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Gwern's Law: Ads cost you a tenth of your users

620 points by ascertain 8y ago

laurent123456 8y ago
That would make sense. Ads are designed to be visible and clicked on, but on the other hand you can't go too far without annoying the users. It's a fine line to walk so it's not surprising you'd lose some users as a result. The unblockable ads they had on Facebook at some point is what finally pushed me to close my account.
- eli 8y ago
  Also, at the risk of stating the obvious: clicking on the ads takes you off the site in question. Some of the people who would have been clicking around your site more are now at someone else's site.
  - lapnitnelav 8y ago
    Click rates (CTR) are usually quite low, if you get 2% you can open the champagne. Or at the very least, keep it at the ready and look at your conversion rate.
  - Semaphor 8y ago
    What? Ads open in new tabs.
    - benj111 8y ago
      Wouldn't it depend on the default behaviour of your browser?
      - nitrogen 8y ago
        Not if they use target=_blank or use JS to open a new window/tab
    - code_duck 8y ago
      The focus changes to that tab, typically. It’s not a big difference hitting a back button or closing a tab/window, is it? Some users are confused by this, being less familiar with the browser interface, and the effect of interruption is the same.
      - Semaphor 8y ago
        I guess that's a possibility, I'm not good at thinking like non-technical users.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  but on the other hand you can't go too far without annoying the users Back in the ancient history before Google and search engines, a web site I built was submitted for inclusion in DMOZ. At the time, all web sites were hand-approved by an editor who also wrote a description of the site. The site was included, but the description noted that it was "covered with too many ads" or something similar. The site had one 468x60 static image banner ad, and one 236x60 static image ad. My how our standards have changed.
  - buboard 8y ago
    I believe Adsense policies allow only up to 3 ad units in a page. And after all ads below the fold do not perform that well. I see a lot of ads in long form content/news websites though, which do not receive a lot of pageviews. It's a tradeoff for most
    - Semaphor 8y ago
      That can't be right, we have Google AdManager deliver to more than 3 slots.
      - buboard 8y ago
        Right, the limitation was lifted in 2016
  - degenerate 8y ago
    Maybe your standards have changed, but that's still too much for me. I don't mind guest posts or (mentioned) sponsored content, however I will always use ublock to remove ads. It would be different if the typical ad experience were a related, useful product. But it's always unrelated hot garbage - distracting and annoying at any pixel size.
    - reaperducer 8y ago
      that's still too much for me Reasonable ads don't bother me. I don't long for the day when I can install an ad blocker in my car's windshield so I don't see billboards or the names of car dealerships on the backs of the other cars. Then again, when I drive someplace where there's too many billboards I find it annoying.
- bluGill 8y ago
  Most web ads are designed to be clicked, but I firmly believe this is the wrong model. Ads should be designed not to get you to click/buy now. Ads should be designed to make you think about buying it latter. You see/hear a car ad, and next time you drive you think wouldn't it be nice if my car did X.
  - captainbland 8y ago
    I think they do partly still retain that effect, but internet advertisers don't rate it so highly because it's hard to measure the effectiveness of.
    - bluGill 8y ago
      You can't measure it for any other ad at all yet TV, radio, newspaper, billboards, and other ads are all common because they work.
reallydude 8y ago
Only if they are done intrusively. Nobody cares about the ads on CrossMe, for example...but Jewels Jungle, the interstitials may aggravate a small number.
- ergothus 8y ago
  I have troubles with the concept of a "non-intrusive" ad - If you don't notice it to any degree, it's not doing its job, and if you DO notice it to any degree, it's intrusive and disruptive (to a matching degree) I think you mean "Nobody cares ENOUGH" rather than "Nobody cares", and that's a big distinction.
  - DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
    Actually, I'd have different concerns about ads that I didn't consciously notice.
    - ergothus 8y ago
      Good point - while I'd still lump that in as "disruptive", it's more accurate to be a bit more granular. One of the things that I think got completely overlooked in the recent Cambridge Analytica (and related) scandal was the idea that microtargeting actually WORKED to some degree. (Granted, it's easy to be manipulative when you aren't accountable for anything, but still - the idea went from vague promise to actual implementation). We've paid attention to the CONSCIOUS effects of those ads, but not so much to the subconscious ones. Even the ads that I dismiss as ridiculous are affecting my impressions of certain groups, and when the ads are primarily there to increase division, dismissing them still has the same result.
      - lapnitnelav 8y ago
        Yeah, it has more power than one can think. Every-time I go for groceries in one of the Costco equivalent here, they have an alley to funnel you into the self-service machines area. This path has on both sides sweets and at the very end the bakery stuff before you are free to do your checkout. Every single time, despite being well aware of the trap, I can't help but grab either some muffins or cookies.
deleted 8y ago
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gwern 8y ago
More detailed discussion of the 4 other datapoints: https://www.gwern.net/Ads#replication https://www.gwern.net/Ads#replication (I added McCoy et al 2007 just last night, so now it's 5 total: me, Pandora, Mozilla, LinkedIn, and McCoy et al 2007.)
- simongr3dal 8y ago
  It also lines up pretty well with the fact that a lot of early stage SV-style startups don't monetize before they have a lot of users. You don't want to lose 10% in the early stages of exponential growth. 10% less users later on would not be a big deal however.
  - ambicapter 8y ago
    I'd assume that the 10% later on is a relatively larger dollar amount in revenue, no?
    - gwern 8y ago
      But you're not sacrificing growth then. When you sacrifice growth for revenue up front, you're sacrificing not just 1 user but that user and all subsequent users they would've brought in via downstream/compounding effects plus the associated economies of scale (which may well be the only thing that will make you eventually profitable, ads or no ads).
    - jonfw 8y ago
      Assuming that advertising is going to be a primary source of revenue, than you aren't going to have much revenue to lose before you start advertising. The idea is that companies don't advertise at first to take advantage of the exponential growth and user retention when they start getting hot, and once they have market share they start to target profit rather than growth.
    - kemitche 8y ago
      It depends - if you're going from zero revenue, then, losing 10% of your users to go from zero dollars to N dollars is a great deal. If you have existing other revenue sources, then you definitely have to factor that into the equation.
mlthoughts2018 8y ago
This may help explain why many companies focus so much ad budget on brand awareness and generally inserting their brand into the zeitgeist or popular memes and conversation. Corporations rarely prize loyalty of any type: loyalty from employees, loyalty from customers... they don’t care. Creating loyalty requires sublimating your own short term desires for the sake of promoting someone else’s interests instead. Corporations, as sociopathic legal constructs meant to encode ruthless pursuit of short term financial gain, are essentially incapable of acting this way. This is why you have to pay so much to get new employees to join your team, or pay so much to acquire new customers. The corporation never cares to proactively reward existing employees or proactively improve products or reduce prices for customers. So all short term attention is paid to seeding the necessary details required to acquire new supply of employees / customers / whatever. Holding on to / valuing what you already have is just not a concept modern corporations have the ability to understand or articulate, despite lots of lip service about it.
buboard 8y ago
but can you rephrase that in terms of revenue? and tbh 10% is right about the amount of pain you 'd expect to inflict to monetize your traffic.
- gwern 8y ago
  No, because that will depend on the purpose of a site, what alternative revenue streams there, the site owners' utility preferences between traffic and revenue, what sort of ads there are, what sort of clickthrough rate they have, what the advertising rate is, and so on. At best, you can make a directional generalization: given that people systematically appear to underestimate the effects of ads (they just don't know), there is probably a large but unknown number of people who have overshot the optimal number of ads by an unknown amount, which will be different for each person. In contrast, the binary variable ads/no-ads appears to have a (surprisingly) consistent effect on general metrics of users/usage, as measured by 5 very different large-scale studies.
