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SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

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Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#71

Post by relaxing »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #10
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 .

Google and Meta collectively employ how many software people in the United States? The jobs hit would be unimaginable. High octane nightmare fuel, that idea.

Google AI summary says:

> As of December 2024, Meta Platforms had 74,067 full-time employees. This is down from 67,317 in 2023

lol. At least Gemini doesn’t make the same mistake for its makers:

> As of 2024, Alphabet, Google's parent company, has 183,323 full-time employees

Of course that’s total headcount, I couldn’t find figures for just US based SWEs.

And in the US alone there are something like 200-400k SWE+IT job openings and 7M openings across all sectors.

Verdict: after the dust settles, it would be a net benefit for everyone to get those bright minds working on real problems.

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#72

Post by relaxing »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #63
michaelt wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t seem like a nightmare to me - a trillion dollars spent on ads that get blocked is a trillion dollars wasted. The real nightmare is hundreds of thousands of people on six figure salaries wasting their lives producing ads everyone hates.

You're right. What was I thinking? Instead, they should be unemployed and starving, and all the services they bought from other Americans with their $200k/year salaries, those Americans should also be unemployed and starving too. All because you don't want to see an ad on whatever ridiculous social media it is that people are visiting now days. That will make the world right.

Get a grip, mate.

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#73

Post by Macha »

superkuh wrote: post #59
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've been playing NationStates(.net) for 20+ years now. They run a php forum as part of the civic simulation php site. It hasn't really changed in the 20 years. Lately the entire site has become completely inaccessible to many of us because they've deployed a cloudflare block. They say they had to do this because the increase in bot traffic was slowing down the site so much it was costing them money: https://forum.na…

> Computational resources and bandwidth have become massively less expensive over those 20 years.

Your budget tier VPS provider on the other hand has only really doubled what you get over the last 10 years, and user feature expectations and AI scrapers really have caused resource usage to more than double.

The cost efficiency has really only benefited the middle end here really. HN is probably cheaper to run than it was 10 years ago. But the large sites are on cloud providers who have provided added services that you might not have used 10 years ago to keep up their margins, and the intro tier VPS that "Bob's Friendly phpBB Forum" might be on isn't getting you much more, which matters when Bob's revenue is $60/year from a handful of the most investigated regulars only.

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#74

Post by x0x0 »

amluto wrote: post #48
x0x0 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

the nyt has largely done this afaik

the limiting factor is that you have to opt out of a lot of the ad industry. That means transaction costs are high. iow, you have to be super valuable and have a ton of traffic because buyers have to buy from your site by name and often by doing actual work to make the transaction happen.

So this strategy can work, but you need enough volume for it to be worthwhile for the buyers to overcome the cost of working with you. One of the big things exchanges and google offer ad buyers is a low friction experience which means low costs to place a lot of ads.

if you're unfamiliar with the ads, imagine either (1) plugging $50k into whatever demand side platform (dsp), such as google/criteo/the trade desk/adobe/etc and being done; vs hand selecting even 50 or more sites; working with their ad ops to get ads up and running; monitoring 50 different individual budgets, etc. It's just a lot of work on both sides.

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#75

Post by jdeibele »

skizm wrote: post #56

I sympathize, I really do. But I was a daily reader for a while and the ads on their mobile site were particularly brutal so I stopped visiting a while ago. I’ve since setup pi-hole and the site was probably viewable at that point, but I never ended up going back to reading daily. I’d probably have paid a monthly or annual subscription for an ad-free experience, but I also know that’s not as profitable.

I read SMBC via RSS. I use NetNewsWire on my Mac and iPad synced to Feedly but there's lots of other ways to do it.

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#76

Post by hakfoo »

seanalltogether wrote: post #27
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…

The answer to no more ads is you can't be independent. You have to have service aggregation. The fundamental problem is that you can't grow an audience all your content is behind a paywall. So you have to offer some content for free, but if you're an independent comic artist like smbc, no one is going to visit your site if only 1 comic per week is free. But if a lot of creators are behind a single paywall, and that p…

I think in a way, we already sort of have precedent for this, in the comics sector.

The Japanese-style "phone book sized" manga weeklies/monthlies are the manifestation of this idea. Technically it's not a "free" teaser, but if you buy the issue for one or two "known" series you want to try, the rest is shoveled into your hand for free.

It also provides a good stickiness factor-- if you originally bought the magazine for one or two series, hopefully you've glommed onto others by the time those end or you lose interest in them.

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#77

Post by lazide »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #55
ben_w wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Advertisement is positive sum: it connects people who need goods or services with people who can provide those goods and services. The modern advertising industry is negative-sum: the sheer cost to everyone far outweighs this theoretical benefit. (Most people I know will deliberately refuse to buy anything that's advertised at them, unless they have no other option.) The "attention economy" is stealing people's time,…

Agree - I think another way to put it, is the advertising industry is positive ROI directly, but has severe negative externalities. Especially when ramped up to the extent it currently is, and likely will continue to be even more.

It’s a similar analogy to global warming/fossil fuels IMO. As long as we don’t care about the somewhat invisible co2 part of it slowly cooking us to death, it’s awesome.

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#78

Post by lazide »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #45
lazide wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t disagree, I just cringe when I see (presumably young/haven’t been through it before) folks cheer for destruction.

We had alternatives to those things, when we banned them, after all. Or didn’t ban them at all, just taxed them more.

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#79

Post by TylerE »

homarp wrote: post #54
TylerE wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good enough isn’t nearly good enough. You’re competing against apps, offering just a much better use experience. One bit of feedback I got repeatedly from users on a couple communities (now dead) I helped run was how much harder posting image and video content in a forum is - true user generated content I mean, not shared from YouTube. Even that meant ricking around with bbcode.

i somehow envision a forum as text first. Image and video hosting is 'out of scope'.

Times change. About 95% of the world’s population now carries a good-to-amazing camera in their pocket almost all the time.

Re: SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

#80

Post by defrost »

TylerE wrote: post #79
homarp wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i somehow envision a forum as text first. Image and video hosting is 'out of scope'.

Times change. About 95% of the world’s population now carries a good-to-amazing camera in their pocket almost all the time.

Don't confuse penetration and ownership:

  As of 2024, there are approximately 4.88 billion smartphone users worldwide, accounting for about 60.42% of the global population. The number of smartphones in use globally is around 7.21 billion.
and

   The global smartphone penetration rate was estimated at 69 percent in 2023, up from 2022. This is based on an estimated 6.7 billion smartphone subscriptions worldwide and a global...
( various conflicting sources ).

A number of people have more than a single phone.

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