9 ms·

At the Guardian we needed our own video player, because we couldn't rely on a third party platform not to take down something that we published. Editorial indep

by cantlin 10y ago

At the Guardian we needed our own video player, because we couldn't rely on a third party platform not to take down something that we published. Editorial independence was important. We implemented our player on top of video.js, and most of the developers who were there at the time still have nightmares about it. We finally got the thing working, looking good, embeddable, reasonably cross-browser. We shipped it. A few days later, we get a curious email from some ad provider. "It looks like your VPAID ads have stopped running!" Oops. We'd naively believed we could live without Flash (I take full responsibility for this stupidity). The sales folks pointed to a big gap between our old projected revenue and our new projected revenue. So we went and did the work[0], hating every minute of it. The underinvestment in ad-tech by publishers and the cancerous ecosystem of vendors that have grown up around it is one of biggest collective mistakes made by an industry. I am optimistic that this problem can be solved, and we are actively looking at this at my current employer. We sell direct, usually without a ton of intermediaries. Talk to me if you want to know more. Incidentally, if you want to know if a publisher is going to survive the next five years, a decent proxy is the number of intermediaries involved in their ad supply chain. [0] https://github.com/guardian/video-js-vpaid https://github.com/guardian/video-js-vpaid

whatever_dude 10y ago
Thanks for sharing. Regardless of my opinion on the subject it's always great to read impressions coming from someone who worked on it.
pawadu 10y ago
Thanks for sharing this. May I ask, did anyone tried to talk to the management about the long term effects of this? Long term = people will eventually learn to avoid your site because BBC feels much more responsive.
- cantlin 10y ago
  We spent a lot of time talking about that balance. The thing to remember is that these conversations are happening in the context of an industry that's in structural decline. You have ever lower print revenues, and Facebook and Google taking 80%+ of the spend that's moving to digital. And then you have a sales culture incentivised on short-term outcomes. In that environment it becomes really hard to turn down a buck. My two cents right now would be that consumer revenues (people paying you directly) is probably the only way to run a profitable generalist news company. That, or have the backing of a nation state (BBC) or philanthropic institution. If you want to run a business from ads on the internet, you need a great case for why you're a better option than Facebook, and most news companies just can't make that case.
thirdsun 10y ago
Thanks for your insight. Maybe I'm naive but how are these ads of any value to the advertiser? - nobody wants them, everybody ignores them. How can ads that surely almost exclusively receive accidental clicks be so worthwhile for publishers like you?
- merpnderp 10y ago
  I'm no expert but I believe the clickthroughs are measured in tiny fractions. It is quite possible you don't know anyone who clicks on them on purpose, but that doesn't mean few enough people do it to not make money.
- dave_sullivan 10y ago
  Advertising is a weird business. There's different types of media: print, television, digital (banner ads). Print is dead (has been the increasingly accurate argument for 10 years now), television is expensive and untrackable, and digital is here to save the ad industry because that's where all your customers are and it's very trackable. The value to the advertiser is either direct-action ("click here and buuuuuy!") or branding ("we exist, see!") Companies like Verizon, Proctor and Gamble, Johnson and Johnson, unilever, etc. spend billions on branding. How does that money get allocated? Well, you've got a brand manager for, say, Acme Inc. Their job is "Get more people to buy" and they split their resources between creative--often working with big agencies (think Madmen, see AdAge)--and media buying. There's often pressure to spend less on creative and more on ad buys. And when ad buys don't perform, they say "We should have spent more on creative". Media buying is basically buying banner ads (or tv or whatever). They're typically sold at a CPM (Cost Per thousand iMpressions), less often Cost Per Click. So to answer your question: major brands have billions for branding and it's a bunch of people's jobs to spend that money and convince the people they work for that it's money well spent. And if it's not money well spent, they'll find someone who will tell them it is.
