I'm pretty amazed at the current state of ads. With multiple ad exchanges, private sellers, and static brand deals, the entire serving process is a mess and users are paying for it. I don't think publishing websites are being malicious; they're incentived to make money and just haven't figured out how to do it at a high enough margin while keeping users happy. I just think the entire internet ad industry is in shambles and nobody really knows a solution that makes everyone happy.
That's equivalent to pharmacists selling illegal drugs (heroin, cocaine) simply because they obviously make them more profits.
I'd liken it more to a hardware product being shipped with faulty materials when multiple manufacturers are involved and it's extremely difficult to identify the responsible party. Sure, they're responsible for the end product, but it's not so black and white.
Doesn't make them less culpable for the damage they cause, I'm just saying I don't think it's something they make additional money on, I think it's something that gets slipped under the radar by a few bad actors.
They obviously aren't incentivized enough to stop it though so why not implement a more direct compensation? If a user gets a malware program on their machine and it can be traced back to a given provider, that provider should be billed accordingly for the cost of the removal (including if the user can do it themselves, they should get paid for that anyway) as well as lost productivity time.
Currently any ad network serving malware just gets to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and keep on making money, and considering how damaging some of this shit can be I'd say that's the first point that needs addressing.
Ad networks are utterly unregulated. In terms of this pharmacy metaphor they're snake-oil salesmen.
Not defending the shitty ad scene online. Just want to point out that most people don't want to pay for anything online, they are at least partially responsible for this mess.
Impossible and usually the worst approach to have. The best thing is to have a visionary that blazes the path for the rest to follow. Sadly the vast majority of visionaries will fail.
* You make an ad network that makes advertisers happy. In reality this will pretty much *always* make users *unhappy*.
* You make an ad network that makes users happy. In reality this makes advertisers *unhappy*.
...or you could just have one ad network that advertisers hate that users are happy with but because there's only one the advertisers just have to live with it.
And no, that's not a mistake. It's not advertisers I direct my ire but those who should know better and who apparently are meant to exist for the greater public good: The Press.
Given that Reddit is a large source of incoming referrals this stance (if implemented) might be a sufficient lever to send a signal to get those sites to improve their environment.
In any case since the sites are still able to use curated self hosted ads (ie not JavaScript redirects to externally hosted providers) they are able to sell static ad space to make money even with adblockers enabled.
It might be worth seeing what the outcome for the experiment is (if it goes ahead) and then seeing if the same logic would work for HN.
Ad blockers don't just block external ads, they use CSS rules to block internal ads as well. So the only way to avoid ad blockers is to make advertisement completely indistinguishable from content.
Imagine if Google did that, if they made sponsored results competent indistinguishable from organic results. The uproar would be loud.
In response to ad blockers, sites install ad blocker blockers.
In response to ad blocker blockers, Reddit adds ad blocker blocker blocker.
I think in a war between ad's trying to assert a user has seen an ad, and clients trying to view content, so long as the client owns the computer, the client will win. That's why I hate walled gardens so much. I'm convinced it was a preemptive shot in this war.
In response to add blocker blockers, ad blockers install ad blocker blocker blockers.
then onto your number 3
:)
it's an arms race!
This is like thinking that you would increase a crop yield by increasing the amount of fertilizer you put on it. There is an optimal balance beyond which you burn the crop with too much fertilizer.
I would suggest to significantly reduce the amount of advertisement on the site. Sell the add space with auction. Less advertisement increase the add efficiency. Increase the quality of content to increase the number of readers. Select high quality none intrusive adds that don't disrupt people's experience on the site.
In short take back the control of your site advertisement. Prohibit tricks your readers don't like (e.g. tracking), etc.
This is not much different from companies and hallmarks selling unhealthy food. The difference with adblocks is that people have a tool filtering out unhealthy food from their view. Who is the bad guy ? The client with its filter or the companies providing unhealthy food ?
Regulation doesn't work. We should know it by now. We have to take things in our own hand because the system is not able to keep a sane course by itself (cf. liberalism).
But the data retains its toxic qualities (of being a database of every action I take on the Internet and some in the real world).
I fire up the YouTube homepage and all of my recommendations are for UK daytime TV. Celebrities, 'Jeremy Kyle' (the UK Jerry Springer), etcetera.
YouTube sends me adverts for female hygiene products and dog food. (I am male and I own no dog.)
Even when I get advertising that's not selling me stuff that would require I buy something else first (sex change, dog) it's invariably for something vastly overpriced or some sort of megabrand.
http://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm
That's quite a good talk. The takeaway is to treat data, especially personal data, as a liability rather than an asset, to discard data by default, and to retain only with a very specific goal in mind, and even then to transform the retained data into some kind of useful aggregate and discard it.
It doesn't contain the YouTube metaphor, which is included in this http://idlewords.com/talks/internet_with_a_human_face.htm
In my experience, the content recommendation on YouTube is the best. I've been learning about electronics and watching a few videos about it. Now YouTube recommends me new content and channels that are extremely relevant.
