Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023) • Hacker News Board

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#111

Post by bruce511 » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 4:29 AM UTC

konstantinua00 wrote: post #105

bruce511 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How has market cap got anything to do with monetizing the site? You're suggesting that if Google was smaller then that would make this site more appealing to advertisers? That having more advertising companies would make this site more valuable?

if Google didn't make site more appealing, Google2 or Google3 or Google4 or SomeOtherCompetitor5 might but the problem is that there are no "2,3,4,5' options - there's only one. And it has no incentive for "good people" to leverage

Ok, theres only one option.

But let's imagine you're CEO of option 2. What do you think you might do differently which would make this site, in its original form, appealing to advertise on?

Having multiple ad companies doesn't sound like an improvement when the advertising space on offer doesn't seem to be good for advertising.

Or to put it another way, do you feel this space does have value, but Google is leaving that value on the table? If so, why hasn't some other company taken advantage of this value?

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#112

Post by MatthiasPortzel » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 4:32 AM UTC

shepherdjerred wrote: post #13

gretch wrote: post #7

“a link to what the site looked like last week, before Google made me make it worse on purpose to make money.” Sounds like you sold out. You should own up to your agency in the matter. They made me make it worse so I could make more money - it’s like you think you are under unique pressure to pay bills, thus excusing you, but everyone else in the world shouldn’t be excused.

I think the point is that Google is creating an incentive to have useless content on your website if you want to show ads on it.

That was the author's point, but I think it is undermined by the fact that the ads on the page are more obnoxious than the AI-generated content. The AI generated content is nicely hidden away underneath the huge banner ad and the full screen popup ad that the author wanted to include.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#113

Post by bruce511 » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 4:32 AM UTC

jdewerd wrote: post #63

bruce511 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How has market cap got anything to do with monetizing the site? You're suggesting that if Google was smaller then that would make this site more appealing to advertisers? That having more advertising companies would make this site more valuable?

The complaint was about Google's "talk to the hand" onboarding/feedback process, not the preferences of advertisers.

Sure, I think we can agree that at Google scale the business interactions with me as a potential supplier are automated and soulless.

On the other hand there are several large supermarket chains where I live, and while I have a small artisinal cheese making hobby, so far my interactions with any of them to put it on their shelves have been equally soulless.

Perhaps in this context the issue is not monopoly, but rather that I have nothing of value to offer them.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#114

Post by bruce511 » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 4:34 AM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #83

bruce511 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How has market cap got anything to do with monetizing the site? You're suggesting that if Google was smaller then that would make this site more appealing to advertisers? That having more advertising companies would make this site more valuable?

Google thinks the value is zero, which is definitely wrong, and yes competition would help with that.

Can you elaborate on what the value of the site might be, to say a competitive advertiser, and how that value might be unlocked?

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#115

Post by datascienced » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 4:34 AM UTC

bruce511 wrote: post #29

Of course Google didn't make the web site bad, you did. In a purely practical sense you changed the site, not them. Which leads us to the "why" of it. Which is you wanted to monetize the site (if only to cover its costs.) Since advertising seems to be the business model of the internet that's your first port of call. But here's a site that performs a task. Quite who uses this site is unclear. Sure lots of people migh…

Google knows who the visitor is, what ads they clicked before and so on. They also know the search terms the site ranks for. What is on the site is just one clue as to what to serve.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#116

Post by AlienRobot » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 4:35 AM UTC

zeroCalories wrote: post #93

AlienRobot wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A good "this work is done for free pleading emoji" message can get you some decent cash Source? As far as I know you will need to put banners so users know you accept donations (as OP accepts donations in their support page and you literally missed that), and most people don't donate, so what tends to happen is you replace banners that everyone hates but that pays money with banners that everyone hates that don't pa…

I know from work I've done with voluntary contributions that you can get near the amount that ad sense will give you, but that's on the high end, and will depend on the type of content and how you push it. But it would have at least been worth trying, given the public service nature of the content. Certainly enough to cover the costs of the domain name and hosting. Also, people are far more receptive to a message ask…

It's in the "support" nav button.

https://theluddite.org/#!support

I think I saw a banner when I scrolled to the bottom as well, but it isn't showing again for some reason.

