What Happens Next Will Amaze You • Hacker News Board

Re: What Happens Next Will Amaze You

#271

Post by rl3 » Wed, Sep 23, 2015, 10:16 PM UTC

seiji wrote: post #79

rl3 wrote: post #46

>I've also met people on the YouTube ads team, and they hate their lives and want to die. Maybe those informational widgets that pop up when you Google suicide-related terms didn't actually arise from a sense of humanity or civic duty, but from a desire to reduce employee turnover in their ad divisions. /s Macabre humor aside, I actually wonder if there's any organizations out there funding ads targeted at suicidal i…

Asking google for suicide topics usually starts off with a big info box (non-ad unit) of: Need help? United States: 1 (800) 273-8255 National Suicide Prevention Lifeline Hours: 24 hours, 7 days a week Languages: English, Spanish Website: www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org As for YouTube ad engineers, pretty much everybody on the planet knows forced pre-roll youtube ads are a bad idea. Nobody wants to watch them. So, t…

>Asking google for suicide topics usually starts off with a big info box (non-ad unit) of:

Yeah, I wasn't suggesting those were ads.

> ... pretty much everybody on the planet knows forced pre-roll youtube ads are a bad idea. Nobody wants to watch them.

Totally agree. I'm amazed a better method hasn't been implemented.

Re: What Happens Next Will Amaze You

#272

Post by krisdol » Wed, Sep 23, 2015, 10:18 PM UTC

mozumder wrote: post #260

krisdol wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intent-driven ads are far more relevant to a site's audience than hand-picked, static ones. They have much higher CTR and conversion rates, when done right. You're asking sites to remove sources of income that people find relevant in exchange for ads that some higher up in marketing thinks relates to its users. Not all publishers subscribe to the low quality Google AdExchange. In fact, they typically have a variety o…

> Intent-driven ads are far more relevant to a site's audience than hand-picked, static ones. They have much higher CTR and conversion rates, when done right. Not in my experience. My hand-picked ads are alway at a higher CTR than programmatic. Intent-driven programmatic gives me a 2x CTR over random static ads. Hand tuned gives me about 10x more CTR. You may be able to optimize down a set of hand-picked ads programm…

Good point. A combination of handpicked optimization and programmatic, intent-driven placement is likely optimal.

Re: What Happens Next Will Amaze You

#273

Post by spopejoy » Wed, Sep 23, 2015, 11:20 PM UTC

Here is Bill Maris, of Google Ventures. This year alone Bill gets to invest $425 million of Google's money, and his stated goal is to live forever.

He's explained that the worst part of being a billionaire is going to the grave with everyone else. “I just hope to live long enough not to die.”

This is my FAVORITE example of SV silliness. "Waah death! But I'm TOO RICH to die!"

Re: What Happens Next Will Amaze You

#274

Post by voltagex_ » Thu, Sep 24, 2015, 12:23 AM UTC

mozumder wrote: post #2

The correct answer is to never use programmatic ads. Ever. If you own a site, just curate a set of ads on your site that actually enhances your sites appeal. A fashion site should have matching fashion ads. A tech site should have matching tech ads. A local site should have matching local ads. Reach out to advertisers to get these ads. Never use an algorithm. You, as an editor, should be better than the algorithms. A…

Maybe I can crowdsource some help from here then - My SO has a food blog [1] which it would be nice if it were self sustaining (so ~$30USD/month for domains/hosting). She's just put up Amazon affiliate links on select articles and is still working on building traffic.

Should I stay away from AdSense? Where am I going to find the ads to "hand-pick"?

[1]: http://thecinnamonscrolls.com

Re: What Happens Next Will Amaze You

#275

Post by tertius » Thu, Sep 24, 2015, 12:42 AM UTC

wcummings wrote: post #258

tertius wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They need to realize that eventually the market will drive their users elsewhere. Content is king and there is more content elsewhere. If you provide a worse user experience with the same content as another, then income will dwindle altogether. Innovate, move forward.

If you have an interest in the 3rd party web, you should have an interest in a functional ad technology industry. The market might just drive small publishers out of business. Or drive them and their customers to walled-gardens, so we'll be reading their content on Facebook, being served Facebook ads.

