Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

“Your frustration is the product”

daringfireball.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 352 posts

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#271

Post by inopinatus »

VertanaNinjai wrote: post #234
browningstreet wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a site with some traffic and a popular, class-leading ad plugin for the platform. At some point I just lost interest in the whole thing and cancelled my plugin subscription. I got an email from the developer, which was kind enough, asking me why I was cancelling and if there was any feedback I wanted to share. I mentioned how complicated ad inventory, ad placement, and online ordering for hands-off customer sel…

Maybe there are some details missing here, but asking for more detailed or tailored feedback makes it seem like he cares and was willing to hear you out. Sometimes people are in their own industry for so long that they forget what their industry and tools look like to outside eyes. A simple menu to him could’ve been overwhelming for you as a quick example.

Unsurprisingly, there's a representative XKCD. https://xkcd.com/2501/

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#272

Post by AxEy »

etiennebausson wrote: post #218
dmd wrote: post #178

> the equivalent of a broadcast TV channel that only showed 7 minutes of actual TV content per hour, devoting the other 53 minutes to paid commercials and promotions for other shows on the same channel. Almost no one would watch such a channel. I recently was in a 45 minutes Uber ride where the driver had the stereo set to the Sirius XM self-advertising channel - the one you get if you haven't subscribed. For 45 minu…

Is it possible that he was paid to play such add to his passengers?

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. I've definitely seen behind-the-front-seats screen ad placement and other weird things in ride shares in the U.S. so this doesn't seem out of the question.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#273

Post by deanishe »

School-Cotton wrote: post #256
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…

What if they dropped the average price of YouTube Premium to $2? And charged you $20 but people in Africa $1. Then it’d be more comparable to ad revenue. Would you be happier then?

What if?

That's exactly what they do. It's 80c/month in Argentina.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#274

Post by bluGill »

didgetmaster wrote: post #258
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.

Everyone who thinks that some kind of subscription service will replace ads, needs to take a look at history. Cable TV, satellite TV, etc., might have started ad free, but they soon adopted ads. So you ended up paying for a subscription in addition to high numbers of ads.

cable didn't start ad free. It started because some valley communities couldn't get a signal at all so the put one community antenna on high ground and ran a cable to houses to get normal broadcast tv with ads to each house. a few ad free stations came latter.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#275

Post by mapt »

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…

There are enormous piles of money looming around every corner seeking a return on investment. If you have users that are enjoying a service, one of those piles of money can buy out the owner, double the price, implement ads, and sell all the private data. The bet they are making is it will take longer for the userbase to quit than it will take to make back their investment.

Every popular / beloved service is a target for these giant piles of cash. The fact that lots of people like it is de facto proof that it's underpriced, or over-resourced, or coddles its users with too much content. According to the finance industry, a stable business relationship should have the userbase reluctantly concluding that they have no other option, gritting their teeth and opening their wallet - and that's the sort of maximally profitable entity that a giant pile of cash will leave alone, letting it just exist, as a business.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#276

Post by School-Cotton »

deanishe wrote: post #273
School-Cotton wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if they dropped the average price of YouTube Premium to $2? And charged you $20 but people in Africa $1. Then it’d be more comparable to ad revenue. Would you be happier then?

What if? That's exactly what they do. It's 80c/month in Argentina.

Indeed, so what’s OP complaining about?

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#277

Post by ojbyrne »

The referenced article ends like this:

"I'm Shubham, a full-stack product engineer passionate about fixing hostile UI, building privacy-first tools (like my YouTube extension with 51k+ DAU), and making the web usable again. I am currently looking for my next role."

:-(

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#278

Post by pseudohadamard »

VertanaNinjai wrote: post #234
browningstreet wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a site with some traffic and a popular, class-leading ad plugin for the platform. At some point I just lost interest in the whole thing and cancelled my plugin subscription. I got an email from the developer, which was kind enough, asking me why I was cancelling and if there was any feedback I wanted to share. I mentioned how complicated ad inventory, ad placement, and online ordering for hands-off customer sel…

Maybe there are some details missing here, but asking for more detailed or tailored feedback makes it seem like he cares and was willing to hear you out. Sometimes people are in their own industry for so long that they forget what their industry and tools look like to outside eyes. A simple menu to him could’ve been overwhelming for you as a quick example.

I ran into this a while back at a talk when the speaker used the phrase "perfectly ordinary sodium iodide gamma ray spectrometer". I pointed out to him afterwards that that's not something that most people would expect to follow "perfectly ordinary" in a sentence, and he explained that, yes, today you'd be using thallium-doped CsI or NaI scintillators instead.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#279

Post by bandrami »

I still in 2026 do not understand the absolute manic drive websites have to push me to the app. I've administered services that have both a web client and an app client and the metrics just really weren't better, certainly not enough to spend energy actively pushing people to the app.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#280

Post by bandrami »

abrookewood wrote: post #265
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…

That is just plain ridiculous. How the hell did they end up not knowing how to manage the content on their site?

Oh Lord you need to take on some non-tech companies as clients if this surprises you. I've had clients who forgot they had a website and thought that monthly hosting bill was just for something to do with the back-office Internet connection.
Post reply on HN