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“Your frustration is the product”

daringfireball.net

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Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#91

Post by MarkusWandel »

Just a crazy idea, but could it be that they don't dogfood their own stuff? I have Ublock Origin Lite on by default (RIP full Ublock Origin) and a lot of sites look clean. I'm often not even aware that if I send a link to an article via Whatsapp or whatever, it may reflect badly on me that I send such an ad-overloaded mess to them. I just don't know the mess is there except sometimes by accident.

I watched someone getting a livestream of an important (to them) soccer game going via the sort of thing usually reserved for "adult" content - that any given click, be it "play" or "fullscreen" or whatever, has a 9/10 chance of triggering a junk popup rather than the intended action, so you play whack-a-mole until you finally get it playing, whack-a-mole again until you get fullscreen, and then for heaven's sake don't touch it any more. Whereas with the adblocker, typically it looks completely clean, with no junk popups, and every click doing exactly what it should on the first try.

Anyway so could it be that the web having turned into such ad-overloaded garbage, that even its designers have adblockers running and don't even fully realize what a mess they're publishing?

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#92

Post by jrmg »

rcarr wrote: post #8

> The reader is not respected enough by the software. The reader is not respected by the software because the reader themselves does not respect the software or the article. If the reader paid for a subscription to the website they would get an ad-free version. Don't pay and then this is what you get. The money has to come from somewhere. The issue is that a large portion of the population seems to think that if a pr…

The money has to come from somewhere.

Agree - and I pay for news - but I also find it hard to imagine that the current morass of low quality, usually scammy, ads is the most lucrative way to monetize a news web site. It’s literally driving away views while attracting advertisers that are willing to pay less and less. We’ve hill-climbed onto a plateaux (hill-descended into a crevasse?) and everyone is too afraid to make the leap to a potentially better one because if they get it wrong they’ll end up with less or no income.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#93

Post by PaulHoule »

dfxm12 wrote: post #52
AlienRobot wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People want lyrics. They don't want to pay for them, but they want someone to make the lyrics available for them, for free, on the Internet, forever. And they feel they are entitled to this without ads for some reason. That's where we are today.

There's an asymmetry here. We aren't talking about ads like billboard ads or TV commercials. We're talking about creepy behavioral tracking, harvesting and selling.

... and many other sins.

I go to YouTube and see a lot of things that make me question the narrative that this is an advanced system that elicits user preferences, makes markets clear, allows competitors to enter the market, etc.

The first ad I see if is for Chrome. Well I'm already using Chrome because sometimes Youtube punishes me for using Firefox. So the message is "lights are on and nobody is home", I mean, they can see the user agent and probably have deeper analysis that would indicate I'm not faking it.

Next I get a sequence of three obvious scam ads. Trying to provoke the fear of dementia in elderly people unless you use this "one weird trick" or a crypto scam or something that's obviously a scam but no way I am going to sit through 45 minutes of droning to know what the punch line is.

Then there are the saturation ads for things like car insurance that are always over-advertised because nobody wants to buy them (people wouldn't buy insurance at all if they didn't get it from their employer, or had to get it to drive a car or get a mortgage, etc.) These have internalized the form of the scam ads because they're surrounded by them.

Finally after maybe 20 ads I see something I might want and think "do I send them an email that says I'm afraid they're a scam because they're advertising in a place soaked with scams, they've incorporated so many superficial characteristics of scams and that they should reconsider their advertising spend?"

