5 ms·

Interesting how the response of sites with terrible user experiences caused by ad tech is not to say “oh, how can we change our ads so people will accept them?”

Interesting how the response of sites with terrible user experiences caused by ad tech is not to say “oh, how can we change our ads so people will accept them?” but rather to find ways to make their user experiences even more horrible, e.g. popping up new unwanted interruptions accusing you of having an ad-blocker. Hey big web sites, here is the solution, and I won’t even charge you for it: stop making terrible user experiences. I am not trying to block your ad; I am blocking your carelessly-written malware-laden code, your obnoxious pop-ups, your auto-playing videos, your shove-in-my-face-at-the-worst-time messages, your unreasonable consumption of my mobile data, and everything that is making a simple article difficult to load. I’ll even tell you how to fix this: make more simple text ads, or images that are not animated and not peppered with distracting colors. Make the first paragraph of every article a nice little blurb telling me more about a company that pays you to advertise for them. Put some cute ads in muted colors inline with the content. Create a couple simple links to things that cost money that could support you (apps, T-shirts or whatever). In short, don’t be a complete jerk to the people you apparently “need” to help maintain the costs of your site.

krapp 9y ago
Do many sites have that much direct editorial control over the ads they run? I've only ever done a little ad banner work so I don't know how it is for "large" sites, but I assume the people writing and maintaining the code are not the ones actually selling or creating the ads. I assume those decisions are made between sales and the client.
- alkonaut 9y ago
  Any site that doesn’t control the content of their ads deserve to be starved out of business as fast as possible by ad blockers. That is: I don’t mind ads, I just don’t accept “adtech”.
  - krapp 9y ago
    Advertisers tend not to be willing to give that much control to whatever medium they're advertising in. More often than not, they can dictate terms because they drive revenue.
    - alkonaut 9y ago
      I understand that. But once adblocking ensures that the cost of an impression via an “ad network” is an order of magnitude higher than the alternative - their trust will likely increase.
    - CaptSpify 9y ago
      Well advertisers have clearly shown that they can't be responsible with the controls they have. It's time their tools are taken away. I'm not sure that how this should happen, but this is a clear sign that something in this system is seriously broken.
    - zipwitch 9y ago
      And they then use that leverage to attack the readers/viewers. Speaking for myself, I will see the internet wither and die before I'll accept that as a valid model for anything.
getaclue99 9y ago
You do realize that these websites give zero shits about you, right? “Oh no, this megacorporation is willing to exploit everyone for a profit, but maybe they’ll see the error of their ways and back out of this lucrative revenue model!” Widen up, dude. These websites don’t care about you as a user. You’re a metric, you’re a fucking dot on a graph at a board meeting where a small number of people in suits decide how best to extract every last red cent from you and the millions of other cattle that only exist to fuel their fucking empire.
- dang 9y ago
  Please don't post rageful rants to HN. Some websites may treat their users as cattle, but that's no reason to spoil this one.
- makecheck 9y ago
  One can find many examples of corporations successfully making money on things that aren’t good (such as harm to people and the environment). Web sites are merely the latest. Just because terrible companies exist and are “successful” doesn’t mean that they’re not crappy and it sure doesn’t mean we should give up and not work for something better.
danso 9y ago
> “oh, how can we change our ads so people will accept them?” If a single website -- say, your local or regional news site -- overhauled its ad experience to become more user-friendly, how would you even notice, if their ad server was added to your ad blocker's blacklist?
- TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
  Host ads as first-party content?
  - intrasight 9y ago
    This is obviously the right solution. It's what print newspapers and magazines do. Why isn't there a quality first-party ad platform? Is there a business opportunity here?
    - danso 9y ago
      Some non-legacy news sites do make ads first-party content, i.e. native advertising or sponsored content. BuzzFeed is probably the most prolific at it [0], with a great tech team and focus, but even BuzzFeed is floundering when it comes to revenue targets. I think Quartz [1] also does it well (though it's also part of the Atlantic media group. Newer outlets do it well too -- e.g. theoutline.com and axios.com -- but both are too new to know how viable their business is. Of the legacy outlets, New York Times is in the forefront as it is in most digital categories (the creators of D3, Backbone, and other tech have been on the payroll), but most of their gains seem to have come from digital subscriptions, with digital advertising still nowhere close to offsetting the loss in print ad revenue [2] I'm guessing the reason why native advertising hasn't been the status quo is related to inertia and the timing of seismic change in the industry. When I was in j-school many years ago, the professors were fond of saying that newspapers was basically money printers with profit margins only rivaled by the cocaine trade -- though this was only the case after TV and radio crushed the industry, to the point that most cities became one-newspaper monopolies. At around the time of the digital boom, i.e. 90s and mid-200s, regional and local newspapers were floundering and bigger players figured it be wise to swoop them up and turn one-city monopolies into regional monopolies. The NYT famously bought the Boston Globe in 1993 for $1.1 billion -- and then sold it for $70m in 2013 [3]. McClatchy had become the 3rd biggest publisher after buying the Knight-Ridder chain for $4.5 billion in 2006 [4] and racking up $2B in debt as the entire industry was facing double digit drops in revenue. And all of this was about the time when publishers realized (too late) that Craigslist had effectively decimated everyone: classified ads were once as much as 20-25% of a newspaper's revenue. All this is to say that the news business definitely had the money to blow on innovation [5], but by the time they realized how fucked the Internet was going to make things, they weren't in a position of confidence and stability. There was some efforts -- I think cars.com was a bright spot for McClatchy and Tribune [6] -- but all too little and too late. The shitty ads that I see news sites serving up seem to me to be a symptom of legacy inertia and existential panic -- going with DoubleClick and other shitty 3rd-party ads probably seemed like the most efficient solution. Remember that most of these companies still have significant print ad departments, because these ads still make way more money than digital. And then there's the traditional firewall between the editorial and ad departments. I worked