cm2012 8y ago
Not having ads costs you 100% of your members if it's the only way to monetize your content (not all content is suited to be supported by paywalls or Patreon).
- AdsAreLazy 8y ago
  Is the content worth anything then? Why not just distribute it through torrents or ipfs or something?
  - cm2012 8y ago
    I guarantee you that you read tons of content that you wouldn't pay for. Hacker news itself is a big ad for Ycombinator.
Reedx 8y ago
I assumed this would be the case and removed ads from my web game about a year ago. But didn't see a difference with traffic or retention (granted, I didn't A/B test it! I removed them 100%). Which was disappointing. The only difference I noticed is that I lost that revenue (5 figures). But probably depends on volume and/or type of ads? [EDIT] Clarified re: traffic
- gwern 8y ago
  'Revenue'!='users'. EDIT: and 10% is, while important, a pretty subtle difference compared to the enormous variability of traffic. Traffic is a time-series which drifts and has many potentially large jumps. If you removed ads only once, how would you ever notice? The effect is very noticeable if you look at samples with _n_ in the millions, or if you remove/add scores of times and model it statistically, though.
  - kelnos 8y ago
    A very good point -- if you don't have other sources of revenue aside from ads, and can't run the site/game/whatever without that, 10% of your users gone might be a perfectly reasonable trade off for the ad revenue that keeps the site running. I think you mention later in the Twitter thread that Patreon has given you much more recurring revenue than ads? I wish operators would spend the time to look at the effectiveness of ad alternatives as you've done.
- civilian 8y ago
  I mean, he's not making a prediction on revenue. Gwern is making a statement about traffic. Did your traffic increase ~10%? From the Pandora paper, (which showed that as more ads were played during pandora sessions, subscriptions were boosted but free users left) it sounds like there's an "optimal advertisement" rate for revenue. Enough to not push away users, but not too much to deter users altogether.
  - Reedx 8y ago
    > Did your traffic increase ~10%? It followed the same pattern as I've seen for years. > Enough to not push away users, but not too much to deter users altogether. That could be. I might've had a goldilocks amount.
OJFord 8y ago
Surely any user that's going to bail because of advertising is already blocking the ads anyway?
- gwern 8y ago
  You would think so, and yet...
- bluGill 8y ago
  I don't object to advertising - it is how free news sights should pay for themselves. I understand and accept the deal. However this is a two way deal, they give me "free" content in exchange for me seeing the ads. If the ads are too intrusive they have violated their end of the contract and I leave.
  - kaybe 8y ago
    I actually don't really block ads, I block tracking and by-default scripting (I whitelist pages), plus enforced https. That gets rid of almost all of the ads. If they can't give me ads without these things, their problem.
- exolymph 8y ago
  It's probably subconscious.
- lexicality 8y ago
  Seems unlikely - if they're running adblock they won't notice that you added ads.
- AdsAreLazy 8y ago
  It’s easier just to remember the ad free places.
umvi 8y ago
I believe it. There are a lot of games that I downloaded from the app store and really liked initially. However, I noticed a pattern. At first, ads seemed to be optional (i.e double your gems by watching an ad!) However, after about 10 minutes of playing, I'd see an ad. No big deal. But then it got more and more aggressive. Pretty soon there was an ad after every single level, (plus the bonus ad if you want to double gems). It got to the point I was spending about 50% of the time actually playing games, 50% of the time watching ads (the levels could be beaten in 30 seconds or so). At that point I uninstall even though the game is fun. It's not like I can just pay a 1 time fee to get rid of all ads with the type of game I am talking about. I have paid to get rid of ads for a few bucks in the past, but these games will still pester you with in game pop-ups for "diamond memberships" (outrageous recurring subscription fee for nominal and significant bonuses) and "best value" gem packs (also sold at outrageous prices going up to $100 for the biggest pack).
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- nitrogen 8y ago
  I've seen a five year old play those games and talk about how much he really needs that $100 gem pack. I wonder if these will have any lasting effect on how kids of today understand value.
  - lupire 8y ago
    Parents today have to train kids early. Mine learned by age 3 that any non-animated video content on YouTube was an ad that needed to be skipped. Not perfect, but a great start. Constantly drill into them that these are ads, and ads are bad people trying to trick them, and that ads should be avoided, in apps, websites, billboards, etc. I'm not any advertising, but the only good ad is an ad I asked to see, as when I'm using a web-search-engine for a product.
    - Waterluvian 8y ago
      My toddler learned at about 20 months how to skip YouTube ads. It's unbelievable. I watched him evolve as he would mash the "skip ad in 5..." Countdown to waiting until it was done to skip. He also learned through trial and error not to accidentally tap on the ads.
tjpnz 8y ago
I was a long time mobile Chrome user (until my recent switch to Firefox which allows me to block ads). My rule then was to move onto another source if I couldn't find one place on the page unimpeded by ads or spammy shite from Taboola et al. News sites are definitely the biggest offender here.
- vorticalbox 8y ago
  You can block ads in chrome too. Ublock is on both ff and chrome or you could install a chromium based browser with native ad blocking like brave or opera.
  - slig 8y ago
    He meant mobile Chrome, which doesn't have extensions.
  - gibspaulding 8y ago
    I assume they are referring to Chrome on mobile.
eridius 8y ago
If a game doesn't offer any way to pay to remove ads, it's an instant uninstall for me. If a game does offer it, but doesn't let me play for long enough to decide whether I like the game before it starts serving up unskippable ads, I uninstall it. Most games simply don't give enough time to decide if you even like it before they start throwing ads at you. That seems like a terrible policy in general, regardless of whether you have a "skip ads" IAP or not. You want to wait until the player has made up their mind about your game before you start degrading the experience. This seems like such an obvious thing I don't know why so many games are so bad about it.
- luxuryballs 8y ago
  I’m about to release a fun little ambient physics based puzzle game on iOS and have been debating this. To me ads are a stain on what I consider my art. But at the same time I want to monetize and wonder if people will skip over a $1.99 download. What do you think? Ads with the option to unlock? Seems gross though... maybe free with paid version that includes level editor or additional level packs?
  - hiccuphippo 8y ago
    Maybe release a couple of levels for free and if they like it they can buy the full game?
    - HenryBemis 8y ago
      I have made an app for iOS, and it is about helping children between on the ages 4-8 read. It took me 1 second to decide "free with ads" vs "0.99". It costs 0.99, and I don't regret the 'small' sales. I prefer that people's children are not tracked by advertisers, facebook (that bloody ping on 31.13.x.x) and other trackers.
      - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
        Is sales income less than you'd expect with ads?
deleted 8y ago
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everdev 8y ago
> So now there are 4 independent quasi-/experimental datapoints (me, Pandora, LinkedIn, & Mozilla resp) showing that a standard load of ads vs no ads decreases total consumption/activity by 10–15%. From the tweet itself, this is 10% of activity, not users. Kind of suspect that someone misinterpreted their own data so significantly.
- gwern 8y ago
  I disagree about it being a misinterpretation. They are measuring different things because they have to, but if you read the papers, you see that that's the net effect and most reasonable way to summarize them: an 11% reduction in intention to visit, a 9% reduction in total traffic, a similar reduction in total web browsing per individual, and in the case of LinkedIn, you can see both a decrease in users and activity per user, which net to the >10% reduction in total activity. This is as it must be (what is a web browser user going to do - stop using web browsers completely and quit the Internet entirely...? Not likely! Reduction in web usage is their only possible response.) How else could one reasonably summarize that in a few words?
  - everdev 8y ago
    In analytics there are ways to discuss activity like: visits per month, pages per session, time on site, conversion rate, etc. It's possible for any of those activity metrics to go down 10% without losing any active users.
radium3d 8y ago
I believe it. I've stopped playing games with ads altogether. I'd rather pay $40-60 for a game that keeps me in the story. I don't have time for ads. Apparently 90% of users do though, so they'll continue to fill up the "top games" lists and make it impossible for us to find good ad-free games in the app stores. Even worse now that google removed the "contains ads" tag from the play store top game lists. sigh
