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The correct amount of ads is zero

manuelmoreale.com

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Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#341

Post by lousken »

freeAgent wrote: post #260
lousken wrote: post #245

15 years ago regular site used to have a nice banner ad that was related to the topic of the site, maybe some small logo here and there on the right side and that was about it I did not think about blocking it, did not mind, did not care. That's how ads should have stayed instead of this giant annoying/spyware/loud/popup/... mess. Nowadays I would not use anything without ublock and i am considering storing everythin…

There were absolutely obnoxious ads, including pop-ups and pop-unders 15 years ago, but at least they were generally contextual rather than targeted to your ad profile.

maybe something existed in the US already, but internet in Czech republic used to be pretty good with no popups and just a few ads e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20090302032443/http://web.volny....

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#342

Post by ajsnigrutin »

lambdaba wrote: post #105
jillesvangurp wrote: post #44

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 really can't imagine someone with CTO title doesn't have $15/month to pay for YouTube when you're a regular user. People with far fewer resources pay. This goes to content creators, if you're not even seeing ads, they don't get paid.

I'm pretty sure, that by this logic, if you combine all the "$15/month" things that someone should have money for, they'll eventually be left without any of that money. Every goddamn website wants $15 per month, and even after they get it, they still show you ads. Even youtube, if nothing else, there are the in-video ads ("this video is sponsored by,...") that an adblock skips.

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#343

Post by deergomoo »

whereismyacc wrote: post #294

My biggest frustration right now is paying for Spotify and not getting any ads in music, but getting ads in podcasts. Not even just the ads embedded in the audio stream, which I can understand Spotify can't do much about, but Spotify actively injecting more ads into the shows.

Please do yourself a favour and download a proper podcast client. There are so many great ones out there, they’re often from independent developers, and podcasts are one of the last parts of the modern web that actually work how the web was supposed to work: decentralised* and open access. Don’t let media giants turn it into a closed system.

* the elephant in the room being that the iTunes podcast directory is the de-facto standard index. It’s freely available, but the fact that it could be withdrawn at any time is not great. Projects like https://podcastindex.org/ are trying to address that.

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#344

Post by PaulHoule »

xixixao wrote: post #322
bambax wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, and probably true, but the difference with newspaper is, it would be prohibitively expensive to produce different versions of the same newspaper for different subscription options, while it's trivial to do on the web. Why not offer an ad-free tier?

The richest people, hence the most valuable for advertisers, would buy it. This significantly affects the whole ad business value. Such that the ad-free tier would have to be priced too high. It’s more profitable to “force” everyone to watch ads. I’m afraid.

Yep. Elephant in the room of media economics.

Look at ads on daytime broadcast TV and it is: medicare advantage, something you can get from medicare, a medicare scam, personal injury lawyer, some drug your insurance might pay for, personal injury lawyer #2. Ads for something you spend your own money on are few and far between (maybe you will get a car ad because if nobody bought a car who'd get hit by a car and call William Matar?)

People in that demographic don't have money to spend so they get subprime ads.

In the day newspapers and magazines thought about the balance of ad and subscription revenue a lot.

On top of (1) people have money for a subscription being better qualified than people who don't, (2) people who are motivated to get a subscription are qualified because they care about the topic (you can get a free magazine about construction equipment but you'd better convince them you are really in the industry) and (3) in the current era, subscribers give up their name and other personal details and will be more definitely tracked.

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#345

Post by eterevsky »

shortformblog wrote: post #265

Stances like this probably feel good to write out, but they miss the reality that when running a media business, relying on one revenue stream is dangerous. That’s why newspapers had classified ads, even though they charged a nominal fee to subscribe. People won’t pay $5 a day to subscribe to a newspaper, but the ads subsidize enough of it to make it so that a paid subscription is accessible to more people. On the in…

It is always possible to have several tiers of subscriptions, a cheap tier with some additional feature and ads, and a higher tier with no ads at all.

I am perfectly willing to pay extra to support a website or service that I'm using, but only if it removes all ads.

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#346

Post by JKCalhoun »

shortformblog wrote: post #265

Stances like this probably feel good to write out, but they miss the reality that when running a media business, relying on one revenue stream is dangerous. That’s why newspapers had classified ads, even though they charged a nominal fee to subscribe. People won’t pay $5 a day to subscribe to a newspaper, but the ads subsidize enough of it to make it so that a paid subscription is accessible to more people. On the in…

> That’s why newspapers had classified ads, even though they charged a nominal fee to subscribe.

