8 ms·
Why ads are a problem
- nononoxd 11y agoHow many of you do actually donate?
- makecheck 11y agoWhile online ads consume substantial resources (energy, etc.), traditional ads did as well. Consider the cost of printed pages, or even making your TV run for slightly longer than it otherwise would because your TV show lasts 30 minutes with ads even though it would last 22 minutes with no ads. An interesting environmentalist argument would be, to ask everyone to pay more to producers of all kinds (online or otherwise), to prevent the "need" for extra resource consumption on any medium. It "should" be an easy argument because people are clearly already paying for ads, they just don't see how. For instance, your electric bill would go down if you knew your TV would run for a half hour less every day.
- PhilWright 11y agoI don't think this would change the number of minutes people spend watching TV. They would simply watch one more program in the available time.
- js4 11y agoAhh yes. Another "ads are bad" post. People always seem to forget that most of the Internet is free BECAUSE of ads.
- nononoxd 11y agoI know. But I'd like to have an internet with donations, not ads.
- mei0Iesh 11y agoNot me. Donations are a much worse business model to me than ads. With ads, I offer free information they want, and free information about unrelated products and services they may or may not want. Either way they get something free, and I get money without owing anyone anything. With donations, I'm offering free information, that they're really supposed to pay for, but instead of just asking for the money as an exchange, I rely on the goodness of their heart, or guilting them into feeling bad and owing me. Then they pay, but the information was already free, so they're not actually paying for it, instead they're paying for the smugness of being one of the few that actually paid what they owed, and I become the charity case in their eyes, and they are disappointed if they're not rewarded for their good deed. They expect me to do something, give them some feedback, either by personally thanking them, or posting on the website how great they are for donating. Either way, I owe them, they owe me, and it's all in this fuzzy emotional space that's outside the actual exchange of information and costs of hardware and networking. I hate donations. I tried them once, and where I would've made $100 per day, I'd be lucky if I got $1 per day, maybe even $1 per week it was that low. Because I don't want to have a "family". I don't want charity. I refunded donations and put ads back up. Ads are what people want. Nobody wants to pay directly, and nobody wants to be guilted and in debt. The people who donate are doing it for other purposes than paying for nothing. They want something out of it, and I don't want to give them it. Go ahead and block ads. So what. They aren't for everyone. Then you get free information, donated to you by the people who like ads and support those who pay to advertise, and the businesses who take the risk in paying to have their name part of your site. People love ads, even those who block them.
- manigandham 11y agoPeople don't like to pay when they can get things for free. This is human behavior. Donations are also not reliable or viable for a real business. You're not going to change human behavior so donations instead of ads means 99% of the content out there disappears.
- potatote 11y agoIs it fair to assume that the model of voluntary contribution/donation doesn't stick with the major publishers because they could potentially make less money by adopting such model? Is there any major content publisher which adopts voluntary-donation-as-income model? I can see that a lot of casual reader like me will forget (or some intentionally ignore) to "tip/donate" whenever we read, say, the New York Times (by "casual", I mean someone like me who reads one NYT article a day at most). For cases like mine, what about encouraging (via a pop-up at the corner?) the site visitors to donate if they visit your site to read a certain number of articles in a day or a week? Will that work? I feel like there has to be a happy medium where publishers get paid some reasonable amount for their content, and readers also get to enjoy the content for a reasonable price. I think this model can coexist with the current model if the reader/content consumer doesn't mind the ads.
- singron 11y agoWhat about public radio and TV? There are some sponsors and government funding, but I think they are largely based on private donations.
- autarch 11y agohttp://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finances http://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finances Individuals are the largest single source of funding, but they don't make up the majority of it, at least for NPR. Corporate sponsorship is the next biggest piece, and while it's not very intrusive, AFAIC the sponsorship messages on NPR are basically ads (very tolerable ads, but still ads).
- robbrown451 11y agoI often find the sponsership messages less tolerable than ads, at least when talking about public TV.
- mikeash 11y agoNot sure what you'd count as "largely," but this shows about a third of the funding for US public radio coming from individuals: http://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finances http://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finances And unfortunately, the messages they run to acknowledge corporate and foundation sponsors get more and more ad-like with each passing year.
- Lapsa 11y agostackoverflow.com fixed ads problem beautifully one designated spotlight, no animations i actually pay attention to them willingly
- rpgmaker 11y agoThis. Although we pay attention to them because they're mostly job postings. I doubt most publishers can post those kind of ads effectively :)
- manigandham 11y agoThis didn't fix the "ads" problem as described by the article. It just improved the implementation to what it should be. Our ad network takes a similar approach and sees great results. Regardless though, the advertising model itself is completely fine.