- annadane 8y ago
  What bothers me is imagining what board room conversation led to that decision. Here's a piece of information, that benefits the consumer, and they took it away. It's hard to see much motivation beyond "it makes money, by selling more ads, because the user is uninformed". If you have a job in that position, yes I know money, but how the fuck do you justify that to yourself? Are you really that blind?
- theandrewbailey 8y ago
  > I'd rather pay $40-60 for a game that keeps me in the story. I don't have time for ads. Old-fashioned console and PC gaming is still a thing, though mobile inspired microtransactions are starting to creep into the market.
  - radium3d 8y ago
    Yes and I am very appreciative of companies like Nintendo who keep the art alive. I feel the phone market has untapped potential still.
    - majewsky 8y ago
      The Nintendo Switch's start screen has ads on it. When you turn the console on from sleep mode, it shows flashy images entitled "Featured News" on the left third of the lock screen. [1] I tried to disable it, but apparently you cannot unsubscribe from the preloaded "news" channels. When I play Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the in-game experience is mostly ad-free, but there is a side quest on my quest log that appears to be a cross-promotion with some non-Nintendo game. It's really frustrating that Nintendo is also doing this bullshit now, even if in moderation. [1] Representative example: http://www.bearingnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/IMG_4920.jpg http://www.bearingnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/IMG_49...
marcell 8y ago
This is pretty interesting. I'd love to see the analysis broken down by some measure of the ads' "annoyingness." For example, what is the harm from an animated gif ad vs. a text ad?
yeukhon 8y ago
I have been seeing Squarespace ads on YouTube nearly for every video. I hate it and I just gives thumbs down hoping it will go away. Nope. Although the echo effect is real, I have to say I do not and will not use Squarespace simply because of the ads. It's insane. Same music, same video over and over. /rant
- therealdrag0 8y ago
  Why don't you use an adblocker or pay for YouTube premium to support your content creators.
  - yeukhon 8y ago
    My conscious choice NOT to pay premium. Content creators already get $$ for views.
    - penagwin 8y ago
      Aren't youtube ads pay per click? In which case adblock doesn't cost the creator money (if you weren't going to click an ad), and their viewer/subscriber count is still normal (important for non-youtube sponsors)
      - 12298765 8y ago
        Pretty sure they aren't -- on my PS4 for example, YouTube shows ads just like on PC/mobile, but they're totally unclickable. There's no button for "see more on this ad" or anything. I know this because it has shown an ad for something that I was interested in buying, and I tried everything to get to the ad and couldn't. Ended up having to Google it on my phone!
    - aoeusnth1 8y ago
      Why do you think youtube is willing to pay for views?
    - lupire 8y ago
      Content creators get paid for ad views.
Causality1 8y ago
Additionally, 26 percent of desktop and 15 percent of mobile users block ads, so those studies already exclude the most ad-averse part of the user base.
fixermark 8y ago
(sardonic) True, but did you want those users if they aren't even willing to spend money?
- lupire 8y ago
  Sometimes. Those users are potential advertisers for your site.
kbenson 8y ago
> @Piccirello: What viable alternatives exist that don’t directly charge the user and therefore disadvantage the less privileged? Is JavaScript-based crypto mining feasible? That leads to an interesting thought. Ads are definitely one of the more egalitarian ways of getting payment from people, as they sap time and attention somewhat equally (or randomized along a fairly predictable spectrum not affected by most differentiators, I would think), and in proportion to how much you use something. Also, the ones problematic form a privacy perspective likely screw people over equally as well.
AdsAreLazy 8y ago
A site with ads is guaranteed to not care about how you use it. A site that takes your money is one that will care about the experience. Seeing an ad is an instant “if I can’t use reading mode I just block the site”. Life is too short to waste your attention on people selling you crap.
alpaca128 8y ago
I'm curious about the numbers for websites automatically playing videos. I find these even more annoying than 80% of ads and they often don't get blocked. And I personally run a domain blocker plugin just for these sites. Playing a video I didn't ask for? Bye forever. Most sites with this problem have 10 competitors just on that page of search results.
jrockway 8y ago
Is it ads, or slowly-loading ad-sized content? One thing I've noticed is that ads seem like an afterthought in most apps. The New York Times iPhone app displays ads, even if you pay for it, and occasionally the entire app will freeze while it's waiting for ads to download. (The app works offline, but if it gets a hint of network availability, it will stop the world to try and download them. Usually as your train is leaving the subway station with a 4G signal entering the tunnel without.) The Wall Street Journal app is similar, except instead of freezing completely, scrolling starts to run at about 5Hz instead of the expected 60Hz. Obviously, the developers of the apps develop it with ads turned off (or with sample images loaded from servers they control with no DNS lookup latency, etc.), so probably aren't even aware of these issues. That is going to reduce subscriptions, even if the images weren't ads.
pbhjpbhj 8y ago
Could just be an effect of page load time? Any attempt to rule out confounding parameters - on the web ads increase pageload a heap.
masswerk 8y ago
I really do think the way ads are presented and how they are embedded matters. E.g., a static banner, embedded statically server-side without tracking and targeting, respectfully sitting besides the content may be not offensive to anyone. We may even appreciate that the advertiser is supporting the content we like, a positive image transfer besides the needs of last week's shopping list (of which we're kept reminded just too often by common advertising practice). On the other hand, what we mostly see, is advertising going off-the-rails, competing with the content (reading a news site is often some of a glimpse of war of its own today, at least visually), aggressive tracking and targeting, in combination fostering the feeling that the ad-networks and by this also the hosting site are actively working against you, providing the content just as a pretext for exploitation. Something has gone terribly wrong. (I've actually not bought products, I would have bought else, because of advertising practices.) Edit: As an ethical workaround, I find myself increasingly opening a site in broser A without blocker and then copying the URL to another browser B with blocking, because I can't concentrate on the content anymore, or maybe switching to reader mode to consume the content. But, does presenting the ads to me make any sense at all? Most interestingly, this would result in inflated user statitistics. Maybe, we're seeing a combination of both?
tschwimmer 8y ago
This is interesting and valuable analysis. Despite a lot of people in this thread saying "See! I told you ads are user toxic!" I'd easily make this tradeoff if I had no/limited other sources of revenue. Two additional questions I have are: 1) Which 10% of users churn because of ads? Are these just average p50% actives or are they power users who evangalize your product? 2) What's the effect on annual growth rate?
- godelski 8y ago
  I think the real key takeaway is the graph he has about what type of ads are served. I'll deal with inline ads, but I'm closing the window if you think a popup is okay.
- JohnFen 8y ago
  > I'd easily make this tradeoff if I had no/limited other sources of revenue. Not me.
eqdw 8y ago
If any app or service offers me the ability to pay them money in exchange for removing ads, I do I do this even if the price is rather large. I think the most I've ever paid is $25 but I'd go higher.
lcfcjs2 8y ago
Wait, people click on ads?
atoav 8y ago
I might be one of the 10% mentioned here. It was sefinitly true for instagram since facebook took over. If every 5th image in my stream is a sponsered ad by nike or some startup it doesn’t feel like my stream anymore. There is weird content coming out of nowhere that I didn’t ask for. Effectively I just ended up using it less and less, till I sropped using it entirely.
- mywittyname 8y ago
  This is exactly why I quit pinterest. A good 10% of the content are ads.
fwip 8y ago
While ads may cost you 10% of your users, it may also be responsible for up to 100% of your revenue.
- ContentTho 8y ago
  That’s your own fault if that’s the case.
jfehr 8y ago
