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One aspect of web ads that nobody seems to mention, especially with click-bait articles, is that people click them. They work, and they work very well. Within

One aspect of web ads that nobody seems to mention, especially with click-bait articles, is that people click them. They work, and they work very well. Within the insular world of tech people, it all seems so absurd that anyone would be interested in following these ads and click-bait articles, but the truth is people enjoy that sort of content. This is why gossip magazines sell like hot cakes. I am not sure what the solution is. People like all sorts of things that are bad for them.

leejoramo 10y ago
One of the differences is that the same types of garbage ads that fill gossip magazines (and the back pages of good magazines like the New Yorker) is that these ads are being pushed to us front and center of nearly any site you visit. I avoid these ads in print. It is easy to not read magazine or skip the back ads. I don't even feel that I give the front ads of the New Yorker or the Economist much of my attention. I can easily passively avoid ads in print. Online, ads have become highly annoying and detract from the experience of website in a way that does not happen in print. I am not saying that I entirely avoid print ads. Back in the day of Creative Computing and Byte Magazine, I would pour over the ads as much as the editorial content. The ads were interesting to me.
- salmon30salmon 10y ago
  Right, but the web is the great democracy. And in the great democracy, the will of the majority wins outright. I believe, that a majority of the folks on the web today are alright with these ads. Much like the ads in Creative Computing spoke to you, todays ads speak to exactly the people they are targeting The difference is, we all use the web, where as we don't all read People Magazine. Such is the nature of the great democracy.
ajoy39 10y ago
and those people keep things free for the rest of us, so I'm fine with it. Everybody likes to complain about advertising but no one has come up with a way to eliminate it without a large portion of the sites we use everyday shutting down.
- knowaveragejoe 10y ago
  That is the core of the issue that people keep missing in these discussions. Web advertising in its current state didn't form in a vacuum, it's a byproduct of our expectation that content on the Internet is mostly free.
  - redbeard0x0a 10y ago
    We aren't missing the point of web advertising. The problems being described, especially with traffic laundering - illegitimate sites are making money from ads, but aren't giving a return to the company buying the ad. When you have a low ROI on making an ad, you stop buying them. At that point, we don't have enough legitimate ads to support the web content we actually want to see survive. The solution isn't to get rid of the Ads, it is to get rid of the perversion of the system (easier said than done). An efficient ad system is better for everybody.
    - jamiequint 10y ago
      This is true. The problem is stupid buyers. Many people here would be shocked at the lack of sophistication (or 'sophisticated buying theater') some marketers use to deploy 8 figure annual marketing budgets. It's getting better slowly and as it does we'll see less of this kind of crap. To their credit, many of the DSPs (at least AppNexus) are trying to clean up their own systems as well and automatically block this type of traffic from being purchased. The trend in ad-tech right now around viewability and viewable eCPM metrics is also a step in the right direction.
  - lobotryas 10y ago
    So let's change the expectation. There is a real cost to these "free" services (as has been discussed at length on hn and elsewhere) and this cost is only rising as more and more people block ads. I am looking forward to businesses failing on the ad supported model so that jew approaches are tried instead. For example, I would pay 99 cents for a full story after reading a teaser if this was easy to do. I'd even buy a membership if I could trust that a news org isn't pushing an agenda (looking at you, NYT, WaPo and many others). Heck, maybe crowdfunding select journalists is the key. I know organizations are trying to think out of the box, but because ads are still giving them a cushion I charge that they are not trying hard enough.
enraged_camel 10y ago
>>One aspect of web ads that nobody seems to mention, especially with click-bait articles, is that people click them. They work, and they work very well. They do work, but not very well. Think about the false positives. How many people accidentally click an ad? Even on HN, where the crowd is very tech-savvy, people always complain about it. Now imagine average users. The fact that there are people who click on ads on purpose is a given. Otherwise ads wouldn't exist. That's why no one talks about it: it's like saying the sky is blue. It doesn't add anything to the conversation.
- salmon30salmon 10y ago
  Right I agree. But admitting that may change how we view the issue. If we accept it isn't these faceless near-criminals throwing garbage at us, but rather advertising companies producing ads that work. Still, I do not know what to do about it. It is the bane of minority to be at the will of the majority.
combatentropy 10y ago
