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The correct amount of ads is zero

manuelmoreale.com

131–140 of 611 posts

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#131
Historically there have always been ads in paid news media (look at the newspapers, they have had ads in print since almost their inception) so I don’t think there is anything out of the ordinary here…

I.e. for paid print media the ‘correct’ amount of ads is almost definitely non-zero from the publishers perspective.

(Personally I’m not too bothered about ads in a paid online website as long as they aren’t excessive or intrusive but people may disagree and can vote with their wallets)

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#132

Advertising is fundamentally corrosive to society and should be outlawed with few and carefully tailored exceptions. Any business models that consequently fail, fail because their externalities to collective society are now priced in.

You will just get other kinds of advertisement. Ads that are technically not ads. Things like product placements, free promotions, word of mouth campaigns etc.

These are ads and in many jurisdictions Also treated like ads.

Weird that This is not the case in the US?

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#133
post #76
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding The Verge, I wish something like Apple News existed in this space. I'd happily throw in $10/mo into a pool that distributed money towards a bunch of different smaller tech reporting/blogs/YouTube channels. I just can't justify paying $X/mo individually to 20 different sources. Though, I dislike that Apple News now runs ads in it's offering and would happily pay a little more to completely get rid of them, b…

Then that'd be Apple News Premium, or whatever. But the curve of how many subscribers need to go premium, how much subscription to charge them and how many/few ads do both sides find acceptable has to be discovered by experimentation (like Netflix's 'Standard with ads' tier). See also recent articles on "Apple TV+ is a failure despite making great content and $20b investment, Apple is about to make cuts". (The compar…

> By the way I only just realized that Netflix releasing Squid Game Season 2 on Dec 26 is probably intentional strategy to reduce January and February cancellations.)

Also why many services release episodes weekly instead of giving them at once.

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#134
post #131

Historically there have always been ads in paid news media (look at the newspapers, they have had ads in print since almost their inception) so I don’t think there is anything out of the ordinary here… I.e. for paid print media the ‘correct’ amount of ads is almost definitely non-zero from the publishers perspective. (Personally I’m not too bothered about ads in a paid online website as long as they aren’t excessive…

Paid print media != digital/web.

In latter, you can extract endless amount of data about your customers in realtime and ship it off wherever.

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#135
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP’s talking about the time taken to write the text, not the hosting costs (which would be zero on GH Pages or something like that).

Indeed, in 2009 I used free hosting. However, my articles were so interesting that in one week my site was visited by about a million people. Because of the huge traffic, I was kicked out of free hosting. Then I rented a VPS. Then I was still a big opponent of advertising, like all of you, and I was naive. I was an idealist. But when I tried to sell access to the site for sending SMS messages costing 10 cents, no one…

If ads are first-party, non-personalized, non-tracking, and don't get in the way of the content, people are mostly fine with them. Most ads are not like this, so people use ad-blockers, and the good ads get blocked along with the bad ads. The fault lies with the advertising industry, not the consumers.

It's an old-fashioned notion, but the advertising industry has extremely bad manners: it doesn't respect civilized social norms like not exploiting personal information for private gain and not egregiously interrupting people for trivial reasons. It's nosey, untrustworthy, intrusive, manipulative, and deceptive. I wouldn't tolerate this behaviour from a friend, and I'm not going to tolerate it from a bunch of amoral strangers.

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#136

It's why I use Firefox and avoid situations where I might get exposed to annoying ads. I was watching some Amazon Prime recently (the new rings of power season). Pretty OK and completely ad free experience. Except I noticed these weird cuts every few minutes. It took me quite a while to realize that Amazon introduced ads some time ago for Amazon prime and uBlock origin was doing a great job of simply blocking them. H…

I went to watch Rings of Power on Prime (I pay for Prime) and saw it had ads. I closed it so fast and went to my IPTV service. The show was awful too.

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#137
How does a paywalled full-text RSS feed even work? Yeah, I get it, RSS itself can work with auth tokens. But I use a service like Feedly to maintain my RSS subscriptions, and managed RSS services will cache the response to a single RSS feed for multiple subscribers. The Verge trusts Feedly to not abuse the paywall mechanism?

I mean, I definitely like full-text RSS when it's available, but even summary-only RSS is good enough for me. 99% of the value is in not needing to go to a bajillion sites manually to see what's new, and avoiding the eye-grabbing behavior of these sites when doing so.

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#138
post #93

The correct amount of tracking ads at least. We always paid for magazines and newspapers and saw ads despite paying. But then the transaction was between the publisher and the advertiser, and MY information wasn't sold. They were dumb ads. If I pay for online content it's NOT for the content itself (obviously not, in the case of freemium), it's in order to not have to pay with my personal information. I want to pay w…

> We always paid for magazines and newspapers and saw ads despite paying just because that happened doesn't mean it has to keep happening, we can do better

> do better

Which is what?

> just because that happened

The subtleties matter. The ads were purchased per issue or over several issues. The publication solicited the advertisers business and not the other way around. The rates were set per publication and were equal for all potential buyers. The ads were static and approved by the publisher before being included for distribution.

Then you get doubleclick now swallowed up by google. Which reversed all of this and reversed all of the incentives as well. So now people publish crap to create automatically filled ad inventory instead of having a more or less fixed inventory which required real work to get contracted buyers for.

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will just get other kinds of advertisement. Ads that are technically not ads. Things like product placements, free promotions, word of mouth campaigns etc.

These are ads and in many jurisdictions Also treated like ads. Weird that This is not the case in the US?

They aren't all ads, because the situation gets really muddy. If a website talks about an upcoming movie is that an ad? What if they were shown the movie before its release?

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#140

I don’t get why advertisers still advertise. I select brands either by nearest retail box store or by dedicated research into comparative qualities. I don’t watch or listen to any advertising-supported video or audio media. I don’t use personalized or targeted promotion codes. I don’t ever knowingly click on banner/interstitial ads of any kind. Am I still in the minority or has my behavior become more prevalent? (Not…

You are not even in a 0.00001% group, never mind approaching "prevalent".
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