at a McClatchy newspaper as a reporter and a developer and there were many problems arising from the fact that digital operations were basically under the business side, and effectively in an entirely different building. I think the other problem is that ads are fundamentally a different experience in print than they are on the web (and for TV and radio). Newspapers have a whole page to work with for ad layout, and ads can come in all kinds of sizes and formats, from full-page ads to small bottom corner ads to tiny classifieds. When newspapers were rolling in money, they were also the primary places for the average citizen to find out things like stock prices, government auctions/notices, apartment rentals, and local sales and events. My parents (Vietnamese refugees) weren't much into reading English publications, but we subscribed to the local newspaper's weekend edition because it was chock full of ads and coupons. Ads were a destination -- arguably, for the average person, they were more valuable and desired than the newspaper's actual editorial content, in the way that people might watch the Super Bowl just for the ads. In today's web environment, is there any normal mindset in which people actively seek out ads (other than looking them up on YouTube if you missed the Super Bowl)? The kind of native advertising that BuzzFeed et. al seem to have the most success with are advertorials that don't seem like ads. Unfortunately, this creates its own conflict with news-minded organizations. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/12/buzzhome/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/12/buzzhome/ [1] https://nypost.com/2017/11/16/buzzfeeds-revenue-to-fall-70m-short-of-target/ https://nypost.com/2017/11/16/buzzfeeds-revenue-to-fall-70m-... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/business/media/new-york-times-earnings.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/business/media/new-york-t... [3] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/business/media/new-york-times-company-sells-boston-globe.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/business/media/new-york-ti... [4] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/06/business/media/06paper.html http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/06/business/media/06paper.htm... [5] http://archives.cjr.org/feature/the_newspaper_that_almost_seized_the_future.php http://archives.cjr.org/feature/the_newspaper_that_almost_se... [6] http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-cars-spinoff-0908-biz-20160907-story.html http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-cars-spinoff-0908-...
noncoml 9y ago
I had to disable my ad blocker today to try out another plugin. The sites were 2-3x slower to load. There is no way anyone can convince me to disable my ad blocker again.
lscotte 9y ago
Oh... I, like most people, am actually intentionally blocking the ads.
lwansbrough 9y ago
> Interesting how the response of sites with terrible user experiences caused by ad tech is not to say “oh, how can we change our ads so people will accept them?” but rather to find ways to make their user experiences even more horrible, e.g. popping up new unwanted interruptions accusing you of having an ad-blocker. That's not how online advertising works. If a user doesn't like ads, they block all ads indiscriminately. Changing ads doesn't do anything, because users will always block ads regardless of their quality, at least until the vast majority of ads are "acceptable" -- and even then, many demographics will continue blocking anyway. What is "acceptable", anyway? Make the ad small enough and/or dumb enough that it is no longer worth anything to the advertiser? > stop making terrible user experiences. There are plenty of websites with acceptable UX (or UX that isn't practically made worse by ads) that use ads. How many of them are on your whitelist? Do you even know which sites are showing ads if you use an adblocker? > I’ll even tell you how to fix this: make more simple text ads, or images that are not animated and not peppered with distracting colors. While this is a reasonable request, it doesn't change the fact that many/most people now have an adblocker on their browser. There's no doubt this problem has been exasperated by malicious ad creatives. But the onus of correcting the problem lies in the hands of BOTH adblocker developers AND the online ads industry (including publishers, exchanges, and advertisers.)
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  I always forget to install my ad-blocker after an install. Once I start browsing the web I re-install it. If ads weren't so terrible, I would likely just forget to install it.
- nasredin 9y ago
  >But the onus of correcting the problem lies in the hands of BOTH adblocker developers AND the online ads industry (including publishers, exchanges, and advertisers.) Disagree. Adblock developers should block ads. Advertising-surveillance companies should die. Website owners should personally vet AND HOST ads on their sites. It's all very simple in my opinion. --- Why do you think adblocking is such a "problem" for some? Because almost all ads are hosted on third party servers. I know a couple small blogs that host image ads on the side of the page and it's not blocked in any default ABP lists. The "adbros" brought this upon themselves. This war on our minds is so pervasive they got fanboys on most major tech forums always defending them. These people are either in the industry themselves or suffering from the Battered Wife Syndrome: "If only adblock developers weren't so mean... maybe these adbros would stop pushing malware and spying on us". Also "gorhill" is an asshole.
CaptSpify 9y ago
Although I agree with your first point, I think this is a symptom of a much larger problem that we are ignoring: We have a serious economic problem in which we can't fund things that we want and need. Instead of making advertising "less bad", we should be looking into alternative ways to fund sites and services. Advertising in it's current form simply needs to go.
- jacques_chester 9y ago
  My bet is microsubscription, but that's only because it's something I've been working on (Robojar). Part of my motivation has been to make the best parts of the early web economically viable. For a few years it was normal to have relatively successful small sites with good writing and regular readers. They've largely been driven out by the economics of clickbait. I'd like to help that come back by breaking the rigid nexus between traffic and revenue. Adblock/flattr are doing something very similar. Google Contributor was, but seems to have morphed into a prepaid micropayment scheme. Patreon splits the middle. I still think the model where a single subscription fee is distributed amongst participating sites/services/apps approximately according to usage is the best overall model.
  - marcusjt 9y ago
    Flattr http://flattr.com http://flattr.com is the best solution out there IMHO, Patreon is good but only makes sense if you're a regular/loyal consumer of a source.
    - jacques_chester 9y ago
      Flattr is the closest to what I'm aiming at. Some minor scheme differences, quite distinct implementation. One thing I can do differently is to interoperate smoothly with paywalls without revealing user identity.

