Do you remember the days when they had "punch the monkey" ads? This is progress in plain advertising. Also, it's the responsibility of the website owner to be smart. He/she could have spent the effort in finding dinosaur book publishers, but apparently they took the lazy route. As well, the web designer didn't think the ad aspect through -- it's an "oops" on their part. It's not greed, it's poor execution.
The Internet Made Me Sad Today
41–50 of 186 posts
Re: The Internet Made Me Sad Today
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you feel about the fact that certain farmers will starve if they can’t grow coca or poppies as a cash crop?
The problem with that analogy is that 90%+ of the farmers are growing coca or poppies today. Without a viable alternative "crop" or payment mechanism on the open web, I think the net effect will be to drive all of the content which advertising is paying for today into walled gardens, like a Physorg "app".
I think the answer he was looking for is: "sad"
Re: The Internet Made Me Sad Today
#43I'm very interested in the point made regarding interactive children's education. High schools across the country seem to think that giving students iPads to use as text books is a good idea. I think that if I was in high school and I had an iPad, I'd be surfing the web the entire time I was in class. I'm certain that's what the next generation will be doing if high schools do indeed end up going that route.
And then some entrepreneur will realize this problem, and sell a solution that prevents students from surfing the web while in class.
I never got all the fuss about digitizing education, because it seems like the biggest downside is 'distractions.' Even if there is no way to prevent distractions, are digital textbooks not worth the improvement in costs, accessibility, and breadth (and type) of information?
Re: The Internet Made Me Sad Today
#44I get the authors point, and yes... it is indeed sad that "play games" are the most profitable types of ads. And stupid weight loss ones, and look younger, and hot women in my area. It might be because those specific industries see the most value in online ads, since they can tie a click to a sale end-to-end and can justify spending $1 to make $1.01. Large multi-nationals who dominate TV advertising (Beer companies,…
It's likely not a profitable ad at all -- that's a google "house" ad for a google product, which means they have nothing paid to show.
Re: The Internet Made Me Sad Today
#45AHAHAHAHA HE SAID VALUES falls out of chair
Americans don't have those anymore, silly. We have money, and to hell with everything else.
Edit, for those who don't get it: Consider what you do at work and whose benefit you do it for. If you're in the states, your job is to make money for shareholders and/or investors, period. You are not building a product, you are driving inequality. Always keep this in mind in any industry to understand "business decisions" and politics, because it's all the same game; "I want to be better than those people"
This attitude is literally destroying our planet.
Re: The Internet Made Me Sad Today
#46This viewpoint as raganwald expressed it is too oversimplifying for my tastes.
It's pretty .. well, wrong.. to say that all Google engineers are working on is putting ads on web pages. Similarly it's not true that a whole generation of people are working on ads. Google is working on a tremendous number of things -- as is the rest of this industry. It boggles the mind.
I do; however, agree with the generalization of his point (and it's not a unique or new one) that what the technology industry has produced in the first 10 years of the 21st century is mostly a letdown compared to what got done in the last 10 years of the 20th century.
The first dot-com bubble left us with the worldwide infrastructure that powers the Internet today. What will this social-networking bubble leave us with when it pops?
Hopefully strong AI and the best possible tools for dealing with petabytes of data -- but this is likely just wishful thinking on my part.
Re: The Internet Made Me Sad Today
#47Why blame google? The problems here are: 1) the publisher has chosen to embed ad tags within editorial content; 2) the editorial content is so worthless that google can only show a house ad.
>the editorial content is so worthless
I think it's important to qualify this statement. Worthless to who? Google's ad bots? Perhaps. There's no obvious ad category that relates to dinosaurs.
But just from the snippet the OP included in his screenshot, it is clear the content is not mindless drivel and is actually worth reading (to some people).
Re: The Internet Made Me Sad Today
#48I'm surprised no one has mentioned that AdWords can target users and offer them ads based on what they think they might want. They're not always contextual. Do you like to play games Reg?
This is a very interesting point, thank you. So here’s a thought experiment: I look at this article about dinosaurs, and Google shows me an ad about mountain bike holidays.
Great timing, Spring is looming and I am making plans for Summer (Google knows this from watching my search history or annual credit card spend on travel.) It’s late afternoon, when I historically am distractible (witness reading about dinosaurs during my work day. And I ride quite a bit (easy to figure out when you’re Google).
I might be quite likely to click an ad for Sacred Rides (Free plug for Mike’s business!). But I would still feel sad that at the moment when I was reading something educational, I was lured away to think about something else.
I don’t know if Google can come up with a way to make quadrillions of dollars and to keep me from being sad. Maybe my feelings are simply a cost of doing business, or maybe what I want is impossible. But I think my sadness is independent of the attraction the ad holds for me personally. My issue is with the relationship between the ad and the content.
Re: The Internet Made Me Sad Today
#49Why doesn't Google offer some across-the-board AdSense subscription-- $10 a month to never see a single "Ads by Google"?
See also:
AB+
Ghostery
Priv3
RequestPolicy
Noscript
Combine all this and the web is almost useful again.
Re: The Internet Made Me Sad Today
#50The text ad is the only one served on that page by Google, if you go and look at the actual page the rest are served by AdBlade or Tribal Fusion. I feel like it's pretty misleading to complain about those ads as if they all came from the same company.
The article is quite clear on the fact that the other ads need not be coming from Google.
It wasn't the impression I got from reading it, the text leading into the slideshow is:
>Between them, physorg.com and Google value money, and that’s it. > > There’s more on the same page, of course:
Which I felt kind of set the tone that they were Google related.
FWIW, I think that the aging secret, penny stock and money ads are scammy as hell and I think the internet would be better off without the bottom feeding ads that take advantage of people's ignorance or insecurities.
The Google+ ad, while poorly targeted to the content of the page, might actually be targeted towards you (I'm not sure that's possible though). In my case I get text ads for elbow tendonitis, probably because I've done searches for "wrist pain" and I've ended up on medical related websites recently. That and the hints they pass to adsense are:
google_hints = "animals elbow muscles";
The combination of those came up with that ad.