I have a strong feeling that not all ads/strategies will have the same result. I enjoy a large number of the ads that are shown to me on instagram and facebook, and have actually bought things from them. They're easy to skip or ignore. I'm not sure I'd use Facebook as much as I do if I didn't get some value out of the ads. But 30 second ads for penis enlargement pills every minute while playing a free puzzle game? I'm never coming back. I'd love to see a paper along the lines of the ones linked in the twitter thread in the OP that tries to control for the annoyingness/intrusiveness of the ad, the number of the ads, the relevancy of the ad, and some kind of personal touch of the ad. Admittedly, I didn't click through to the papers in the OP, so I'm not sure if this already exists.
Octoth0rpe 8y ago
I mean, sure, but they also often fund 100% of your users.
OscarTheGrinch 8y ago
I tried to get my young son into original Angry Birds, thinking it would be a nice simple physics lesson for him, but it has become absolutely unnavigateable for his age level. So many pop up special offers for magic birds to solve the level, cut scene product placement, and other in game purchases, that I can't trust those games to not get him lost in a maze of advertising bullcrap. I paid for this game, a kids game I thought, why can't I just enjoy it with my son?
- avgDev 8y ago
  Basically, everyone that makes games now knows how insanely lucrative it can be. I am not sure if this is caused by sales/marketing/executives but games now can generate massive cash. Many games now offer micro-transactions, casino style loot crates where you can open them by buying keys to have a chance of wining something. Even I bought a few things in games. However, many others young or old drop massive amount of cash on some games. My uncle drops thousands of dollar in world of tanks(or whatever it is called) to have the best tank. Plus, those game can create gambling addiction in kids, I think it is quite sad.
  - OscarTheGrinch 8y ago
    Oh man, sorry for your uncle blowing that amount! Speaking of training kids to gamble, I'm gonna thread jack with a public service announcement, please avoid letting your kids see any "Surprise Egg" videos all costs. I downloaded "you-tube kids", their supposedly safe curated experience, and almost half of the recommended videos on a completely clean user install was this moronic kiddy click bait that turns youngsters into drooling dopamine rinsed zombies, primed for our loot-box overlords. Un-install, go play outside. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/modern-minds/201703/welcome-the-madness-and-mystery-surprise-egg-videos https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/modern-minds/201703/...
- scarface74 8y ago
  And it wasn’t that bad before. The difference between the original Angry Birds and Angry Birds Go with all of the in app purchases is stark.
jedberg 8y ago
I don't have the data anymore, but based on my memory of the time, I don't think reddit saw any difference in traffic when we launched ads (which was more than 10 years ago). That's not to say that it wouldn't change now, but just throwing out there that it didn't make a difference then.
- m463 8y ago
  Reddit lost me with the redesign to track and monetize. maybe 2-3 years ago? I had 250k karma all from mindful comments.
aiisahik 8y ago
> I feel like I'm on crazy-pills with this topic. No one links to my page, hardly any orgs run these experiments, no one upvotes them on Reddit or HN Gwern is on crazy pills because this is a feature not a bug. Your users are there to generate ad revenue - not the other way around.
sesteel 8y ago
I feel like advertisements ruin everything. I remember driving onto the my air force base and being thankful that all the visual pollution was gone. It was like stepping into another world. Now the internet has ads everywhere. I find the attention economy awful and dystopian. I'd gladly pay to never see another ad.
- emit_time 8y ago
  I’ve come to hate ads for how much they try to get me to buy things I don’t need. Sure you can say something about willpower whatever, but constantly being bombarded by them is horrible. I’m pretty happy with what I have, I don’t need all this stuff. But advertising makes me want stuff I don’t need. I don’t feel bad about blocking advertising to improve my quality of life.
  - sesteel 8y ago
    I don't even pay attention to them; they are just there as visual noise. I worry a lot about the world we've created and where this is all heading. I like to wrangle some of these problems, maybe create a "no ad" network. You pay into a pool and the money is doled out to various businesses based on what you spend your time doing: games, websites, etc.
    - dest 8y ago
      Flattr? Patreon? Google contributor?
- anitil 8y ago
  I remember reading about someone that built a system where you put $X in to a pot every month, and every page you visit gets $X/pages_visited. This allows you to directly monetize creators without ads. I cannot for the life of me find it - does it ring any bells with anyone?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
vertis 8y ago
In a similar vein. Anti-adblock measures will pretty much guarantee I never come back. I'd love to be able to filter them from my search results. Plenty of domains I would blacklist.
microdrum 8y ago
The guys who built RealClearPolitics built a sort of "pay to eliminate ads" feature.[1] I wonder if they saw Gwern's Law in action. [1] http://subscriptions.publir.com/ http://subscriptions.publir.com/
wittedhaddock 8y ago
Ads strike me as a laughable local maximum on our ability to monetize spare brain cycles of the human mind. Critical thinking cycles, arguably the most precious resource, is subverted for single digit clickthrough rates. Ad tech makes me cry, and after reading science fiction, depressed. Let's please please gtfo out of this paradigm and figure out how to bootstrap these things between our ears for creation, than consumption, of something. And to go a bit deeper for a moment, it seems likely to me that what we now call critical thinking is the same thing as what Chomsky and Berwick mean when they use the word "language": an ability to hierarchically represent the world using symbols. Our "external representation" or ability to communicate ideas to one another, according to them is a byproduct of that effect. This was from their recent book, Why Only Us, and go on to point to the specific gene, FOXP2, that they believe caused this ability for the mind, and then assert that this emergence caused us to leave Africa (Out of Africa Theory). And if that's even remotely true, then the human mind is inherently more able and creative than we will ever know. Or said another way, the cross product of Dunning & Kruger with Berwick & Chomsky suggests an almost infinite unawareness of our own potential. - How do we know that the 10% drop off in traffic isn't "just" due to the increase of latency by the nature of adding additional the additional ad package that dispatches and draws on the main thread, slowing everything down (Linden, 2006)? http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/12/slides-from-my-talk-at-stanford.html http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/12/slides-from-my-talk-at-s...
dahart 8y ago
Are the 10%-15% who bail free users, or paying users? Number of free users is only a good metric if you have ads. Without ads, a better metric is needed, like revenue. The other thing we need is a real alternative. Ads are more or less unanimously not beloved, but bootstrapping revenue and funding are real problems. Worse than losing 10% of your customers is losing 100% of your customers because you can’t afford to stay in business. No matter how much everyone dislikes ads, they aren’t going away until there’s a way to fund your site/org/business.
- JohnFen 8y ago
  > No matter how much everyone dislikes ads, they aren’t going away until there’s a way to fund your site/org/business. The problem isn't that there aren't other ways of generating revenue. There are lots of them. The problem is that carrying ads is the easiest way -- it requires almost no development effort.
  - dahart 8y ago
    That doesn’t answer my question. The question isn’t what ways there are to generate revenue, it’s what is the right metric. Number of users dropping doesn’t mean that revenue is dropping, so it’s not a great metric to demonstrate that ads are bad. If we want to show that adding ads to a site is damaging, we have to show that it’s actually damaging, rather than you lose a fraction of the people who were mooching anyway. I’m not sure I agree there are lots of ways to generate revenue, and more importantly that there are reliable ways to generate revenue when bootstrapping a small company. If there were reliable ways to do it, ads wouldn’t be such a big problem. The scourge of ads is evidence that finding revenue sources isn’t reliable. The main sources of funding for small companies are: loans, grants, personal savings, friends & family, angels, VCs, sales, and ads. Sales and ads are the only sustainable long term strategies unless you’re going for government funding of research or a public service. Sales requires a product with market fit, i.e., a bootstrapped company. For most early stage companies that leaves only ads as a potential positive long-term revenue stream. What other options are there? Making money with ads requires an audience, which requires having something of value. In that sense, it does require development effort. Maybe installing the ad into an iframe is easy, but getting enough people to your site isn’t trivial.
altitudinous 8y ago
Ads cost a tenth of my users, but I gain 100% of my income. No regrets.
charlie0 8y ago
Life hack for stopping ads on mobile games: Turn off internet connection. So far this has worked for me with solo games.

