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“Your frustration is the product”

daringfireball.net

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Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#241

Post by WorldPeas »

saltyoldman wrote: post #186
MyHonestOpinon wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been waiting for "Netflix for news or magazines". Pay $20 a month and get access to multiple publishers.

What frustrates me to no end, is that Youtube makes about $2 per user per month from ads. Yet if i want to go ad free, they expect me to pay $14 per month. Why in the hell would they not just sell it to me at cost for $2. Heck, I'll even say I'll be a customer for the REST OF TIME if they did that. I understand why Netflix and other vendors charge $12 - $20 because it has to pay for the copyright. But Youtube does NO…

...And you'll find that when you do so magically you seem to get logged out more frequently, and because of their UI, you likely won't notice until the sneaking suspicion the quality of your recommendations has dropped catches up with you

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#242

Post by pixelatedindex »

pcl wrote: post #194

It’s ironic seeing Gruber gripe about screen percentages used when his own website dedicates only about 50% of the screen width (on mobile) to content, and leaves the other half blank. Not to mention the light-grey-on-dark-grey and the tiny font. Just as I need an ad blocker to browse the modern web, I need Reader mode to read Gruber’s rant about it.

If zooming in to read content is the biggest concern, that’s a win in the modern web. I double tap on the content and it fits to screen perfectly.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#243

Post by m463 »

everdrive wrote: post #11

"I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data." Not really the point of the article, but almost all major news sites are significantly better if you block javascript. You sometimes lose pictures and just get text, but often the pictures are irrelevant anyhow. (a story about a world leader, and some public / stock photo is used and is not…

> are significantly better if you block javascript.

lol. https://www.wsj.com always shows me one line of text:

  Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#244

Post by weird_tentacles »

magiclaw wrote: post #239
pcl wrote: post #194

It’s ironic seeing Gruber gripe about screen percentages used when his own website dedicates only about 50% of the screen width (on mobile) to content, and leaves the other half blank. Not to mention the light-grey-on-dark-grey and the tiny font. Just as I need an ad blocker to browse the modern web, I need Reader mode to read Gruber’s rant about it.

That's what CTRL+MouseWheel is for

[dead]

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#245

Post by nosioptar »

davidfischer wrote: post #152
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 built EthicalAds ( https://www.ethicalads.io/ ) for exactly this reason. No tracking. No cookies. No behavioral targeting (targeting based on stuff you've previously done). Every website where our ads appear AND every advertiser is hand approved. No JS from advertisers: just a plain JPG/PNG and text. We're small but on track to pay out $500k to publishers this year.

I really hope you succeed. If ads were a simple text/image with zero js, I wouldn't need an adblocker.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#246

Post by hunterpayne »

jrmg wrote: post #92
rcarr wrote: post #8

> The reader is not respected enough by the software. The reader is not respected by the software because the reader themselves does not respect the software or the article. If the reader paid for a subscription to the website they would get an ad-free version. Don't pay and then this is what you get. The money has to come from somewhere. The issue is that a large portion of the population seems to think that if a pr…

The money has to come from somewhere. Agree - and I pay for news - but I also find it hard to imagine that the current morass of low quality, usually scammy, ads is the most lucrative way to monetize a news web site. It’s literally driving away views while attracting advertisers that are willing to pay less and less. We’ve hill-climbed onto a plateaux (hill-descended into a crevasse?) and everyone is too afraid to ma…

At the dawn of the web, no industry was better positioned to take advantage of it than the news media. Instead they ignored it and were cannibalized to a greater degree than any other industry. Its hard to keep an industry afloat when it is managed so badly. Part of the reason that the news media is where it is, is that they have lost most of their income and viewers so the only people who are willing to work in it have ulterior motives. This drives a vicious cycle of continuously more partisan news coverage which drives away even more viewers. The ads are just a symptom of this, not the cause. If they were managed better, they would have a more effective ad policy but they aren't. Still though, I'm sure its a hard balance to keep but others seem to do it so...

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#247

Post by _doctor_love »

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #154
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…

This is fascinating! Can you share more stories?

Not OP, but I’ll throw out that many large commercial websites don’t directly integrate ads themselves. Instead, they use a tag manager.

Often, that tag manager isn’t managed by the technology department, and well-meaning marketing people continue to sign contracts and jam JavaScript into the front end. If there’s also not a good content security policy in place, ad networks quickly become unregulated, all sorts of strange ads come in, and it’s very difficult to control them.

There are a lot of “MarTech” consultants out there that help clients essentially burn their tag manager to the ground, then build it from the ground up to work properly.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#248

Post by card_zero »

BizarroLand wrote: post #190
MyHonestOpinon wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been waiting for "Netflix for news or magazines". Pay $20 a month and get access to multiple publishers.

I would gladly pay an extra $20/m for a Disney style internet fast pass where I can browse any site that is subscribed to the service without ads, cookie preferences already set, no login or login managed by the extension for the fast pass service, and maybe a search provider that allows me to filter out SSO spam sites and adwhores like Meta and Google, and where some significant portion of my monthly pay is sent to…

Then there's the TV streaming problem where the three shows (or sites) you're interested in viewing regularly belong to three different subscription services, and they're jealously set against uniting. I guess that's like the same problem as individual paywalled sites, but bigger.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#249

Post by troad »

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…

> Just a crazy idea, but could it be that they don't dogfood their own stuff?

I am so convinced that this is the case. They're using their own product using some max-level sub that removes all the annoyances, and don't realise how unbearable the default experience is.

Speaking of the NYT: previously, I used to bypass the paywall, and I simply got the article with no nonsense. Now I subscribe, and every single day I get an obnoxious pop-up ad to upgrade my subscription to some higher family tier. Giving the NYT money has made my day a tiny bit more annoying than not giving them money. Lesson learnt.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#250

Post by smcin »

simonw wrote: post #189
saltyoldman wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What frustrates me to no end, is that Youtube makes about $2 per user per month from ads. Yet if i want to go ad free, they expect me to pay $14 per month. Why in the hell would they not just sell it to me at cost for $2. Heck, I'll even say I'll be a customer for the REST OF TIME if they did that. I understand why Netflix and other vendors charge $12 - $20 because it has to pay for the copyright. But Youtube does NO…

My guess is that the $2/user/month thing is an average across all of the users, and the fact that you use YouTube enough to even consider to pay to go ad free puts you in the much higher range of dollars-per-month users such that $14/month may even lose them money.

Yes it's a very broad global average. Advertisers pay much more for North American users, then European users.
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