> I am not sure what the solution is. I boycott them. Google News will present three articles about the same thing, and I will click the one whose headline is most like what a headline should be: an actual summary of the story. Sometimes all of them are clickbait, so I just click the one for the site that I like most. It was surprising when I first saw that even respectable companies like Time and USA Today had adopted the clickbait style with gusto. I'm not saying that this boycott will catch on and change the world. It's just my own little war. > Within the insular world of tech people, it all seems so absurd It's not because I'm in tech that I am wise to their tricks. It's because of my writing background. I have only bits and pieces of evidence from my own non-tech friends, but I'm pretty sure most people are aware that ads and clickbait are manipulative and that gossip magazines are the linguistic equivalent of junk food and bad for the heart. And while I said I was dismayed to see the old guard like Time and USA Today adopt the tactic of clickbait, most disconcerting of all is to see everyday people start to adopt it. I've seen quite a few blog posts and Medium articles posted on HN with clickbait titles. And on a certain video production forum, I see members starting threads with clickbait subjects (something like "I bought this camera, and you won't believe what happened!"). Forum members get no money for clicks. So why do they do it? Maybe they just want some attention. But I'm a little worried that it's just unconscious imitation, that clickbaiting is catching on like a bad habit.
- rms_returns 10y ago
  Another problem is how do you decide that something is clickbait without clicking it? Agreed that most of the catchy headlines are actually clickbaits, but there could be always some that are genuine. Think of clickbaits as a marketing tactic. On the way to your workplace, you see hundreds of those salesmen trying to sell you something by telling tall tales. Your impression would be like, "Hey, not these stupid fellas again. Next time one comes near me, I'll start a war on them!". However, if you think about it, a substantial portion of those salesmen (at least 20-30%) are genuine people who are just earning their livelihoods. You know that even after accounting for some of their exaggerations, their products are sometimes actually useful to you!
  - viewer5 10y ago
intrasight 10y ago
What is "click-bait" in this context? Is it in the Google search results? Or is it an ad displayed in a page? If it's an ad, why call it click-bait - it's just an ad.
- stinkytaco 10y ago
  Because largely they masquerade as content, and some users are not savvy enough to spot that. An "article" like "You won't believe what these 80s stars look like now" is not obviously an ad.
homero 10y ago
It's tiring. Main reason I don't open Facebook anymore
dhimes 10y ago
Work for what? Do you actually purchase items you see in these ads because of the ads? Especially on mobile, every ad click I've ever made was accidental. Small businesses are foolish for advertising like this, especially ppc. Large business may be able to get some sort of successful branding out of it I suppose.
mikestew 10y ago
One aspect of web ads that nobody seems to mention, especially with click-bait articles, is that people click them. No one seems to mention the exceedingly obvious, without which the whole discussion is rendered moot. The fact that someone, somewhere is clicking an ad is not lost us, but we've moved on to a higher level discussion.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
Mahn 10y ago
In theory the solution is simple: show click-bait ads to people who enjoy them only. Publishers still get make money and the ads don't get in the way for people who don't care. This is why Google and Facebook are kings in the online advertising world, because the have mastered the art of showing ads to people that are most likely to care. Heck, Google Search doesn't even show ads at all in their search pages if they figured you never click on them. In practice this is hard to do without troves of user behaviour data, but the approach that companies like Taboola and Outbrain take of showing irrelevant ads to everyone visiting is definitively not the solution, and if anything it's only going to diminish the efficacy of online ads further in the long run.
- petewailes 10y ago
  The Google bot is just flat wrong. Everyone gets ads. You Judy aren't realising what's an ad there anymore.
dspillett 10y ago
> They work, and they work very well. I suspect it would be more realistic to say "they work at least very slightly better than the less attention-grabby-information-zero headlines". If they worked very well there wouldn't need to be so many of them per page and for articles carrying them to be split into so many single paragraph pages (because enough money would be made that the site owner would start considering design and UX factors as much as getting that extra 0.0000000001$ per page impression).
johnward 10y ago
Right. "They ruining the web" for us but apparently they are providing value to someone else.
- criley2 10y ago
  Clickbait is like heroin. Just because people use it so much it kills them doesn't mean it provides value to them. Just because clickbait preys on our nature doesn't make it valuable. Easy to argue that by choosing manipulation over substance for the sole reason of generating revenue that you are not providing value, you are more of a rent seeker, not providing anything new of value but rather seeking rents on existing content. Seeing as most clickbait is "Top 10 Things Our Underpaid Interns Stole From Other Sites: You won't believe #7!", the rent seeking analogy is kinda decent.
  - johnward 10y ago
    Maybe "value" wasn't the right word. I would hope that these types of things would fail because the users would give up clicking through 20 pages of ads but the fact that "respected" outlets like Forbes still do it suggests otherwise.

