It strikes me in a weird way that power users are brought up in one of the comments as the main users of Firefox. It's obviously a major stretch to argue the counter-argument, that Chrome and others must be mostly used by casual users, but the idea that those people are somehow more accepting of bullshit UX is, well, just wrong. They are either even more frustrated, not knowing how to deal with it, or have already developed habits to sieve the noise out, definitely not bringing any additional advertisement revenue.
Is it worth supporting Firefox?
81–90 of 224 posts
Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?
#82This is a totalitarian publisher's wet dream, to strongarm users to pay them or look at they ads whether they like it or not. If somebody's using adblockers, they're not going to be converted by your ads either way. If you introduce bothersome mechanisms preventing me from interacting with your website on my terms, I'm just going to leave and never come back.
This is exactly why we need Firefox and other browsers, so that Google can't dictate what the web has to look like. They'd like to ideally introduce a tracking id in everything you ever do everywhere, it's up to us to stop them.
Anyway, no matter what kind of mechanism is introduced, there will be an equal and proportionate response to mitigate it within a week. You can't force people to watch ads they don't care about, and that's it. The sooner you accept it, the smaller losses you'll incur.
Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?
#83This discussion makes me wonder why I haven't seen more server side ad solutions that render ads into a page in a way that's harder to detect or block. Of course, advertisers could find ways to abuse that too and then adblockers would have to up their game. I think the best strategy is to render a fallback into your page that looks like an image related to your content and then replace that image on they fly with unobtrusive ads that respect the user experience. If people block the adds they'll see the fallback which is an opportunity to plead your case to users and ask for donations, subscriptions or permission to show respectful ads.
Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?
#84How hard is it to sell a fixed tag or any block of text within an article? Sell it as "this content will stay there for as long as the page is published". The problem is that every major publisher has bought into centralized ad brokers. Google and Facebooks of the world sell the idea that they can personalize ads better than content producers and so everyone relies on their trackers and javascripts to build content b…
Companies simply get better leads with tracking. You don’t really know about your audience when you are online, because there are so much traffic and so many users.
Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why can't we have content based ads that are non-intrusive like television and old print media? Yeah they still interject in the middle of content, but not with the same level of deceit as what some ads and sponsored links do on web media. I would disable my adblocker for sites that have ad campaigns not based on "gross obnoxiousness", privacy intrusions, and disregard for if an advertising party is serving up malwar…
> non-intrusive like television In which country?!? I hardly see any regular TV because in 30m show, 20m are advertisements, and the remaining 10m have lots of product placements.
Ha ok that's true. Ad breaks are long, superimposed ads exist, and sponsored content is a thing. Maybe "less intrusive" or even "predictable" is better language. I'm thinking of moments where you're scrolling and you get a pop-up that you can barely figure out how to close. You go to click a link and the page moves, whether by accident or not, because of an ad loading there. Autoplay ads (and other videos) that make me instaclose, etc. TV is at least predictable.
Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?
#86How hard is it to sell a fixed tag or any block of text within an article? Sell it as "this content will stay there for as long as the page is published". The problem is that every major publisher has bought into centralized ad brokers. Google and Facebooks of the world sell the idea that they can personalize ads better than content producers and so everyone relies on their trackers and javascripts to build content b…
>Google and Facebooks of the world sell the idea that they can personalize ads better than content producers and so everyone relies on their trackers and javascripts to build content business online. Publishers should know their audience better than ad servers.
Part of the problem is that Google and Facebook actually can know the audience better than the content creator. A content creator only knows that the reader is interested in, say, cooking. Facebook and Google know most everything the reader is interested in, and what sort of ads the reader actually interacts with. They can use all of that information to maximize the chance the reader will click on an ad.
The problem now is that because of how effective Google' and Facebook's ads are, a single click on an ad is basically worthless. Someone who's trying to sell a product isn't going to pay 100 times as much per click to use a smaller ad network, they're going to go with whoever can give them the most impact.
Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why can't we have content based ads that are non-intrusive like television and old print media? Yeah they still interject in the middle of content, but not with the same level of deceit as what some ads and sponsored links do on web media. I would disable my adblocker for sites that have ad campaigns not based on "gross obnoxiousness", privacy intrusions, and disregard for if an advertising party is serving up malwar…
> non-intrusive like television In which country?!? I hardly see any regular TV because in 30m show, 20m are advertisements, and the remaining 10m have lots of product placements.
Bit of an exaggeration. The average show is roughly 22-24 minutes per half hour with the rest going to advertisments.
Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?
#88How hard is it to sell a fixed tag or any block of text within an article? Sell it as "this content will stay there for as long as the page is published". The problem is that every major publisher has bought into centralized ad brokers. Google and Facebooks of the world sell the idea that they can personalize ads better than content producers and so everyone relies on their trackers and javascripts to build content b…
Companies simply get better leads with tracking. You don’t really know about your audience when you are online, because there are so much traffic and so many users.
I heard and even understand the truth in that argument, it even worked well in the past 10 years. But I think the content business has reached a point where it needs a new solutions. Paywalling is only one of them.
Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if you "discourage" my browser, I go away and don't come back. If the site is supported by ad revenue and you actively refuse to permitany ad revenue is it really a loss to the publisher if you leave?
Depends on whether you share the links to others who run without ad blocking in place.
From the linked post: "I tried telling him that the people who use adblockers are likely to share more content, which brings in non-adblock users. However, that is also falling apart as adblock users are bringing other adblock users."
Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?
#90Computer savvy users are never going to accept the web flashing, blinking, popping, interrupting, lagging.... And there will only be more of us in the future when the new generation grows up. Your revenue model is dying and you are trying to save it by making the web even worse. Its a race to the bottom.
> There will be more of us
That doesn't look to be the case. While the "net native" generation is more likely to turn to digital content than other media, studies show that computer literacy, in the sense of understanding the basic workings of a computer, is on the decline.