I'm curious about the numbers for websites automatically playing videos. I find these even more annoying than 80% of ads and they often don't get blocked.
And I personally run a domain blocker plugin just for these sites. Playing a video I didn't ask for? Bye forever. Most sites with this problem have 10 competitors just on that page of search results.
Gwern's Law: Ads cost you a tenth of your users
111–120 of 323 posts
Re: Gwern's Law: Ads cost you a tenth of your users
#112Re: Gwern's Law: Ads cost you a tenth of your users
#113(sardonic) True, but did you want those users if they aren't even willing to spend money?
Sometimes. Those users are potential advertisers for your site.
Re: Gwern's Law: Ads cost you a tenth of your users
#114Is it ads, or slowly-loading ad-sized content?
One thing I've noticed is that ads seem like an afterthought in most apps. The New York Times iPhone app displays ads, even if you pay for it, and occasionally the entire app will freeze while it's waiting for ads to download. (The app works offline, but if it gets a hint of network availability, it will stop the world to try and download them. Usually as your train is leaving the subway station with a 4G signal entering the tunnel without.) The Wall Street Journal app is similar, except instead of freezing completely, scrolling starts to run at about 5Hz instead of the expected 60Hz. Obviously, the developers of the apps develop it with ads turned off (or with sample images loaded from servers they control with no DNS lookup latency, etc.), so probably aren't even aware of these issues. That is going to reduce subscriptions, even if the images weren't ads.
Re: Gwern's Law: Ads cost you a tenth of your users
#115More detailed discussion of the 4 other datapoints: https://www.gwern.net/Ads#replication (I added McCoy et al 2007 just last night, so now it's 5 total: me, Pandora, Mozilla, LinkedIn, and McCoy et al 2007.)
It's often said that less than 10% of users click ads. If there would be way to identify those users with reasonably low false positive rate, you could annoy only small fraction of users and keep more of them (if you want to have them).
Yeah, that's the thing. I will never (except possibly accidentally) click on an ad. Every single time I see an add in my Instagram feed, I mark it as "not relevant". And yet these days I see ads every 5-7 photos in my feed. I use Instagram much less now because of the quantity of ads, and Instagram should clearly be able to tell that I don't interact with ads at all except to get rid of them. I've probably reduced my use of the app by 75% or so (both viewing and posting), solely because of ads.
Re: Gwern's Law: Ads cost you a tenth of your users
#116Could just be an effect of page load time?
Any attempt to rule out confounding parameters - on the web ads increase pageload a heap.
Re: Gwern's Law: Ads cost you a tenth of your users
#117I assumed this would be the case and removed ads from my web game about a year ago. But didn't see a difference with traffic or retention (granted, I didn't A/B test it! I removed them 100%). Which was disappointing. The only difference I noticed is that I lost that revenue (5 figures). But probably depends on volume and/or type of ads? [EDIT] Clarified re: traffic
'Revenue'!='users'. EDIT: and 10% is, while important, a pretty subtle difference compared to the enormous variability of traffic. Traffic is a time-series which drifts and has many potentially large jumps. If you removed ads only once, how would you ever notice? The effect is very noticeable if you look at samples with _n_ in the millions, or if you remove/add scores of times and model it statistically, though.
A very good point -- if you don't have other sources of revenue aside from ads, and can't run the site/game/whatever without that, 10% of your users gone might be a perfectly reasonable trade off for the ad revenue that keeps the site running.
I think you mention later in the Twitter thread that Patreon has given you much more recurring revenue than ads? I wish operators would spend the time to look at the effectiveness of ad alternatives as you've done.
Re: Gwern's Law: Ads cost you a tenth of your users
#118I really do think the way ads are presented and how they are embedded matters. E.g., a static banner, embedded statically server-side without tracking and targeting, respectfully sitting besides the content may be not offensive to anyone. We may even appreciate that the advertiser is supporting the content we like, a positive image transfer besides the needs of last week's shopping list (of which we're kept reminded just too often by common advertising practice). On the other hand, what we mostly see, is advertising going off-the-rails, competing with the content (reading a news site is often some of a glimpse of war of its own today, at least visually), aggressive tracking and targeting, in combination fostering the feeling that the ad-networks and by this also the hosting site are actively working against you, providing the content just as a pretext for exploitation. Something has gone terribly wrong. (I've actually not bought products, I would have bought else, because of advertising practices.)
Edit: As an ethical workaround, I find myself increasingly opening a site in broser A without blocker and then copying the URL to another browser B with blocking, because I can't concentrate on the content anymore, or maybe switching to reader mode to consume the content. But, does presenting the ads to me make any sense at all? Most interestingly, this would result in inflated user statitistics. Maybe, we're seeing a combination of both?
Re: Gwern's Law: Ads cost you a tenth of your users
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the classic "shareware demo" model is a good one, have some free stuff to introduce the user and make sure they like the game, then give them a wall and tell them to pay if they want more. It's fair to them and fair to you. It doesn't violate their privacy, it makes sure your customers actually want to be your customers (reducing chargebacks because the game has an issue for someone) and you get paid without…
I miss this model for games. Demo disks were my favorite thing in the world. I'd play a demo a dozen times or so before I decided that it was worth begging a parent to buy the game for me.
It has been a long time since I played games, but I thought games still had demos. In Steam, do you have to buy a game before playing it?
Re: Gwern's Law: Ads cost you a tenth of your users
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe your standards have changed, but that's still too much for me. I don't mind guest posts or (mentioned) sponsored content, however I will always use ublock to remove ads. It would be different if the typical ad experience were a related, useful product. But it's always unrelated hot garbage - distracting and annoying at any pixel size.
that's still too much for me Reasonable ads don't bother me. I don't long for the day when I can install an ad blocker in my car's windshield so I don't see billboards or the names of car dealerships on the backs of the other cars. Then again, when I drive someplace where there's too many billboards I find it annoying.
I would absolutely love an ad blocker for my car's windshield (or, since I don't drive much, some sort of AR glasses that block ads). I find advertising unbearable. People's tolerance levels are different.
I wouldn't say that your old site, with its two image ads, was "covered with too many ads", but I would still expect an ad blocker to remove them.