I resisted using an ad blocker for many years; I kinda felt like if I wanted to use a site, I should be willing to trade for seeing their ads. I've changed my tune a couple of years ago, and this is a (small) part of the reason (but a bigger part of it now that I know how crazy usage for ads has gotten). I'm on mobile data nearly 100% of the time most months. 14GB costs me $50-$70 (depending on which network I'm on,…
I recently (past year) bit the bullet and began ad blocking myself. My primary concern is the recent proliferation of malicious content through the common ad networks. Supporting websites is great, but not at the expense of your own security.
LA Times and ads
101–110 of 192 posts
Re: LA Times and ads
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
The worst type of ad on newspaper sites are the disgusting "chumboxes" (by scumsuckers like "taboola" or "outbrain") that orbit at the bottom of pages and serve up images meant to be as simultaneously repulsive and fascinating as possible: https://theawl.com/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum-de0b... As long as these pages have ads that display utterly gross images (if you doubt me, click the above link) that make…
It made me sad when boingboing put one of those ad boxes on the site. I work in digital media. I get why publishers do it. But, sheesh, if you're resorting these ads that insult your audience in exchange for pennies, I think you need to reexamine your approach.
Let's not beat around the bush: some publishers do that kind of thing because they are scumbags.
Re: LA Times and ads
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
You must be in an NSFW ad bubble. I only see tame clickbait from the Taboola links.
> You must be in an NSFW ad bubble. No, i get the trypophobia-triggering (DON'T GOOGLE THAT WORD) chumbox images when browsing in incognito mode, without pre-existing cookies or anything else. This has nothing to do with my ad bubble, https://theawl.com/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum-de0b... has mentioned that the chumboxes very often carry those images. Also i'm not the only one, there's lots of other people w…
It's sad that I know immediately which ads are "trypophobia" tiggerers... now that i know what that phobia means...
Re: LA Times and ads
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
You must be in an NSFW ad bubble. I only see tame clickbait from the Taboola links.
> You must be in an NSFW ad bubble. No, i get the trypophobia-triggering (DON'T GOOGLE THAT WORD) chumbox images when browsing in incognito mode, without pre-existing cookies or anything else. This has nothing to do with my ad bubble, https://theawl.com/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum-de0b... has mentioned that the chumboxes very often carry those images. Also i'm not the only one, there's lots of other people w…
Totally anecdotal, but I think I see worse stuff in incognito mode than otherwise. Perhaps the default is bad, but with tracking you can get into a less bad bubble?
Re: LA Times and ads
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi I'm the author. I did the naive extrapolation. 5 * 2 * 1440 = 14,400. Perhaps this number is not entirely accurate. The fact it is any larger than, say, 10 is the problem.
That's a terrible methodology, and makes the headline pretty inaccurate. (Edit: looks like the blog headline isn't inflammatory at the moment: did you change it, or did the HN poster insert the 24-hour figure?) I'm against bad ads as much as everyone else, but I don't think using a terrible methodology to criticize them is a good idea. Making clear what you measured would be much better, and actually leaving the thin…
Oh yeah, like all the extra effort is going to make any actual difference. Sorry, demanding better data or methods on a casual observation is a way to avoid engaging with the problematic behavior. If publishers use bullshit methods to drive revenue then they must expect to receive bullshit critiques of their bullshit methods.
Re: LA Times and ads
#106I develop software used by newspapers. This is a problem with the whole industry. It's amazing how much crap they load. These sites all use a third party "tag manager" (Google Tag Manager, Tealium, Piwik etc.) to manage the scripts they load: ads, analytics, trackers etc. The people who use the tag manager typically aren't techies, so they don't understand that adding another tag will cause the page to slow down. Typ…
The worst type of ad on newspaper sites are the disgusting "chumboxes" (by scumsuckers like "taboola" or "outbrain") that orbit at the bottom of pages and serve up images meant to be as simultaneously repulsive and fascinating as possible: https://theawl.com/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum-de0b... As long as these pages have ads that display utterly gross images (if you doubt me, click the above link) that make…
I nearly got tricked into closing that article after the first paragraph; the chumbox subconsciously indicated to me the end of the article and I had to consciously think "wait, this is an article about these ad grids." In fact it happened for every example they showed.
