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“Your frustration is the product”

daringfireball.net

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Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#71

Post by projektfu »

red_admiral wrote: post #30
rcarr wrote: post #8

> The reader is not respected enough by the software. The reader is not respected by the software because the reader themselves does not respect the software or the article. If the reader paid for a subscription to the website they would get an ad-free version. Don't pay and then this is what you get. The money has to come from somewhere. The issue is that a large portion of the population seems to think that if a pr…

> We used to pay for things - including the news. Have newspapers or magazines ever been financially sustainable on sale revenue alone? They've always carried ads, and I suspect that's always been a bigger income stream than the cost of buying the paper itself.

The division has been more equal in the past. When I was a kid, probably 75% of the neighborhood subscribed to the paper and others, like my parents, bought it regularly on Sunday and certain other days. Perhaps sales was 25-30% of revenue. Advertising was big but a large portion was classified ads. Wikipedia says up to 70% of some newspapers' revenue was classifieds. These ads are unlikely to have much editorial effect, but that revenue has basically gone away. What remains is more perilous to independence, and since the number of print readers has gone way down, also not as important to the advertiser.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#72

Post by alentred »

> the equivalent of a broadcast TV channel that only showed 7 minutes of actual TV content per hour, devoting the other 53 minutes to paid commercials

Yes, I tried YouTube iOS app recently, without an ad blocker. It pretty much describes the experience.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#73

Post by naravara »

rivetfasten wrote: post #18

"... the equivalent of a broadcast TV channel that only showed 7 minutes of actual TV content per hour, devoting the other 53 minutes to paid commercials and promotions ... Almost no one would watch such a channel." QVC exists. That channel is ONLY ads. Not to detract from the point, which seems to be "yes what this other guy said."

The internet equivalent of QVC would be TikTok I believe. The ads are thinly veiled, but it seems like after you go through a few chunks of content eventually it’s basically all ads disguised as content with bits of entertainment thrown in to keep you strung along. It meshes the distinction between advert and content so completely that it doesn’t really matter anymore.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#74

Post by lapcat »

everdrive wrote: post #11

"I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data." Not really the point of the article, but almost all major news sites are significantly better if you block javascript. You sometimes lose pictures and just get text, but often the pictures are irrelevant anyhow. (a story about a world leader, and some public / stock photo is used and is not…

It depends. Some sites have a soft, client-side paywall and others have a hard, server-side paywall. NYT has the latter, so you can't get the full article text with JS blocked.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#75

Post by PaulHoule »

It was funny but when we switched from my failing Alienware laptop to a new M4 Mac Mini my wife was absolutely furious at the ad saturation until I switched her from Safari to Firefox and installed an ad blocker. I guess I could have installed one in Safari if she registered an Apple account but that's something she'd feel no need for at all.

(e.g. as maligned as it is, the Microsoft account really is one account you can use to log into your computer, your XBOX, and all sorts of things. The Apple account is the center of your digital life on iOS but on MacOS it's kinda... tacked on)

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#76

Post by 542354234235 »

AlienRobot wrote: post #33
red_admiral wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For "lyric sites" read "ad sites that use lyrics to attract an audience". That's where we are today.

People want lyrics. They don't want to pay for them, but they want someone to make the lyrics available for them, for free, on the Internet, forever. And they feel they are entitled to this without ads for some reason. That's where we are today.

No, its because greedy people try to make money off people. Ads are the reason the internet sucks. There could be a wikipedia like site for lyrics that would cost pennies to maintain and people who like music and contributing would add to it. But scummy sites making money will pay to be at the top of search results as an ad, so they can get people to click on their site that is full of ads, all while sucking up bandwidth and processing power. Why are their dozens of almost identicle recipes for every dish? Because each one is trying to extract money with ads. Why do they all have some long-winded story about how they grew up eating this recipe every 9/11 anniversary? So they have more space to shove ads.

Wikipedia only exsists because they refuse to sell out. Do you know how much money they could make turning every wiki reader into a product for ads?

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#77

Post by jes5199 »

I used to work at a startup that was trying to replace ads as the funding source for news (we failed, obviously)

but the crazy thing we discovered is that the people who run news websites mostly don’t know where their ads are coming from, have forgotten how the ad system was installed in the first place, and cannot turn them off if they try

we actually shipped a server-side ad blocker, for a parter who had so completely lost control of their own platform that it was the only way to make the ads stop

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#78

Post by carlosjobim »

PaulHoule wrote: post #75

It was funny but when we switched from my failing Alienware laptop to a new M4 Mac Mini my wife was absolutely furious at the ad saturation until I switched her from Safari to Firefox and installed an ad blocker. I guess I could have installed one in Safari if she registered an Apple account but that's something she'd feel no need for at all. (e.g. as maligned as it is, the Microsoft account really is one account you…

You can block ads on a system level with NextDNS. Much easier to use for non-tech users then any browser plugin.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#79

Post by matheusmoreira »

rivetfasten wrote: post #18

"... the equivalent of a broadcast TV channel that only showed 7 minutes of actual TV content per hour, devoting the other 53 minutes to paid commercials and promotions ... Almost no one would watch such a channel." QVC exists. That channel is ONLY ads. Not to detract from the point, which seems to be "yes what this other guy said."

In that case it's not really advertising, it's just information. People watch that channel when they want to see products. They're giving people exactly what they asked for.

Advertising is when you're baited into watching some fun "content" and then they interrupt it to shove ads in your face. Nobody asked for this.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#80

Post by PaulHoule »

jasode wrote: post #49
mattw2121 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhere along the way, we lost the original vibe of the Internet. There was a time when it was fundamentally a community. People hosted things for the sheer joy of doing it and for the satisfaction of contributing. If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did…

>If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did it because it was fun and because sharing knowledge felt like the point. Unfortunately, music lyrics are protected by copyrights so your site of King Crimson lyrics would not be authorized unless you paid for a licen…

There's a tension that the fan engagement is what really makes entertainers rich. The industry has every right to crack down, but if they do say they are really cutting their own legs off.
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