How large reputable sites trust third party ad servers is a mystery to me.
Besides, native ads that could be served from StackOverFlows own servers would be harder to block.
Is SO smaller business? Possible... just surprised.
I appreciate you trying to fight the argument that's being made, and you have a background for a valid opinion people are dismissing.
That being said, I'm on the buying end and work a lot of different channels, and would argue that there are definitely direct buy models that SO could utilise.
Lots of smaller sites have started offering direct buy inventory in larger quantities recently, and pretty much every media package I've bought this year has had some internally served display with it. I'd expect this to work its way upwards, and would fully expect something self serve to come soon for internal buys.
Also, SO seems prime for a self-serve product akin to AdWords, Reddit, or even Facebook. We already buy on those channels (even though through an agency, the agency is just buying self-serve on their end - and they put their insurance, tracking and ASBOF & TI on the cost).
That's be a really cool project actually, self-serve ad platform for a forum/knowledge base.
At that point I'd expect sites like Stack Overflow to point out that they have a specific of way of running their sites as well - and that shouldn't include having ads execute arbitary javascript.
While those requirements would certainly exclude a significant number of ad agencies, I can't imagine that there aren't enough advertisers left that would happily play by Stack Overflow's rules to reach a rather large and specific target audience with (likely) disposable income.
I'm curious what you think the world wide demographics of SO are.
Techies expect the world to bend over backwards because they make money. A decent chunk of that is basically funded by ads.
That being said, techies—unlike admen—are still builders and the people who build the shit will always ultimately have the clout. It’s just a question of using the clout effectively.
Sure, SO is easier than parsing a forum thread, but the actual value that I care about is the answers provided for free by their users. I could easily return to 90's era usenet, it wasn't as convenient but it worked. What I couldn't deal with is a lack of a platform where people ask technical questions & get answers, I remember being on dial-up and reading paper manuals that were out-of-date/incomplete. But SO isn't irreplaceable, and I am oftentimes frustrated with finding questions closed for incorrect reasons, normally my answer is buried 2 links deep in SO because my DDG search (and Google too) takes me to an improperly closed question where the 'previously addressed' question is adjacent to my query.
StackOverflow does not provide an irreplaceable service; like github they do some nice things but there isn't any reason they must be the dominant platform. And the real value is in the answers, which SO gets for free.
Yes, most people would not be "fine" if they lost their googles and youtubes and stack overflows. But then in a few weeks or maaaybe months they'd get over it, because none of these "free" services are in any way essential. Paid alternatives will pop up where needed.
If we're adults, lets also acknowledge that this relationship between me and SO is not really symmetrical and that forcing me as a user to accept privacy invading ads has a hint of blackmail in it. This is not about supporting the site's content. If they would introduce a paid service that lets me have the exact same site, but without ads, I would sign up in a second. Hell, my employer would likely want to foot the bill, so they wouldn't even have to be modest with their pricing.
Why is this not an option, I ask you. Why keep sites like this insisting on their surveillance model?
> and appreciate that they are actually trying to solve this issue.
It's very hard not to be cynical about this. They care about their image. I'm not convinced that they care about my feelings. They is absolutely no evidence for that.
And then do that and then suddenly users think it's not worth the money for reason X and they tank. It has happened many times before and few companies can pull that off when their products were established as free.
Any ad that fingerprints and tracks users is not "passive".