620 points by ascertain 8y ago

That would make sense. Ads are designed to be visible and clicked on, but on the other hand you can't go too far without annoying the users. It's a fine line to walk so it's not surprising you'd lose some users as a result. The unblockable ads they had on Facebook at some point is what finally pushed me to close my account.

eli 8y ago
Also, at the risk of stating the obvious: clicking on the ads takes you off the site in question. Some of the people who would have been clicking around your site more are now at someone else's site.
- lapnitnelav 8y ago
  Click rates (CTR) are usually quite low, if you get 2% you can open the champagne. Or at the very least, keep it at the ready and look at your conversion rate.
- Semaphor 8y ago
  What? Ads open in new tabs.
  - benj111 8y ago
    Wouldn't it depend on the default behaviour of your browser?
    - nitrogen 8y ago
      Not if they use target=_blank or use JS to open a new window/tab
  - code_duck 8y ago
    The focus changes to that tab, typically. It’s not a big difference hitting a back button or closing a tab/window, is it? Some users are confused by this, being less familiar with the browser interface, and the effect of interruption is the same.
    - Semaphor 8y ago
      I guess that's a possibility, I'm not good at thinking like non-technical users.
reaperducer 8y ago
but on the other hand you can't go too far without annoying the users Back in the ancient history before Google and search engines, a web site I built was submitted for inclusion in DMOZ. At the time, all web sites were hand-approved by an editor who also wrote a description of the site. The site was included, but the description noted that it was "covered with too many ads" or something similar. The site had one 468x60 static image banner ad, and one 236x60 static image ad. My how our standards have changed.
- buboard 8y ago
  I believe Adsense policies allow only up to 3 ad units in a page. And after all ads below the fold do not perform that well. I see a lot of ads in long form content/news websites though, which do not receive a lot of pageviews. It's a tradeoff for most
  - Semaphor 8y ago
    That can't be right, we have Google AdManager deliver to more than 3 slots.
    - buboard 8y ago
      Right, the limitation was lifted in 2016
- degenerate 8y ago
  Maybe your standards have changed, but that's still too much for me. I don't mind guest posts or (mentioned) sponsored content, however I will always use ublock to remove ads. It would be different if the typical ad experience were a related, useful product. But it's always unrelated hot garbage - distracting and annoying at any pixel size.
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    that's still too much for me Reasonable ads don't bother me. I don't long for the day when I can install an ad blocker in my car's windshield so I don't see billboards or the names of car dealerships on the backs of the other cars. Then again, when I drive someplace where there's too many billboards I find it annoying.
bluGill 8y ago
Most web ads are designed to be clicked, but I firmly believe this is the wrong model. Ads should be designed not to get you to click/buy now. Ads should be designed to make you think about buying it latter. You see/hear a car ad, and next time you drive you think wouldn't it be nice if my car did X.
- captainbland 8y ago
  I think they do partly still retain that effect, but internet advertisers don't rate it so highly because it's hard to measure the effectiveness of.
  - bluGill 8y ago
    You can't measure it for any other ad at all yet TV, radio, newspaper, billboards, and other ads are all common because they work.

reallydude 8y ago

Only if they are done intrusively. Nobody cares about the ads on CrossMe, for example...but Jewels Jungle, the interstitials may aggravate a small number.

ergothus 8y ago
I have troubles with the concept of a "non-intrusive" ad - If you don't notice it to any degree, it's not doing its job, and if you DO notice it to any degree, it's intrusive and disruptive (to a matching degree) I think you mean "Nobody cares ENOUGH" rather than "Nobody cares", and that's a big distinction.
- DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
  Actually, I'd have different concerns about ads that I didn't consciously notice.
  - ergothus 8y ago
    Good point - while I'd still lump that in as "disruptive", it's more accurate to be a bit more granular. One of the things that I think got completely overlooked in the recent Cambridge Analytica (and related) scandal was the idea that microtargeting actually WORKED to some degree. (Granted, it's easy to be manipulative when you aren't accountable for anything, but still - the idea went from vague promise to actual implementation). We've paid attention to the CONSCIOUS effects of those ads, but not so much to the subconscious ones. Even the ads that I dismiss as ridiculous are affecting my impressions of certain groups, and when the ads are primarily there to increase division, dismissing them still has the same result.
    - lapnitnelav 8y ago
      Yeah, it has more power than one can think. Every-time I go for groceries in one of the Costco equivalent here, they have an alley to funnel you into the self-service machines area. This path has on both sides sweets and at the very end the bakery stuff before you are free to do your checkout. Every single time, despite being well aware of the trap, I can't help but grab either some muffins or cookies.

deleted 8y ago

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gwern 8y ago

More detailed discussion of the 4 other datapoints: https://www.gwern.net/Ads#replication https://www.gwern.net/Ads#replication (I added McCoy et al 2007 just last night, so now it's 5 total: me, Pandora, Mozilla, LinkedIn, and McCoy et al 2007.)

simongr3dal 8y ago
It also lines up pretty well with the fact that a lot of early stage SV-style startups don't monetize before they have a lot of users. You don't want to lose 10% in the early stages of exponential growth. 10% less users later on would not be a big deal however.
- ambicapter 8y ago
  I'd assume that the 10% later on is a relatively larger dollar amount in revenue, no?
  - gwern 8y ago
    But you're not sacrificing growth then. When you sacrifice growth for revenue up front, you're sacrificing not just 1 user but that user and all subsequent users they would've brought in via downstream/compounding effects plus the associated economies of scale (which may well be the only thing that will make you eventually profitable, ads or no ads).
  - jonfw 8y ago
    Assuming that advertising is going to be a primary source of revenue, than you aren't going to have much revenue to lose before you start advertising. The idea is that companies don't advertise at first to take advantage of the exponential growth and user retention when they start getting hot, and once they have market share they start to target profit rather than growth.
  - kemitche 8y ago
    It depends - if you're going from zero revenue, then, losing 10% of your users to go from zero dollars to N dollars is a great deal. If you have existing other revenue sources, then you definitely have to factor that into the equation.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago

This may help explain why many companies focus so much ad budget on brand awareness and generally inserting their brand into the zeitgeist or popular memes and conversation. Corporations rarely prize loyalty of any type: loyalty from employees, loyalty from customers... they don’t care. Creating loyalty requires sublimating your own short term desires for the sake of promoting someone else’s interests instead. Corporations, as sociopathic legal constructs meant to encode ruthless pursuit of short term financial gain, are essentially incapable of acting this way. This is why you have to pay so much to get new employees to join your team, or pay so much to acquire new customers. The corporation never cares to proactively reward existing employees or proactively improve products or reduce prices for customers. So all short term attention is paid to seeding the necessary details required to acquire new supply of employees / customers / whatever. Holding on to / valuing what you already have is just not a concept modern corporations have the ability to understand or articulate, despite lots of lip service about it.

buboard 8y ago

but can you rephrase that in terms of revenue? and tbh 10% is right about the amount of pain you 'd expect to inflict to monetize your traffic.

gwern 8y ago
No, because that will depend on the purpose of a site, what alternative revenue streams there, the site owners' utility preferences between traffic and revenue, what sort of ads there are, what sort of clickthrough rate they have, what the advertising rate is, and so on. At best, you can make a directional generalization: given that people systematically appear to underestimate the effects of ads (they just don't know), there is probably a large but unknown number of people who have overshot the optimal number of ads by an unknown amount, which will be different for each person. In contrast, the binary variable ads/no-ads appears to have a (surprisingly) consistent effect on general metrics of users/usage, as measured by 5 very different large-scale studies.

cm2012 8y ago

Not having ads costs you 100% of your members if it's the only way to monetize your content (not all content is suited to be supported by paywalls or Patreon).

