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I would be very happy if everyone followed this example. Think of this as "modern" from now on. Return to the old, simple web that I know we all loved. Keep the

by Zash 8y ago

I would be very happy if everyone followed this example. Think of this as "modern" from now on. Return to the old, simple web that I know we all loved. Keep the lessons in usability and design learned in the last decade or two.

rock_hard 8y ago
Now we only need to find somebody to pay for that simple web....
- otterley 8y ago
  That would be us. :)
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  I think there's somewhat of a false dilemma there. There are plenty of sites that I frequent that have tastefully located, static banner ads that are served directly through the site operator rather than through an add network. This has the dual advantage of allowing the operator some editorial control, and of producing ads that tend to be much higher quality (to me, anyway) because they involve actually telling me about new products and services I might be interested in because they are related to the actual content I'm reading, rather than being a giant pile of "one weird trick" ads and targeted advertisers' sad attempts to sell me things I've looked at before, and therefore either already bought or already decided not to buy. In essence, it would be a return to the kind of advertising that print media uses. Which, incidentally, tends to command a higher price than all this junk, anyway. I've also done paid subscriptions to various journalistic websites in the past. I've since stopped, generally because their reading experience is generally so awful that I've retreated back to print media for such things. So I suppose you could count me as one of those people who would be willing to directly pay for a simple web. (It's not like I prefer to kill trees. I just value readability is all.)
  - dkarras 8y ago
    I don't think it is a false dilemma. The problem is about the difference between the magnitude of revenue generated by the proposed methods. Both for publishers AND people interested in advertising products. Tasteful banners are nice but tracking the performance of such ads is very hard. Ad business is really cut-throat. When you visit a site, there literally are multiple ad networks / advertisers bidding for a spot in front of you, with real money, based on the site, your location and your interests. A huge network of autonomous trader bots that trade real money billions of times per day for a spot in front of a human's eyeballs. If an algorithm decides that you have a higher than normal probability of converting to a paying customer, they (an AI or expert system) decides on the spot to pay "premium" to be in front of your eyeballs. They do this while running A/B tests with different ad variations to figure out what converts better, for which segment of the population etc. Modern ads are not only kind of targeted. They are INSANELY targeted. There have been instances of people targeting singular people through ads based on geolocation and interests. A publisher cannot be expected to run all that bidding code on their own servers. Those networks are actually a network of networks. If you are buying ads today, you want analytics immediately to see how you are doing, how much you are spending so that you can improve and adapt before sinking more money on it. The profits generated by such methods are a couple orders of magnitude higher than a simple untrackable banner on a site placed by a site owner which gets swapped out whenever...
- white-flame 8y ago
  It's a heck of a lot cheaper than it was in decades past, and things like torrents and ipfs can help eliminate high-cost choke points.

by Zash 8y ago

rock_hard 8y ago

Now we only need to find somebody to pay for that simple web....

otterley 8y ago
That would be us. :)
bunderbunder 8y ago
I think there's somewhat of a false dilemma there. There are plenty of sites that I frequent that have tastefully located, static banner ads that are served directly through the site operator rather than through an add network. This has the dual advantage of allowing the operator some editorial control, and of producing ads that tend to be much higher quality (to me, anyway) because they involve actually telling me about new products and services I might be interested in because they are related to the actual content I'm reading, rather than being a giant pile of "one weird trick" ads and targeted advertisers' sad attempts to sell me things I've looked at before, and therefore either already bought or already decided not to buy. In essence, it would be a return to the kind of advertising that print media uses. Which, incidentally, tends to command a higher price than all this junk, anyway. I've also done paid subscriptions to various journalistic websites in the past. I've since stopped, generally because their reading experience is generally so awful that I've retreated back to print media for such things. So I suppose you could count me as one of those people who would be willing to directly pay for a simple web. (It's not like I prefer to kill trees. I just value readability is all.)
- dkarras 8y ago
  I don't think it is a false dilemma. The problem is about the difference between the magnitude of revenue generated by the proposed methods. Both for publishers AND people interested in advertising products. Tasteful banners are nice but tracking the performance of such ads is very hard. Ad business is really cut-throat. When you visit a site, there literally are multiple ad networks / advertisers bidding for a spot in front of you, with real money, based on the site, your location and your interests. A huge network of autonomous trader bots that trade real money billions of times per day for a spot in front of a human's eyeballs. If an algorithm decides that you have a higher than normal probability of converting to a paying customer, they (an AI or expert system) decides on the spot to pay "premium" to be in front of your eyeballs. They do this while running A/B tests with different ad variations to figure out what converts better, for which segment of the population etc. Modern ads are not only kind of targeted. They are INSANELY targeted. There have been instances of people targeting singular people through ads based on geolocation and interests. A publisher cannot be expected to run all that bidding code on their own servers. Those networks are actually a network of networks. If you are buying ads today, you want analytics immediately to see how you are doing, how much you are spending so that you can improve and adapt before sinking more money on it. The profits generated by such methods are a couple orders of magnitude higher than a simple untrackable banner on a site placed by a site owner which gets swapped out whenever...
white-flame 8y ago
It's a heck of a lot cheaper than it was in decades past, and things like torrents and ipfs can help eliminate high-cost choke points.