I assume that they already had this page before they chose to monetize with adsense, which kind of implies that asking for donations hasn't been very effective for OP.

>people are far more receptive to a message asking for a contribution than an ad.

I disagree. Do you want to know what my hot take is?

Imagine, for one moment, that we didn't have ads on the internet.

Instead, every page was full of banners begging for donations.

Instead of ad-blockers, everyone would be using donation-blockers.

All that "concern" I keep hearing about about privacy and tracking and long lists of partners in cookie banners would disappear in an instant, and everyone would show that what they really care about is just being mildly inconvenienced by distracting banners telling you to do things and nothing more.

That's what I really think about it. The instant ads disappear, whatever replaces it, people are just going to hate it the same if not even more, specially when it comes to free stuff on the internet.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#117

Post by petepete » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 4:39 AM UTC

codetrotter wrote: post #3

richieartoul wrote: post #2

Is there a word for things that are both hilarious and tragic? I laughed out loud multiple times. Kudos to the author for making such a depressing topic so hysterical.

> Is there a word for things that are both hilarious and tragic? Yes, tragicomic. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tragicomic

I've never heard that word, perhaps it's more of an American expression? In the UK we'd probably say bittersweet.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#118

Post by nitwit005 » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 4:41 AM UTC

bruce511 wrote: post #29

Of course Google didn't make the web site bad, you did. In a purely practical sense you changed the site, not them. Which leads us to the "why" of it. Which is you wanted to monetize the site (if only to cover its costs.) Since advertising seems to be the business model of the internet that's your first port of call. But here's a site that performs a task. Quite who uses this site is unclear. Sure lots of people migh…

You're arguing Google has sensible motives. That doesn't particularly matter. What matters is what they encourage website owners to do in practice. Apparently that is to fill your website with worthless junk text.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#119

Post by bruce511 » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 4:41 AM UTC

keepamovin wrote: post #82

bruce511 wrote: post #29

Of course Google didn't make the web site bad, you did. In a purely practical sense you changed the site, not them. Which leads us to the "why" of it. Which is you wanted to monetize the site (if only to cover its costs.) Since advertising seems to be the business model of the internet that's your first port of call. But here's a site that performs a task. Quite who uses this site is unclear. Sure lots of people migh…

Interesting take on the backstory. Also, > Of course Google didn't make the web site bad, you did. That's right. Whenever anybody says "X made me do Y", sometimes I get flashes of the 1980/s1990s action movie villain, in the industrial backdrop, for the violence climax scene, with the hero on the ropes, screaming hysterically "You made me do this!" Nobody makes you do anything. That's true from a strict personal resp…

>> of course that's not what this is about. It's about Google providing the incentive, for ruining perfectly good websites.

Wait,what? The author wants to monetize the site. He understands the actual users won't pay. So looking for an alternate option he turns to advertising.

Google says "hey, unfortunately your site isn't appealing to advertisers." That's not Google's fault, they're just telling the truth as they see it.

The site author has many choices at this point. One of them is to make the site better for advertisers (and worse for users). He chooses this route. Google should have stopped this how?

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#120

Post by antihipocrat » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 4:47 AM UTC

bruce511 wrote: post #29

Of course Google didn't make the web site bad, you did. In a purely practical sense you changed the site, not them. Which leads us to the "why" of it. Which is you wanted to monetize the site (if only to cover its costs.) Since advertising seems to be the business model of the internet that's your first port of call. But here's a site that performs a task. Quite who uses this site is unclear. Sure lots of people migh…

Google didn't 'make' the site owner change anything, there is obviously the choice not to serve ads and not change the site.

However, once the site owner decided to use Adsense then in order to use this service the site needed to change according to Google's requirements.

The point being made is that in order to serve ads the site owner had to add a lot of useless information irrelevant to what was driving traffic to the site in the first place.

Why did the first attempt get rejected, yet the final attempt after making the website objectively worse gets accepted?

The useless information that needed to be added to the site contributes to the decline in quality many people are noticing when using google search nowadays. This article provides a very interesting explanation for this decline.