use their platform and they will be fine with that because everyone else will continue to choose ad supported because they do not want to pay $50 or $100 per year for Facebook when they can get it for what they perceive to be as free.

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