8 ms·

Advertising 'accounts for half of data used to read articles'

63 points by denzil_correa 11y ago

InclinedPlane 11y ago
The fact that people consider forced advertising defensible at all shows you just how far skewed toward corporate interests the zeitgeist is in general. Imagine if most content sites got most of their revenue from sms spam. Would that be defensible? Would we dare to say that using tools to avoid that spam is tantamount to theft? It's a very comparable situation. It's sad that so many sites have hitched their fortunes to bad business models, but that's their responsibility to fix.
- buserror 11y ago
  Whats even more bizare is that its been published that most of the 'clicks' and returns from ads are completely fake, generated from clickbots, so that whole 'industry' is spinning on thin air. That's why most website try to 'engage' the users with full screen nags when you arrive, they are trying desperately to know if you are a human or a bot, and that's their latest attempt at it (until the bots catch up that is) The 'users' are rather removed from the advertiser->agencies->publishers->content providers->websites spinloop, yet all of a sudden they are being blamed from trying to shield themselves from the torrent of crap. The true, real victims are the people who try to advertise stuff, and the users at the other end -- all the advertiser's budget is siphoned down that chain of intermediaries, and the 'return' they get is ... wind as less and less users want to see their stuff anyway given the deluge.
  - ssharp 11y ago
    Most advertisers aren't throwing blind money around and most ads are sold by impressions and not clicks, so clickbots aren't that big of a deal. If you're able to do attribution at the impression level, you're far less worried about clicks. With that level of tracking, you can build out an attribution model that accurately reflects the value of an impression and not waste money.
- meritt 11y ago
  This has been standard practice for at least 100 years: Newspaper. Radio. Television. Magazines. Internet. All have had roughly the same model of providing free or nearly-free content in exchange for periodically injecting the flow of that content with advertising. If you want to accuse humanity of favoring corporate interests for the past century and longer, that's definitely your prerogative, but please stop acting like this is a new phenomenon.
  - rosser 11y ago
    Online advertising vs. the forms that existed in "traditional" media is not at all a difference of degree. It is a difference of kind. There are fundamental differences between online advertising and every other form of the medium that has ever existed, and you deny — or are ignorant of — those at your own peril.
    - meritt 11y ago
      I disagree. Fundamentally it's no different. Content-providers create or distribute content and they need to be paid for that in order to continue operations. That's traditionally came from one of two ways: Subsidized by advertising or premiums paid directly by the consumer. Do you have a third way to facilitate this business model that's likely to succeed?
      - rosser 11y ago
        You're looking at the result, and not the mechanism. Sure, advertising pays for the content. That's no different. But how it does it? Tracking your every click across time, across the entire web? No, that's completely new, utterly unprecedented, and a thing the consequences of which we haven't even begun to unpack.
        meritt 11y ago
        Which is why I think the long term reality of what we'll end up with is not simply ad blocking but blocking of the privacy violating tracking. There's two issues here only one of which I think is worth fighting: 1) Do companies have the right to serve advertisements in exchange for consumption of their content? I'd agree they do. 2) Do companies have the right to track your every move across the web and use that to improve the efficacy of #1? Absolutely not.
- SyneRyder 11y ago
  Many people forget there is another option - you don't have to read these sites. If you don't like their business model, don't visit those sites. They can offer ad-free paywalls instead, and if the content isn't worth paying for, that's probably because their content was of no value in the first place. It's actually negative value, because you've lost a few minutes of your life reading it.
  - leereeves 11y ago
    You'd have to be a little bit obsessed to research and keep track of the business model of every site (including the tracking, which may not be obvious).
  - DanBC 11y ago
    Or the fourth option: Allow users to have a bit of control over the ads they see. I never ever want to see ads for alcohol or gambling[1]. The fact I can't opt out of that advertising means I installed an ad-blocker. I turn it off for everything, and turn it on if a site shows me an ad for alcohol or gambling. (I also try to tell the site). [1] I either never want to see them, or I want to see as many as possible and click all of them to increase click-fraud rates and discourage their use.
    - SyneRyder 11y ago
      Brilliant. I completely agree - there are some ads I like (I'm so glad I saw ads for Harvest Accounting and 10 Cloverfield Lane), but I never want to see an ad for Zoosk ever again. Telling the site is a great idea, but they probably don't have enough control in their ad tools to block them. Google at least gives some user control via http://www.google.com/settings/ads/ http://www.google.com/settings/ads/ and Google Contributor in the US, but nowhere near enough to block specific advertisers.
    - dspillett 11y ago
      The problem with that is it requires tracking, which is one of the key things people object to. For your preferences to be respected, you need to be tracked so they know it is you they are showing ads to.
- TheLogothete 11y ago
  Why do you feel the need to invent some hypothetical scenario to defend your point? Maybe because deep down you know that blocking ads is not justified?
  - DanBC 11y ago
    Stopping people sending me stuff that I do not want that costs me money to receive is easy to justify.
    - TheLogothete 11y ago
      Don't visit their sites. Problem solved!
      - douche 11y ago
        Except you don't know, before you go to it, whether any random site is going to hit you with 47-bazillion tracking cookies, load ads from 17 different ad networks, pulling down high-resolution images, malicious scripts, etc, etc. It's gotten bad enough that I'm using my hosts file to block all this garbage, so requests to any of these sleazeball advertisers and trackers just 404. I'm amazed at how awful the internet is when I have to see all the sludge that advertising sprays all over it.
