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“Your frustration is the product”

daringfireball.net

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Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#141

Post by andrekandre »

PaulHoule wrote: post #93
dfxm12 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an asymmetry here. We aren't talking about ads like billboard ads or TV commercials. We're talking about creepy behavioral tracking, harvesting and selling.

... and many other sins. I go to YouTube and see a lot of things that make me question the narrative that this is an advanced system that elicits user preferences, makes markets clear, allows competitors to enter the market, etc. The first ad I see if is for Chrome. Well I'm already using Chrome because sometimes Youtube punishes me for using Firefox. So the message is "lights are on and nobody is home", I mean, they…

  > I know the numbers say Google and Facebook are making money hand over fist but on the ground my perception is that it looks like a Potemkin Village that is trying to fool investors into thinking there is a vibrant "advertising economy" when it is really a vast wasteland like daytime TV where it is all about medicare fraud and personal injury lawyers.
by hook or crook, people have things to sell and those platforms are the place to put up shop... (my opinion) most new products/services are garbage (hello temu and friends) so its not a surprise most ads are therefore garbage/frauds as well...

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#142

Post by everybodyknows »

deejaaymac wrote: post #101
andai wrote: post #89

Does anyone know a form of internet advertising that isn't complete cancer? 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.…

I know of one but it's niche. OpenSubtitles allows people to pay for ads at the start/end of content when you download subtitles on the fly. I've seen countless NordVPN ads in subtitles.

Another niche: Software professionals

https://www.carbonads.net/

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#143

Post by criddell »

rafabulsing wrote: post #106
andai wrote: post #89

Does anyone know a form of internet advertising that isn't complete cancer? 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.…

Yeah, I don't mind the static, manually selected ads too much. They tend to be much less annoying, and for better/more relevant services and products. And as a bonus (for the website owner), they're also much harder to automatically block!

I don't even mind dynamic ads if they are targeted to the page content and not on my browsing history. If I'm reading a page on how to repair my dishwasher, ads from dishwasher manufacturers or sellers make sense.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#144

Post by JohnMakin »

jdp wrote: post #137

I'm doing my small part by paying for websites that respect me in the way TFA describes. I have annual subscriptions to Defector, Brand New, and DIELINE, and I'll add more as other websites follow their lead. Maybe it'll become too much to manage one day, but it might be for other readers too, and then maybe that will pressure our card companies and banks to start providing some more useful consumer services. We need…

Are you sure they are? Loading dieline home page I get a ton of tracking blocks. Defector was better, but I still see adtech endpoints. I don't really know of any modern monetized site that isn't like this.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#145

Post by suzzer99 »

jdp wrote: post #137

I'm doing my small part by paying for websites that respect me in the way TFA describes. I have annual subscriptions to Defector, Brand New, and DIELINE, and I'll add more as other websites follow their lead. Maybe it'll become too much to manage one day, but it might be for other readers too, and then maybe that will pressure our card companies and banks to start providing some more useful consumer services. We need…

Every time I load an article in archive.ph, I think "I want to support these guys. I would happily pay $.10, maybe even $.25 for this, if it was seamless and instantaneous."

But that's never the option and apparently it never will be. Sorry, I'm just never getting yearly subscriptions to 30 different content websites. That would probably 10x my spam email intake, I'd have to worry about them jacking up prices and playing games after the initial subscription ran out, and I'd have yet another subscription floating out there in the ether for me to forget about.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#146

Post by btbuildem »

jes5199 wrote: post #77

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…

If I may, what was your vision? What were you aiming to replace the ads with?

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#147

Post by suzzer99 »

arcxi wrote: post #108
MarkusWandel wrote: post #91

Just a crazy idea, but could it be that they don't dogfood their own stuff? I have Ublock Origin Lite on by default (RIP full Ublock Origin) and a lot of sites look clean . I'm often not even aware that if I send a link to an article via Whatsapp or whatever, it may reflect badly on me that I send such an ad-overloaded mess to them. I just don't know the mess is there except sometimes by accident. I watched someone g…

> RIP full Ublock Origin it's alive and well

In Chrome?

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#148

Post by tlhunter »

> No print publication on the planet does this. The print editions of the very same publications — The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Yorker — don’t do anything like this.

Ehh... I cancelled my SF Chronicle subscription a year ago. Since then I've received a dozen predatory phone calls and just add many letters. Plus when you do have the subscription they alter prices on you like a cable TV provider. So in some ways print is better than web but in other ways it's worse.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#149

Post by [deleted] »

piperswe wrote: post #98
andai wrote: post #89

Does anyone know a form of internet advertising that isn't complete cancer? 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.…

Project Wonderful took the best of both (automated auction for ads, but there's only one ad active at any given moment for any given ad slot so no targeting) but apparently it wasn't able to keep making enough money to stay around

[deleted]

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#150

Post by giovannibonetti »

btbuildem wrote: post #146
jes5199 wrote: post #77

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…

If I may, what was your vision? What were you aiming to replace the ads with?

Micro-payments, probably
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