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Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

theluddite.org

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Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#121

Post by bruce511 »

blargey wrote: post #94
bruce511 wrote: post #29

Of course Google didn't make the web site bad, you did. In a purely practical sense you changed the site, not them. Which leads us to the "why" of it. Which is you wanted to monetize the site (if only to cover its costs.) Since advertising seems to be the business model of the internet that's your first port of call. But here's a site that performs a task. Quite who uses this site is unclear. Sure lots of people migh…

> Quite who uses this site is unclear. Isn't that what all the tracking and analytics is supposed to determine? I thought ads were supposed to be tailored to the viewer as much (if not more than) the site. > Conversely Adsense sells ads based on "targeted users". Which means your original site is pretty useless to Adsense. It might have been a fair point, but AI-generated word salad was enough to make this site palat…

Oh, I agree it's still a crappy site for advertising. He gamed the algorithm to get onto the program.

Of course getting into adsense isn't the goal, the goal was to make some money. But he didn't have a site worth advertising on before, and he doesn't now. I predict actual revenue will be equally turgid.

On the tracking front, sure, I mean I suppose some people go to the site. So it gets some views.

I have a road past my property which gets a few cars a day. Not sure putting up an advertising sign is useful there though...

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#122

Post by Dylan16807 »

bruce511 wrote: post #114
Dylan16807 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google thinks the value is zero, which is definitely wrong, and yes competition would help with that.

Can you elaborate on what the value of the site might be, to say a competitive advertiser, and how that value might be unlocked?

> Can you elaborate on what the value of the site might be, to say a competitive advertiser,

Lots of ads don't care very much what site they are on, even if the purpose of the site is somehow unknowable.

But google knows the traffic it sends there. And it's able to show ads alongside those search results. Why can't it put similar ads on the page?

And apparently adding the dumb text unlocked ads, so there's the value being put to work. The old site has the same value, google just refused to recognize it.

> how that value might be unlocked?

Uhh, put ads on the site and the ads will get valuable views.

I don't know what you're asking here.

Or are you asking how competition between advertising networks would help? You wouldn't see several big networks in healthy competition all having the same bad requirements that a superpower can get away with.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#123

Post by jonahx »

keepamovin wrote: post #82
bruce511 wrote: post #29

Of course Google didn't make the web site bad, you did. In a purely practical sense you changed the site, not them. Which leads us to the "why" of it. Which is you wanted to monetize the site (if only to cover its costs.) Since advertising seems to be the business model of the internet that's your first port of call. But here's a site that performs a task. Quite who uses this site is unclear. Sure lots of people migh…

Interesting take on the backstory. Also, > Of course Google didn't make the web site bad, you did. That's right. Whenever anybody says "X made me do Y", sometimes I get flashes of the 1980/s1990s action movie villain, in the industrial backdrop, for the violence climax scene, with the hero on the ropes, screaming hysterically "You made me do this!" Nobody makes you do anything. That's true from a strict personal resp…

> Nobody makes you do anything. That's true from a strict personal responsibility standpoint, and it's an important boundary and important to remember: it's always your choice.

There's truth in this old chestnut but it has limits...

There's a spectrum from total freedom to pressure by incentives to the credible threat of violence. In extreme cases claiming someone "had a choice" is as ghastly as a free person claiming they had none.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#124

Post by bruce511 »

nitwit005 wrote: post #118
bruce511 wrote: post #29

Of course Google didn't make the web site bad, you did. In a purely practical sense you changed the site, not them. Which leads us to the "why" of it. Which is you wanted to monetize the site (if only to cover its costs.) Since advertising seems to be the business model of the internet that's your first port of call. But here's a site that performs a task. Quite who uses this site is unclear. Sure lots of people migh…

You're arguing Google has sensible motives. That doesn't particularly matter. What matters is what they encourage website owners to do in practice. Apparently that is to fill your website with worthless junk text.

My point is that Google has sensible motives, and that people with perfectly good sites will butcher them in the hope of making a buck, and then blame Google.

Google doesn't "encourage" people to butcher their site. Google has determined the kind of property they want to advertise on.

The owners of the site make their own choices. If they choose to game the review process then that's on them, not Google.

The owner now has a crappy site, which is still a bad place for ads (although the review doesn't know it.) The ultimate goal, of getting revenue, is perhaps still unrealized.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#125

Post by bruce511 »

8note wrote: post #79
bruce511 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well firstly, I'm not sure the site author knows the demographic. I'm pretty sure he doesn't ask that sort of thing before doing the calculation. Secondly the way Google determines the demographic is via the site content. Or to put it another way; site owners don't have a "right" to Adsense. Google is clearly allowed to choose those sites it considers "to be good advertising sites". Therefore if you have a site that…

Google has a monopoly though. Multiple monopolies even. If Google had competition in the ads space, this would be less of an issue, as the author could pick an advertiser that works for their website, rather than contorting their website for google

Tell me more about the advertising potential an alternative advertiser would see in this site?