  - manigandham 10y ago
    > So to answer your question: major brands have billions for branding and it's a bunch of people's jobs to spend that money and convince the people they work for that it's money well spent. And if it's not money well spent, they'll find someone who will tell them it is. I'll be the first to say there's a lot of mismanagement, incompetence, politics, etc that leads to this but it's also one of the most data driven industries around and there's a lot of proof behind the results. It's not all just random guessing.
mtgx 10y ago
They will have to solve it by next year, because Chrome will stop activating Flash by default. http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/15/11679394/chrome-to-block-flash-later-2016 http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/15/11679394/chrome-to-block-f...
redcalx 10y ago
Incidentally, your (The Guardian) android app is very slow to load, it's annoying enough that I uninstalled it.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
bnastic 10y ago
Seriously, how did you (and everyone else) end up in this mess? Imagine your printed edition where your editors have no idea what sort of ads are printed in your paper, because it's all added at the printing firm by some shady characters.
- untog 10y ago
  The short answer is that online advertising pays very little compared to print advertising. Obtrusive video advertising pays slightly more. You might say that such advertising is losing in the long run because it's alienating users, and you'd be right. But when you balance sheet shows a precipitous decline month on month as your print readers convert to online ones, you don't have many other options to keep investors happy.
- canucktux 10y ago
  It already is that way to some extent. Not every newspaper has the same ad setup. Ads are added at printing and are still targeted to the best of the publishing companies ability.
mercer 10y ago
I've spent months working on the video players for all the brands for one of the largest media companies in the world. I did plenty unpleasant work for them, like building a clean redesign, agonizing over page load speeds, and then filling up the page with multi-megabyte tracking tools and every possible ad under sun (which would not only ruin the design, but often inexplicably and randomly break the page because of really, really shitty code). All that work was pleasant compared to the horror of working on the video player though, and I felt bad for the full-timers who were usually put on 'bug-fixing' duty while we contractors got to work on the cool projects...
- lostlogin 10y ago
  I always feel like people are brave to admit they do this sort of work, and I have less of this feeling reading about much older professions. However it's very interesting and the stories are often both amusing and horrifying whatever my overriding view.
  - mercer 10y ago
    I'm not entirely sure what you're saying (or implying), but I'm curious. Could you elaborate?
    - lostlogin 10y ago
      I perceive the industry to be a waste of very talented people's time and skill sets. The brains doing this stuff could solve some huge problems yet they are just working on ways of serving up more adverts in more distracting ways. Somewhat in conflict with this view of mine is my interest in the stories that come out of the industry and the clever ways hard problems are solved.
      - mercer 10y ago
        Hah, I agree. That's why I developed some degree of depression and vowed never to do this kind of thing again. Not that I'm likely to solve some huge problems, but at the very least I don't want to make the world a worse place. I don't know if your view and interest are in conflict though. Valuable knowledge can come from bad sources, no?
delibes 10y ago
Funnily enough, MailOnline had the same problem and also implemented VPAID for VideoJS https://github.com/MailOnline/videojs-vast-vpaid https://github.com/MailOnline/videojs-vast-vpaid I really hoped that the Guardian and others were going to create their own safer (no pron/malware) and faster (less RTB) network and cut out much of the cruft when I read about Pangaea last year. Looks like it's more about sharing data though :( http://pangaeaalliance.com/ http://pangaeaalliance.com/
- jhenkens 10y ago
  I work in industry, and while I haven't explored the Guardian's player, I do use MailOnline's plugins extensively, and they work better than any other tester I've found. Fantastic stuff, and its open source.
peeky 10y ago
I've actually emailed the Guardian before to say I would gladly pay at least whatever they earn from my ad impressions to have an ad-free site. They just pointed me to the mobile apps where this is already an option. I wish more sites offered an alternative to the dilemma of UX-breaking ads vs ad blocker guilt.