leejoramo 10y ago

One of the differences is that the same types of garbage ads that fill gossip magazines (and the back pages of good magazines like the New Yorker) is that these ads are being pushed to us front and center of nearly any site you visit. I avoid these ads in print. It is easy to not read magazine or skip the back ads. I don't even feel that I give the front ads of the New Yorker or the Economist much of my attention. I can easily passively avoid ads in print. Online, ads have become highly annoying and detract from the experience of website in a way that does not happen in print. I am not saying that I entirely avoid print ads. Back in the day of Creative Computing and Byte Magazine, I would pour over the ads as much as the editorial content. The ads were interesting to me.

salmon30salmon 10y ago
Right, but the web is the great democracy. And in the great democracy, the will of the majority wins outright. I believe, that a majority of the folks on the web today are alright with these ads. Much like the ads in Creative Computing spoke to you, todays ads speak to exactly the people they are targeting The difference is, we all use the web, where as we don't all read People Magazine. Such is the nature of the great democracy.

ajoy39 10y ago

and those people keep things free for the rest of us, so I'm fine with it. Everybody likes to complain about advertising but no one has come up with a way to eliminate it without a large portion of the sites we use everyday shutting down.

knowaveragejoe 10y ago
That is the core of the issue that people keep missing in these discussions. Web advertising in its current state didn't form in a vacuum, it's a byproduct of our expectation that content on the Internet is mostly free.
- redbeard0x0a 10y ago
  We aren't missing the point of web advertising. The problems being described, especially with traffic laundering - illegitimate sites are making money from ads, but aren't giving a return to the company buying the ad. When you have a low ROI on making an ad, you stop buying them. At that point, we don't have enough legitimate ads to support the web content we actually want to see survive. The solution isn't to get rid of the Ads, it is to get rid of the perversion of the system (easier said than done). An efficient ad system is better for everybody.
  - jamiequint 10y ago
    This is true. The problem is stupid buyers. Many people here would be shocked at the lack of sophistication (or 'sophisticated buying theater') some marketers use to deploy 8 figure annual marketing budgets. It's getting better slowly and as it does we'll see less of this kind of crap. To their credit, many of the DSPs (at least AppNexus) are trying to clean up their own systems as well and automatically block this type of traffic from being purchased. The trend in ad-tech right now around viewability and viewable eCPM metrics is also a step in the right direction.
- lobotryas 10y ago
  So let's change the expectation. There is a real cost to these "free" services (as has been discussed at length on hn and elsewhere) and this cost is only rising as more and more people block ads. I am looking forward to businesses failing on the ad supported model so that jew approaches are tried instead. For example, I would pay 99 cents for a full story after reading a teaser if this was easy to do. I'd even buy a membership if I could trust that a news org isn't pushing an agenda (looking at you, NYT, WaPo and many others). Heck, maybe crowdfunding select journalists is the key. I know organizations are trying to think out of the box, but because ads are still giving them a cushion I charge that they are not trying hard enough.

enraged_camel 10y ago

>>One aspect of web ads that nobody seems to mention, especially with click-bait articles, is that people click them. They work, and they work very well. They do work, but not very well. Think about the false positives. How many people accidentally click an ad? Even on HN, where the crowd is very tech-savvy, people always complain about it. Now imagine average users. The fact that there are people who click on ads on purpose is a given. Otherwise ads wouldn't exist. That's why no one talks about it: it's like saying the sky is blue. It doesn't add anything to the conversation.

salmon30salmon 10y ago
Right I agree. But admitting that may change how we view the issue. If we accept it isn't these faceless near-criminals throwing garbage at us, but rather advertising companies producing ads that work. Still, I do not know what to do about it. It is the bane of minority to be at the will of the majority.