My brother is into guitars, and his frontpage is all about that.
YT has trouble figuring me out because I watch a lot of gamers that also appeal to a younger audience (eg Yogscast). I get recommended a lot of terrible stuff targeted at that audience that I have no interest in (eg PewDiePie and Markiplier).
I have no idea why they recommend stuff I've already watched.
But, and this is a big but: YouTube doesn't provide the options to either dismiss any given suggestion, nor to block specific channels. There's sufficient crap on YouTube that both are essential. I've been campaigning for both features for some time now.
Google's recently implemented an account-wide blocked-users manager. It applies now to G+ and Hangouts, though it may move beyond that. "Google doesn't comment on future plans", as they're fond of saying. I have hopes.
The majority of the other ad companies are still--despite all the massive dot-com failures during the boom--trying to just throw in ad referrals everywhere hoping something will stick, and trying to hand off those connections to the highest bidder... like, maybe if they just keep doing it for decades, somehow it will magically become profitable.
Unfortunately, the adverts aren't.
I agree with every word.
Here's my idea for an ad company:
* People who want to post ads have to provide their name, address, verified email, and a security deposit(say $500). Larger volumes of ad purchases require either a long history, insurance, or a bank letter to vouch for you. If you load malware anywhere into the system, you get fined and your information gets turned over to the police.
* People who want to earn money with advertisements have to provide name, address, verified email, and a security deposit. The security deposit could be funded out of earnings(or not). Fraud is countered by randomly sampling websites and fining offenders if the ad isn't visible. Also they get their information turned over to the police if it was intentional fraud.
* Security deposits are returned within 1 month after the advertising relationship is terminated.
* Fines are paid out of the security deposit, and your access is restricted until you refill the account(possible with an even bigger deposit).
* People who are higher risk(from a shady lawless country, no history or background, etc.) have to pay a higher security deposit.
* Ads can be either text or banner ads. Anything Turing-complete needs insurance or a bank letter.
* If someone pushes through a porn ad to get advertised on the NYT by miscategorizing it, they get fined.
Now all the ads are guaranteed to be of high quality, and the websites you're advertising on are probably higher quality too.
It seems to work decently well, for some definition of decent that Facebook has.
The point is that it removes the upside for a scammer: low friction entry point (good for scammers!) but limited ceiling: you're not gonna be able to do this to very many people.
Remove the incentive by capping the upside, rely on reputation until that point. Feels like a pretty good service.
My business is at 123 fakenschaft, Zurch. My email is a newly created Gmail account.
* Require security deposits to be paid with a bank transfer, cashier's check, or money order from a country with strong anti-money-laundering laws.
* For countries like the US where business information is public, verify the provided business address against public records.
* Allow larger sites like the NYT to require higher standards of verification(maybe 6 months active history on your account), so even if you went ahead with your malware attacking(say, using a homeless person to shield you from the cops) it at least wouldn't hit the NYT.
Honestly, I think at least taking their security deposit would deter a lot of attackers. You're probably right that it wouldn't help much against targeted attacks at smaller sites.
That sounds fine initially, but actually think about that for a minute. You want to give 1st world countries and established businesses lower barriers to entry than a random entrepreneur who happens to be from India?
Also, AdSense works in a similar manner with the deposits. You don't get a payout until you earn $100. That acts as a buffer for Google to determine whether you are legit or not, and stops people from earning low amounts on lots of different accounts.
Likewise, ads are fine in theory but the implementation is absolutely horrible.
Paywalls are also fine. Content producers choice. It's (un-annotated) links to paywalled content that is annoying.
http://www.ghettoforensics.com/2016/03/of-malware-and-adware...
"Here is what is clear:
The advertisement was not malware.
Forbes is still whitelisted from my ad-blocker.
We have no evidence of what exactly created this pop-up."
At the very least the "ad" was being run by someone trying to create an air of legitimacy around events like... a random popup IN YOUR BROWSER telling you about host system software you might actually need and should therefore go right ahead and install.
Oh HELL no. If it's part of someone's malware campaign, it should be categorized malware. That some dinky piece of their campaign doesn't involve machine-executable code does not matter in the slightest.
The weasely logic needing to justify allowing deliberate attempts at mis-education is how one gets sites for which navigation is rather like attempting to defuse a bomb, blindfolded, while riding a stampeding buffalo.
How on earth should someone from Bangladesh use Reddit? They can't even access PayPal.
It seems like just signing the software is enough to remove this labelling but their policies are not transparent.
At the end Google is behaving like a vigilante.
In that way, they are behving like a typical corporation.
I have first-hand experience with such a situation and you quickly loose faith in the ad network you're using. A month of blocking would be devastating to the site, considering it's not even their fault.
Repeat offenders could be handled differently though.
I definitely am not interested in subscribing separately to (e.g.) Wired, the NY Times, the Economist, WSJ, the New Yorker, etc. But I think I'd be totally down for a single rate that gave me ad-free access to some or all of those.