- mattmaroon 11y ago"Advertisers must pay to publish ads, this results (indirectly) in higher prices of products and services." Not really. This is the same as the "stealing causes us to raise prices for other shoppers" misperception. Supply and demand set the prices of products and services. If advertisers could maximize profits by charging more they already would be. Advertisement dollars mainly just come out of profits.
- robbrown451 11y agoI have a problem with that statement too, but for different reasons. Costs affect prices because if companies can't make a profit, they stop doing business. Under (near perfect) competition, prices tend to be a bit over cost. Supply and demand may be the mechanism, but costs do indeed come into it. In many cases though, advertising lowers prices because if you can sell more products, the average cost can be lower because of economies of scale.
- manigandham 11y agoExactly. Advertising usually leads to more volume and availability which has a much greater effect in actually reducing the price of goods. The cost of marketing (which includes advertising) is usually a small fraction of the overall cost of production for most products and services.
- manigandham 11y agoThis is a rather shallow article with barely any real points. Talking about all those externalities only serves to create noise rather than support any arguments against the ad model. You can just as easily argue that images and CSS should be removed to save even more bandwidth and processing power. Why even go online at all actually when you can get a newspaper for a few cents? Here's the reality - We only have 2 options to enable the value exchange of content: direct (via you moving funds to the publisher) or in-direct (monetizing through ads). It's a binary choice. It's one or the other, that's it. There's no magic 3rd option that's available (today). Here are a few reasons why advertising is still a better model: - It's fast. Faster than money transfer. - It's efficient. Money is not cheap to transfer, even today. - It's passive. No mental energy expended or decision making required. - It's anonymous. No need for payment details or 3rd party to handle funds. - It's secure. Again no need for payment information, there's not much ads can do. (Malware is a different problem.) - It's accessible. Your wealth doesn't determine the amount of content you can get. Everyone can access everything equally. This is fundamentally a question of human behavior and the common reaction is to take things for free when possible. People just do not value content that highly, if at all. You can already see the reaction to rising rates for netflix and spotify even though they provide so much value, certainly more than an equally priced cup of coffee. Add to that the amount of willpower and decisioning it requires to judge whether a piece of content is worth it or not and it's clear that this is not a scalable system. Perhaps a "cable subscription" for the internet with time-based billing for each domain might be something that works as a direct-payment option in the future but this is a massive technical, security and privacy challenge the way things are now. I do agree that ads have gotten out of hand recently - however this is an implementation problem. Regulation and standards and enforcement are what's needed to fix this. It has nothing to do with the ad model itself which is still the most universally scalable and viable monetization system for content.
- Terr_ 11y agoSaying "it's just an implementation problem" understates the severity of that problem, and I think it's a little deceptive to claim that laws, regulations, and economic models are all "implementation" just as much as the raw code. I mean, would you say that dumping a type of toxic waste into a river is an "implementation" problem when there's no law against it? > It's fast. Except when ad-frameworks slow down browsing to a crawl because they heap innumerable delays on the page-load in order to "auction" the spot and maximize revenue. > It's anonymous Except for our big ad-networks that incorporated quita lot of fingerprinting, profiling, and even surveillance. > It's secure Except for how ad-networks are a vector for malware, since there's no incentive to vet content beyond maintaining their own throughput.
- robbrown451 11y agoDonations rarely work. They certainly fail any game theoretic model. A rationally self-interested person would not donate, because in most cases, their donation would not give them as much benefit as the cost. The way you'd measure benefit is the value received from the site, times times the chance that their donation makes the difference between the site existing and not existing. That chance is typically a very small number. Naive articles like this don't bother factoring in what the chance is that your donation will make a difference....in other words they ignore the fact that most people would rather be a freeloader than a sucker.
- pdkl95 11y ago> Donations rarely work. That implies "most" content has negligible value. People that offer quality content seem to have no problem getting people to donate. Just because you haven't seen this doesn't mean it doesn't exist. > They certainly fail any game theoretic model. > A rationally self-interested person would not donate, This isn't particularly relevant, as humans are not "rational actors". Even thought economists like to pretend otherwise, "Homo economicus" obviously doesn't actually exist in reality. > Naive articles like this don't bother factoring in what the chance is that your donation will make a difference Sure they did. You just don't like the results. Good content will usually be paid for, and junk content will go out of business, just like they should. > most people would rather be a freeloader than a sucker. Your politics is showing. Such a limited view is not helpful.