  - spriggan3 11y ago
    > Maybe because deep down you know that blocking ads is not justified? Well we can debate the "morality" of ad blocking but not the justification : - faster browsing (less javascript) - safer browsing (it has been shown time and time again than ad networks were used to push malware ). - saves phone/laptop battery since most ad-networks use/abuse javascript, - better privacy (no tracking) - more focus on the actual content, when there is one. I personally disable javasript BY default because for me it's not the web. Is it immoral to do so ? I think not. I only enable it when it is justified ( a rich application like an online regex tool or a game ). If a website forces me to have javascript on just to read an article or block me then I don't feel bad about it. It is especially true on mobile where disabling javascript has a huge impact on battery life. Me saving some CPU cycles, some Mo on my data plan doesn't feel immoral at all. Maybe websites should think about it and the useless crap they send across the wire. Strangely today it doesn't seem to be a concern for most websites, the loading speed or the size of content. A responsive website is not enough to make it mobile friendly. I don't feel bad about punishing bad technical choices. Ads served on a different domain is also one of these bad choices.
- ssharp 11y ago
  It's not really a comparable situation. Yes, there are lots of content providers who create terrible content and shove tremendous amounts of ads in your face to try and make a quick buck. There are also people producing quality content who need to make money from the content in order to continue producing it. That group of people are more likely to realize that obnoxious and overly intrusive ad placements are not a good thing, so they avoid them. The point being that good publishers strike a balance. Placing a single banner ad on a long-form article is certainly more defensible than 35 ads on a "awkward celebrity high school photos" slideshow article. Things aren't black and white.
alrs 11y ago
Turn on US network television one night, and watch a three-camera sitcom. Note the production value of the show against the production value of the ads. You can see that the commercials, per second, cost orders of magnitude more to make. "Content" == "Bait". The amount of data used by the advertisers will continue to rise.
- reitzensteinm 11y ago
  Orders of magnitude more to make? So a 20 second commercial costs more to produce than a 30 minute sitcom?
  - jbmorgado 11y ago
    Per second probably yes.
    - reitzensteinm 11y ago
      Not per second - I think you misread my post.
  - alrs 11y ago
    Absolutely.
codeulike 11y ago
With paper newspapers, if you look at the space given to adverts you'd probably get a similar if not worse ratio.
- huskyr 11y ago
  Yeah, but they don't take over the whole page when you hover over them, send all your personal details to a third party and make everything slow.
pjc50 11y ago
Only half? They haven't done the maths, but I suspect that each ad served over mobile data earns the mobile carrier far more than the advert earns for the page that hosts it. Mobile carriers should be banned from charging for data involved in serving ads .. and given the option of blocking them instead.
- velox_io 11y ago
  Yeah I'm not really surprised by this. However the problem with Ads is that they take far longer to load than the rest of the website content (plus the heavy use of animation and JavaScript to bring the mobile browser to its knees). If Ads were much lighter and better behaved, I there would be such a problem with advertising - Both for the publishers and the consumers.
  - zha 11y ago
    Thats why I disabled js from chrome on my android. On desktop chrome, my default profile runs uBlock origin and blocks all third party js & frames. Much faster, & you can selectively allow 3rd party content.
- rsfern 11y ago
  Another potential solution is for the mobile carriers to charge the ad networks for the bandwidth they use. That's more aligned with the incentives the mobile carriers have, more fair to users, but it might be detrimental to the earnings of the sites hosting ads.... Edit: your solution is much less technically complex, and less intrusive than carriers inspecting traffic for billing purposes though
  - pjc50 11y ago
    Ironically, the mobile carriers are the one group who can implement a popularly suggested alternative to ads: micropayments. They already have billing systems and traffic inspection. Not that this would be popular, as people would just click "no" on the "pay 1c to read this page" dialog.
  - 11y ago
spriggan3 11y ago
Is it just me or all these media sites are in panic mode ? the narrative a few months ago was like "ad-blockers have no effect on ad-driven revenue". Now it feels like something is about to collapse and everybody working in online advertising(thus these online news media) is panicking.
- pjc50 11y ago
  I think this is in response to malvertising; once "use an adblocker" becomes as standard a piece of advice as "use an antivirus", the industry is doomed. Of course, the response is to blame the users rather than attempt to take responsibility for the quality of ads.
  - a_imho 11y ago
    >"use an adblocker" becomes as standard a piece of advice as "use an antivirus" I really like going overboard with ads making it swinging that way. When content blocking users were a very small minority, it was very easy to brand them akin to pirates doing something shady. Sure, we will have sponsored content or whatever form ads come next, but I see people are more concerned about their privacy as ever before, which I feel is a good thing.
- na85 11y ago
  Good. I hope they all go bankrupt.
chflags 11y ago
Do you think there could be any bias when the newspapers, or for-profit search engine projects, who rely on selling advertising "space" as their "business", report on the practice of filtering out advertising? Not me. These folks epitomize the highest standards of integrity. If www search engines and "journalists" are being paid primarily by advertisers, and not readers, then we have the best system for "news" that has ever been created. And we can be proud of their achievement, and how they are using the latest communications technology and the public resource of internet bandwidth for its highest and best purpose. Everyone in the ad sales industry should pat each other on the back. You have provided readers with so much greatness. You have earned your success. As readers, we should be thankful for these heros for making the internet and mobile carrier networks work so smoothly and keeping us so well informed, at such low cost to readers. Everbody wins. Brilliant.

