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“Your frustration is the product”

daringfireball.net

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Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#341

Post by pinkmuffinere »

jes5199 wrote: post #325
pinkmuffinere wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fascinating! Can you share more stories?

one of the other head-exploding experiences from that startup was when a major cell-phone company sat down with us and said, we have an idea: the ad-free cell phone. What if, every time a website would normally show an ad, we just paid them not to, at about the same rate the ads are paying. How much would that cost? and the answer is: not much money at all. we ran the numbers and a typical user’s browsing was worth s…

That is a really interesting idea! I immediately see some problems, and you probably already thought through these while working on it, but I'm curious to hear if there were good solutions, or if they were non-issues for some reason:

- If it's a niche product, you can just "buy out" the ad space on the website. But if the phone becomes popular enough that the majority of a website's ad revenue comes through this route, there starts to be a bit of an extortion-like opportunity for the website owners. The website has an incentive to show _even more annoying ads_, with the knowledge that most users actually won't see the ads, but they'll still get paid as if they did. They can say "oh, we're adding 5 more banners, so you'll need to pay us 5x the amount you used to"

- I also see problems from the other direction (from the companies purchasing the ad space). By paying a website _not_ to show ads, you're essentially buying ad space. But the other purchasers-of-ad-space will still exist, and will now be competing for a more limited amount of space. So prices should rise, as demand rises. And as prices rise, you'll have to pay the websites more to keep them ad free. This should converge to a new equilibrium eventually, but I wonder if you accounted for that? If you get significant market share, the new equilibrium would be really expensive, because you're essentially trying to out-purchase everyone.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#342

Post by swiftcoder »

542354234235 wrote: post #76
AlienRobot wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People want lyrics. They don't want to pay for them, but they want someone to make the lyrics available for them, for free, on the Internet, forever. And they feel they are entitled to this without ads for some reason. That's where we are today.

No, its because greedy people try to make money off people. Ads are the reason the internet sucks. There could be a wikipedia like site for lyrics that would cost pennies to maintain and people who like music and contributing would add to it. But scummy sites making money will pay to be at the top of search results as an ad, so they can get people to click on their site that is full of ads, all while sucking up bandw…

> Wikipedia only exsists because they refuse to sell out

Technically, they already did a long time ago. Jimmy Wales spun up a for-profit arm using the wikipedia tech stack, and it's now everyone's least favourite ad-ridden pop culture wiki[1]...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fandom_(website)

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#343

Post by saltyoldman »

Gunax wrote: post #299
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…

There is a comment somewhere on HN where a person described implementing ads for a small, hobby website. Users complaied about the price to go ad-free (something like $25 per year). The commenter revealed that the actual revenue from ads was much more than $25 per year. Every person who purchased the ad-free option actually cost them money. ----- The lesson I took away is that ads pay more than we expect, though i di…

I think that's the angle I'm going for. If Youtube was $25 per year or even $50 per year, it would be a no-brainer for me to pay that. Even if 50 does NOT outbid the advertiser, wouldn't YT rather have guaranteed income rather than trying to constantly find high bidders.

Youtube claims "we’ve reached 125 million YouTube Music and Premium subscribers globally, including trials"

And I bet most of that is trials and it's probably cumulative rather than right now. I bet that 500m people paying $50 /year would actually make them real money that is dependable - since most people would pay for it again next year to avoid ads. And the lower price would skyrocket subscriptions.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#344

Post by evilduck »

superjared wrote: post #90
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…

> we actually shipped a server-side ad blocker, for a parter who had so completely lost control of their own platform that it was the only way to make the ads stop this is batshit insane, yet I believe it

I'll bolster it. I've worked on a site-you-have-heard-of. They were struggling and as a response they would change marketing leadership basically every year to try to find a new way to reach a new or different demographic. Every year the new marketing leader would say "we're not doing any of that previous idiot's strategy, as I am the one who knows best". And as each marketer tried to make their mark, 50 new Google Tag Manager script injects would appear.

Now, whose job was it to remove the previous 200 Tag Manager scripts? Obviously the last guy's, because those were his experiments and he was in charge at the time so new guy was clearly not responsible for it. And at the end of the year, 250 Tag Manager injections would now exist and we would turn the page to reveal a new CMO.

And thus ends the parable of how I put a wrapping feature flag on the code that added Google Tag Manager to the site so that I could display the effects of the insanity and demonstrate why the PageSpeed metrics were ass and why engineering couldn't fix it (in a way they would permit, anyways).

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#346

Post by masterleopold »

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…

[dead]

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#347

Post by [deleted] »

Aurornis wrote: post #310
wouterjanl wrote: post #291

I believe one of the reasons I keep coming back to hackernews is the absence of ads and the near complete focus on content. Shout out to those who work in the background to keep it like this. It would be interesting to hear from dang or other insiders how evident it is that this website is adfree. At some point there must have been someone who probably raised the idea that money could be made by injecting an ad or a…

YCombinator, the accelerator which invests in startups, is a money printer. Any tiny amount of money generated by ads on Hacker News would be a rounding error. The site does technically show ads. YCombinator companies can post job ads here. The job ads are privileged in that users are not allowed to comment on them. Now that I think about it, I haven't seen many job postings from YCombinator companies in a long time.…

[deleted]

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#348

Post by snthpy »

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…

Lol

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#349

Post by RevEng »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #56
mattw2121 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhere along the way, we lost the original vibe of the Internet. There was a time when it was fundamentally a community. People hosted things for the sheer joy of doing it and for the satisfaction of contributing. If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did…

So exactly when was this? Even Geocities was full of punch the monkey ads and the web was inundated with X10 pop under ads. Right before the web became a thing, Usenet was starting to become inundated with spam

Geocities was full of a lot of things. There were pages that were just ad farms, often with no meaningful content except a bunch of key words hidden in the background. But there were also plenty of clean and useful sites by people who wanted to share their passion with others.

The later all but ceases to exist. Even if you are sharing your passion, you are doing it on a social media platform that is using your content to drive your audience into seeing their ads. You are ad bait.

That's very different from the web of the turn of the century.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#350

Post by frmersdog »

frmersdog wrote: post #151
piperswe wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Project Wonderful took the best of both (automated auction for ads, but there's only one ad active at any given moment for any given ad slot so no targeting) but apparently it wasn't able to keep making enough money to stay around

IIUC this is how ads on 4chan work. I learned this during my brief foray into targeted merchandising ( https://www.temporary-url.com/9CBFE ). Everyone on a given board at a given time was seeing the same ads.

>When the temporary url dies, it becomes a referral link to cryptocrap.

Huh. Good to know. Please don't click it anymore, thanks.

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