combatentropy 10y ago

> I am not sure what the solution is. I boycott them. Google News will present three articles about the same thing, and I will click the one whose headline is most like what a headline should be: an actual summary of the story. Sometimes all of them are clickbait, so I just click the one for the site that I like most. It was surprising when I first saw that even respectable companies like Time and USA Today had adopted the clickbait style with gusto. I'm not saying that this boycott will catch on and change the world. It's just my own little war. > Within the insular world of tech people, it all seems so absurd It's not because I'm in tech that I am wise to their tricks. It's because of my writing background. I have only bits and pieces of evidence from my own non-tech friends, but I'm pretty sure most people are aware that ads and clickbait are manipulative and that gossip magazines are the linguistic equivalent of junk food and bad for the heart. And while I said I was dismayed to see the old guard like Time and USA Today adopt the tactic of clickbait, most disconcerting of all is to see everyday people start to adopt it. I've seen quite a few blog posts and Medium articles posted on HN with clickbait titles. And on a certain video production forum, I see members starting threads with clickbait subjects (something like "I bought this camera, and you won't believe what happened!"). Forum members get no money for clicks. So why do they do it? Maybe they just want some attention. But I'm a little worried that it's just unconscious imitation, that clickbaiting is catching on like a bad habit.

rms_returns 10y ago
Another problem is how do you decide that something is clickbait without clicking it? Agreed that most of the catchy headlines are actually clickbaits, but there could be always some that are genuine. Think of clickbaits as a marketing tactic. On the way to your workplace, you see hundreds of those salesmen trying to sell you something by telling tall tales. Your impression would be like, "Hey, not these stupid fellas again. Next time one comes near me, I'll start a war on them!". However, if you think about it, a substantial portion of those salesmen (at least 20-30%) are genuine people who are just earning their livelihoods. You know that even after accounting for some of their exaggerations, their products are sometimes actually useful to you!
- viewer5 10y ago

intrasight 10y ago

What is "click-bait" in this context? Is it in the Google search results? Or is it an ad displayed in a page? If it's an ad, why call it click-bait - it's just an ad.

stinkytaco 10y ago
Because largely they masquerade as content, and some users are not savvy enough to spot that. An "article" like "You won't believe what these 80s stars look like now" is not obviously an ad.

homero 10y ago

It's tiring. Main reason I don't open Facebook anymore

dhimes 10y ago

Work for what? Do you actually purchase items you see in these ads because of the ads? Especially on mobile, every ad click I've ever made was accidental. Small businesses are foolish for advertising like this, especially ppc. Large business may be able to get some sort of successful branding out of it I suppose.

mikestew 10y ago

One aspect of web ads that nobody seems to mention, especially with click-bait articles, is that people click them. No one seems to mention the exceedingly obvious, without which the whole discussion is rendered moot. The fact that someone, somewhere is clicking an ad is not lost us, but we've moved on to a higher level discussion.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

Mahn 10y ago

In theory the solution is simple: show click-bait ads to people who enjoy them only. Publishers still get make money and the ads don't get in the way for people who don't care. This is why Google and Facebook are kings in the online advertising world, because the have mastered the art of showing ads to people that are most likely to care. Heck, Google Search doesn't even show ads at all in their search pages if they figured you never click on them. In practice this is hard to do without troves of user behaviour data, but the approach that companies like Taboola and Outbrain take of showing irrelevant ads to everyone visiting is definitively not the solution, and if anything it's only going to diminish the efficacy of online ads further in the long run.

petewailes 10y ago
The Google bot is just flat wrong. Everyone gets ads. You Judy aren't realising what's an ad there anymore.

dspillett 10y ago

> They work, and they work very well. I suspect it would be more realistic to say "they work at least very slightly better than the less attention-grabby-information-zero headlines". If they worked very well there wouldn't need to be so many of them per page and for articles carrying them to be split into so many single paragraph pages (because enough money would be made that the site owner would start considering design and UX factors as much as getting that extra 0.0000000001$ per page impression).

johnward 10y ago

Right. "They ruining the web" for us but apparently they are providing value to someone else.

criley2 10y ago
Clickbait is like heroin. Just because people use it so much it kills them doesn't mean it provides value to them. Just because clickbait preys on our nature doesn't make it valuable. Easy to argue that by choosing manipulation over substance for the sole reason of generating revenue that you are not providing value, you are more of a rent seeker, not providing anything new of value but rather seeking rents on existing content. Seeing as most clickbait is "Top 10 Things Our Underpaid Interns Stole From Other Sites: You won't believe #7!", the rent seeking analogy is kinda decent.
- johnward 10y ago
  Maybe "value" wasn't the right word. I would hope that these types of things would fail because the users would give up clicking through 20 pages of ads but the fact that "respected" outlets like Forbes still do it suggests otherwise.