81–90 of 352 posts
At least in India, most popular newspapers actually do this nowadays. Several full page ads including on the front page have become the norm.
It is mostly a function of how little the reader is willing to pay for content. When the price point is too low (which for online content is too low), publishers make their money by other means. It is not rocket science.
At some point, either subscriptions have to carry more of the load or the web experience just keeps degrading
A lot of print magazines, like Vogue or even Field & Stream, are like 60% or more full page ads. But if you’re reading something like New Bride magazine you’re probably actively shopping for wedding dresses and flowers and such, so the advertising ideally works as part of what makes the magazine valuable for the reader and the advertiser.
The real problem is that the finance and business folks are addicted to performance metrics and they preferentially put their money towards things that can be represented as graphs because it’s hard to argue with a graph. Jon Gruber has a vague sense for what sort of audience he has and what they’re into, so he can pitch advertisers on the idea that by advertising with him they’re going to reach an audience of Apple enthusiast technologists who presumably care about design and UI/UX and whatever other intuitions he has about his readership. But none of that is a quantitative metric, so only a small market is open to putting money into it.
> No print publication on the planet does this. Because you have to pay for the print version. They have plenty of ads, too, but they're not the sole revenue stream.
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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 bandw…
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So exactly when was this? Even Geocities was full of punch the monkey ads and the web was inundated with X10 pop under ads. Right before the web became a thing, Usenet was starting to become inundated with spam
Pre-1995
The median age in the US in 39, which means at least half of all Americans would have been in elementary school or not around during that supposed era of the internet, and the mass adoption of the internet only really began in earnest in the early 2000s.
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It kills programmatic advertising, not sponsorships or subscriptions. I always subscribe to the four or five sites I use most and use a blocker. If HN had a subscription tier I would pay it to support them.
HN doesn't need your money, it is run by YCombinator, a venture capital firm. As far as I can determine HN is a way to raise brand awareness for them. Sure, there are probably some people passionate about the concept at the company, but it wouldn't stick around if it they didn't also determine that it has more value to them than the operating costs of the site.
This is a pretty inconsequential blog post where Gruber is just echoing another article. > “A lot of websites actively interfere the reader from accessing them by pestering them with their ‘apps’ these days. I don’t know where this fascination with getting everyone to download your app comes from.” It comes from people who literally do not understand, and do not enjoy, the web, but yet find themselves running large w…
He does this to amplify things, and look: it worked! The original post made the HN homepage a couple days ago, and now Gruber’s post about it has made the HN homepage again.
"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…
For "lyric sites" read "ad sites that use lyrics to attract an audience". That's where we are today.
Free newspapers and alt-weeklies are the same. How are they supposed to function if people don't pay for them?
On the one end we've got Google Ads, which spies on your users everywhere they go. (I think most ad networks are in the same category, unfortunately.)
On the other end, you've got "someone emailed me to negotiate a sponsorship / affiliate thing and I added the banner/link manually, with no tracking code."
I only really see those two options.
Maybe the manual one is not so bad? I mean people don't want to see an ad either way, but if there's one, and you hand-approved it, and it doesn't spy on you... then we've eliminated most of the ethical and respect issues, right?
There's a temptation to "set it and forget it", but if you have even an atom of respect for your readers or customers, it only seems right that you'd put in a few minutes of work per month instead of deploying spyware on their machines.
(Just making it also seems to solve all 49MB of ass.)
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 complet…
this is batshit insane, yet I believe it