Re: LA Times and ads
#107I see this all the time. No regard for mobile users that are paying for data plans. To me the big reason to have ad-blocker is data, not just UX.
I'm focused on getting a mobile article page down from 20+ seconds on 4G with 300+ requests and page-weight of 2MB+ (mostly ads).
Right now, on CI environment it is averaging 2.1s, 350K in size, Sadly, Hearst doesn't own the LAT so it won't help them.
Re: LA Times and ads
#108But how many users would actually be willing to pay for the content they consume in order to get rid of ads and tracking and excessive data volume consumption? And how much would they be willing to pay? It seems like they would have to be willing to pay at least an amount comparable to the average ad revenue per user and page view, whatever that actually is. Just blocking ads is certainly justifiable in the current s…
Lots would if it weren't so inconvenient. I read articles from maybe 100 different news sources in a typical month but realistically I don't want 100 newspaper and magazine subscriptions, or 100 different subscription offers or website accounts.
Why isn't there something like a Netflix for News that just gives me news free of visual cruft and takes care of distributing the revenue from what I read in approximately accurate portions to the content providers, not to mention a seamless interface for socially rating and categorizing news?
Newspaper/magazine subscriptions made sense when newspapers were heavily local and magazines were periodicals. Neither condition really obtains any more and having multiple subscriptions is not worth the overhead for even a small number of publications. The last time I made the mistake of subscribing to a magazine I also saw a huge increase in junk mail for several years afterwards. GFTO of my mailbox with that shit.
Re: LA Times and ads
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi I'm the author. I did the naive extrapolation. 5 * 2 * 1440 = 14,400. Perhaps this number is not entirely accurate. The fact it is any larger than, say, 10 is the problem.
That's a terrible methodology, and makes the headline pretty inaccurate. (Edit: looks like the blog headline isn't inflammatory at the moment: did you change it, or did the HN poster insert the 24-hour figure?) I'm against bad ads as much as everyone else, but I don't think using a terrible methodology to criticize them is a good idea. Making clear what you measured would be much better, and actually leaving the thin…
In the time since I read the linked article, I opened the LA Times site and navigated to a story, opened my network console, and read some comments on HN about the article.
Safari says it's been about 12 minutes. It's requested over 1000 resources (it pegged 999+ at ~2 minutes). It's downloaded 88.4 Megabytes of data. It appears to be continually firing pixels from a multitude of places (openX and doubleclick are common). It's also downloading a number of different videos. The article I opened does not have any videos related to it's content. This article is open in an unfocused window; I have not fired any scroll, click, or touch events natively after the few seconds I opened the link, scrolled a bit, then came back to HN.
88.4 megabytes in a few minutes. I remember when my modem couldn't download more than a couple megs in dozens of minutes, and I'm a shitty stupid millennial, not some graybeard. Maybe it could hit a gig, or 14, in a day, but the point really remains set: the LATimes site is absurd.
Re: LA Times and ads
#110I develop software used by newspapers. This is a problem with the whole industry. It's amazing how much crap they load. These sites all use a third party "tag manager" (Google Tag Manager, Tealium, Piwik etc.) to manage the scripts they load: ads, analytics, trackers etc. The people who use the tag manager typically aren't techies, so they don't understand that adding another tag will cause the page to slow down. Typ…
+1 on this.
I'm dealing with Ensighten right now. A wonderful tag-manager (sarcasm) that lets anyone add any random 3rd-party script to all the pages.
Am finding services being loaded twice. From different URLs too so its not just a cache hit.