Or to put it another way, what product should this be advertising on this site? Because there are a lot of companies in the world, so of you can identify just one of them, they'll likely pay enough for exclusivity.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#126

Post by zeroCalories »

AlienRobot wrote: post #116
zeroCalories wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know from work I've done with voluntary contributions that you can get near the amount that ad sense will give you, but that's on the high end, and will depend on the type of content and how you push it. But it would have at least been worth trying, given the public service nature of the content. Certainly enough to cover the costs of the domain name and hosting. Also, people are far more receptive to a message ask…

It's in the "support" nav button. https://theluddite.org/#!support I think I saw a banner when I scrolled to the bottom as well, but it isn't showing again for some reason. I assume that they already had this page before they chose to monetize with adsense, which kind of implies that asking for donations hasn't been very effective for OP. >people are far more receptive to a message asking for a contribution than an a…

Yeah I know they have a donation button hidden away on their main site, on a different domain. That's not what we're talking about. The problem is that OP is so fucking stupid that they didn't realize they basically cut their conversation rate by several orders of magnitude with their design. It doesn't take a genius to make a large highlighted message at the top and bottom begging for a donation.

As for your hot take, I see no reason why I should take that seriously. Plenty of contribution requests exist today and have not been blocked, and they seem to drive okay conversation. Ads and contributions are not the same, and different strategies will emphasize them differently.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#127

Post by vitus »

rustcleaner wrote: post #16

Maybe it's time for a market cap maximum. If your market cap exceeds the median GDP of all African countries, you get broken up. No more borg controlling the internet. This should help prevent vertical consolidation. Truly corporate death penalty any children of breakups who collude (full loss to equity, half loss to creditors, assets auction to public). Google shouldn't exist at its scale, nor should Apple, Microsof…

> If your market cap exceeds the median GDP of all African countries

What does this mean?

In terms of GDP, the median African country is Benin, with a GDP of about $20 billion. Maybe you want mean instead. The average GDP across the 51 countries in Africa is $56 billion.

Do you think that, um, Chipotle with its market cap of $88 billion should be broken up? What about Costco? Its market cap is over $300 billion, and it has quarterly revenue of about $60 billion -- if it were a country in Africa, its annual revenue would rank in the top 5 in terms of GDP.

The aggregate GDP of all of Africa is about $2.9 trillion. Literally only Microsoft exceeds that today.

Are you just picking companies with a market cap above $2 trillion? What about $1 trillion? $500 billion? Alphabet's market cap at the end of 2016 was $540 billion. Has Google's influence over the internet increased meaningfully since then?

(I don't necessarily disagree with your thesis; I'm just trying to understand your benchmark.)

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#128

Post by jazzyjackson »

konstantinua00 wrote: post #106
Dylan16807 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Buy Me a Coffee is not literal, it's a service to collect contributions. I know it's not literal, but the size and donator effort required makes it a very bad fit for small interactions.

it's a donation the whole point is to only get donations from people willing to do the effort - with no downsides to others

if there was an apple pay button i would have given him a dollar but instead there's "buy me a coffee" which i've never heard of, stripe which im not filling out, and liberapay which iirc is for crypto nerds

i wonder if apple makes it easy to accept money with apple pay (they allow peer to peer payments via apple cash after all)

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#129

Post by throwup238 »

tonyarkles wrote: post #60
oakashes wrote: post #46

It's a fair point about how awful recipe sites look without ad blockers, but this part is just plain incorrect: > You can tell just by looking at the URLs that those sites are going to be worthelss blogspam. At least two of the three results in the screenshot are from legitimate baking sites (Cookie and Kate, Sally's Baking Addiction) which are generally trusted sources online. I don't know anything about the third.…

I just looked up Cookie and Kate. On my iPad I had to flick 7 times to get past the exposition on Crispy Roasted Chickpeas and find the actual ingredients. When I found the ingredients, they occupied a small squeezed sliver of the page. As I was counting the number of simultaneous ads surrounding the ingredient list (4 separate ads), a pop up covered them all and suggested I sign up for her newsletter. The recipe loo…

The problem is that Google started weighing time spent on page very heavily in their ranking algorithm - I don't remember at what point this happened but it must be about a decade ago by now. Every time a user clicks a Google result without using "Open in New Tab" and clicks the back button, Google gets a signal about how long they spent on the page. The longer a user spends on the site, the stronger the signal. Once all the SEO vampires figured it out, everyone started to pile on prologues to all their content, not just recipe sites. In my experience that was the beginning of the end.

Any recipe site that survived had to adopt the tactic or die, leaving only the spammers and the odd outlier with actual content to write about like Serious Eats. Same thing happened to Youtube and their preview photos; even the legit content creators had to start making those stupid bug eye images.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#130

Post by dwallin »

bogwog wrote: post #109
carl_sandland wrote: post #11

thanks for the interesting read, one amusing thing: I went to the site and "where is the adds?", then I remembered I'm using a add-hardened firefox to view it ;) Sure enough using safari showed me the horror. Serious question: why do we put up with this as readers?

I had to pull out the ol' ungoogled chromium browser for this and for a moment I thought it was still a joke because of how absurd some of the ads were. One of them was a picture of an empty toilet paper roll holding up a toilet seat with the title "Put a Toilet Paper Roll Under the Toilet Seat at Night, Here's Why", and clicking it took me to a site[1] with a bunch of nonsense life hacks probably written by some AI.…

Ironically, by linking to it you’ve probably vastly boosted it’s rank on Google.
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