- agarden 10y ago
  You can pay them $49/year. If that doesn't remove the ads, then install an ad blocker that you turn on for just their site. https://membership.theguardian.com/us/supporter?INTCMP=ADBLOCK_BANNER_TOYNBEE_US https://membership.theguardian.com/us/supporter?INTCMP=ADBLO...
  - lostlogin 10y ago
    The idea of paying them then paying someone else to remove their shit is a little insane. Until that is resolved, I pay for my ad blockers. The added bonus is that I can remove any content I don't like (lifestyle stories about our rugby players).
- Fiahil 10y ago
  Ad blocker guilt? Never felt that.
manigandham 10y ago
As someone who's been in the adtech business for years, I admire the Guardian for being one of the better engineered sites out there when it comes to ads. At least you guys have fast loading content and try to optimize the experience as much as you can. We built a brand new modern ad network[1] and it's amazing how few advertisers and publishers care or even understand how important a good user experience is. 1. https://instinctive.io https://instinctive.io
- roymurdock 10y ago
  Seems like the ad market is bifurcating: "native content" for those with ad blockers, and ridiculous garbage-ads for those who either (1) don't have the tech literacy to install and run an adblocker, or (2) are whitelisting out of empathy for content creators. Increasingly I believe we'll see the former. Does "native content" (paid-for pieces disguised as objective information) require "sophisticated" ad network tech?
  - manigandham 10y ago
    There's a difference between the formats and the distribution systems. Content has always been a good marketing tool, we're just starting to see a lot more of it with publishers setting up their own "agencies" to sell pieces written by the same teams but for advertisers. Some are actually really great (Netflix stories for example). When it comes to distribution, there is just a lot that needs to be done for advertising. Part of the big draw for digital/online is all the data you can collect and analyze and use to optimize. Publishers usually do not have the technical resources to build this or manage and integrate with all the other thousands of systems that advertisers use. It's almost always worth it to have a vendor that specializes in the infrastructure so publishers can just focus on their own business. However, because adblockers mostly work at the network interface level, the typical 3rd party javascript tag approach is very easy to disable, and self-published native content by publishers using the existing content management system is a good workaround. It's more of a stop gap then a long term approach though.
    - JoshTriplett 10y ago
Shinchy 10y ago
You worked on the newer Video Player for the Guardian? Coincidently I created the really old one built in Flash, never had too many bugs though since most of the work was already done with the Flash framework. Just visual stuff going all over the place.
- thruflo22 10y ago
  As part of the R&R project? I half won and then firmly lost a project around then to port their video serving to our web tv platform. Lost due to severe inability to manage such a project but we had a nice multi-format video player for the time: js abstraction over different players for different platforms (flash, quicktime, windows media, ...).
warfangle 10y ago
Feel your pain. Worked on a video player at a previous company. Advertising was the biggest pain point. The fun part is when the ad trafficker would run a VPAID payload with 18 sequential ad-auction vendors. We saw delay from first byte of the player to first byte of the advertisement go from Xms on a fast connection to > 30 seconds. And then they blamed the player for being slow \o/
afandian 10y ago
And in doing so made something that doesn't work with the most recent browser on my phone. And breaks in a very annoying way. https://twitter.com/joewass/status/720661385504538625 https://twitter.com/joewass/status/720661385504538625
profeta 10y ago
keep in mind that the alternative for flash is downloading a script from who knows where and running it on the same scope as the page. for each ad. it is the exact same thing. No matter if they moved away from flash or not. they still would have full control of your site and be able to do what they want just the same. They only have to copy and paste javascript instead of actionscript.
syngrog66 10y ago
> Incidentally, if you want to know if a publisher is going to survive the next five years, a decent proxy is the number of intermediaries involved in their ad supply chain. indeed. rule of thumb: every intermediary is a potential disintermediary (see Google, Apple etc) bright side: or acquirer!