63 points by denzil_correa 11y ago

The fact that people consider forced advertising defensible at all shows you just how far skewed toward corporate interests the zeitgeist is in general. Imagine if most content sites got most of their revenue from sms spam. Would that be defensible? Would we dare to say that using tools to avoid that spam is tantamount to theft? It's a very comparable situation. It's sad that so many sites have hitched their fortunes to bad business models, but that's their responsibility to fix.

buserror 11y ago
Whats even more bizare is that its been published that most of the 'clicks' and returns from ads are completely fake, generated from clickbots, so that whole 'industry' is spinning on thin air. That's why most website try to 'engage' the users with full screen nags when you arrive, they are trying desperately to know if you are a human or a bot, and that's their latest attempt at it (until the bots catch up that is) The 'users' are rather removed from the advertiser->agencies->publishers->content providers->websites spinloop, yet all of a sudden they are being blamed from trying to shield themselves from the torrent of crap. The true, real victims are the people who try to advertise stuff, and the users at the other end -- all the advertiser's budget is siphoned down that chain of intermediaries, and the 'return' they get is ... wind as less and less users want to see their stuff anyway given the deluge.
- ssharp 11y ago
  Most advertisers aren't throwing blind money around and most ads are sold by impressions and not clicks, so clickbots aren't that big of a deal. If you're able to do attribution at the impression level, you're far less worried about clicks. With that level of tracking, you can build out an attribution model that accurately reflects the value of an impression and not waste money.
meritt 11y ago
This has been standard practice for at least 100 years: Newspaper. Radio. Television. Magazines. Internet. All have had roughly the same model of providing free or nearly-free content in exchange for periodically injecting the flow of that content with advertising. If you want to accuse humanity of favoring corporate interests for the past century and longer, that's definitely your prerogative, but please stop acting like this is a new phenomenon.
- rosser 11y ago
  Online advertising vs. the forms that existed in "traditional" media is not at all a difference of degree. It is a difference of kind. There are fundamental differences between online advertising and every other form of the medium that has ever existed, and you deny — or are ignorant of — those at your own peril.
  - meritt 11y ago
    I disagree. Fundamentally it's no different. Content-providers create or distribute content and they need to be paid for that in order to continue operations. That's traditionally came from one of two ways: Subsidized by advertising or premiums paid directly by the consumer. Do you have a third way to facilitate this business model that's likely to succeed?
    - rosser 11y ago
      You're looking at the result, and not the mechanism. Sure, advertising pays for the content. That's no different. But how it does it? Tracking your every click across time, across the entire web? No, that's completely new, utterly unprecedented, and a thing the consequences of which we haven't even begun to unpack.
      - meritt 11y ago
        Which is why I think the long term reality of what we'll end up with is not simply ad blocking but blocking of the privacy violating tracking. There's two issues here only one of which I think is worth fighting: 1) Do companies have the right to serve advertisements in exchange for consumption of their content? I'd agree they do. 2) Do companies have the right to track your every move across the web and use that to improve the efficacy of #1? Absolutely not.
SyneRyder 11y ago
Many people forget there is another option - you don't have to read these sites. If you don't like their business model, don't visit those sites. They can offer ad-free paywalls instead, and if the content isn't worth paying for, that's probably because their content was of no value in the first place. It's actually negative value, because you've lost a few minutes of your life reading it.
- leereeves 11y ago
