Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is it worth supporting Firefox?

reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 224 posts

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#171

Post by magduf »

pjmlp wrote: post #68
lakechfoma wrote: post #29

Earlier 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.

Don't forget how they jack up the volume on the commercials.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#172

Post by UncleMeat »

appleiigs wrote: post #133
mcherm wrote: post #66

Earlier 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?

As mentioned, if they put up ads that aren’t “blinking GIFs, auto-play videos and misleading links thrown between paragraphs” then they could have more traffic. Even now with an ad blocker many videos autoplay. I bounce immediately once I see a video being loaded.

Are you sure? Just the other day there was a whole thread complaining about ad block plus permitting static ads with clickbait titles. No blinking. No autoplay. And people still we're pissed.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#173

Post by mercer »

johnchristopher wrote: post #14

> I work for a major publisher. Ad-blockers are starting to hurt our revenue big time. No. What's hurting your edit:employer's revenue is years of blinking GIFs, auto-play videos and misleading links thrown between paragraphs. That's the first reason why I started using ad-blockers 15 years ago. The privacy issue is a recent thing. > We're doing a redesign now. Manager says that we should just discourage the users of…

Based on my (limited) experience in a few media companies, the problem is not malice, but just a complete lack of understanding of 'digital'. I've worked on multiple projects that were really fun and good right up until we had to add various tracking tools and ads. They rendered the end product borderline unusable (which of course none of us or our leaders were bothered by because of adblockers).

And the problem of all this wasn't just that the end product was ruined. It also played a significant role in the exodus of multiple skilled developers that were sick of toiling away at stuff that would end up ad- and tracker-riddled monstrosities. Just that struck me as reason enough to stop blindly doing all that.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#174

Post by smoe »

627467 wrote: post #60

How 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…

I used to work in the marketing department for a big news site in Switzerland some years ago. I wasn't involved much in normal ads, but building interactive campaigns, contests and such.

What you say is being done. Mostly in form of "native advertising" these days. But those articles tend to be written with virality in mind, not necessarily usefulness.

In my opinion, most of the worst ads come from remnant space advertisement. A middle to upper management person discovers some unused white space while browsing the site and asks the marketing department to fill with something that makes money. Repeat until the site is completely plastered.

But because those ads bring in so little in isolation, it is not worth it to have your own sales people trying to sell them. That is why they get outsourced. The publishers I met back then, did not like Google/Facebook, because it their opinion they took to big a cut. But it is either that, or not monetizing the space at all.

Another big problem is, the advertisement agencies developers who build the things to be included in websites, tend to be junior/intern level under massive time pressure. Practically no QA and little to no thought put into consequences by any of the involved parties.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#175

Post by ihsw2 »

JepZ wrote: post #159
wvenable wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How hard is it to sell a fixed tag or any block of text within an article? Ad blockers will block that as well. Ad blockers will even block regular old HTML text on the page if it looks like an ad.

How does an ad look like?

CSS classes and IDs match certain criteria, like being prefixed with "ad" or suffixed with "banner" and having a rendered size that matches an ad box (eg: 600px by 100px).

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#176

Post by alsocasey »

dagmx wrote: post #87
pjmlp wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think the most egregious example is latter seasons of The Big Bang Theory clocking in at 16 minutes. That's ~50% ads.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#177

Post by Silhouette »

Steltek wrote: post #15
johnchristopher wrote: post #14

> I work for a major publisher. Ad-blockers are starting to hurt our revenue big time. No. What's hurting your edit:employer's revenue is years of blinking GIFs, auto-play videos and misleading links thrown between paragraphs. That's the first reason why I started using ad-blockers 15 years ago. The privacy issue is a recent thing. > We're doing a redesign now. Manager says that we should just discourage the users of…

But what if this publisher never did that? Ad blockers are taking off because of Internet-wide abuses (malware, privacy, gross obnoxiousness). It's a tragedy of the commons. Publishers never got together to regulate themselves so users are now doing it for them.

Publishers never got together to regulate themselves so users are now doing it for them.

Unfortunately, that may also prove to be a tragedy of the commons. If everyone blocks ads aggressively, ad-funded resources will need to find new business models or they won't be available any more.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#178

Post by jamie_ca »

pimeys wrote: post #67
rosege wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what will you replace Confluence with?

We'll change our whole business model and do 100% open source, so I guess it'll be Github.

You mean GitLab?

GitHub is free, but definitely not open source (and has never pretended to be).

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#180

Post by potench »

The real question for media publishers (one I've already experienced at a large sports agency): "is it worth supporting the web".

It is worth it, there's still a lot of traffic, but it's a different model and elegant, interactive browser experiences aren't the target.

Minutes spent, repeat, and quality traffic continues to move toward native apps. GDPR and ad-blocking represent increasing risk + decreasing revenue with the status-quo media web experience.

So the status-quo is becoming prioritizing search engines, social scrapers, and a well-designed URL funnel that pushes traffic toward your native app where you can still monetize with display ads, reliably autoplay video with client-side video ads, and push notifications that result in actual traffic.

There are strategies for monetizing on the web (server-side ad stitching, integrated marketing, pay-gates, hell - just buy traffic to your site that you know doesn't have ad-blockers) but sometimes it's counterintuitive to funneling traffic to native.

Ultimately it requires investment in Product/Creative/UX/Dev to define and sell-through a vision/strategy for web to decision-makers when those decision-makers are seeing numbers that suggest even the investment to define the web strategy is a poor investment - let alone investment in developing and maintaining it.

Post reply on HN