I know the numbers say Google and Facebook are making money hand over fist but on the ground my perception is that it looks like a Potemkin Village that is trying to fool investors into thinking there is a vibrant "advertising economy" when it is really a vast wasteland like daytime TV where it is all about medicare fraud and personal injury lawyers.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#94

Post by PaulHoule »

HexPhantom wrote: post #60
everdrive wrote: post #11

"I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data." Not really the point of the article, but almost all major news sites are significantly better if you block javascript. You sometimes lose pictures and just get text, but often the pictures are irrelevant anyhow. (a story about a world leader, and some public / stock photo is used and is not…

I think your point about one-off visitors is key. If most traffic is coming from search/social, there's no real incentive to build a clean, loyal-reader experience

... when it comes to news, however, I am always winding up at the major newspapers (e.g. New York Times) from search and social.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#95

Post by everdrive »

lapcat wrote: post #74
everdrive wrote: post #11

"I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data." Not really the point of the article, but almost all major news sites are significantly better if you block javascript. You sometimes lose pictures and just get text, but often the pictures are irrelevant anyhow. (a story about a world leader, and some public / stock photo is used and is not…

It depends. Some sites have a soft, client-side paywall and others have a hard, server-side paywall. NYT has the latter, so you can't get the full article text with JS blocked.

Yep, that's true, and it feels like an intentional decision on the part of companies. Wider access, or higher margins?

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#96

Post by skeeter2020 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #43
mattw2121 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhere along the way, we lost the original vibe of the Internet. There was a time when it was fundamentally a community. People hosted things for the sheer joy of doing it and for the satisfaction of contributing. If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did…

> If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did it because it was fun and because sharing knowledge felt like the point. Anyone can still do this today (I don’t know the legalities of publishing copyrighted lyrics though). Of course, the proportion of people who…

>> Anyone can still do this today

But no-one would ever find it - which might be fine - and that seems like a waste.

>> to expect that much quality content from volunteers to keep flowing.

This is a big change in perspective & expectation. The original web was not volunteers doing work for others, but humans voluntarily doing work to share with others.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#97

Post by not_the_fda »

AlienRobot wrote: post #33
red_admiral wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For "lyric sites" read "ad sites that use lyrics to attract an audience". That's where we are today.

People want lyrics. They don't want to pay for them, but they want someone to make the lyrics available for them, for free, on the Internet, forever. And they feel they are entitled to this without ads for some reason. That's where we are today.

You used to get the lyrics when you bought the music. Came in a nice booklet with the tape or CD, and then you would read along while listening to the music.

Should be the same with streaming. If I can listen to the song, I should be able tho see the lyrics.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#98

Post by piperswe »

andai wrote: post #89

Does anyone know a form of internet advertising that isn't complete cancer? On the one end we've got Google Ads, which spies on your users everywhere they go. (I think most ad networks are in the same category, unfortunately.) On the other end, you've got "someone emailed me to negotiate a sponsorship / affiliate thing and I added the banner/link manually, with no tracking code." I only really see those two options.…

Project Wonderful took the best of both (automated auction for ads, but there's only one ad active at any given moment for any given ad slot so no targeting) but apparently it wasn't able to keep making enough money to stay around

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#99

Post by mcculley »

rcarr wrote: post #8

> The reader is not respected enough by the software. The reader is not respected by the software because the reader themselves does not respect the software or the article. If the reader paid for a subscription to the website they would get an ad-free version. Don't pay and then this is what you get. The money has to come from somewhere. The issue is that a large portion of the population seems to think that if a pr…

What paid subscriptions respect the readers? I would love to pay for news from organizations that only get money from readers. For example, I have been paying for The Economist for decades and still see advertisements.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#100

Post by the_af »

AlienRobot wrote: post #33
red_admiral wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For "lyric sites" read "ad sites that use lyrics to attract an audience". That's where we are today.

People want lyrics. They don't want to pay for them, but they want someone to make the lyrics available for them, for free, on the Internet, forever. And they feel they are entitled to this without ads for some reason. That's where we are today.

> People want lyrics. They don't want to pay for them

You're wrong. We pay for everything all the time.

We pay for home internet (not cheap!). We pay for various subscriptions and streaming services. We pay for online tools. We pay for a TON of stuff.

And we still get hit by tons of obnoxious, invasive ads regardless of how much we pay. And people call us pirates if we want to install and adblocker. Advertisers like to violate us; it's their business model.

Stop parroting their lines, and stop defending bullshit.

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