  You'd have to be a little bit obsessed to research and keep track of the business model of every site (including the tracking, which may not be obvious).
- DanBC 11y ago
  Or the fourth option: Allow users to have a bit of control over the ads they see. I never ever want to see ads for alcohol or gambling[1]. The fact I can't opt out of that advertising means I installed an ad-blocker. I turn it off for everything, and turn it on if a site shows me an ad for alcohol or gambling. (I also try to tell the site). [1] I either never want to see them, or I want to see as many as possible and click all of them to increase click-fraud rates and discourage their use.
  - SyneRyder 11y ago
    Brilliant. I completely agree - there are some ads I like (I'm so glad I saw ads for Harvest Accounting and 10 Cloverfield Lane), but I never want to see an ad for Zoosk ever again. Telling the site is a great idea, but they probably don't have enough control in their ad tools to block them. Google at least gives some user control via http://www.google.com/settings/ads/ http://www.google.com/settings/ads/ and Google Contributor in the US, but nowhere near enough to block specific advertisers.
  - dspillett 11y ago
    The problem with that is it requires tracking, which is one of the key things people object to. For your preferences to be respected, you need to be tracked so they know it is you they are showing ads to.
TheLogothete 11y ago
Why do you feel the need to invent some hypothetical scenario to defend your point? Maybe because deep down you know that blocking ads is not justified?
- DanBC 11y ago
  Stopping people sending me stuff that I do not want that costs me money to receive is easy to justify.
  - TheLogothete 11y ago
    Don't visit their sites. Problem solved!
    - douche 11y ago
      Except you don't know, before you go to it, whether any random site is going to hit you with 47-bazillion tracking cookies, load ads from 17 different ad networks, pulling down high-resolution images, malicious scripts, etc, etc. It's gotten bad enough that I'm using my hosts file to block all this garbage, so requests to any of these sleazeball advertisers and trackers just 404. I'm amazed at how awful the internet is when I have to see all the sludge that advertising sprays all over it.
- spriggan3 11y ago
  > Maybe because deep down you know that blocking ads is not justified? Well we can debate the "morality" of ad blocking but not the justification : - faster browsing (less javascript) - safer browsing (it has been shown time and time again than ad networks were used to push malware ). - saves phone/laptop battery since most ad-networks use/abuse javascript, - better privacy (no tracking) - more focus on the actual content, when there is one. I personally disable javasript BY default because for me it's not the web. Is it immoral to do so ? I think not. I only enable it when it is justified ( a rich application like an online regex tool or a game ). If a website forces me to have javascript on just to read an article or block me then I don't feel bad about it. It is especially true on mobile where disabling javascript has a huge impact on battery life. Me saving some CPU cycles, some Mo on my data plan doesn't feel immoral at all. Maybe websites should think about it and the useless crap they send across the wire. Strangely today it doesn't seem to be a concern for most websites, the loading speed or the size of content. A responsive website is not enough to make it mobile friendly. I don't feel bad about punishing bad technical choices. Ads served on a different domain is also one of these bad choices.
ssharp 11y ago
It's not really a comparable situation. Yes, there are lots of content providers who create terrible content and shove tremendous amounts of ads in your face to try and make a quick buck. There are also people producing quality content who need to make money from the content in order to continue producing it. That group of people are more likely to realize that obnoxious and overly intrusive ad placements are not a good thing, so they avoid them. The point being that good publishers strike a balance. Placing a single banner ad on a long-form article is certainly more defensible than 35 ads on a "awkward celebrity high school photos" slideshow article. Things aren't black and white.

