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We Never Paid for Journalism

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Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#61

Post by WalterBright »

ghaff wrote: post #51
WalterBright wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> newspaper advertising has always been a low-return-on-investment marketing avenue Back in the 1980s (in the Datalight/Zortech days), the only game in town was advertising in computer magazines. We knew it worked because the day the monthly mag appeared on the shelf, we'd get a big spike in sales, that would then taper off through the month. It was fairly easy to correlate which computer mags mattered, how ad placem…

Heck, Computer Shopper was an absolutely huge magazine that was almost nothing but ads. There were some mostly low quality articles to lend a little credibility but basically people bought it for the ads.

Thus proving that people will pay for ads, if the ads are for things that interest them.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#63

Post by WalterBright »

musicale wrote: post #59
ghaff wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heck, Computer Shopper was an absolutely huge magazine that was almost nothing but ads. There were some mostly low quality articles to lend a little credibility but basically people bought it for the ads.

People like advertisements and used to read whole magazines made of them, but web advertising is a hated, privacy-violating, battery-draining, performance-crushing, pop-up and autoplay-infested, malware-tainted monstrosity. Advertisements used to engage and attract magazine readers, but web advertising detracts from web sites so much that ad blockers are immensely popular if not essential for a pleasant browsing expe…

That's because they push ads at people for what they think they want. That's very different from people buying ads for what those people actually want.

For example, I buy hot rod magazines for ads for cool stuff for my car. I'm not interested in furniture ads in those magazines, and furniture makers don't advertise in car mags. When I want to buy furniture, then I'll buy a home decor magazine and look at furniture ads. I don't want to see a fuel injection pump in a home decor magazine.

Hemmings Motor News is another example of effective advertising. It's nothing but car ads - and people pay for a subscription.

An online example is newegg.com. All it is is computer electronics. It's my go-to location when I'm looking for stuff for my computer. Seeing ads on newegg is exactly why I'm going there.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#64

Post by elliekelly »

bluk wrote: post #45
kodablah wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With the dawn of digital advertising, where every view, click and conversion is neatly accounted for, advertisers have come to realize that newspaper advertising has always been a low-return-on-investment marketing avenue, even when it was the only game in town. They just didn't have the metrics to prove it. How does this compare with television advertising? I see them as similar. Is traditional television advertis…

Related to this, I wish more of Hulu's financials were made public. They have essentially concentrated on growing their ad-supported subscriptions by cutting the consumer price and doing subscription bundle deals with others like Spotify. Sometimes you could get Hulu for $1 per month (when it costs about ~$12 per month for an ad-free subscription). Is it due to ad supported subscriptions being worth more to Hulu or i…

Hulu's privacy policy[1] is one of the whackiest I've ever seen. Most policies limit sharing of user information to affiliates, service providers, business partners (read: advertisers) and when legally required. Hulu makes no such promises:

> We may share information collected from or about you with third parties as explained further below, including business partners, social networking services, service providers, advertisers, and other companies that are not affiliated with Hulu.

Basically anyone.

But it's probably not that big of a deal if advertisers and "other companies not affiliated with Hulu" can see that you watch Always Sunny with alarming frequency, right? Well that's not the only data they're collecting. Hulu's tracking is just as invasive as Google and Facebook:

> This information may relate to your use of the Hulu Services, websites you visited, advertisements you viewed, and your other activities online. Advertising that is based on information collected from or about you across websites, applications and other platforms over time is known as interest-based or online behavioral advertising.

It's not tracking though, Hulu uses the far less sinister name of "Behaviorial Advertising" in their policy. And the policy repeatedly justifies their practices by pointing to the "Self Regulatory Principals for Online Behavioral Advertising"[2] which are not particularly principled principals. Unsurprising when you consider they were created by the American Association of Advertising Agencies.

Hulu might share information about everything you do online but at least your personal data will be cloaked in the anonymity of "aggregate" data, right? Nope.

> We may share the information collected from or about you in encrypted, aggregated, or de-identified forms

That's a tres commas club sentence. Meaning they'll share your information in the aggregate OR de-identified OR they'll encrypt it. So they might send all of your information and browsing habits to the highest bidder but at least they'll do you the solid of encrypting it first.

And notice they use the term "de-identified" instead of the standard "personally identifiable." That's no mistake. According to the policy, "de-identified" means:

> that the information does not identify you personally

As in, it doesn't have your full name or phone number. Contrast that with the typical definition of PI[3]:

> any information that can be used to distinguish or trace an individual's identity

It's no wonder they aren't operating in Europe.

TL/DR: Hulu's privacy practices are significantly more abhorrent than FAANG's.

