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Adblocking: How about Nah?

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Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#371

Post by jefftk »

Silhouette wrote: post #332
jefftk wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work at an advertising company that worked this way, doing lead gen. In some verticals there's nothing better, and as long as your own metrics are good you can figure out how much a traffic source is worth. If a traffic source goes bad and starts being 50% spam, no problem, your automatic system lowers its bids by 50% and you're fine. The thing is, only a very small fraction of the ads ecosystem works this…

I recognize that other advertisers may have different goals, such as for large, brand-centric advertising campaigns. I'm not an expert on those so can't offer an informed opinion on any specifics. From a casual observer's point of view, I don't see how they're any worse off than the classic "everyone is wasting half of their ad budget, they just don't know which half" of the print/broadcast era. As you say, at least…

Try looking at it from the publisher's perspective. If their ad network can't detect fraud then of all the money the network brings in an increasing proportion will go to fraudulent publishers. Honest publishers will make less and less money and eventually give up on the ad network.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#372

Post by DangitBobby »

lolinder wrote: post #333
j_m_b wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like such a rational comment, but it is based on the naive idea that ads can be effectively targeted simply based on content. You're never going to have ads that people are willing to pay for (i.e. a certain threshold click-through rate) without some sort of direct targeting. For example, you can't tell if your article on basic car maintenance is being read by a 30 year old male who might be interested in…

When I turned 25 I started getting nothing but hard soda ads from YouTube. I don't drink. I went and disabled personalized advertising, and for the first time in years I started seeing ads that tempted me to click through, ads from tech companies about tech. Why the difference? Because YouTube started showing me ads related to the content I'm actually watching rather than based on their faulty neural network profile…

You have a good point here. What website I'm currently on is a pretty strong indicator for the types of content and services I'm interested in. Content aggregator sites like Facebook where people spend a ton of time thinking about all sort of topics are really the Holy Grail target, though, and that probably explains why the ad delivery model is less about where you are on the internet and more about who they think you are.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#373

Post by sergiotapia »

grepthisab wrote: post #361
kweks wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm browser crypto mining. There's a direct link between the time a user is engaged, and the amount of money a publisher earns. The relationship is direct between reader and publisher; making quality content becomes important again, there's no adoption friction, and ad networks become a thing of the past. It's no wonder Google blocked browser mining quick-smart.. it had the potential to bring down the entire house of…

Stop spreading this nonsense.

What part of his comment is nonsense?

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#374

Post by snuxoll »

prostoalex wrote: post #366
sgeisler wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a massive drive to consolidation: people don't want to have a lot of subscriptions to manage. Imo subscriptions aren't viable at all. For me to subscribe to something I need strong evidence that I will use it enough. Automatic micropayments with a daily allowance seem like a much superior solution. They remove the friction of making the subscribe decision and keep the content creators in check by only payin…

> Automatic micropayments with a daily allowance seem like a much superior solution. How do you ensure some content quality that goes beyond a headline and a catchy teaser paragraph? Kindle Unlimited had this problem when they started distributing payouts based on pages read, which led to a proliferation of books with catchy first page, instructions to skip to the last page and a bunch of junk in between.

Kindle Unlimited has other problems that make issues for content quality, king among them being the KDP Select requirement.

I’ve managed to find value from Kindle Unlimited, but pretty much nobody but self published authors (which I have no problem with, but there’s effectively zero bar to entry meaning quality is over the place) is available on the service because of the KDP Select issue. It doesn’t seem to be evenly enforced either, since the Harry Potter books are available via Kindle Unlimited yet are available for sale on other eBook stores, for example.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#375

Post by marcosdumay »

jgeada wrote: post #357

I think we’re going to need adclickers: similar to adblockers except they put the ad in a sandbox and click it. As long as this registers as a click, someone somewhere will want to be paid and sooner or later the whole ad economy nightmare will implode.

Like AdNauseam?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adnauseam/

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#376

Post by Dylan16807 »

prostoalex wrote: post #366
sgeisler wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a massive drive to consolidation: people don't want to have a lot of subscriptions to manage. Imo subscriptions aren't viable at all. For me to subscribe to something I need strong evidence that I will use it enough. Automatic micropayments with a daily allowance seem like a much superior solution. They remove the friction of making the subscribe decision and keep the content creators in check by only payin…

> Automatic micropayments with a daily allowance seem like a much superior solution. How do you ensure some content quality that goes beyond a headline and a catchy teaser paragraph? Kindle Unlimited had this problem when they started distributing payouts based on pages read, which led to a proliferation of books with catchy first page, instructions to skip to the last page and a bunch of junk in between.

> How do you ensure some content quality that goes beyond a headline and a catchy teaser paragraph?

How about a simple button that makes a view/visit not count?

> instructions to skip to the last page

That happened because it didn't count pages read or time spent.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#377

Post by taf2 »

So there is a technical solution to ad delivery that is pretty hard to impossible to block that is serve everything from the same domain. It’s very possible today and even desirable with http/2. You can configure this with cloud front and multiple origins or using service workers with cloudflare... I’d guess it’s only a matter of time before this becomes the more common way to deliver content and ads as one origin...

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#378

Post by mlguy456 »

jefftk wrote: post #320
dkersten wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best content I’ve found in recent years has been either on sites that don’t contain advertisement (because they’re someone’s personal hobby blog, for example, or HN) or from videos where the person was supported directly by fans through Patreon. Anecdotally, the advertisement-supported content is mostly garbage.

HN does have ads. They're job ads for YC companies, and they're the entries you see without an option to vote on. Ones like "Come eat – I mean build with the ZeroCater (YC W11) engineering team".

That's an example what ads should be. They are relevant, appropriate, they don't try to fool you or spy on you.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#379

Post by dwaltrip »

thomas wrote: post #362

What a weird phrase: “how about nah”. Is this a reference to something I’m totally missing out on? I can barely pay attention to that point the article make when it’s framed in such an odd and unclear context. I get wanting to have style to your writing but not at the expense of clarity.

It means something to the affect of "Thanks, but no thanks, I'll do this my way", with a bit of extra snark.

I liked the term "adversarial interoperability" that they used in the article. I think it is an interesting concept. Although I might want to reframe it as protecting individual autonomy.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#380

Post by TylerE »

klez wrote: post #352
zrm wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another possibility would be to create ad blockers that do that, i.e. block third party javascript but not pure text or images. Then you get the same result, simple ads get through but ad scripts don't, so the people who use ads without scripts are the only ones who make money from them.

Blocking third party JavaScript will have the unwanted consequence of blocking CDNs as well, so at least you need some whitelist that allows those scripts.

Which rather defeats the alleged purpose - you know ever CDN is monetizing your data.
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