by cantlin 10y ago

whatever_dude 10y ago

Thanks for sharing. Regardless of my opinion on the subject it's always great to read impressions coming from someone who worked on it.

pawadu 10y ago

Thanks for sharing this. May I ask, did anyone tried to talk to the management about the long term effects of this? Long term = people will eventually learn to avoid your site because BBC feels much more responsive.

cantlin 10y ago
We spent a lot of time talking about that balance. The thing to remember is that these conversations are happening in the context of an industry that's in structural decline. You have ever lower print revenues, and Facebook and Google taking 80%+ of the spend that's moving to digital. And then you have a sales culture incentivised on short-term outcomes. In that environment it becomes really hard to turn down a buck. My two cents right now would be that consumer revenues (people paying you directly) is probably the only way to run a profitable generalist news company. That, or have the backing of a nation state (BBC) or philanthropic institution. If you want to run a business from ads on the internet, you need a great case for why you're a better option than Facebook, and most news companies just can't make that case.

thirdsun 10y ago

Thanks for your insight. Maybe I'm naive but how are these ads of any value to the advertiser? - nobody wants them, everybody ignores them. How can ads that surely almost exclusively receive accidental clicks be so worthwhile for publishers like you?

merpnderp 10y ago
I'm no expert but I believe the clickthroughs are measured in tiny fractions. It is quite possible you don't know anyone who clicks on them on purpose, but that doesn't mean few enough people do it to not make money.
dave_sullivan 10y ago
Advertising is a weird business. There's different types of media: print, television, digital (banner ads). Print is dead (has been the increasingly accurate argument for 10 years now), television is expensive and untrackable, and digital is here to save the ad industry because that's where all your customers are and it's very trackable. The value to the advertiser is either direct-action ("click here and buuuuuy!") or branding ("we exist, see!") Companies like Verizon, Proctor and Gamble, Johnson and Johnson, unilever, etc. spend billions on branding. How does that money get allocated? Well, you've got a brand manager for, say, Acme Inc. Their job is "Get more people to buy" and they split their resources between creative--often working with big agencies (think Madmen, see AdAge)--and media buying. There's often pressure to spend less on creative and more on ad buys. And when ad buys don't perform, they say "We should have spent more on creative". Media buying is basically buying banner ads (or tv or whatever). They're typically sold at a CPM (Cost Per thousand iMpressions), less often Cost Per Click. So to answer your question: major brands have billions for branding and it's a bunch of people's jobs to spend that money and convince the people they work for that it's money well spent. And if it's not money well spent, they'll find someone who will tell them it is.
- manigandham 10y ago
  > So to answer your question: major brands have billions for branding and it's a bunch of people's jobs to spend that money and convince the people they work for that it's money well spent. And if it's not money well spent, they'll find someone who will tell them it is. I'll be the first to say there's a lot of mismanagement, incompetence, politics, etc that leads to this but it's also one of the most data driven industries around and there's a lot of proof behind the results. It's not all just random guessing.

mtgx 10y ago

They will have to solve it by next year, because Chrome will stop activating Flash by default. http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/15/11679394/chrome-to-block-flash-later-2016 http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/15/11679394/chrome-to-block-f...

redcalx 10y ago

Incidentally, your (The Guardian) android app is very slow to load, it's annoying enough that I uninstalled it.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

bnastic 10y ago

Seriously, how did you (and everyone else) end up in this mess? Imagine your printed edition where your editors have no idea what sort of ads are printed in your paper, because it's all added at the printing firm by some shady characters.

untog 10y ago
The short answer is that online advertising pays very little compared to print advertising. Obtrusive video advertising pays slightly more. You might say that such advertising is losing in the long run because it's alienating users, and you'd be right. But when you balance sheet shows a precipitous decline month on month as your print readers convert to online ones, you don't have many other options to keep investors happy.
canucktux 10y ago
It already is that way to some extent. Not every newspaper has the same ad setup. Ads are added at printing and are still targeted to the best of the publishing companies ability.

mercer 10y ago

I've spent months working on the video players for all the brands for one of the largest media companies in the world. I did plenty unpleasant work for them, like building a clean redesign, agonizing over page load speeds, and then filling up the page with multi-megabyte tracking tools and every possible ad under sun (which would not only ruin the design, but often inexplicably and randomly break the page because of really, really shitty code). All that work was pleasant compared to the horror of working on the video player though, and I felt bad for the full-timers who were usually put on 'bug-fixing' duty while we contractors got to work on the cool projects...

lostlogin 10y ago
I always feel like people are brave to admit they do this sort of work, and I have less of this feeling reading about much older professions. However it's very interesting and the stories are often both amusing and horrifying whatever my overriding view.
- mercer 10y ago
  I'm not entirely sure what you're saying (or implying), but I'm curious. Could you elaborate?
  - lostlogin 10y ago
    I perceive the industry to be a waste of very talented people's time and skill sets. The brains doing this stuff could solve some huge problems yet they are just working on ways of serving up more adverts in more distracting ways. Somewhat in conflict with this view of mine is my interest in the stories that come out of the industry and the clever ways hard problems are solved.
    - mercer 10y ago
      Hah, I agree. That's why I developed some degree of depression and vowed never to do this kind of thing again. Not that I'm likely to solve some huge problems, but at the very least I don't want to make the world a worse place. I don't know if your view and interest are in conflict though. Valuable knowledge can come from bad sources, no?

delibes 10y ago

Funnily enough, MailOnline had the same problem and also implemented VPAID for VideoJS https://github.com/MailOnline/videojs-vast-vpaid https://github.com/MailOnline/videojs-vast-vpaid I really hoped that the Guardian and others were going to create their own safer (no pron/malware) and faster (less RTB) network and cut out much of the cruft when I read about Pangaea last year. Looks like it's more about sharing data though :( http://pangaeaalliance.com/ http://pangaeaalliance.com/

jhenkens 10y ago
I work in industry, and while I haven't explored the Guardian's player, I do use MailOnline's plugins extensively, and they work better than any other tester I've found. Fantastic stuff, and its open source.