AdsAreLazy 8y ago
Is the content worth anything then? Why not just distribute it through torrents or ipfs or something?
- cm2012 8y ago
  I guarantee you that you read tons of content that you wouldn't pay for. Hacker news itself is a big ad for Ycombinator.

Reedx 8y ago

I assumed this would be the case and removed ads from my web game about a year ago. But didn't see a difference with traffic or retention (granted, I didn't A/B test it! I removed them 100%). Which was disappointing. The only difference I noticed is that I lost that revenue (5 figures). But probably depends on volume and/or type of ads? [EDIT] Clarified re: traffic

gwern 8y ago
'Revenue'!='users'. EDIT: and 10% is, while important, a pretty subtle difference compared to the enormous variability of traffic. Traffic is a time-series which drifts and has many potentially large jumps. If you removed ads only once, how would you ever notice? The effect is very noticeable if you look at samples with _n_ in the millions, or if you remove/add scores of times and model it statistically, though.
- kelnos 8y ago
  A very good point -- if you don't have other sources of revenue aside from ads, and can't run the site/game/whatever without that, 10% of your users gone might be a perfectly reasonable trade off for the ad revenue that keeps the site running. I think you mention later in the Twitter thread that Patreon has given you much more recurring revenue than ads? I wish operators would spend the time to look at the effectiveness of ad alternatives as you've done.
civilian 8y ago
I mean, he's not making a prediction on revenue. Gwern is making a statement about traffic. Did your traffic increase ~10%? From the Pandora paper, (which showed that as more ads were played during pandora sessions, subscriptions were boosted but free users left) it sounds like there's an "optimal advertisement" rate for revenue. Enough to not push away users, but not too much to deter users altogether.
- Reedx 8y ago
  > Did your traffic increase ~10%? It followed the same pattern as I've seen for years. > Enough to not push away users, but not too much to deter users altogether. That could be. I might've had a goldilocks amount.

OJFord 8y ago

Surely any user that's going to bail because of advertising is already blocking the ads anyway?

gwern 8y ago
You would think so, and yet...
bluGill 8y ago
I don't object to advertising - it is how free news sights should pay for themselves. I understand and accept the deal. However this is a two way deal, they give me "free" content in exchange for me seeing the ads. If the ads are too intrusive they have violated their end of the contract and I leave.
- kaybe 8y ago
  I actually don't really block ads, I block tracking and by-default scripting (I whitelist pages), plus enforced https. That gets rid of almost all of the ads. If they can't give me ads without these things, their problem.
exolymph 8y ago
It's probably subconscious.
lexicality 8y ago
Seems unlikely - if they're running adblock they won't notice that you added ads.
AdsAreLazy 8y ago
It’s easier just to remember the ad free places.

umvi 8y ago

I believe it. There are a lot of games that I downloaded from the app store and really liked initially. However, I noticed a pattern. At first, ads seemed to be optional (i.e double your gems by watching an ad!) However, after about 10 minutes of playing, I'd see an ad. No big deal. But then it got more and more aggressive. Pretty soon there was an ad after every single level, (plus the bonus ad if you want to double gems). It got to the point I was spending about 50% of the time actually playing games, 50% of the time watching ads (the levels could be beaten in 30 seconds or so). At that point I uninstall even though the game is fun. It's not like I can just pay a 1 time fee to get rid of all ads with the type of game I am talking about. I have paid to get rid of ads for a few bucks in the past, but these games will still pester you with in game pop-ups for "diamond memberships" (outrageous recurring subscription fee for nominal and significant bonuses) and "best value" gem packs (also sold at outrageous prices going up to $100 for the biggest pack).

deleted 8y ago
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nitrogen 8y ago
I've seen a five year old play those games and talk about how much he really needs that $100 gem pack. I wonder if these will have any lasting effect on how kids of today understand value.
- lupire 8y ago
  Parents today have to train kids early. Mine learned by age 3 that any non-animated video content on YouTube was an ad that needed to be skipped. Not perfect, but a great start. Constantly drill into them that these are ads, and ads are bad people trying to trick them, and that ads should be avoided, in apps, websites, billboards, etc. I'm not any advertising, but the only good ad is an ad I asked to see, as when I'm using a web-search-engine for a product.
  - Waterluvian 8y ago
    My toddler learned at about 20 months how to skip YouTube ads. It's unbelievable. I watched him evolve as he would mash the "skip ad in 5..." Countdown to waiting until it was done to skip. He also learned through trial and error not to accidentally tap on the ads.

tjpnz 8y ago

I was a long time mobile Chrome user (until my recent switch to Firefox which allows me to block ads). My rule then was to move onto another source if I couldn't find one place on the page unimpeded by ads or spammy shite from Taboola et al. News sites are definitely the biggest offender here.

vorticalbox 8y ago
You can block ads in chrome too. Ublock is on both ff and chrome or you could install a chromium based browser with native ad blocking like brave or opera.
- slig 8y ago
  He meant mobile Chrome, which doesn't have extensions.
- gibspaulding 8y ago
  I assume they are referring to Chrome on mobile.

eridius 8y ago

If a game doesn't offer any way to pay to remove ads, it's an instant uninstall for me. If a game does offer it, but doesn't let me play for long enough to decide whether I like the game before it starts serving up unskippable ads, I uninstall it. Most games simply don't give enough time to decide if you even like it before they start throwing ads at you. That seems like a terrible policy in general, regardless of whether you have a "skip ads" IAP or not. You want to wait until the player has made up their mind about your game before you start degrading the experience. This seems like such an obvious thing I don't know why so many games are so bad about it.

luxuryballs 8y ago
I’m about to release a fun little ambient physics based puzzle game on iOS and have been debating this. To me ads are a stain on what I consider my art. But at the same time I want to monetize and wonder if people will skip over a $1.99 download. What do you think? Ads with the option to unlock? Seems gross though... maybe free with paid version that includes level editor or additional level packs?
- hiccuphippo 8y ago
  Maybe release a couple of levels for free and if they like it they can buy the full game?
  - HenryBemis 8y ago
    I have made an app for iOS, and it is about helping children between on the ages 4-8 read. It took me 1 second to decide "free with ads" vs "0.99". It costs 0.99, and I don't regret the 'small' sales. I prefer that people's children are not tracked by advertisers, facebook (that bloody ping on 31.13.x.x) and other trackers.
    - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
      Is sales income less than you'd expect with ads?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

everdev 8y ago

> So now there are 4 independent quasi-/experimental datapoints (me, Pandora, LinkedIn, & Mozilla resp) showing that a standard load of ads vs no ads decreases total consumption/activity by 10–15%. From the tweet itself, this is 10% of activity, not users. Kind of suspect that someone misinterpreted their own data so significantly.

gwern 8y ago
I disagree about it being a misinterpretation. They are measuring different things because they have to, but if you read the papers, you see that that's the net effect and most reasonable way to summarize them: an 11% reduction in intention to visit, a 9% reduction in total traffic, a similar reduction in total web browsing per individual, and in the case of LinkedIn, you can see both a decrease in users and activity per user, which net to the >10% reduction in total activity. This is as it must be (what is a web browser user going to do - stop using web browsers completely and quit the Internet entirely...? Not likely! Reduction in web usage is their only possible response.) How else could one reasonably summarize that in a few words?
- everdev 8y ago
  In analytics there are ways to discuss activity like: visits per month, pages per session, time on site, conversion rate, etc. It's possible for any of those activity metrics to go down 10% without losing any active users.