[1] https://secure.hulu.com/privacy

[2-PDF] https://www.aboutads.info/resource/download/seven-principles...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_data

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#65

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

musicale wrote: post #59
ghaff wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heck, Computer Shopper was an absolutely huge magazine that was almost nothing but ads. There were some mostly low quality articles to lend a little credibility but basically people bought it for the ads.

People like advertisements and used to read whole magazines made of them, but web advertising is a hated, privacy-violating, battery-draining, performance-crushing, pop-up and autoplay-infested, malware-tainted monstrosity. Advertisements used to engage and attract magazine readers, but web advertising detracts from web sites so much that ad blockers are immensely popular if not essential for a pleasant browsing expe…

Computer Shopper was more of a condensed catalog of multiple vendors. It served as a search index and comparison pricing utility. Nobody "liked" the ads other than that was the only way to become informed about a wide range of products.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#66

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

excalibur wrote: post #10
imgabe wrote: post #4

I was going to buy a physical newspaper recently thinking it would make for cheap packing material, only to find that the Sunday edition of the NY Times is like $6 now. It's not as fat as it used to be either it seems.

Someone keeps leaving physical papers in my driveway despite me never asking them to or subscribing to anything. They usually go directly in the bin, but I also usually feel guilty that I'm not saving them all for some unknown future project.

You're playing an important role in the economy of unread newsprint. Just keep throwing it away and someone gets to keep their job.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#67

Post by ninth_ant »

blueyes wrote: post #31

While the 50 cents per edition that newspapers charged was not enough to cover their costs, it sent a signal to advertisers that they were getting a certain type of eyeball. An eyeball that had 50 disposable cents per day to buy packaged news in a local market. That 50 cents was an important signal. Newspapers would find other ways of getting those same eyeballs, by striking deals with hotels and airlines and essenti…

Is that the 50c really signalling disposable income? Or just that it signalled that the newspapers were being read by humans and not just sitting in a pile somewhere?

To my intuition 50c per day doesn’t signal a useful amount of disposable income even in 2006 dollars.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#68

Post by perl4ever »

WalterBright wrote: post #63
musicale wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People like advertisements and used to read whole magazines made of them, but web advertising is a hated, privacy-violating, battery-draining, performance-crushing, pop-up and autoplay-infested, malware-tainted monstrosity. Advertisements used to engage and attract magazine readers, but web advertising detracts from web sites so much that ad blockers are immensely popular if not essential for a pleasant browsing expe…

That's because they push ads at people for what they think they want. That's very different from people buying ads for what those people actually want. For example, I buy hot rod magazines for ads for cool stuff for my car. I'm not interested in furniture ads in those magazines, and furniture makers don't advertise in car mags. When I want to buy furniture, then I'll buy a home decor magazine and look at furniture ad…

I tend to watch youtube videos about cars. One day, the absurdity struck me - they're trying to force me to watch ads at the beginning, but the whole video is basically an ad. It's absolutely ridiculous, the idea that I need to watch an ad for something I'm not interested in to "pay" for watching an ad for something I am interested in (albeit I'm probably going to buy neither in the near future).

Of course, if I actually was able to buttonhole some guru at Google who understood the business and my situation, they would just look at me like I was an idiot and say "we warned you that if you turned off the various personalization features the ads wouldn't be relevant".

But if I left every option turned on, the ads wouldn't be better, just creepier.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#69

Post by perl4ever »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #52
vilhelm_s wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would point to the graph here: https://baekdal.com/thoughts/what-killed-the-newspapers-goog... The increased income of Google (which is nearly all ads) matches the decreased income of the newspapers, so it doesn't seem like the ad spending actually decreased, it just moved away from the papers.

Ugh. For an article whose point is "the sum of these lines does X," you'd really thing they'd graph the sum of those lines.

I think there is a lot of inadvertent irony/lack of awareness in:

"Google, Craigslist and others are (mostly) in the new high-intent advertising market. It's an entirely different type of market based on an entirely different type of moment. The reason newspapers are losing here is because you aren't even in this market to begin with."

Not even in the market? Surely anyone who reads about the newspaper business has heard about the role of classifieds, and how they propped up newspapers until Craigslist came along?

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#70

Post by scarejunba »

Most newspapers are just the equivalent of retweets - as mediocre journalists rewrite AP and Reuters reports. These jobs are going to go away. Real journalism costs money. And it will go to the real journalists in time. I predict that in the next 30 years we'll have the Taylor Swifts, Kanye Wests, and the Beatles of journalism suck up all of the revenue while the low-effort rewriters are demolished by machines.
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