alrs 11y ago

Turn on US network television one night, and watch a three-camera sitcom. Note the production value of the show against the production value of the ads. You can see that the commercials, per second, cost orders of magnitude more to make. "Content" == "Bait". The amount of data used by the advertisers will continue to rise.

reitzensteinm 11y ago
Orders of magnitude more to make? So a 20 second commercial costs more to produce than a 30 minute sitcom?
- jbmorgado 11y ago
  Per second probably yes.
  - reitzensteinm 11y ago
    Not per second - I think you misread my post.
- alrs 11y ago
  Absolutely.

codeulike 11y ago

With paper newspapers, if you look at the space given to adverts you'd probably get a similar if not worse ratio.

huskyr 11y ago
Yeah, but they don't take over the whole page when you hover over them, send all your personal details to a third party and make everything slow.

pjc50 11y ago

Only half? They haven't done the maths, but I suspect that each ad served over mobile data earns the mobile carrier far more than the advert earns for the page that hosts it. Mobile carriers should be banned from charging for data involved in serving ads .. and given the option of blocking them instead.

velox_io 11y ago
Yeah I'm not really surprised by this. However the problem with Ads is that they take far longer to load than the rest of the website content (plus the heavy use of animation and JavaScript to bring the mobile browser to its knees). If Ads were much lighter and better behaved, I there would be such a problem with advertising - Both for the publishers and the consumers.
- zha 11y ago
  Thats why I disabled js from chrome on my android. On desktop chrome, my default profile runs uBlock origin and blocks all third party js & frames. Much faster, & you can selectively allow 3rd party content.
rsfern 11y ago
Another potential solution is for the mobile carriers to charge the ad networks for the bandwidth they use. That's more aligned with the incentives the mobile carriers have, more fair to users, but it might be detrimental to the earnings of the sites hosting ads.... Edit: your solution is much less technically complex, and less intrusive than carriers inspecting traffic for billing purposes though
- pjc50 11y ago
  Ironically, the mobile carriers are the one group who can implement a popularly suggested alternative to ads: micropayments. They already have billing systems and traffic inspection. Not that this would be popular, as people would just click "no" on the "pay 1c to read this page" dialog.
- 11y ago

spriggan3 11y ago

Is it just me or all these media sites are in panic mode ? the narrative a few months ago was like "ad-blockers have no effect on ad-driven revenue". Now it feels like something is about to collapse and everybody working in online advertising(thus these online news media) is panicking.

pjc50 11y ago
I think this is in response to malvertising; once "use an adblocker" becomes as standard a piece of advice as "use an antivirus", the industry is doomed. Of course, the response is to blame the users rather than attempt to take responsibility for the quality of ads.
- a_imho 11y ago
  >"use an adblocker" becomes as standard a piece of advice as "use an antivirus" I really like going overboard with ads making it swinging that way. When content blocking users were a very small minority, it was very easy to brand them akin to pirates doing something shady. Sure, we will have sponsored content or whatever form ads come next, but I see people are more concerned about their privacy as ever before, which I feel is a good thing.
na85 11y ago
Good. I hope they all go bankrupt.

chflags 11y ago

Do you think there could be any bias when the newspapers, or for-profit search engine projects, who rely on selling advertising "space" as their "business", report on the practice of filtering out advertising? Not me. These folks epitomize the highest standards of integrity. If www search engines and "journalists" are being paid primarily by advertisers, and not readers, then we have the best system for "news" that has ever been created. And we can be proud of their achievement, and how they are using the latest communications technology and the public resource of internet bandwidth for its highest and best purpose. Everyone in the ad sales industry should pat each other on the back. You have provided readers with so much greatness. You have earned your success. As readers, we should be thankful for these heros for making the internet and mobile carrier networks work so smoothly and keeping us so well informed, at such low cost to readers. Everbody wins. Brilliant.