krapp 9y ago

Do many sites have that much direct editorial control over the ads they run? I've only ever done a little ad banner work so I don't know how it is for "large" sites, but I assume the people writing and maintaining the code are not the ones actually selling or creating the ads. I assume those decisions are made between sales and the client.

alkonaut 9y ago
Any site that doesn’t control the content of their ads deserve to be starved out of business as fast as possible by ad blockers. That is: I don’t mind ads, I just don’t accept “adtech”.
- krapp 9y ago
  Advertisers tend not to be willing to give that much control to whatever medium they're advertising in. More often than not, they can dictate terms because they drive revenue.
  - alkonaut 9y ago
    I understand that. But once adblocking ensures that the cost of an impression via an “ad network” is an order of magnitude higher than the alternative - their trust will likely increase.
  - CaptSpify 9y ago
    Well advertisers have clearly shown that they can't be responsible with the controls they have. It's time their tools are taken away. I'm not sure that how this should happen, but this is a clear sign that something in this system is seriously broken.
  - zipwitch 9y ago
    And they then use that leverage to attack the readers/viewers. Speaking for myself, I will see the internet wither and die before I'll accept that as a valid model for anything.

getaclue99 9y ago

You do realize that these websites give zero shits about you, right? “Oh no, this megacorporation is willing to exploit everyone for a profit, but maybe they’ll see the error of their ways and back out of this lucrative revenue model!” Widen up, dude. These websites don’t care about you as a user. You’re a metric, you’re a fucking dot on a graph at a board meeting where a small number of people in suits decide how best to extract every last red cent from you and the millions of other cattle that only exist to fuel their fucking empire.

dang 9y ago
Please don't post rageful rants to HN. Some websites may treat their users as cattle, but that's no reason to spoil this one.
makecheck 9y ago
One can find many examples of corporations successfully making money on things that aren’t good (such as harm to people and the environment). Web sites are merely the latest. Just because terrible companies exist and are “successful” doesn’t mean that they’re not crappy and it sure doesn’t mean we should give up and not work for something better.

danso 9y ago

> “oh, how can we change our ads so people will accept them?” If a single website -- say, your local or regional news site -- overhauled its ad experience to become more user-friendly, how would you even notice, if their ad server was added to your ad blocker's blacklist?

TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
Host ads as first-party content?
- intrasight 9y ago
  This is obviously the right solution. It's what print newspapers and magazines do. Why isn't there a quality first-party ad platform? Is there a business opportunity here?
  - danso 9y ago
    Some non-legacy news sites do make ads first-party content, i.e. native advertising or sponsored content. BuzzFeed is probably the most prolific at it [0], with a great tech team and focus, but even BuzzFeed is floundering when it comes to revenue targets. I think Quartz [1] also does it well (though it's also part of the Atlantic media group. Newer outlets do it well too -- e.g. theoutline.com and axios.com -- but both are too new to know how viable their business is. Of the legacy outlets, New York Times is in the forefront as it is in most digital categories (the creators of D3, Backbone, and other tech have been on the payroll), but most of their gains seem to have come from digital subscriptions, with digital advertising still nowhere close to offsetting the loss in print ad revenue [2] I'm guessing the reason why native advertising hasn't been the status quo is related to inertia and the timing of seismic change in the industry. When I was in j-school many years ago, the professors were fond of saying that newspapers was basically money printers with profit margins only rivaled by the cocaine trade -- though this was only the case after TV and radio crushed the industry, to the point that most cities became one-newspaper monopolies. At around the time of the digital boom, i.e. 90s and mid-200s, regional and local newspapers were floundering and bigger players figured it be wise to swoop them up and turn one-city monopolies into regional monopolies. The NYT famously bought the Boston Globe in 1993 for $1.1 billion -- and then sold it for $70m in 2013 [3]. McClatchy had become the 3rd biggest publisher after buying the Knight-Ridder chain for $4.5 billion in 2006 [4] and racking up $2B in debt as the entire industry was facing double digit drops in revenue. And all of this was about the time when publishers realized (too late) that Craigslist had effectively decimated everyone: classified ads were once as much as 20-25% of a newspaper's revenue. All this is to say that the news business definitely had the money to blow on innovation [5], but by the time they realized how fucked the Internet was going to make things, they weren't in a position of confidence and stability. There was some efforts -- I think cars.com was a bright spot for McClatchy and Tribune [6] -- but all too little and too late. The shitty ads that I see news sites serving up seem to me to be a symptom of legacy inertia and existential panic -- going with DoubleClick and other shitty 3rd-party ads probably seemed like the most efficient solution. Remember that most of these companies still have significant print ad departments, because these ads still make way more money than digital. And then there's the traditional firewall between the editorial and ad departments. I worked at a McClatchy newspaper as a reporter and a developer and there were many problems arising from the fact that digital operations were basically under the business side, and effectively in an entirely different building. I think the other problem is that ads are fundamentally a different experience in print than they are on the web (and for TV and radio). Newspapers have a whole page to work with for ad layout, and ads can come in all kinds of sizes and formats, from full-page ads to small bottom corner ads to tiny classifieds. When newspapers were rolling in money, they were also the primary places for the average citizen to find out things like stock prices, government auctions/notices, apartment rentals, and local sales and events. My parents (Vietnamese refugees) weren't much into reading English publications, but we subscribed to the local newspaper's weekend edition because it was chock full of ads and coupons. Ads were a destination -- arguably, for the average person, they were more valuable and desired than the newspaper's actual editorial content, in the way that people might watch the Super Bowl just for the ads. In today's web environment, is there any normal mindset in which people actively seek out ads (other than looking them up on YouTube if you missed the Super Bowl)? The kind of native advertising that BuzzFeed et. al seem to have the most success with are advertorials that don't seem like ads. Unfortunately, this creates its own conflict with news-minded organizations. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/12/buzzhome/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/12/buzzhome/ [1] https://nypost.com/2017/11/16/buzzfeeds-revenue-to-fall-70m-short-of-target/ https://nypost.com/2017/11/16/buzzfeeds-revenue-to-fall-70m-... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/business/media/new-york-times-earnings.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/business/media/new-york-t... [3] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/business/media/new-york-times-company-sells-boston-globe.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/business/media/new-york-ti... [4] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/06/business/media/06paper.html http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/06/business/media/06paper.htm... [5] http://archives.cjr.org/feature/the_newspaper_that_almost_seized_the_future.php http://archives.cjr.org/feature/the_newspaper_that_almost_se... [6] http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-cars-spinoff-0908-biz-20160907-story.html http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-cars-spinoff-0908-...

