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Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

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Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#201

Post by bamboozled »

manigandham wrote: post #173
mikeash wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s completely insane. Can you imagine a TV station receiving ads on tapes and playing them to their audience without looking at them first? Can you imagine TV stations occasionally showing ads containing porn, urging people to kill, showing extreme violence during cartoons, or containing specially crafted audio that blows out your speakers, and the TV station just shrugs and says they try their best to stop these t…

Tv spots are very limited. Digital ad impressions number in the billions with 10s of millions of ad creatives. It’s not the same situation.

Well I would argue if billions will see the content, that gives more reason to have it checked over before serving no?

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#202

Post by manigandham »

scarface74 wrote: post #200
manigandham wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just not how digital ad campaigns are run. Advertisers, agencies, media buyers and the rest of the supply chain don't negotiate with individual sites like that, not at any scale that can sustain a site like SO.

Stack Overflow has a known demographic and is not some unknown site. Are you really saying that companies like Amazon (AWS),Microsoft, JetBrains, Google (GCP), Slack, etc would ignore a sales pitch from SO?

It doesn't work like that is what I'm saying. You dont just pitch those companies. They have layers of agencies (a master agency of record, creative agencies, media buying agencies) that handle all the advertising duties. These shops create and traffic these ad campaigns in demand-side platforms (DSPs) which connect and bid on inventory in adexchanges and supply-side platforms (SSPs).

Then there's layers of targeting, accountability, measurement, and insurance that gets requested and bought from anti-fraud, brand-safety and verification vendors. That's likely where this fingerprinting came script came from.

Going to individual agencies with your own different supply path is not going to get any attention and nobody is going to change the way they buy millions in advertising just for you. No single publisher has that much power these days, not even Stackoverflow.

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#203

Post by wool_gather »

manigandham wrote: post #194
scarface74 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could “solve” the issue by not having third party ads. Of all the sites on the internet, StackOverflow has the demographics that any advertiser would crave. How large of an inside ads sales force would you need to target higher than average income earners? How large reputable sites trust third party ad servers is a mystery to me. Besides, native ads that could be served from StackOverFlows own servers would be h…

That's just not how digital ad campaigns are run. Advertisers, agencies, media buyers and the rest of the supply chain don't negotiate with individual sites like that, not at any scale that can sustain a site like SO.

No. They already do this. This is how ads have been run on SO forever. The new ad network ads that they've started with are an aberration from SO's own established practice.

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#204

Post by paulie_a »

scarface74 wrote: post #190
craftinator wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be adults here. This is SO, and I imagine you've used and enjoyed the use of their services just like the rest of us. Support them by letting passive ads sit on the edges of the page, and appreciate that they are actually trying to solve this issue.

They could “solve” the issue by not having third party ads. Of all the sites on the internet, StackOverflow has the demographics that any advertiser would crave. How large of an inside ads sales force would you need to target higher than average income earners? How large reputable sites trust third party ad servers is a mystery to me. Besides, native ads that could be served from StackOverFlows own servers would be h…

The tech industry has a bit of habit over emphasizing their importance. In reality they have much less clout than they like to think.

Techies expect the world to bend over backwards because they make money. A decent chunk of that is basically funded by ads.

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#205

Post by manigandham »

wool_gather wrote: post #203
manigandham wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just not how digital ad campaigns are run. Advertisers, agencies, media buyers and the rest of the supply chain don't negotiate with individual sites like that, not at any scale that can sustain a site like SO.

No. They already do this . This is how ads have been run on SO forever. The new ad network ads that they've started with are an aberration from SO's own established practice .

No they don't. They use their own adserver (bought from adzerk) to physically serve the ads, but they have always come through RTB connections to ad exchanges.

There are private marketplaces and "automated guaranteed" deals to isolate their inventory in its representation and pricing from the rest of the market but the actual campaigns they get exposure to, and the creatives delivered, aren't special to them.

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#206

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

craftinator wrote: post #160
keyle wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you know, we wouldn't stop serving ads until we work it out... no no imagine the loss in revenues.

Let's be adults here. This is SO, and I imagine you've used and enjoyed the use of their services just like the rest of us. Support them by letting passive ads sit on the edges of the page, and appreciate that they are actually trying to solve this issue.

We're talking about this precisely because the ads are becoming less passive.

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#207

Post by manigandham »

bamboozled wrote: post #201
manigandham wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tv spots are very limited. Digital ad impressions number in the billions with 10s of millions of ad creatives. It’s not the same situation.

Well I would argue if billions will see the content, that gives more reason to have it checked over before serving no?

Billions? No single creative is seen by that many. In fact, with dynamic creative optimization (DCO) and all the optimization that happens, you can easily get creatives that are custom generated and only see by a few individuals or even a single person.

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#208

Post by yellowapple »

dorgo wrote: post #128
yellowapple wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm hoping in 10 years the world will have figured out that allowing arbitrary Turing-complete code to automatically run on one's personal machine is a terrifically terrible idea, and that the World Wide Web will instead orient itself around something that doesn't make security and privacy extraordinarily difficult to achieve (whether that's still HTML/CSS or something entirely new). At the very least, though, eventu…

> Turing-complete code You can't build apps without turing complete code. We would be back to downloading and executing applications/programs.

> You can't build apps without turing complete code.

Sure you can. None of these things should require me to run your arbitrary Turing-complete code in my browser:

* Reading an article

* Writing an article

* Shopping online

* Searching for things online

* Reading social media posts/comments

* Submitting social media posts/comments

* Browsing a code repo

* Submitting issues / PRs / etc. to a code repo

* Reading documentation

That (non-exhaustive) category accounts for a solid 80% of everything I do online (and the other 20% are things which I'd rather be doing through native apps). All of these things should be possible (and indeed are possible) entirely with HTML (and optionally CSS) + a server somewhere handling the backend logic. If they're not, then your "app" is over-engineered, or it is indeed better off as something I explicitly download and install, which brings me to...

> We would be back to downloading and executing applications/programs.

Good. That's the direction the mobile world has already been going for a decade now. Native apps actually integrate with the platform. Web pages don't (or at least don't do so well). At least in that situation I'm explicitly "downloading and executing those applications/programs" by my own choice.

We even have things like WebAssembly now, with experiments and effort toward making it usable as a general-purpose compilation target/runtime outside a web browser. No reason why it'd take more than a decade for someone to figure out how to wire a WebAssembly module into some sort of Qt-based (or whatever) runtime + UI and get the best of both worlds.

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#209

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

keithwinstein wrote: post #16
jackdh wrote: post #2

Has there been any serious thought / discussion about how the cat and mouse chase of the ads vs ad blockers is going to end? It would be interesting to see where we are in ten years.

There's a passage of Carl Sagan's "Contact" that's on point and interesting to read 34 years later. The billionaire who helps to decode the Message (from outer space) and ends up building the working copy of the Machine made his fortune by selling tools to detect and block ads from television. There is some discussion of the technical cat-and-mouse game he has to play as advertisers try to make their content avoid de…

> In this version of the future, the ad blockers eventually win and network television is destroyed.

I love utopian visions of the future.

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#210

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

jupp0r wrote: post #118
synthmeat wrote: post #33

It's most likely for web scraper detection. State of the art was using video codec availability as fairly reliable data point, and I haven't seen audio being used for this. Quite interesting.

What makes you think it would be for web scraper detection vs user fingerprinting?

Is there a difference? I mean, slightly different ends, but both very much benefit from fingerprinting.
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