101–110 of 158 posts
I've never understood why media companies don't treat ad sales as a core business. They are in the business of delivering ads to eyeballs, so why are they outsourcing their core business. I can see outsourcing the ad platform. However sales should be in house, and they should exercise editorial control over who is allowed to advertise.
It's refreshing to see an assumption of incompetence rather than malice, since I seem to have come across the idea that Google is questionably motivated by ideology rather a lot recently. One thing I don't understand is why Google continues to try to use algorithmic solutions for content moderation. Surely the frequent false positives ends up hurting potential revenue? And would it not be able to hire people to at le…
After incompetence and malice, there’s a third option, or maybe a blend of two: arrogance and laziness. They’ve been sitting on top of the world for a while. The results sometimes speak for themselves. As a case in point, for over a full decade they have been flagging their own emails, that they send, that they know I signed up for, as spam. For a decade. Possibly as long as two decades.
It's refreshing to see an assumption of incompetence rather than malice, since I seem to have come across the idea that Google is questionably motivated by ideology rather a lot recently. One thing I don't understand is why Google continues to try to use algorithmic solutions for content moderation. Surely the frequent false positives ends up hurting potential revenue? And would it not be able to hire people to at le…
>It seems one could even argue that Google's focus on algorithmic rather than human solutions is a kind of harmful ideology It's the kind of ideology that you often find in people who think they are smarter than everyone else.
Scalability of algorithims is how they became a behemoth in the first place. I would call it being ruthlessly un-ideological in a sense. While there are implicit goals the approach is more "whatever works" for the system as a whole. While annoying it isn't a breaking point that gets people to exodus.
It is ultimatelty "democratic" in being what is wanted instead of what makes sense. Like the yotube advertiser exoduses where they stupidly think they need "advertiser friendly" content or it will harm their brand when nobody gives a fuck that they advertise on content where people swear or talk about sex.
Banning one publisher (unless it's truly massive), isn't going to have much effect to Google's bottom line, so they err on the side of protecting the 'quality' of places ads can be served, at all costs. This also comes through when you see 'invalid traffic' deductions on your AdSense income reports, as i'm sure almost every account running AdSense does, along with the seemingly random crawler errors mentioned in the article. They don't feel the need to explain themselves, and can withhold the revenue at the excuse of 'protecting' the advertiser's side of things.
I think the more correct answer to "Why Are Currently No Ads on Techdirt?" is "Because we put all of our eggs in one basket." Don't build a single point of failure into your revenue stream. There are plenty of alternatives to Google that they should have been using in a smaller way that they could then move into prime position. That way, Techdirt's revenue might have been diminished, but not eliminated.
I want to medium-to-heavy push back on this. Techdirt didn't build a single point of failure into their revenue stream, otherwise the title of this article would be, "Why is Techdirt closing down?". Their support page[0] lists 8 different revenue sources other than Google Ads. And this is precisely the type of diversity that you want. Signing up for 5 different ad networks isn't really good diversity, because: A) you…
It's refreshing to see an assumption of incompetence rather than malice, since I seem to have come across the idea that Google is questionably motivated by ideology rather a lot recently. One thing I don't understand is why Google continues to try to use algorithmic solutions for content moderation. Surely the frequent false positives ends up hurting potential revenue? And would it not be able to hire people to at le…
> One thing I don't understand is why Google continues to try to use algorithmic solutions for content moderation. I don't mean to sound condescending, but I think the answer to this question would be much clearer to you if you took a moment to try to comprehend the scale that google operates in.
The scale is not the problem, the profiteering is.
Google's true customers are the people buying ads in the first place. They could care less about publishers. Banning one publisher (unless it's truly massive), isn't going to have much effect to Google's bottom line, so they err on the side of protecting the 'quality' of places ads can be served, at all costs. This also comes through when you see 'invalid traffic' deductions on your AdSense income reports, as i'm sur…
I often wonder how the web would have evolved differently if early in the HTML spec an html tag was added that just had a SRC and href attribute.
It's refreshing to see an assumption of incompetence rather than malice, since I seem to have come across the idea that Google is questionably motivated by ideology rather a lot recently. One thing I don't understand is why Google continues to try to use algorithmic solutions for content moderation. Surely the frequent false positives ends up hurting potential revenue? And would it not be able to hire people to at le…
After incompetence and malice, there’s a third option, or maybe a blend of two: arrogance and laziness. They’ve been sitting on top of the world for a while. The results sometimes speak for themselves. As a case in point, for over a full decade they have been flagging their own emails, that they send, that they know I signed up for, as spam. For a decade. Possibly as long as two decades.
Not super positive but still.
A few months ago, I tried experimenting with Google ads to drive some traffic to a side project of mine which was basically a chess-over-videochat website. A little more than 40 impressions later, it was taken down for being "in violation of our Google ad policies". There was never any indication what the violation actually was. I replied and asked several times hoping to get a human to tell me what I had actually do…
after one year I wanted to integrate Google ads into another my side project and my account was still blocked (I took down my first application and re-applied again without any success)
I've never understood why media companies don't treat ad sales as a core business. They are in the business of delivering ads to eyeballs, so why are they outsourcing their core business. I can see outsourcing the ad platform. However sales should be in house, and they should exercise editorial control over who is allowed to advertise.