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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?

#341

Post by jakobegger »

scarface74 wrote: post #256
manigandham wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those sites are far smaller than Stackoverflow. Bespoke campaigns don't always pay more, and usually mean less total revenue for the site if that's all they run.

Tell that to John Gruber over at DaringFireball - He makes $6500 a week just from posting one ad in the RSS feed. If he can gross over $300K a year on a niche Apple blog without a sales team, can you imagine what a sales team could do at SO? He also sells three ad spots on his mostly weekly podcast for $6000 each. He’s a one man business grossing over 1 million a year without a sales team.

> He’s a one man business grossing over 1 million a year without a sales team

1) He has a sales person that sells ads on his podcast: http://neat.fm

2) Extrapolating from published rates is not very reliable. Nobody except John Gruber and his accountant knows how many sponsors really pay the sticker price.

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#342

Post by scarface74 »

qroshan wrote: post #275
manigandham wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make what happen exactly? C-level execs do not run ad campaigns. At most they'll defer to the CMO, who then just tells you to talk to their agency. There are private marketplaces and other deals you can work out with agencies but this is usually for inventory against existing campaign RFPs, and comes with all of the typical creative requirements. They're not going to run an entirely custom campaign under your own ter…

Thanks for your insights here dude. It is wasted on HN crowd though, who are mostly clueless about business and have pre-conceived notions and hate about everything. Any books / blog posts that you recommend. You should write a book :)

Yes because all business is based on ad sales....

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#343

Post by atoav »

I don’t get the modern ad stuff, any reasonable person uses an adblocker anyway, because ads are often slow, problematic in terms of privacy and security.

The fact that even people of a big site like stack overflow don’t know where it comes from instantly, is only further proof that using an adblocker is a resonable decision.

Maybe it is naive, but all ads should be in my eyes is a picture and something that counts the page views. And when you are a site that has ads as it’s main income you should have at minimum one employee who knows and tests each ad before it gets accepted and put onto your server.

Only then your customers will trust the ads you use and only then any reasonable person can even consider deactivating the adblocker for your site.

I am pretty sure somebody explored this idea before me, why doesn’t it work?

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#344

Post by rsj_hn »

DCoder wrote: post #326
rsj_hn wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideally you would like the iframe to not be visible -- you don't want it to show scrollbars if the content overflows. But at the same time, you want to see all the content in the iframe. If you knew ahead of time exactly the layout of the text in the iframe you could do this, but it's harder when you have dynamically generated content inserted into the iframe, and now add to that wanting the page to be on different d…

Solving this problem requires the JS on the parent and child frames to cooperate and talk to each other about their sizes, so the parent can resize the iframe to match the size of its content. This is not something ad providers would bother to implement on their own, let alone in a consistent way.

Correct, there are solutions, but in our case none of them were feasible because we didn't control what was happening inside the iframe.

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#345

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

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.

> Support them by letting passive ads sit on the edges of the page

Any ad that fingerprints and tracks users is not "passive".

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#346

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

DCoder wrote: post #280
zeta0134 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Vizio's built-in software tries to do that. There's a reason it's not allowed to connect to wifi.

When you say "it's not allowed", do you trust its own settings? Are you sure it's not doing something like [0]? How do you even protect against that? [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/bpr6xs/if_you_choo...

Don't buy a "smart" TV?

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#347

Post by wtmt »

stevenjohns wrote: post #294
wtmt wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're "NOT okay with it", how about stopping ads completely until you resolve this problem? That should give a bigger impetus to solve it ASAP as the bottom line gets hit for multiple stakeholders. This is not just ads, but about fingerprinting and tracking users somehow or the other by third parties. It's plain evil, and not a decent thing to continue foisting on your unsuspecting users after you've known it. Te…

Probably not his call. By "we" he's probably talking about the engineering team, which in many cases is nothing more than a conduit for whims of the marketing and sales teams. The only time they'd do that is if the marketing team decided that the value-add from taking ads off cancelled out the profit loss from taking the ads off.

I completely understand that it may not be his call. That's why I said "Tell management to take an ethical stance and preserve the reputation of SO."

Maybe he (or someone else in the team) has already given this as a temporary solution but it's been rejected. Since we don't know what's going on in the background, this suggestion being put on a public forum is still worthwhile. It could also help external parties (like HN readers) add more pressure in not letting this kind of surveillance continue just because the company doesn't want to stop making money while they're working on a solution or waiting for Google (or someone else) to help.

Every minute they delay cutting this off puts thousands of people in a position of vulnerability.

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#348

Post by meerita »

chance_state wrote: post #60
meerita wrote: post #55

Did anyone checked how much data from our data plan cede to advertising? I bet it's 30%-40%.

I have been using uBlock Origin for about three years and I browse the web heavily (4-6 hours/day). In that time it has blocked 13% of requests (10% on mobile). I don't have enough info to quantify the amount of data blocked though.

I tried to check my uBlock stats, but it didn't worked well. It seems on Firefox doesn't fully works.

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#349

Post by IloveHN84 »

Nick-Craver wrote: post #68

I just wanted to chime in from Stack Overflow here and let people know: we are aware of the issue. And we're NOT okay with it. We're trying to sort out how to kill the audio behavior now. It's not very straightforward to find where it's coming from, but we are working on it. We've also reached out to Google for their assistance in tracking it down. If anyone can offer advice, we'll more than happily take it. - Nick C…

Why don't you block all the JavaScript not coming from your origin and just display a simple link+PNG as advertising?

Re: Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?

#350

Post by dual_basis »

perl4ever wrote: post #180
rocky1138 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that it may go the other way: that receiving communication from a source that is supported by ad revenue while knowingly and actively bypassing those same ads will be seen as theft. I fully expect lobbyists to push for this and see some success in the next 10 years.

When people refuse to watch ads, there is theft going on, but it's theft from the advertisers by the media owners. The viewers aren't guilty of anything.

I don't understand your point. If an ad doesn't display, then the content owner doesn't get any money for it.
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