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

LA Times and ads

nelsonslog.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 192 posts

Re: LA Times and ads

#41

Post by jamez1 »

zkms wrote: post #33
lobster_johnson wrote: post #22

I develop software used by newspapers. This is a problem with the whole industry. It's amazing how much crap they load. These sites all use a third party "tag manager" (Google Tag Manager, Tealium, Piwik etc.) to manage the scripts they load: ads, analytics, trackers etc. The people who use the tag manager typically aren't techies, so they don't understand that adding another tag will cause the page to slow down. Typ…

The worst type of ad on newspaper sites are the disgusting "chumboxes" (by scumsuckers like "taboola" or "outbrain") that orbit at the bottom of pages and serve up images meant to be as simultaneously repulsive and fascinating as possible: https://theawl.com/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum-de0b... As long as these pages have ads that display utterly gross images (if you doubt me, click the above link) that make…

And they wonder why people believe fake news when they link to it in their ads.

Re: LA Times and ads

#42

Post by mirimir »

Well, I can read the article in Firefox with Adblock Plus if I enable Reader View before the modal box opens :)

Learned that trick here. Thanks, guys.

Edit: Automatic Reader View add-on eliminates the race.

Re: LA Times and ads

#44

Post by throdowngoblow »

SwellJoe wrote: post #19

I resisted using an ad blocker for many years; I kinda felt like if I wanted to use a site, I should be willing to trade for seeing their ads. I've changed my tune a couple of years ago, and this is a (small) part of the reason (but a bigger part of it now that I know how crazy usage for ads has gotten). I'm on mobile data nearly 100% of the time most months. 14GB costs me $50-$70 (depending on which network I'm on,…

> I should be willing to trade for seeing their ads.

So did you spend time looking at them ads on purpose of guilt???

Re: LA Times and ads

#45

Post by panarky »

SwellJoe wrote: post #19

I resisted using an ad blocker for many years; I kinda felt like if I wanted to use a site, I should be willing to trade for seeing their ads. I've changed my tune a couple of years ago, and this is a (small) part of the reason (but a bigger part of it now that I know how crazy usage for ads has gotten). I'm on mobile data nearly 100% of the time most months. 14GB costs me $50-$70 (depending on which network I'm on,…

The LAT ads are so fat and intrusive, and their blocker blocker is so infuriating, that I recently just turned off JavaScript completely for their site.

It means I don't get images or videos, but I can read the occasional article without going through unnecessary gyrations.

It's not that I'm unwilling to pay for good journalism. I subscribe to the New York Times, Washington Post and The Atlantic. But the LA Times has chopped back their newsroom so savagely that they have very little investigative journalism or foreign corespondents anymore.

It's just not worth enduring their abusive ads and nagware to read what little content is worthwhile.

Re: LA Times and ads

#46

Post by makecheck »

cobookman wrote: post #16
drawkbox wrote: post #8

This is why data caps are bad. Left open all month that could be 400+ GB of data used on your plan. Ad networks are being subsidized by data caps and personal/business broadband costs. Maybe if ad serving went through the main host and their own bandwidth then maybe ad networks would have a reason to control this abuse of transfer.

Or on the flip side. Data caps will make people care about how much data their site uses. Cause customers will stop using data heavy sites as they have economic insentive not to. Making the web all around faster as no more 10MiB webpages, and making the industry move back to server side rendering.

It has been years since data caps though, and years of obnoxious ads, nothing has changed.

The only way in my opinion to fix this is to (a) give phones HARD preferences on maximum data that cannot be exceeded and (b) give web browsers even stricter per-site settings with sane defaults. Then, let the ad companies fight within themselves to figure out how to deal with the fact that none of their content gets through anymore. Force them to innovate into smaller form factors.

Re: LA Times and ads

#47

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

zkms wrote: post #33
lobster_johnson wrote: post #22

I develop software used by newspapers. This is a problem with the whole industry. It's amazing how much crap they load. These sites all use a third party "tag manager" (Google Tag Manager, Tealium, Piwik etc.) to manage the scripts they load: ads, analytics, trackers etc. The people who use the tag manager typically aren't techies, so they don't understand that adding another tag will cause the page to slow down. Typ…

The worst type of ad on newspaper sites are the disgusting "chumboxes" (by scumsuckers like "taboola" or "outbrain") that orbit at the bottom of pages and serve up images meant to be as simultaneously repulsive and fascinating as possible: https://theawl.com/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum-de0b... As long as these pages have ads that display utterly gross images (if you doubt me, click the above link) that make…

You must be in an NSFW ad bubble. I only see tame clickbait from the Taboola links.

Re: LA Times and ads

#48

Post by kalefranz »

amluto wrote: post #27
drawkbox wrote: post #8

This is why data caps are bad. Left open all month that could be 400+ GB of data used on your plan. Ad networks are being subsidized by data caps and personal/business broadband costs. Maybe if ad serving went through the main host and their own bandwidth then maybe ad networks would have a reason to control this abuse of transfer.

I'd like to a see, or at least think about, a system in which everyone pays for egress and no one pays for ingress. That way the LA Times is welcome to throw as much crap as they want at you without charging you much. (One issue is that egresss is involved in every request. Some UI work would be needed to make this work well.) Universal egress fees would go a long way to mitigating DDoS, too.

How does npmjs.org, pypi.python.org, and rubygems.org survive in this world of universal egress fees?

Re: LA Times and ads

#49

Post by jurassic »

Garbage like this is one of the many reasons I've gone back to print to a large extent. Printed magazines are amazing things, a superior experience and product in almost every way to reading online outlets. This whole ethical conflict over how to deal with invasive advertising while supporting the work goes away when you bought and paid already before you even start to read.

Daily news doesn't fit into this philosophy that well (printed papers is too much bulk for me), but I get pretty much all the "breaking news" I need from Twitter. Stepping away from the 24 news cycle to sit with a piece of analysis from a weekly or monthly (or even quarterly!) magazine is a much better way for me to stay informed and support journalism. And as a bonus I don't have creepy ads follow me around the internet if I want to read a Socialist magazine, or a gun rights magazine, a bridal magazine, or whatever.

Re: LA Times and ads

#50

Post by greglindahl »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #25
smaili wrote: post #7

> That’s a timeline of 30 seconds of page activity about 5 minutes after the article was opened. To be clear, this timeline should be empty. Nothing should be loading. Maybe one short ping, maybe loading one extra ad. Instead the page requested 2000 resources totalling 5 megabytes in 30 seconds. It will keep making those requests as long as I leave the page open. 14 gigabytes a day. It's not quite clear if 14GB/day i…

Hi I'm the author. I did the naive extrapolation. 5 * 2 * 1440 = 14,400. Perhaps this number is not entirely accurate. The fact it is any larger than, say, 10 is the problem.

That's a terrible methodology, and makes the headline pretty inaccurate. (Edit: looks like the blog headline isn't inflammatory at the moment: did you change it, or did the HN poster insert the 24-hour figure?)

I'm against bad ads as much as everyone else, but I don't think using a terrible methodology to criticize them is a good idea. Making clear what you measured would be much better, and actually leaving the thing open for 24 hours would be best.

Post reply on HN