noncoml 9y ago

I had to disable my ad blocker today to try out another plugin. The sites were 2-3x slower to load. There is no way anyone can convince me to disable my ad blocker again.

lscotte 9y ago

Oh... I, like most people, am actually intentionally blocking the ads.

lwansbrough 9y ago

> Interesting how the response of sites with terrible user experiences caused by ad tech is not to say “oh, how can we change our ads so people will accept them?” but rather to find ways to make their user experiences even more horrible, e.g. popping up new unwanted interruptions accusing you of having an ad-blocker. That's not how online advertising works. If a user doesn't like ads, they block all ads indiscriminately. Changing ads doesn't do anything, because users will always block ads regardless of their quality, at least until the vast majority of ads are "acceptable" -- and even then, many demographics will continue blocking anyway. What is "acceptable", anyway? Make the ad small enough and/or dumb enough that it is no longer worth anything to the advertiser? > stop making terrible user experiences. There are plenty of websites with acceptable UX (or UX that isn't practically made worse by ads) that use ads. How many of them are on your whitelist? Do you even know which sites are showing ads if you use an adblocker? > I’ll even tell you how to fix this: make more simple text ads, or images that are not animated and not peppered with distracting colors. While this is a reasonable request, it doesn't change the fact that many/most people now have an adblocker on their browser. There's no doubt this problem has been exasperated by malicious ad creatives. But the onus of correcting the problem lies in the hands of BOTH adblocker developers AND the online ads industry (including publishers, exchanges, and advertisers.)

CaptSpify 9y ago
I always forget to install my ad-blocker after an install. Once I start browsing the web I re-install it. If ads weren't so terrible, I would likely just forget to install it.
nasredin 9y ago
>But the onus of correcting the problem lies in the hands of BOTH adblocker developers AND the online ads industry (including publishers, exchanges, and advertisers.) Disagree. Adblock developers should block ads. Advertising-surveillance companies should die. Website owners should personally vet AND HOST ads on their sites. It's all very simple in my opinion. --- Why do you think adblocking is such a "problem" for some? Because almost all ads are hosted on third party servers. I know a couple small blogs that host image ads on the side of the page and it's not blocked in any default ABP lists. The "adbros" brought this upon themselves. This war on our minds is so pervasive they got fanboys on most major tech forums always defending them. These people are either in the industry themselves or suffering from the Battered Wife Syndrome: "If only adblock developers weren't so mean... maybe these adbros would stop pushing malware and spying on us". Also "gorhill" is an asshole.

CaptSpify 9y ago

Although I agree with your first point, I think this is a symptom of a much larger problem that we are ignoring: We have a serious economic problem in which we can't fund things that we want and need. Instead of making advertising "less bad", we should be looking into alternative ways to fund sites and services. Advertising in it's current form simply needs to go.

jacques_chester 9y ago
My bet is microsubscription, but that's only because it's something I've been working on (Robojar). Part of my motivation has been to make the best parts of the early web economically viable. For a few years it was normal to have relatively successful small sites with good writing and regular readers. They've largely been driven out by the economics of clickbait. I'd like to help that come back by breaking the rigid nexus between traffic and revenue. Adblock/flattr are doing something very similar. Google Contributor was, but seems to have morphed into a prepaid micropayment scheme. Patreon splits the middle. I still think the model where a single subscription fee is distributed amongst participating sites/services/apps approximately according to usage is the best overall model.
- marcusjt 9y ago
  Flattr http://flattr.com http://flattr.com is the best solution out there IMHO, Patreon is good but only makes sense if you're a regular/loyal consumer of a source.
  - jacques_chester 9y ago
    Flattr is the closest to what I'm aiming at. Some minor scheme differences, quite distinct implementation. One thing I can do differently is to interoperate smoothly with paywalls without revealing user identity.