And I'm not a fan of going back to AOL. But the ad tech industry and the "small publishing" industry is lazy and greedy. And I won't support them if they treat me like a product. If they don't I will support them.

I'd like to see Netflix for written content and I'd pay for it.

Re: What Happens Next Will Amaze You

#276

Post by shadowmint » Thu, Sep 24, 2015, 12:55 AM UTC

phaer wrote: post #254

shadowmint wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how? That's the issue here. Don't just complain. Actually suggest, tangibly, how to achieve that goal. Installing ad blocks isn't it. A free internet; also not the solution. Redistributing wealth? Ok; that's an idea, but how ? The Gates Foundation has spent billions , and achieved a great deal, but it's not visible for most people. If someone tells me they're sick of people like Elon Musk, who is out there, actually…

> Armchair social commentary doesn't cut it for me. If you'd consider to argue a bit less aggressive and just a but more nuanced, I would in turn consider a serious answer to your arguments. As it stands I am one of the people who can "categorically get lost" for you. Not because I criticize people who are changing the world, but the priorities of some of those people and social structures which ensure that mostly wh…

I'm not going to argue that there are problems in the world...

...but pointing to Elon Musk as one of those is ridiculous.

It's talking straight down the 'space, who needs it? We should spend that money on earth instead' trope, which has been, repeatedly, and in many many places, shown to be a completely hollow and invalid argument. We don't need to debate this. Go speak to the people at NASA; they've been having this conversation for the last 60 years.

When you taint the message you're trying to get across with this sort of trope, it actively harms your ability to convey a meaningful message.

Re: What Happens Next Will Amaze You

#277

Post by firebones » Thu, Sep 24, 2015, 3:25 AM UTC

idlewords wrote: post #138

[deleted] wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

It's a living

Although the parent to your response has been deleted, your response is one of the most idlewords-ish shutdowns of a heckler I could ever hope to see. Bugs Bunny couldn't've said it better!

Wait, maybe he could've!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyxJ7GKGFG0

Re: What Happens Next Will Amaze You

#278

Post by firebones » Thu, Sep 24, 2015, 3:31 AM UTC

hliyan wrote: post #29

This seemed a bit uncalled for: "Here's Elon Musk. In a television interview this week, Musk said: "I'm trying to do useful things." Then he outlined his plan to detonate nuclear weapons on Mars . These people are the face of our industry." Italics mine.

I don't think it was uncalled for. It takes into account that the target reader/listener is up on current events (the Musk quote from Colbert) and is in on the joke that it is an exaggeration, but one that parodies itself.

In the long run, writers (and presenters) must take the risk and assume that their audience is intelligent and informed, lest we be left with lowest common denominator dreck.

Re: What Happens Next Will Amaze You

#279

Post by yarvin9 » Thu, Sep 24, 2015, 4:16 AM UTC

samwiseg wrote: post #204

mdpopescu wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Followed by a conclusion that communism would be the solution, which makes a lot less sense...

He said social democracy, which has nothing to do with communism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Social_Democratic_Labo...

"The RSDLP later split into Majority and Minority factions, with the Majority (in Russian: "Bolshevik") faction eventually becoming the Communist Party of the Soviet Union."

Re: What Happens Next Will Amaze You

#280

Post by Confusion » Thu, Sep 24, 2015, 6:28 AM UTC

Artistry121 wrote: post #185

I liked this article's start but its finish went in a very different direction. Denmark has a ton of things right about it and it's an amazing place - but mostly due to social conditions that don't exist elsewhere in the world. Denmark was almost entirely homogeneous until the 1990s and is slowly becoming less so - but in a very racially charged way. Their fastest growing political party, the Danish People's Party, i…

  The main difference being it is less costly to screw up in Denmark.

We'd call that 'having bad luck'. That's the difference between the US and Western Europe in one sentence. We don't think you deserve a life of extreme poverty, homelessness and worse if you 'screw up' in being born with a disability, lower intelligence, to bad parents or in another way that causes the system to not allow you to be the worker you were supposed to be. We don't believe most people 'screw up': we believe they are unlucky and believe we could have been them.