radium3d 8y ago

I believe it. I've stopped playing games with ads altogether. I'd rather pay $40-60 for a game that keeps me in the story. I don't have time for ads. Apparently 90% of users do though, so they'll continue to fill up the "top games" lists and make it impossible for us to find good ad-free games in the app stores. Even worse now that google removed the "contains ads" tag from the play store top game lists. sigh

annadane 8y ago
What bothers me is imagining what board room conversation led to that decision. Here's a piece of information, that benefits the consumer, and they took it away. It's hard to see much motivation beyond "it makes money, by selling more ads, because the user is uninformed". If you have a job in that position, yes I know money, but how the fuck do you justify that to yourself? Are you really that blind?
theandrewbailey 8y ago
> I'd rather pay $40-60 for a game that keeps me in the story. I don't have time for ads. Old-fashioned console and PC gaming is still a thing, though mobile inspired microtransactions are starting to creep into the market.
- radium3d 8y ago
  Yes and I am very appreciative of companies like Nintendo who keep the art alive. I feel the phone market has untapped potential still.
  - majewsky 8y ago
    The Nintendo Switch's start screen has ads on it. When you turn the console on from sleep mode, it shows flashy images entitled "Featured News" on the left third of the lock screen. [1] I tried to disable it, but apparently you cannot unsubscribe from the preloaded "news" channels. When I play Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the in-game experience is mostly ad-free, but there is a side quest on my quest log that appears to be a cross-promotion with some non-Nintendo game. It's really frustrating that Nintendo is also doing this bullshit now, even if in moderation. [1] Representative example: http://www.bearingnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/IMG_4920.jpg http://www.bearingnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/IMG_49...

marcell 8y ago

This is pretty interesting. I'd love to see the analysis broken down by some measure of the ads' "annoyingness." For example, what is the harm from an animated gif ad vs. a text ad?

yeukhon 8y ago

I have been seeing Squarespace ads on YouTube nearly for every video. I hate it and I just gives thumbs down hoping it will go away. Nope. Although the echo effect is real, I have to say I do not and will not use Squarespace simply because of the ads. It's insane. Same music, same video over and over. /rant

therealdrag0 8y ago
Why don't you use an adblocker or pay for YouTube premium to support your content creators.
- yeukhon 8y ago
  My conscious choice NOT to pay premium. Content creators already get $$ for views.
  - penagwin 8y ago
    Aren't youtube ads pay per click? In which case adblock doesn't cost the creator money (if you weren't going to click an ad), and their viewer/subscriber count is still normal (important for non-youtube sponsors)
    - 12298765 8y ago
      Pretty sure they aren't -- on my PS4 for example, YouTube shows ads just like on PC/mobile, but they're totally unclickable. There's no button for "see more on this ad" or anything. I know this because it has shown an ad for something that I was interested in buying, and I tried everything to get to the ad and couldn't. Ended up having to Google it on my phone!
  - aoeusnth1 8y ago
    Why do you think youtube is willing to pay for views?
  - lupire 8y ago
    Content creators get paid for ad views.

Causality1 8y ago

Additionally, 26 percent of desktop and 15 percent of mobile users block ads, so those studies already exclude the most ad-averse part of the user base.

fixermark 8y ago

(sardonic) True, but did you want those users if they aren't even willing to spend money?

lupire 8y ago
Sometimes. Those users are potential advertisers for your site.

kbenson 8y ago

> @Piccirello: What viable alternatives exist that don’t directly charge the user and therefore disadvantage the less privileged? Is JavaScript-based crypto mining feasible? That leads to an interesting thought. Ads are definitely one of the more egalitarian ways of getting payment from people, as they sap time and attention somewhat equally (or randomized along a fairly predictable spectrum not affected by most differentiators, I would think), and in proportion to how much you use something. Also, the ones problematic form a privacy perspective likely screw people over equally as well.

AdsAreLazy 8y ago

A site with ads is guaranteed to not care about how you use it. A site that takes your money is one that will care about the experience. Seeing an ad is an instant “if I can’t use reading mode I just block the site”. Life is too short to waste your attention on people selling you crap.

alpaca128 8y ago

I'm curious about the numbers for websites automatically playing videos. I find these even more annoying than 80% of ads and they often don't get blocked. And I personally run a domain blocker plugin just for these sites. Playing a video I didn't ask for? Bye forever. Most sites with this problem have 10 competitors just on that page of search results.

jrockway 8y ago

Is it ads, or slowly-loading ad-sized content? One thing I've noticed is that ads seem like an afterthought in most apps. The New York Times iPhone app displays ads, even if you pay for it, and occasionally the entire app will freeze while it's waiting for ads to download. (The app works offline, but if it gets a hint of network availability, it will stop the world to try and download them. Usually as your train is leaving the subway station with a 4G signal entering the tunnel without.) The Wall Street Journal app is similar, except instead of freezing completely, scrolling starts to run at about 5Hz instead of the expected 60Hz. Obviously, the developers of the apps develop it with ads turned off (or with sample images loaded from servers they control with no DNS lookup latency, etc.), so probably aren't even aware of these issues. That is going to reduce subscriptions, even if the images weren't ads.

pbhjpbhj 8y ago

Could just be an effect of page load time? Any attempt to rule out confounding parameters - on the web ads increase pageload a heap.

masswerk 8y ago

I really do think the way ads are presented and how they are embedded matters. E.g., a static banner, embedded statically server-side without tracking and targeting, respectfully sitting besides the content may be not offensive to anyone. We may even appreciate that the advertiser is supporting the content we like, a positive image transfer besides the needs of last week's shopping list (of which we're kept reminded just too often by common advertising practice). On the other hand, what we mostly see, is advertising going off-the-rails, competing with the content (reading a news site is often some of a glimpse of war of its own today, at least visually), aggressive tracking and targeting, in combination fostering the feeling that the ad-networks and by this also the hosting site are actively working against you, providing the content just as a pretext for exploitation. Something has gone terribly wrong. (I've actually not bought products, I would have bought else, because of advertising practices.) Edit: As an ethical workaround, I find myself increasingly opening a site in broser A without blocker and then copying the URL to another browser B with blocking, because I can't concentrate on the content anymore, or maybe switching to reader mode to consume the content. But, does presenting the ads to me make any sense at all? Most interestingly, this would result in inflated user statitistics. Maybe, we're seeing a combination of both?

tschwimmer 8y ago

This is interesting and valuable analysis. Despite a lot of people in this thread saying "See! I told you ads are user toxic!" I'd easily make this tradeoff if I had no/limited other sources of revenue. Two additional questions I have are: 1) Which 10% of users churn because of ads? Are these just average p50% actives or are they power users who evangalize your product? 2) What's the effect on annual growth rate?

godelski 8y ago
I think the real key takeaway is the graph he has about what type of ads are served. I'll deal with inline ads, but I'm closing the window if you think a popup is okay.
JohnFen 8y ago
> I'd easily make this tradeoff if I had no/limited other sources of revenue. Not me.

eqdw 8y ago

If any app or service offers me the ability to pay them money in exchange for removing ads, I do I do this even if the price is rather large. I think the most I've ever paid is $25 but I'd go higher.

lcfcjs2 8y ago

Wait, people click on ads?

atoav 8y ago

I might be one of the 10% mentioned here. It was sefinitly true for instagram since facebook took over. If every 5th image in my stream is a sponsered ad by nike or some startup it doesn’t feel like my stream anymore. There is weird content coming out of nowhere that I didn’t ask for. Effectively I just ended up using it less and less, till I sropped using it entirely.

mywittyname 8y ago
This is exactly why I quit pinterest. A good 10% of the content are ads.

fwip 8y ago

While ads may cost you 10% of your users, it may also be responsible for up to 100% of your revenue.

