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Gwern's Law: Ads cost you a tenth of your users

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Re: Gwern's Law: Ads cost you a tenth of your users

#121

Post by Waterluvian »

lupire wrote: post #108
nitrogen wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen a five year old play those games and talk about how much he really needs that $100 gem pack. I wonder if these will have any lasting effect on how kids of today understand value.

Parents today have to train kids early. Mine learned by age 3 that any non-animated video content on YouTube was an ad that needed to be skipped. Not perfect, but a great start. Constantly drill into them that these are ads, and ads are bad people trying to trick them, and that ads should be avoided, in apps, websites, billboards, etc. I'm not any advertising, but the only good ad is an ad I asked to see, as when I'm…

My toddler learned at about 20 months how to skip YouTube ads. It's unbelievable. I watched him evolve as he would mash the "skip ad in 5..." Countdown to waiting until it was done to skip.

He also learned through trial and error not to accidentally tap on the ads.

Re: Gwern's Law: Ads cost you a tenth of your users

#122

Post by jermaustin1 »

copperx wrote: post #119
jermaustin1 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Unless it is a Free to Play game, you pay before you play. Some Early Access games start out free, but less and less now days.

Re: Gwern's Law: Ads cost you a tenth of your users

#123

Post by tschwimmer »

This is interesting and valuable analysis. Despite a lot of people in this thread saying "See! I told you ads are user toxic!" I'd easily make this tradeoff if I had no/limited other sources of revenue.

Two additional questions I have are: 1) Which 10% of users churn because of ads? Are these just average p50% actives or are they power users who evangalize your product? 2) What's the effect on annual growth rate?

Re: Gwern's Law: Ads cost you a tenth of your users

#125

Post by DuskStar »

leggomylibro wrote: post #90
umvi wrote: post #32

I believe it. There are a lot of games that I downloaded from the app store and really liked initially. However, I noticed a pattern. At first, ads seemed to be optional (i.e double your gems by watching an ad!) However, after about 10 minutes of playing, I'd see an ad. No big deal. But then it got more and more aggressive. Pretty soon there was an ad after every single level, (plus the bonus ad if you want to double…

One of my favorite mobile games (an old Popcap title) used to have a version which cost ~$10 and was just a no-frills port of the original. No ads, no permissions beyond file storage, no issues working offline. But you can't buy that anymore; now the only option is a 'free' version which has ads that you cannot pay away. Fortunately I can still download the old version from the app store; now it is called 'zzSUNSET '…

I think it's partly that the kind of person that pays $10 for an app is also the kind of person that advertisers actually want. So even if your average revenue/user for a free app is $10.

Re: Gwern's Law: Ads cost you a tenth of your users

#126

Post by gameshot911 »

winrid wrote: post #109
eridius wrote: post #44

If a game doesn't offer any way to pay to remove ads, it's an instant uninstall for me. If a game does offer it, but doesn't let me play for long enough to decide whether I like the game before it starts serving up unskippable ads, I uninstall it. Most games simply don't give enough time to decide if you even like it before they start throwing ads at you. That seems like a terrible policy in general, regardless of wh…

All this feedback is great. I'm working on a little competitive multiplayer game for Android (and soon iOS) as a side project. I was thinking about showing ads after every other match w/ the option to pay out and now I think I'll only show them past a certain rank, or just put up a pay wall.

Keep in mind that the HN crowd is not always reflective of the broader population. There is a reason apps show adds they way they do - it's very effective in making a lot of $$.

Re: Gwern's Law: Ads cost you a tenth of your users

#127

Post by OtterCoder »

HenryBemis wrote: post #60
umvi wrote: post #32

I believe it. There are a lot of games that I downloaded from the app store and really liked initially. However, I noticed a pattern. At first, ads seemed to be optional (i.e double your gems by watching an ad!) However, after about 10 minutes of playing, I'd see an ad. No big deal. But then it got more and more aggressive. Pretty soon there was an ad after every single level, (plus the bonus ad if you want to double…

This is not ethical.. but here is a work-around. On Android devices, install the (free-and no ads) 'NoRoot Firewall'. Then it takes some minutes to get used to it, but you ONLY 'Allow' connections that the game needs to operate (e.g. everything that goes to port 443 is an indicator, or everything to/from Akamai, AWS, Azure, Cloudfront), and 'Block' everything that goes to port 80 (which usually is AdJust, doubleclick…

There's nothing ethical about the way advertising invades every part of society, every corner of your home, and every available minute of human attention. Blocking ads is eminently moral, because the only way to stop their encroach is to punish their purchase by blocking them.

Re: Gwern's Law: Ads cost you a tenth of your users

#129

Post by atoav »

I might be one of the 10% mentioned here. It was sefinitly true for instagram since facebook took over. If every 5th image in my stream is a sponsered ad by nike or some startup it doesn’t feel like my stream anymore. There is weird content coming out of nowhere that I didn’t ask for. Effectively I just ended up using it less and less, till I sropped using it entirely.

Re: Gwern's Law: Ads cost you a tenth of your users

#130

Post by Wordball »

kelnos wrote: post #115
nabla9 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What are you trying to accomplish by clicking "not relevant"?
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