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The correct amount of ads is zero

manuelmoreale.com

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Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#371

Post by PaulHoule »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #353
PaulHoule wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Elephant in the room of media economics. Look at ads on daytime broadcast TV and it is: medicare advantage, something you can get from medicare, a medicare scam, personal injury lawyer, some drug your insurance might pay for, personal injury lawyer #2. Ads for something you spend your own money on are few and far between (maybe you will get a car ad because if nobody bought a car who'd get hit by a car and call…

You see the same effect with twitter's advertiser exodus since it was acquired. It was not long ago you'd see everything on twitter: prominent fashion brands, car companies, big name electronics, everything you'd expect from a healthy ad ecosystem. Now it's basically nothing but crypto scams, reverse mortgages, supplements, dude wipes and pills that make your dick work. Like you can feel whatever you feel about that,…

I bet those ads must drive away some people. Watching TV circa 2000 it would be easy to conclude "I want to die before I get old".

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#372

Post by aunty_helen »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #347
ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use uBlock and pay your content creators via Patreon if they have one. I believe that the ad-based freemium business model is harmful to society and unfixable due to the incentives it creates to engage and enrage rather than entertain and inform. So, I use uBlock to use YouTube for free to explicitly drain it of resources without giving Google any ad income, and then I pay the creators that I like using other…

I'm not a big believer in this. It simply doesn't scale. So I might donate chunks of income to 1, 2, maybe 5 or 10 people like this. What about everyone else? It's not a fair system. I engage with lots of youtube channels, read lots of things on dozens/hundreds of websites. Add a few podcasts to the mix and it starts adding up to quite a lot of mouths to feed with individual donations. It's not reasonable for all of…

Paying 1 is better than 0. You’re assuming support has to scale perfectly to be fair, but that’s a false binary. Creators don’t expect everyone to pay but they rely on _someone_ paying. Refusing because it ‘doesn’t scale’ just reinforces a broken system where nobody pays, creators lose and we end up with the shit quality media and content we have now

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#373

Post by prepend »

galfarragem wrote: post #358

The correct amount of ads is one. As an indie web developer, after trying many "ad policies", I believe the sweet spot (not the revenue optimal spot!) is one ad, clear, not intrusive and highly targetted to your audience. This ad will not annoy readers and will keep your motivation at a decent level (instead of a zero ads policy). My take: https://www.slowernews.com/sponsor

Sorry, if I’m paying you for a service I want no ads.

I don’t like ads. They don’t help me. They make my life harder. I’ll tolerate them in some situations, but if I pay you then I should not see an ad.

If you want to show an ad, that you choice. I think it’s anti-user and I won’t buy your thing.

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#374

Post by madeofpalk »

cons0le wrote: post #291
eqvinox wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing the point. There's a reasonable number of people who are willing to pay for content like this, but only if they actually get an ad-free experience in exchange. The business decision The Verge needs to make is whether they want to try to reach these people or not, since these people won't pay for a model that still has ads. (There could of course be 2 subscription levels at different prices, one…

Heck, if online ads didn't move around and pop up in front of the screen, less people would block them. But the reality is that companies are too greedy, and will never draw the line and say "this is enough" . I can't afford to subscribe to the dozens of sites I glance at everyday for 2 minutes. Quite frankly as someone that grew up with the "old" internet, I don't like the idea of paying for every single site I use.…

> But the reality is that companies are too greedy

I don't think this is true.

Ads get worse and more hostile because it so easily turns into a race to the bottom. Worse ads devalue the page and lower the CPM, which leads to websites to add more ads, which lowers everything again.

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#376

Post by greenie_beans »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #351
eterevsky wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is always possible to have several tiers of subscriptions, a cheap tier with some additional feature and ads, and a higher tier with no ads at all. I am perfectly willing to pay extra to support a website or service that I'm using, but only if it removes all ads.

The problem is: advertisers will argue that if you're offering a tier of service that removes ads, that's specifically going to be the most appealing to the group of your user-base that has the most money to spend and whom is most ready to spend it, evidenced by the fact that they have subscribed to your ad-free tier, and is therefore worth the most in terms of reaching with ads. Those people are self-selecting as th…

yikes. that makes sense for an advertiser but also fuck that.

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#377

Post by madeofpalk »

redserk wrote: post #50
jillesvangurp wrote: post #44

It's why I use Firefox and avoid situations where I might get exposed to annoying ads. I was watching some Amazon Prime recently (the new rings of power season). Pretty OK and completely ad free experience. Except I noticed these weird cuts every few minutes. It took me quite a while to realize that Amazon introduced ads some time ago for Amazon prime and uBlock origin was doing a great job of simply blocking them. H…

Regarding The Verge, I wish something like Apple News existed in this space. I'd happily throw in $10/mo into a pool that distributed money towards a bunch of different smaller tech reporting/blogs/YouTube channels. I just can't justify paying $X/mo individually to 20 different sources. Though, I dislike that Apple News now runs ads in it's offering and would happily pay a little more to completely get rid of them, b…

> I'd happily throw in $10/mo into a pool that distributed money towards a bunch of different smaller tech reporting/blogs/YouTube channels

I'm almost certain this exact thing used to exist, and The Verge was a part of it, and then it all fell apart. I can't find it now - it's impossible to search for.

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#378

Post by galfarragem »

amelius wrote: post #363
galfarragem wrote: post #358

The correct amount of ads is one. As an indie web developer, after trying many "ad policies", I believe the sweet spot (not the revenue optimal spot!) is one ad, clear, not intrusive and highly targetted to your audience. This ad will not annoy readers and will keep your motivation at a decent level (instead of a zero ads policy). My take: https://www.slowernews.com/sponsor

> and highly targeted to your audience Just to be clear, are you ruling out user-tracking here, and is this ad meant to be entirely context-based?

You're right, "highly targeted" is not the correct expression. What I mean is: know who your average reader is and give that information to your potential sponsor. No specific user-tracking at all.

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#379

Post by plagiarist »

shortformblog wrote: post #265

Stances like this probably feel good to write out, but they miss the reality that when running a media business, relying on one revenue stream is dangerous. That’s why newspapers had classified ads, even though they charged a nominal fee to subscribe. People won’t pay $5 a day to subscribe to a newspaper, but the ads subsidize enough of it to make it so that a paid subscription is accessible to more people. On the in…

Something laudable? They're trying to sell subscriptions that people will buy. It's completely normal to criticize their offering. I agree with the criticism and you don't, that's all fine, too.

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#380

Post by justinclift »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #351
eterevsky wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is always possible to have several tiers of subscriptions, a cheap tier with some additional feature and ads, and a higher tier with no ads at all. I am perfectly willing to pay extra to support a website or service that I'm using, but only if it removes all ads.

The problem is: advertisers will argue that if you're offering a tier of service that removes ads, that's specifically going to be the most appealing to the group of your user-base that has the most money to spend and whom is most ready to spend it, evidenced by the fact that they have subscribed to your ad-free tier, and is therefore worth the most in terms of reaching with ads. Those people are self-selecting as th…

> This is why the "subscribe to remove ads" thing never took off in a big way [...] advertisers hate it

My heart bleeds for the poor advertisers. /s

Actually, no it doesn't. Not even a little bit.

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