41–50 of 159 posts
I want the advertising industry to die. And I honestly don't care what it takes down with it. If it hurts, we'll find ways around it, Patreon being a good example.
Publicity is the lifeblood of commerce. As long as one seller exists, one or more advertisers will also exist to help him sell more. Sad but true.
It's rather simple in my mind. Putting your content up for free is the same as standing by my fence, waiting for me to ask you to throw your magazine over so I could read it. You can put ads, but I can cut them out if I want for a better reading experience. Don't want me to cut out the ads? tough luck, my reading experience, my choice. Want to make money? try a subscription model. Why can't you have both? Welcome to…
I think you have the chain of events backwards. You are describing spam. A better analogy is that there are a hundred magazine providers waiting by your fence and then you ask them to throw you their magazines.
You are right though that the consumer is empowered with technology to block or not block - but the broader problem is that consumers have shown over time that they aren't willing to pay for content (at scale) so they are left with making money somehow.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reddit has its users create all the content for free. And AFAIK they still aren't profitable.
You'd hope that the content produced by newspapers would rise above the level of reddit leading to people wanting to pay for the content directly. Of course if people are looking for entertainment then that's a different story and reddit may be serious competition.
Newspapers have a lot of trust to regain with people. But then again, I suppose the general population doesn't give a rat's ass about the truth, and want to read only something shocking to use as a "social object" (i.e. something you can start discussing with other people you meet).
Publishers have done this to themselves with obstrusive intersitals; slow, over-the-content pop-ups; autoplaying video and audio ads; and other extremely annoying and degrading ad implementations. They have destroyed the browsing experience. If publishers were more ethical with their implementations of advertising technologies, fewer people would be driven to use ad-blocking.
I personally never bothered with ad blocking until every other site hit me with stupid landing pages (like on Forbes), exhortations to try their mobile app instead of their site (every Tapatalk-enabled forum ever), pleas to take a feedback survey before I've even seen anything that warrants feedback (MSDN), and modal ads that don't load until I try to scroll down to continue reading the content (soooooooooooo many bl…
Advertising is dead. Good riddance.
[0] Which has also killed the modal informational dialog in desktop applications. I've ran training sessions for internal enterprise software and the users literally could not remember there was a dialog mere seconds after dismissing it.
It's rather simple in my mind. Putting your content up for free is the same as standing by my fence, waiting for me to ask you to throw your magazine over so I could read it. You can put ads, but I can cut them out if I want for a better reading experience. Don't want me to cut out the ads? tough luck, my reading experience, my choice. Want to make money? try a subscription model. Why can't you have both? Welcome to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'd hope that the content produced by newspapers would rise above the level of reddit leading to people wanting to pay for the content directly. Of course if people are looking for entertainment then that's a different story and reddit may be serious competition.
One would hope. The problem is, content produced on Reddit (and HN) is way better than content produced by newspapers, by a very simple mechanism: someone posts an article to Reddit/HN, people start debunking all the bullshit, misinterpretations and lies journalists wrote in that article. Newspapers have a lot of trust to regain with people. But then again, I suppose the general population doesn't give a rat's ass ab…
Publishers have done this to themselves with obstrusive intersitals; slow, over-the-content pop-ups; autoplaying video and audio ads; and other extremely annoying and degrading ad implementations. They have destroyed the browsing experience. If publishers were more ethical with their implementations of advertising technologies, fewer people would be driven to use ad-blocking.
Do you block ads on Google's products?
For many years Adwords was probably the biggest risk to people setting up a new computer and wanting to download things like Firefox.
When supposedly the best and most responsible sector of the online advertising market was prepared to profit from malware distribution for years then it's no wonder the entire industry has a reputation in the gutter.
I've long suspected that online ads are actually more of a scam than anything else. Because you can't easily tie the expenditure to a benefit that ad sellers and hosters (Facebook, I'm looking at you) can promote them without having to back it up with quantifiable results. And that has led to a weird "ad ecosystem" which exists for its own purpose, not for actually trying to sell products (cause it doesn't actually work for that). I think the people most worried about the ad blockers are those that make their money from that ecosystem.
It's rather simple in my mind. Putting your content up for free is the same as standing by my fence, waiting for me to ask you to throw your magazine over so I could read it. You can put ads, but I can cut them out if I want for a better reading experience. Don't want me to cut out the ads? tough luck, my reading experience, my choice. Want to make money? try a subscription model. Why can't you have both? Welcome to…
Putting your content up for free is the same as throwing your magazine over my fence for free. I think you have the chain of events backwards. You are describing spam. A better analogy is that there are a hundred magazine providers waiting by your fence and then you ask them to throw you their magazines. You are right though that the consumer is empowered with technology to block or not block - but the broader proble…
Giving away the magazine for free was the choice of the person at the stand. If they want to profit, they have various means to do this. Ads are one way. Asking you for money when you ask for the magazine is another.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reddit has its users create all the content for free. And AFAIK they still aren't profitable.
Alright, fine, then how does HBO do it? If I want to have the NY Times, it's $32/mo [0], plus I have to let them ride my shoulder as I go about the rest of my business online. HBO Now is $15/mo [1], the only ads I get are in between episodes and only for other shows on HBO. [0] http://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp3004.htm... they charge different rates for different screen sizes, which I find highly o…