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SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

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Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#11

Post by stavros »

derkster wrote: post #6
lastofthemojito wrote: post #2

I feel like I've thought a lot about ads on the internet recently, and I hate the way things are, but I'm no closer to a realistic overall solution. I've used an ad blocker for a while because I'm tech savvy and I know I can easily have a better experience that way. I was too late installing an ad blocker on my father's computer - he was scammed out of some money when he mistook a scammy ad for a legitimate message t…

I'm old enough to remember an internet before non-porn ads. Being Hacker News, does someone have any hard idea on infrastructure costs in the late 1990s compared to now? In 1997, when America Online went from an hourly rate to unlimited hours for $20/month. Besides adult ads, I remember a lot of "work from home/get rich quick" ads - and that's all I can personally remember. Almost every forum and community I can reme…

I wonder how cheap a forum is to run now. It used to be that you could run a janky thing on nothing hardware and people would still use it and find value, but now even just running the software is much more demanding and expensive. Never mind the fact that the UI has to be slick or people will be put off, because the bar is much higher now.

These factors have made it less economical to just run a popular forum out of your own pocket, I think, so the barrier to entry is higher.

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#12

Post by stavros »

trilbyglens wrote: post #8
lastofthemojito wrote: post #2

I feel like I've thought a lot about ads on the internet recently, and I hate the way things are, but I'm no closer to a realistic overall solution. I've used an ad blocker for a while because I'm tech savvy and I know I can easily have a better experience that way. I was too late installing an ad blocker on my father's computer - he was scammed out of some money when he mistook a scammy ad for a legitimate message t…

Everyone just assumes that the only way to do ads online are from these giant, shitty ad platforms like Facebook or Google. When really, you can have smaller ad networks that provide curated and content tailored advertising. It's just a lot more labor intensive and it doesn't scale to nation-state levels of money like Google Ads does. If sites just embedded their own ads, then no ad blocker would be able to catch tha…

A smaller company like Hiveworks, for example?

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#13

Post by windowshopping »

Hey if anyone has strong experience with ad networks and configuring them to websites, give me an email at the address in my profile, I'd love to get freelance help with this. I'm new to it and realized it isn't as easy as just signing up the way it is for mobile apps. Apparently most sites can't get approved for adsense at ALL, let alone have it at time of launch before they have traffic. So yeah if anyone has a lot of knowledge/experience with this please holler.

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#14

Post by tsimionescu »

lazide wrote: post #7
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The attention economy is powered by payments from maximizing ad impressions but the public is increasingly recognizing that the attention economy is mentally and culturally toxic. To break free of the attention economy death spiral that we're in, internet advertising has to undergo a pretty drastic dieback. In other words, the whole thing has to fall apart and the sooner the better.

That would mean the death of at a minimum Meta (market cap $1.5 trln), most of Google (market cap $2.1 trln, lets say half would die). So what, a couple trillion haircut on the US stock market, and more of a GDP hit than if the entire US military suddenly stopped getting funded. Not to mention the secondary effects - a LOT of businesses are built based on online ads. A LOT .

Both Google and Meta could just charge for using their services. I already pay meta to see no ads. So there is no reason that they would entirely die.

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#15

Post by rat87 »

stavros wrote: post #11
derkster wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm old enough to remember an internet before non-porn ads. Being Hacker News, does someone have any hard idea on infrastructure costs in the late 1990s compared to now? In 1997, when America Online went from an hourly rate to unlimited hours for $20/month. Besides adult ads, I remember a lot of "work from home/get rich quick" ads - and that's all I can personally remember. Almost every forum and community I can reme…

I wonder how cheap a forum is to run now. It used to be that you could run a janky thing on nothing hardware and people would still use it and find value, but now even just running the software is much more demanding and expensive. Never mind the fact that the UI has to be slick or people will be put off, because the bar is much higher now. These factors have made it less economical to just run a popular forum out of…

> but now even just running the software is much more demanding and expensive. Never mind the fact that the UI has to be slick or people will be put off, because the bar is much higher now.

I'm skeptical of this. There's likely some open source software that's good enough and considering the advances in hardware likely much cheaper to run then it was way back when.