My assumption is that the salaries of reporters, editors was paid for by ads.

The nominal fee for the paper was to pay for the pulp, ink. I mean if you just printed up millions of papers and gave them away, people would pick them up simply as raw material for lining their bird cages, for papier-mâché, to insulate their cardboard box home on the corner of 12th and Main.....

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#347

Post by jillesvangurp »

ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #97
contrast wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re making a very different point to the article. The article is about how to pay for content, your point is that you don’t want to pay for content at all.

You can use uBlock and pay your content creators via Patreon if they have one. I believe that the ad-based freemium business model is harmful to society and unfixable due to the incentives it creates to engage and enrage rather than entertain and inform. So, I use uBlock to use YouTube for free to explicitly drain it of resources without giving Google any ad income, and then I pay the creators that I like using other…

I'm not a big believer in this. It simply doesn't scale. So I might donate chunks of income to 1, 2, maybe 5 or 10 people like this. What about everyone else? It's not a fair system. I engage with lots of youtube channels, read lots of things on dozens/hundreds of websites. Add a few podcasts to the mix and it starts adding up to quite a lot of mouths to feed with individual donations. It's not reasonable for all of them to expect something from me.

At least with Spotify and Netflix there is some kind of rev share thing in place. It's not very fair of course and a bit biased towards rewarding content creators that I don't necessarily like (or are in need of more money). But it's better than having to cherry pick creators. Somehow publishers have resisted creating such a thing for written media. We have this broken model of ad supported media and media outlets taking most of that revenue and paying really shitty wages to journalists, many of whom are working on a freelance basis and get paid pitiful amounts per word. Why do we have all these middlemen?

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#348

Post by stkdump »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #259
ale42 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The company doesn't sell your data, they just offer some other companies to put an ad in front of your screen True, but the result is the same. I would have nothing against _some_ static ads (like in newspapers) even if I'm paying to read articles, but they should be served directly by the website, not by an external ad aggregator. Just check with how many companies data is shared on the cookie banner details: on t…

This is absolutely the most reasonable compromise. I don't really understand how advertising survives as it is, but static ads feel like a win-win.

It isn't. Targeted ads are much more valuable, to the point that fully random ads have almost no value at all. Btw. you can tell. If you regularly delete cookies you get much fewer ads. They like to say that if you don't allow/keep cookies, you get the same amount of ads, just less relevant. But that just isn't the case.

If browsers had the functionality to only preserve cookies that are needed to stay logged in across sessions, that would be quite powerful. That is all the cookies I need.

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#349

Post by ulrikrasmussen »

rpastuszak wrote: post #241
ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They incentivize collecting sensitive data about people. They incentivize businesses to maximize for engagement which generally promotes harmful content over informational content. Empty informational calories.

I'll add: in practice its goal is not to solve a problem, but to create a need.

Good point. I suppose the theoretical utility of advertisement is to supply information to consumers about what the market offers so consumers can seek out suppliers that fulfill their demands. Supplying that kind of information to consumers provides utility for both the supplier and the consumer. This goal can also be accomplished without unsolicited advertisement but using directories where consumers can look up suppliers based on their needs.

Unsolicited advertisement tries to induce a sense of demand in consumers which they didn't have to begin with. This is done using many different tactics, e.g. by disguising the true cost, exaggerating the benefits or simply misinforming. This tips the utility in favor of the supplier while making it harder for the consumer to navigate the market.

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#350

Post by shortformblog »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #346
shortformblog wrote: post #265

Stances like this probably feel good to write out, but they miss the reality that when running a media business, relying on one revenue stream is dangerous. That’s why newspapers had classified ads, even though they charged a nominal fee to subscribe. People won’t pay $5 a day to subscribe to a newspaper, but the ads subsidize enough of it to make it so that a paid subscription is accessible to more people. On the in…

> That’s why newspapers had classified ads, even though they charged a nominal fee to subscribe. My assumption is that the salaries of reporters, editors was paid for by ads. The nominal fee for the paper was to pay for the pulp, ink. I mean if you just printed up millions of papers and gave them away, people would pick them up simply as raw material for lining their bird cages, for papier-mâché, to insulate their ca…

I worked at a number of free tabloid newspapers in my day (one small-town exurban, one mid-sized car-centric metro area, one metro area where most people took public transit) and I will say that most people did not do this. Usually they just left the papers on the train or at the coffee shop.

Nonetheless, the first half of your point—the ads usually paid for all the reporting—is correct.

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