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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)

#141

Post by cuu508 »

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…

If the tracking and 3rd party cookies disappear, it makes sense that complaints about tracking and 3rd party cookies would also disappear.

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

#143

Post by autoexec »

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…

> That's what I really think about it. The instant ads disappear, whatever replaces it, people are just going to hate it the same if not even more, specially when it comes to free stuff on the internet.

I'd guess that'd be true so long as what replaces ads is also annoying/distracting/intrusive, misleading, a security/privacy risk, gets in people's way, and/or prevents them getting to what they requested/came for. Hopefully, something intended to replace ads wouldn't be any of those things.

Ideally the ads wouldn't be replaced with anything at all. It seems unlikely that we'll go back to how things were when people published content online because they just wanted to share something cool or useful with anyone who was interested, but maybe it'll get to the point where it's easy and affordable enough that publishing a table of data, or a recipe, or a simple calculator doesn't cost a person enough to justify worrying about ads or whatever replaces them.

Here we all are on this website after all, typing up comments without demanding payment from anyone and everyone who reads what we have to say or putting flashing ad banners on them. It doesn't cost us much to do it, so we do, without any profit motive.

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

#144

Post by bruce511 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #122
bruce511 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think that if you had 5 advertising networks, they'd all operate the same.

I think Google (probably rightly) sees no value in this site from an advertising point of view. I think if there were 5 advertising aggregators they'd say the same.

You're suggesting Google is leaving money on the table, not just for this site, but a lot of others like it. I'm suggesting that if this category of site had value to an advertising aggregator, someone would be leveraging it (and that someone eould likely be Google.)

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

#145

Post by devsda »

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 first site "cookieandkate" might look like blogspam but it wasn't.

After going through some random archived posts from 2011 & 2016 , I think it probably fell into the same trap the article mentioned and kind of proves how needless seo spam ruins websites.

[1] is a link to a recipe on the same site from back in 2011. It has some content at the top giving personal context and plenty of normal pictures of actual recipe, not those fancy artistic photos. It has that personal touch with no hidden agenda type feel.

[2] is a link to another recipe from 2016. The content and format is more or less same as 2011 with a bit more long form content.

Compare that with current posts on the site. The content looks similar but there is a lot of needless use of bold/emphasised content probably for seo. Every paragraph is worded like it has some call to action or has an agenda.

[1]. https://web.archive.org/web/20120109080425/http://cookieandk...

[2]. https://web.archive.org/web/20160108100019/http://cookieandk...

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

#146

Post by bruce511 »

jonahx wrote: post #123
keepamovin wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 claimin…

I completely agree as a general statement.

Do you think it applies in this case? Do you think the incentive (a few $ at most) drove the author into a corner?

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

#147

Post by refulgentis »

fmy105 wrote: post #142

[flagged]

Flagged: this trips my internal GPT detector (patent pending) at 83% certainty and seems to be a lengthy meandering response to an article describing Google preventing ad blockers. The article is about Google asking for more content on the site before approving ads.

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

#148

Post by bruce511 »

antihipocrat wrote: post #136
bruce511 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> of course that's not what this is about. It's about Google providing the incentive, for ruining perfectly good websites. Wait,what? The author wants to monetize the site. He understands the actual users won't pay. So looking for an alternate option he turns to advertising. Google says "hey, unfortunately your site isn't appealing to advertisers." That's not Google's fault, they're just telling the truth as they se…

Are you suggesting the author's site is now better for advertisers? My takeaway from the author's example is that Google has set up a system that is incentivising actions leading to worse outcomes for both users (frustrating search experience) and advertisers (whose ad spend is not being well spent). Google has no incentive to improve the situation - because google has an effective monopoly.

>> Are you suggesting the author's site is now better for advertisers?

No. Gaming the system in bad faith was just gaming the system.

>> Google has no incentive to improve the situation - because google has an effective monopoly.

Improvement in this case I assume meaning "identifying the site gamed the rules".

I suspect, but don't know, that Google spends a lot on trying to identify site quality. But the ones building spammy (gamey?) sites are winning.

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

#149

Post by atorodius »

refulgentis wrote: post #147
fmy105 wrote: post #142

[flagged]

Flagged: this trips my internal GPT detector (patent pending) at 83% certainty and seems to be a lengthy meandering response to an article describing Google preventing ad blockers. The article is about Google asking for more content on the site before approving ads.

Is this more sarcastic or do you actually have a classifier built that returned 86%? Genuinely curious.

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

#150

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

bruce511 wrote: post #119
keepamovin wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> of course that's not what this is about. It's about Google providing the incentive, for ruining perfectly good websites. Wait,what? The author wants to monetize the site. He understands the actual users won't pay. So looking for an alternate option he turns to advertising. Google says "hey, unfortunately your site isn't appealing to advertisers." That's not Google's fault, they're just telling the truth as they se…

> Google says "hey, unfortunately your site isn't appealing to advertisers."

1) Advertisers - plural? What other advertisers is Google referencing?

In this context, 'advertisers' means all the other meaningfully similar ad options that the author could choose from.

2) This wording: "The team has reviewed it but unfortunately your site isn’t ready to show ads at this time." is Google's clear and blatant refusal to extend their ad ~monopoly to his web page. A refusal that gets satisfied only after he loads his site up with useless, time wasting crap.

I'll grant the author did have a choice. The author could be denied access to Google's ad monopoly or he could crap up his web page.

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