Besides the fact that many people prefer large platforms like reddit or Facebook or discord where they already have an account (don't have to make another one) I'd say the problem is the human one not software. Time and effort to popularize the forum and either paying for moderation or convincing people to volunteer to moderate and deal with inevitable shitshow that comes with moderating controversial topics even if forum isn't really related to them.

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#16

Post by JBiserkov »

trilbyglens wrote: post #8
lastofthemojito wrote: post #2

I feel like I've thought a lot about ads on the internet recently, and I hate the way things are, but I'm no closer to a realistic overall solution. I've used an ad blocker for a while because I'm tech savvy and I know I can easily have a better experience that way. I was too late installing an ad blocker on my father's computer - he was scammed out of some money when he mistook a scammy ad for a legitimate message t…

Everyone just assumes that the only way to do ads online are from these giant, shitty ad platforms like Facebook or Google. When really, you can have smaller ad networks that provide curated and content tailored advertising. It's just a lot more labor intensive and it doesn't scale to nation-state levels of money like Google Ads does. If sites just embedded their own ads, then no ad blocker would be able to catch tha…

> there would be no way to identify them separately from the content

We'll use AI

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#17

Post by x0x0 »

windowshopping wrote: post #13

Hey if anyone has strong experience with ad networks and configuring them to websites, give me an email at the address in my profile, I'd love to get freelance help with this. I'm new to it and realized it isn't as easy as just signing up the way it is for mobile apps. Apparently most sites can't get approved for adsense at ALL, let alone have it at time of launch before they have traffic. So yeah if anyone has a lot…

fwiw, you likely can't make real money with this.

The big drivers are (1) ever more increasing inventory (ie page loads/refreshes/whatever with ad slots). Relatively fixed demand plus increasing supply gives you a price fall that has been going on for 10+ years with no end in sight, combined with:

(2) retargeting has gotten endlessly more sophisticated allowing people whom advertisers wish to target to be found on places with cheap inventory.

You need immense numbers of pageviews or to be very high value to some specific audience. As an example of the latter, somewhat generically: imagine people really into high end watches. There are buyers for that. Or your site is valuable to eg vacation intenders.

It's why more and more sites (Defector, Talking Points Memo, 404, all major newspapers) that wish to, you know, not die are charging subscription revenue.

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#18

Post by [deleted] »

derkster wrote: post #6
lastofthemojito wrote: post #2

I feel like I've thought a lot about ads on the internet recently, and I hate the way things are, but I'm no closer to a realistic overall solution. I've used an ad blocker for a while because I'm tech savvy and I know I can easily have a better experience that way. I was too late installing an ad blocker on my father's computer - he was scammed out of some money when he mistook a scammy ad for a legitimate message t…

I'm old enough to remember an internet before non-porn ads. Being Hacker News, does someone have any hard idea on infrastructure costs in the late 1990s compared to now? In 1997, when America Online went from an hourly rate to unlimited hours for $20/month. Besides adult ads, I remember a lot of "work from home/get rich quick" ads - and that's all I can personally remember. Almost every forum and community I can reme…

[deleted]

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#19

Post by ccppurcell »

trilbyglens wrote: post #8
lastofthemojito wrote: post #2

I feel like I've thought a lot about ads on the internet recently, and I hate the way things are, but I'm no closer to a realistic overall solution. I've used an ad blocker for a while because I'm tech savvy and I know I can easily have a better experience that way. I was too late installing an ad blocker on my father's computer - he was scammed out of some money when he mistook a scammy ad for a legitimate message t…

Everyone just assumes that the only way to do ads online are from these giant, shitty ad platforms like Facebook or Google. When really, you can have smaller ad networks that provide curated and content tailored advertising. It's just a lot more labor intensive and it doesn't scale to nation-state levels of money like Google Ads does. If sites just embedded their own ads, then no ad blocker would be able to catch tha…

I think you're wrong about that last part. For ads to make sense as a revenue stream you have to basically auction them, for example at different times and different countries etc. So there has to be some automation, you can't just manually include each ad. This will have to be done programmatically, and there will always be traces (e.g. in div classes). You can try to randomise these or what have you, but it's basically a cat and mouse game with ad blockers.
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