peeky 10y ago

I've actually emailed the Guardian before to say I would gladly pay at least whatever they earn from my ad impressions to have an ad-free site. They just pointed me to the mobile apps where this is already an option. I wish more sites offered an alternative to the dilemma of UX-breaking ads vs ad blocker guilt.

agarden 10y ago
You can pay them $49/year. If that doesn't remove the ads, then install an ad blocker that you turn on for just their site. https://membership.theguardian.com/us/supporter?INTCMP=ADBLOCK_BANNER_TOYNBEE_US https://membership.theguardian.com/us/supporter?INTCMP=ADBLO...
- lostlogin 10y ago
  The idea of paying them then paying someone else to remove their shit is a little insane. Until that is resolved, I pay for my ad blockers. The added bonus is that I can remove any content I don't like (lifestyle stories about our rugby players).
Fiahil 10y ago
Ad blocker guilt? Never felt that.

manigandham 10y ago

As someone who's been in the adtech business for years, I admire the Guardian for being one of the better engineered sites out there when it comes to ads. At least you guys have fast loading content and try to optimize the experience as much as you can. We built a brand new modern ad network[1] and it's amazing how few advertisers and publishers care or even understand how important a good user experience is. 1. https://instinctive.io https://instinctive.io

roymurdock 10y ago
Seems like the ad market is bifurcating: "native content" for those with ad blockers, and ridiculous garbage-ads for those who either (1) don't have the tech literacy to install and run an adblocker, or (2) are whitelisting out of empathy for content creators. Increasingly I believe we'll see the former. Does "native content" (paid-for pieces disguised as objective information) require "sophisticated" ad network tech?
- manigandham 10y ago
  There's a difference between the formats and the distribution systems. Content has always been a good marketing tool, we're just starting to see a lot more of it with publishers setting up their own "agencies" to sell pieces written by the same teams but for advertisers. Some are actually really great (Netflix stories for example). When it comes to distribution, there is just a lot that needs to be done for advertising. Part of the big draw for digital/online is all the data you can collect and analyze and use to optimize. Publishers usually do not have the technical resources to build this or manage and integrate with all the other thousands of systems that advertisers use. It's almost always worth it to have a vendor that specializes in the infrastructure so publishers can just focus on their own business. However, because adblockers mostly work at the network interface level, the typical 3rd party javascript tag approach is very easy to disable, and self-published native content by publishers using the existing content management system is a good workaround. It's more of a stop gap then a long term approach though.
  - JoshTriplett 10y ago

Shinchy 10y ago

You worked on the newer Video Player for the Guardian? Coincidently I created the really old one built in Flash, never had too many bugs though since most of the work was already done with the Flash framework. Just visual stuff going all over the place.

thruflo22 10y ago
As part of the R&R project? I half won and then firmly lost a project around then to port their video serving to our web tv platform. Lost due to severe inability to manage such a project but we had a nice multi-format video player for the time: js abstraction over different players for different platforms (flash, quicktime, windows media, ...).

warfangle 10y ago

Feel your pain. Worked on a video player at a previous company. Advertising was the biggest pain point. The fun part is when the ad trafficker would run a VPAID payload with 18 sequential ad-auction vendors. We saw delay from first byte of the player to first byte of the advertisement go from Xms on a fast connection to > 30 seconds. And then they blamed the player for being slow \o/

afandian 10y ago

And in doing so made something that doesn't work with the most recent browser on my phone. And breaks in a very annoying way. https://twitter.com/joewass/status/720661385504538625 https://twitter.com/joewass/status/720661385504538625

profeta 10y ago

keep in mind that the alternative for flash is downloading a script from who knows where and running it on the same scope as the page. for each ad. it is the exact same thing. No matter if they moved away from flash or not. they still would have full control of your site and be able to do what they want just the same. They only have to copy and paste javascript instead of actionscript.

syngrog66 10y ago

> Incidentally, if you want to know if a publisher is going to survive the next five years, a decent proxy is the number of intermediaries involved in their ad supply chain. indeed. rule of thumb: every intermediary is a potential disintermediary (see Google, Apple etc) bright side: or acquirer!