It costs ~4.5 USD a month, so ~2-3 hours of an entry level supermarket position pay. I don't know anyone who subscribes.
Advertisements suck at all of these.
I'm perfectly content with banner and text ads, as long as they're not animated.
What has changed is that adblocking reached mainstream.
Here is the thing I just dont get. Why doesnt some tech savvy organization create a white label solution that companies can either slap a subdomain on and invite "Customers" to fill ad supply. Self host the curated assets through said white label solution. Moderate with sophisticated computers that are not subject to the vast majority of mal ware (excluding 0-day obviously), and move on. Im sure someone could easily serve the ads off of the main domain anyway to circumvent all of the ad blockers on subdomains.
This is a perspective from the outside looking in, but people seem to just complain about the problem instead of looking for solutions.
EDIT: BAH, so there is a conversation from last year. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10221859
its less of an issue if you link from here, as not everybody on this side will be a logged in user on reddit, but it should still be considered polite, considering that there is an actual 'best-practice' for linking
For a subset of users (either detected or by user preference), there might be another useful symbol as well for indicating if a website is not tor friendly.
If you don't like the link - don't vote. If enough people like it, then it's fair for others to see it. That's how communities work, you can't change rules to please everyone because you never will.
Power hungry censors from either the government or forums piss me off.
People who own forums have a right to regulate content, true.
But bullshit like this aint cool, I and the users are not babies, bugger off, we'll decide with votes.
I also don't like those sites that require JavaScript to read plain text content. Forbes is an example of both cases, with a twist. The text of the article is embedded in a script tag inside the HTML page and then added to the visible DOM. I could understand a SPA getting JSON from the server but here the content is already in the page.
Single subscription multiple website model may work, but as soon as buy-in ramps up for that model expect everyone jumping in with me-too services, killing it.
You know an arm's race is in progress when...
The majority of people voting on the story may only be reading the headline.
I usually don't even take it out of the plastic overwrap, because my eyes don't have ad-blockers installed.
I guess next time, I can spend some miles on a cheapo flashlight keyfob, or something. I guess I was just sort of throwing them a bone out of 90s nostalgia, anyway. If they don't want me looking at their website on my own terms, I won't do it. And if I stop looking at their website, I don't have much use for their inky paper, either.
I can somewhat an understand an opposition to advertising or paywalls. Opposing both is unconscionable.
Anyone got the list of sites HN currently blocks/penalizes/rewards? I'd love to tweak those options, and add marco.org and buzzfeed to my personal blocklist.
Seems genius to me.
I learned about the deck from daringfireball.
Curate your ads and serve them statically.
The first are overtly refusing to accept users' terms. The second are trying to have their cake and eat it too: viral content propogation whilst refusing to present content to those who come at it via link aggregators and discussion sites such as Reddit.
Both actively thwart Reddit's intended aim: informed discussion of an article _by having read it_. If they don't want to participate, then don't participate.
Moreover, advertising, the advertising infrastructure, and multiple aspects of it are creating a seriously problematic WWW information structure: crap content, user-hostile design, hugely excessive bandwidth usage, slow browser response, and privacy and security risks galore. At the same time, the actual creative producers and journalists responsible for primary content are hugely undercompensated.
Eliminating the existing advertising regime would allow all of these to be addressed.
That said, high-quality information has a very serious revenue problem, and I'd like to highlight that.
It's a topic I've explored in some depth, "Why Information Goods and Markets are a Poor Match" (https://np.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2vm2da/why_info...). Or if you prefer a real economist, Hal Varian's "Markets for Information Goods" (http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/japan/index.h...).
A frequently proposed solution is micropayments. I don't see those as viable, Clay Shirkey, Nick Szabo, and Andrew Odlyzko have all written at length on why not.
Rather, a universal content tax or broadband tax seems an alternative. Phil Hunt of Pirate Party UK and Richard M. Stallman of the Free Software Foundation have suggested this, I'd made my own universal content proposal some time back (https://np.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest...)
I've also done some back-of-the-envelope calculations on amounts. _Total_ global ad spend in 2013 was $500 billion, online was $100 billion. If _only_ the world's richest 1 billion (roughly: US, EU, Japan, Australia) were to contribute to this, the tax would be $100/year to eliminate _all_ online adverts, and $500/year for _all advertising entirely_. The money could fund existing creatives -- writers, editors, film producers, journalists, and musicians -- at roughly _twice_ today's compensation.
It's worth a thought.
As they are refusing to accept theirs :)
This is just contract negotiation. I'm not sure why you have an issue with it (or would desire to ban it). You have told them "we want to change the terms'. They are saying "no". Great, so move if you don't like that supplier.
Humorously, the thing you (and reddit) want to perform by banning is known as "concerted refusal to deal": http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/concerted-refus...
If users can't view the content, they cannot discuss it.
And, as I've also mentioned at length (in the post and its links, as well as elsewhere) advertising itself is the problem in multiple aspects.
The sooner we render it nonviable, the sooner we move to something that works.