ContentTho 8y ago
That’s your own fault if that’s the case.

jfehr 8y ago

I have a strong feeling that not all ads/strategies will have the same result. I enjoy a large number of the ads that are shown to me on instagram and facebook, and have actually bought things from them. They're easy to skip or ignore. I'm not sure I'd use Facebook as much as I do if I didn't get some value out of the ads. But 30 second ads for penis enlargement pills every minute while playing a free puzzle game? I'm never coming back. I'd love to see a paper along the lines of the ones linked in the twitter thread in the OP that tries to control for the annoyingness/intrusiveness of the ad, the number of the ads, the relevancy of the ad, and some kind of personal touch of the ad. Admittedly, I didn't click through to the papers in the OP, so I'm not sure if this already exists.

Octoth0rpe 8y ago

I mean, sure, but they also often fund 100% of your users.

OscarTheGrinch 8y ago

I tried to get my young son into original Angry Birds, thinking it would be a nice simple physics lesson for him, but it has become absolutely unnavigateable for his age level. So many pop up special offers for magic birds to solve the level, cut scene product placement, and other in game purchases, that I can't trust those games to not get him lost in a maze of advertising bullcrap. I paid for this game, a kids game I thought, why can't I just enjoy it with my son?

avgDev 8y ago
Basically, everyone that makes games now knows how insanely lucrative it can be. I am not sure if this is caused by sales/marketing/executives but games now can generate massive cash. Many games now offer micro-transactions, casino style loot crates where you can open them by buying keys to have a chance of wining something. Even I bought a few things in games. However, many others young or old drop massive amount of cash on some games. My uncle drops thousands of dollar in world of tanks(or whatever it is called) to have the best tank. Plus, those game can create gambling addiction in kids, I think it is quite sad.
- OscarTheGrinch 8y ago
  Oh man, sorry for your uncle blowing that amount! Speaking of training kids to gamble, I'm gonna thread jack with a public service announcement, please avoid letting your kids see any "Surprise Egg" videos all costs. I downloaded "you-tube kids", their supposedly safe curated experience, and almost half of the recommended videos on a completely clean user install was this moronic kiddy click bait that turns youngsters into drooling dopamine rinsed zombies, primed for our loot-box overlords. Un-install, go play outside. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/modern-minds/201703/welcome-the-madness-and-mystery-surprise-egg-videos https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/modern-minds/201703/...
scarface74 8y ago
And it wasn’t that bad before. The difference between the original Angry Birds and Angry Birds Go with all of the in app purchases is stark.

jedberg 8y ago

I don't have the data anymore, but based on my memory of the time, I don't think reddit saw any difference in traffic when we launched ads (which was more than 10 years ago). That's not to say that it wouldn't change now, but just throwing out there that it didn't make a difference then.

m463 8y ago
Reddit lost me with the redesign to track and monetize. maybe 2-3 years ago? I had 250k karma all from mindful comments.

aiisahik 8y ago

> I feel like I'm on crazy-pills with this topic. No one links to my page, hardly any orgs run these experiments, no one upvotes them on Reddit or HN Gwern is on crazy pills because this is a feature not a bug. Your users are there to generate ad revenue - not the other way around.

sesteel 8y ago

I feel like advertisements ruin everything. I remember driving onto the my air force base and being thankful that all the visual pollution was gone. It was like stepping into another world. Now the internet has ads everywhere. I find the attention economy awful and dystopian. I'd gladly pay to never see another ad.

emit_time 8y ago
I’ve come to hate ads for how much they try to get me to buy things I don’t need. Sure you can say something about willpower whatever, but constantly being bombarded by them is horrible. I’m pretty happy with what I have, I don’t need all this stuff. But advertising makes me want stuff I don’t need. I don’t feel bad about blocking advertising to improve my quality of life.
- sesteel 8y ago
  I don't even pay attention to them; they are just there as visual noise. I worry a lot about the world we've created and where this is all heading. I like to wrangle some of these problems, maybe create a "no ad" network. You pay into a pool and the money is doled out to various businesses based on what you spend your time doing: games, websites, etc.
  - dest 8y ago
    Flattr? Patreon? Google contributor?
anitil 8y ago
I remember reading about someone that built a system where you put $X in to a pot every month, and every page you visit gets $X/pages_visited. This allows you to directly monetize creators without ads. I cannot for the life of me find it - does it ring any bells with anyone?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

vertis 8y ago

In a similar vein. Anti-adblock measures will pretty much guarantee I never come back. I'd love to be able to filter them from my search results. Plenty of domains I would blacklist.

microdrum 8y ago

The guys who built RealClearPolitics built a sort of "pay to eliminate ads" feature.[1] I wonder if they saw Gwern's Law in action. [1] http://subscriptions.publir.com/ http://subscriptions.publir.com/

wittedhaddock 8y ago

Ads strike me as a laughable local maximum on our ability to monetize spare brain cycles of the human mind. Critical thinking cycles, arguably the most precious resource, is subverted for single digit clickthrough rates. Ad tech makes me cry, and after reading science fiction, depressed. Let's please please gtfo out of this paradigm and figure out how to bootstrap these things between our ears for creation, than consumption, of something. And to go a bit deeper for a moment, it seems likely to me that what we now call critical thinking is the same thing as what Chomsky and Berwick mean when they use the word "language": an ability to hierarchically represent the world using symbols. Our "external representation" or ability to communicate ideas to one another, according to them is a byproduct of that effect. This was from their recent book, Why Only Us, and go on to point to the specific gene, FOXP2, that they believe caused this ability for the mind, and then assert that this emergence caused us to leave Africa (Out of Africa Theory). And if that's even remotely true, then the human mind is inherently more able and creative than we will ever know. Or said another way, the cross product of Dunning & Kruger with Berwick & Chomsky suggests an almost infinite unawareness of our own potential. - How do we know that the 10% drop off in traffic isn't "just" due to the increase of latency by the nature of adding additional the additional ad package that dispatches and draws on the main thread, slowing everything down (Linden, 2006)? http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/12/slides-from-my-talk-at-stanford.html http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/12/slides-from-my-talk-at-s...

dahart 8y ago

Are the 10%-15% who bail free users, or paying users? Number of free users is only a good metric if you have ads. Without ads, a better metric is needed, like revenue. The other thing we need is a real alternative. Ads are more or less unanimously not beloved, but bootstrapping revenue and funding are real problems. Worse than losing 10% of your customers is losing 100% of your customers because you can’t afford to stay in business. No matter how much everyone dislikes ads, they aren’t going away until there’s a way to fund your site/org/business.

JohnFen 8y ago
> No matter how much everyone dislikes ads, they aren’t going away until there’s a way to fund your site/org/business. The problem isn't that there aren't other ways of generating revenue. There are lots of them. The problem is that carrying ads is the easiest way -- it requires almost no development effort.
- dahart 8y ago
  That doesn’t answer my question. The question isn’t what ways there are to generate revenue, it’s what is the right metric. Number of users dropping doesn’t mean that revenue is dropping, so it’s not a great metric to demonstrate that ads are bad. If we want to show that adding ads to a site is damaging, we have to show that it’s actually damaging, rather than you lose a fraction of the people who were mooching anyway. I’m not sure I agree there are lots of ways to generate revenue, and more importantly that there are reliable ways to generate revenue when bootstrapping a small company. If there were reliable ways to do it, ads wouldn’t be such a big problem. The scourge of ads is evidence that finding revenue sources isn’t reliable. The main sources of funding for small companies are: loans, grants, personal savings, friends & family, angels, VCs, sales, and ads. Sales and ads are the only sustainable long term strategies unless you’re going for government funding of research or a public service. Sales requires a product with market fit, i.e., a bootstrapped company. For most early stage companies that leaves only ads as a potential positive long-term revenue stream. What other options are there? Making money with ads requires an audience, which requires having something of value. In that sense, it does require development effort. Maybe installing the ad into an iframe is easy, but getting enough people to your site isn’t trivial.

altitudinous 8y ago

Ads cost a tenth of my users, but I gain 100% of my income. No regrets.

charlie0 8y ago

Life hack for stopping ads on mobile games: Turn off internet connection. So far this has worked for me with solo games.