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How 'One Weird Trick' Conquered The Internet

slate.com

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Re: How 'One Weird Trick' Conquered The Internet

#41

Post by MBCook »

throwawayg99 wrote: post #35

I work with a dozen or so people who are involved in this sort of work. I think it is very interesting to see how they rationalize and deal with their moral compass internally. One of the guys is the most caring, liberal, loving person you'd ever meet; he justifies being involved in this sort of skeezy marketing work as "I can take a small amount from a lot of people and amplify the result to do good with a lot of mo…

I saw lots of cognitive dissonance when I worked for a company that was something of an advertising firm. Everyone hates pop-ups and spam... but it's probably OK if we do it.

We can turn off the user's pop-up blocker right? What do you mean we can't get around it? How are we supposed to get them to see our side offers if we can't do pop-ups?

And the constant discussions about how to keep our emails from landing in spam folders. Since we weren't running a scam, there had to be a way to get our emails in the inbox right? Even though we don't know the person... bought their address from someone (who bought it from someone)... sent them 3 emails this week already...

I'm glad to not be involved in some of that any more.

Re: How 'One Weird Trick' Conquered The Internet

#42

Post by mindslight »

vacri wrote: post #32
mindslight wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's truly amazing the amount of mental energy people will apparently spend dwelling on advertising, even worrying that if they accidentally click it their life could be forfeit to a scam, but yet they won't spend the five minutes it would take to simply install Adblock.

I use flashblock instead of adblock. Advertising pays for much of the internet, so I feel it's reasonable to let some of it through. Flashblock kills the worst offenders, and given I also run noscript (which isn't for everyone), the rest of the bad ones are taken care of as well. Simple images are allowed through, and these kinds of ads aren't particularly distracting. In the rare case there is a bad animated .gif, h…

Advertising wasn't always the norm, and I would personally love to return to the days where people published because they actually had something to say. How many search results these days are from those extremely valuable sites with one person geeking out on everything they know about a topic, versus the sheer number of content farms regurgitating the same simplistic crap just to get page views and ultimately waste your time?

In fact, I'd been waiting until the next DuckDuckGo thread came up to throw out the idea that DDG could further differentiate itself by having an option to only return results from sites without advertisements. I would love such a feature, even using Adblock, because I think the quality of the results would go up immensely.

Re: How 'One Weird Trick' Conquered The Internet

#44

Post by graue »

MartinCron wrote: post #10
Havoc wrote: post #3

I like how one of the stories in slate's sidebar is "The Secret Ingredient [...] will blow your mind"

Spoiler: It's Mint in your iced coffee. I'm eager to try it now.

Interesting! I tried mint with black tea and wasn't a fan. To me, they were two great tastes that did not go great together. But I love mint with green tea or yerba mate. I'm surprised it mixes with coffee.

Re: How 'One Weird Trick' Conquered The Internet

#45

Post by jacques_chester »

brandnewlow wrote: post #14

When we launched Perfect Audience, we wanted to make things easy to use and as open as possible to marketers looking to get into retargeting. Yes, we were a bit naive. The sheer multitude of bad actors participating in the ad/marketing world is bewildering. It tooks us a solid month after launch to get processes in place that let us weed out the bozos swiftly without tying up the whole team. We have many many of thes…

"Marketers hate him"

Re: How 'One Weird Trick' Conquered The Internet

#46

Post by atondwal »

mmanfrin wrote: post #7
grimtrigger wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes sense, but Occams razor is more than enough to explain the bad grammar and production effects. Any evidence its a conscious decision?

PlentyOfFish did a small test: http://blog.ads.pof.com/2012/04/03/throw-everything-you-know...

Hmm, I didn't even notice the first ad, because I subconsciously scanned over it as an ad. The second one looked liked content to me, so I saw that one, and even felt an impulse to click and see what kinda game someone built with such a campy art style

Re: How 'One Weird Trick' Conquered The Internet

#47

Post by iopq »

brandnewlow wrote: post #14

When we launched Perfect Audience, we wanted to make things easy to use and as open as possible to marketers looking to get into retargeting. Yes, we were a bit naive. The sheer multitude of bad actors participating in the ad/marketing world is bewildering. It tooks us a solid month after launch to get processes in place that let us weed out the bozos swiftly without tying up the whole team. We have many many of thes…

One weird trick that an advertising company found to filter out low quality ads. Click here!

Re: How 'One Weird Trick' Conquered The Internet

#49

Post by derefr »

MartinCron wrote: post #10
Havoc wrote: post #3

I like how one of the stories in slate's sidebar is "The Secret Ingredient [...] will blow your mind"

Spoiler: It's Mint in your iced coffee. I'm eager to try it now.

Mint facts! The reason people say to put toothpaste on a bruise or a hickey is that toothpaste is traditionally flavored with mint. It's really the peppermint oil they're after, which is a strong vasodilator.

For this same reason, peppermint oil is, at high doses, an abortificant.

Re: How 'One Weird Trick' Conquered The Internet

#50

Post by ibudiallo »

MartinCron wrote: post #11

I would feel a lot better about Slate (and everyone else) if they didn't run those "SPONSORED FROM AROUND THE WEB" pseudo-article links at the bottom of each page with this exact same kind of manipulative ads in them. Come on Slate. You think better of your audience than this, right?

One weird trick that conquered the internet.

It looks like it worked, cause I clicked and read the article only to find out that it is exactly what I thought in the first place. But still I spent a good 10 minutes on it.

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