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SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

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Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#41

Post by lou1306 »

lastofthemojito wrote: post #2

I feel like I've thought a lot about ads on the internet recently, and I hate the way things are, but I'm no closer to a realistic overall solution. I've used an ad blocker for a while because I'm tech savvy and I know I can easily have a better experience that way. I was too late installing an ad blocker on my father's computer - he was scammed out of some money when he mistook a scammy ad for a legitimate message t…

a) You can set up your own advertisement/sponsorship system and, unless some bloke took the time to specifically write rules targeting your website, the ads would not be blocked. Bonus points: this prevents most malicious ads, which are another major reason people use ad blockers, from appearing on your website, simply by virtue of you not letting them in.

b) You can always follow a combination of free (unpaywalled) content + premium content behind a paywall/Patreon/etc + merchandise + Kickstarter for more ambitious projects.

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#42

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

lazide wrote: post #37
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we'd lose so much GDP, without losing anything of value, perhaps GDP is not a useful measure of the economy.

Easy to say when you don’t have bills to pay.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#44

Post by lazide »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #40
lazide wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would mean the death of at a minimum Meta (market cap $1.5 trln), most of Google (market cap $2.1 trln, lets say half would die). So what, a couple trillion haircut on the US stock market, and more of a GDP hit than if the entire US military suddenly stopped getting funded. Not to mention the secondary effects - a LOT of businesses are built based on online ads. A LOT .

CDOs, the financial instrument behind the 2008 financial collapse, had a tremendous amount of market value too. A "LOT"(sic) of businesses were built on selling tobacco products, lead based gasoline, and high sugar ultra-processed foods too. Perhaps you should rethink your argument? Creating economic activity doesn't justify harming people and it has become thunderingly obvious that titillating and outraging viewers…

I’m saying it’s easy to say until the consequences arrive. And with something this big, the consequences will be big.

But then I’ve lived through 3-4 major downturns so far - and seen the ‘oh shit’s land.

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#45

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

lazide wrote: post #44
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CDOs, the financial instrument behind the 2008 financial collapse, had a tremendous amount of market value too. A "LOT"(sic) of businesses were built on selling tobacco products, lead based gasoline, and high sugar ultra-processed foods too. Perhaps you should rethink your argument? Creating economic activity doesn't justify harming people and it has become thunderingly obvious that titillating and outraging viewers…

I’m saying it’s easy to say until the consequences arrive. And with something this big, the consequences will be big. But then I’ve lived through 3-4 major downturns so far - and seen the ‘oh shit’s land.

I've lived through 3-4 major downturns too and, yeah, it's hard. Like discontinuing leaded gasoline, we either pay the price now or pay much worse later.

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#46

Post by ben_w »

lazide wrote: post #43
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDP does not pay my bills.

If you participate in the economy or are dependent on anything related to taxes, it quite literally does pay your bills.

I beleive the argument being made here is a map-territory distinction — certainly I myself see it this way.

I mean, their other comment was:

> If we'd lose so much GDP, without losing anything of value, perhaps GDP is not a useful measure of the economy.

Meta etc., can pay taxes on the profits made from connecting advertisers to eyeballs, but what actual value do they really provide? What real value gets created due to this, that would otherwise not be created? If Meta is just moving money around, without helping more stuff get made, then whatever measure says "Meta is good" is a poor measure. Even Meta's taxable income would just become someone else's higher profit or cheaper goods.

(But: I presume my belief that ads are zero-sum, or close to thst, is correct; perhaps this is untrue).

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#47

Post by jrmg »

x0x0 wrote: post #17
windowshopping wrote: post #13

Hey if anyone has strong experience with ad networks and configuring them to websites, give me an email at the address in my profile, I'd love to get freelance help with this. I'm new to it and realized it isn't as easy as just signing up the way it is for mobile apps. Apparently most sites can't get approved for adsense at ALL, let alone have it at time of launch before they have traffic. So yeah if anyone has a lot…

fwiw, you likely can't make real money with this. The big drivers are (1) ever more increasing inventory (ie page loads/refreshes/whatever with ad slots). Relatively fixed demand plus increasing supply gives you a price fall that has been going on for 10+ years with no end in sight, combined with: (2) retargeting has gotten endlessly more sophisticated allowing people whom advertisers wish to target to be found on pl…

It does feel like a rubicon has been crossed recently, where most things I like are going behind paywalls, and many smaller outfits are heavily pushing Patreon or the like.

Anecdotally, I’m paying subscriptions for news sites (mainstream and niche) and podcasts I would not have had a few years ago. I subscribed to YouTube, which I thought I’d never do!

I’m not sure what to make of this. Microtransactions and subscriptions powering creators has been a dream of many people for a long, long time - at least since the 90s. So maybe this is great? But even if it is, something has been lost too.

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#48

Post by amluto »

x0x0 wrote: post #17
windowshopping wrote: post #13

Hey if anyone has strong experience with ad networks and configuring them to websites, give me an email at the address in my profile, I'd love to get freelance help with this. I'm new to it and realized it isn't as easy as just signing up the way it is for mobile apps. Apparently most sites can't get approved for adsense at ALL, let alone have it at time of launch before they have traffic. So yeah if anyone has a lot…

fwiw, you likely can't make real money with this. The big drivers are (1) ever more increasing inventory (ie page loads/refreshes/whatever with ad slots). Relatively fixed demand plus increasing supply gives you a price fall that has been going on for 10+ years with no end in sight, combined with: (2) retargeting has gotten endlessly more sophisticated allowing people whom advertisers wish to target to be found on pl…

I wonder whether a high-quality site could gain value for its own ad inventory by trying to minimize the extent to which it leaks retargeting information.

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#49

Post by jrmg »

rat87 wrote: post #15
stavros wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how cheap a forum is to run now. It used to be that you could run a janky thing on nothing hardware and people would still use it and find value, but now even just running the software is much more demanding and expensive. Never mind the fact that the UI has to be slick or people will be put off, because the bar is much higher now. These factors have made it less economical to just run a popular forum out of…

> but now even just running the software is much more demanding and expensive. Never mind the fact that the UI has to be slick or people will be put off, because the bar is much higher now. I'm skeptical of this. There's likely some open source software that's good enough and considering the advances in hardware likely much cheaper to run then it was way back when. Besides the fact that many people prefer large platf…

Yeah, it should not be hard! Cheap hardware is orders of magnitude faster than it was in the 2000s, and we could run dynamic forums written in janky inefficient Perl on it, and serve thousand's of requests a second.

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#50

Post by Kye »

multjoy wrote: post #24
stavros wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how cheap a forum is to run now. It used to be that you could run a janky thing on nothing hardware and people would still use it and find value, but now even just running the software is much more demanding and expensive. Never mind the fact that the UI has to be slick or people will be put off, because the bar is much higher now. These factors have made it less economical to just run a popular forum out of…

I remember running a semi-popular phpBB back in the early 00's. There was nothing like Digital Ocean or Linode. You can run a small instance for pocket change today.

There were VPSes and managed servers back then, but most people went with shared hosts that supported PHP and MySQL. That's how WordPress got so big.
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