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It's not related to the actual article but the footnote about advertisment is what strike me the most : > Advertising revenue is falling fast across the Intern

It's not related to the actual article but the footnote about advertisment is what strike me the most : > Advertising revenue is falling fast across the Internet, and independently-run sites like Ghacks are hit hardest by it. The advertising model in its current form is coming to an end, and we have to find other ways to continue operating this site. It's no wonder Google is pushing to remove (partially) the ability to block ads in Chrome. If the business model based on ads is seriously at stake, a big chunk of the revenues of Alphabet is compromised.

uponcoffee 7y ago
Not that I necessarily disagree, but I think there's a bit of leap between ghack's footnote and assumptions about Google's behavior. One could leap to the assumption that ghack's target demographic are more likely to embrace ad-blockers, which is why they're being hit hard.
Waterluvian 7y ago
To me the absurd thing is that this site could probably just embed ads as if they were normal website elements and not hosted by some ad CDN with lots of Javascript. As long as the ads weren't terrible, I doubt visitors would go to the effort of manually blocking the elements. But that fundamentally breaks the absolute fraud and house of cards of the entire web ad industry and make layers of ad people obsolete so it won't happen. It feels a lot like cable companies: "Our model is absolute shit but we don't need to change, you do." It's why I'm completely unsympathetic to the pending death of the cable and ad industries. They both were in a Sears position to dominate whatever paradigms come next.
- aedocw 7y ago
  Not to defend the current model, but it's a lot more complicated than "just embed ads". Where do they get the ads from? How do they handle charging for them? How does the advertiser know they're not being ripped off, reaching their target demo, etc. The whole model with ads on the internet and the related tracking and profiling of everyone's activity is just terrible. But it's also going to take a lot to replace it with something less bad.
  - Waterluvian 7y ago
    I do kind of agree. But I think that can be a process and tooling problem that can be solved in numerous ways that don't involve handing over the keys to those blocks to the ad industry. I do kind of disagree. I don't think it needs to be a lot more complicated. I just think the industry kept growing to a point that it needed to justify complexity. There's entire categories of jobs that don't need to exist. Consider how advertising works for YouTube sponsorship. It's literally just some person emailing another person saying, "hey I've seen your site and based on a bit of research (the thing that justifies my jobs existence) I think your personality and demographic and other factors are all a match for advertising this product. Want to talk about it more?" And then the advertising agency hands over a package for the YouTuber to fit into their channel in an organic, appropriate way. Why oh why is that so hard for the web ad industry to do? Let's hash out the details, and then our guys will send your guys some html and other assets and you can plug it in to run for a month, using whatever technical architecture you use to run ads.
    - Guvante 7y ago
      300 hours of YouTube videos are uploaded every minute. Assuming that the average video is 2x the minimum required to maximize ad revenue (10 min so 20 min per) that is 25 videos per second. Assuming you can do a deal every 10 minutes you would need 630 people to get ads for 1% of the videos uploaded. The entire point of that complicated web is to eliminate the cost of all those people and move that 0.1% that you could actually do to closer to 80%. While it is true that we have given too much power to advertisers the solutions to the privacy problems that solve the advertisers requirements is hard (remember they are the only ones paying into the system so dropping their requirements won't happen). There have been some technical papers put forward but they are as complex as BitCoin is in order to actually allow for a small subset of the features the terrible leaky privacy of the modern web gives them for no effort.
  - jrockway 7y ago
    > How does the advertiser know they're not being ripped off, reaching their target demo, etc. The same way print ads have worked for ... centuries?
dkraft 7y ago
How absurd would it be for M$ to make changes like this just to generate advertising revenue traffic?
djakjxnanjak 7y ago
The proportion of Google’s ad revenue coming from ads displayed on Google properties keeps growing.

uponcoffee 7y ago

Not that I necessarily disagree, but I think there's a bit of leap between ghack's footnote and assumptions about Google's behavior. One could leap to the assumption that ghack's target demographic are more likely to embrace ad-blockers, which is why they're being hit hard.

Waterluvian 7y ago

To me the absurd thing is that this site could probably just embed ads as if they were normal website elements and not hosted by some ad CDN with lots of Javascript. As long as the ads weren't terrible, I doubt visitors would go to the effort of manually blocking the elements. But that fundamentally breaks the absolute fraud and house of cards of the entire web ad industry and make layers of ad people obsolete so it won't happen. It feels a lot like cable companies: "Our model is absolute shit but we don't need to change, you do." It's why I'm completely unsympathetic to the pending death of the cable and ad industries. They both were in a Sears position to dominate whatever paradigms come next.

aedocw 7y ago
Not to defend the current model, but it's a lot more complicated than "just embed ads". Where do they get the ads from? How do they handle charging for them? How does the advertiser know they're not being ripped off, reaching their target demo, etc. The whole model with ads on the internet and the related tracking and profiling of everyone's activity is just terrible. But it's also going to take a lot to replace it with something less bad.
- Waterluvian 7y ago
  I do kind of agree. But I think that can be a process and tooling problem that can be solved in numerous ways that don't involve handing over the keys to those blocks to the ad industry. I do kind of disagree. I don't think it needs to be a lot more complicated. I just think the industry kept growing to a point that it needed to justify complexity. There's entire categories of jobs that don't need to exist. Consider how advertising works for YouTube sponsorship. It's literally just some person emailing another person saying, "hey I've seen your site and based on a bit of research (the thing that justifies my jobs existence) I think your personality and demographic and other factors are all a match for advertising this product. Want to talk about it more?" And then the advertising agency hands over a package for the YouTuber to fit into their channel in an organic, appropriate way. Why oh why is that so hard for the web ad industry to do? Let's hash out the details, and then our guys will send your guys some html and other assets and you can plug it in to run for a month, using whatever technical architecture you use to run ads.
  - Guvante 7y ago
    300 hours of YouTube videos are uploaded every minute. Assuming that the average video is 2x the minimum required to maximize ad revenue (10 min so 20 min per) that is 25 videos per second. Assuming you can do a deal every 10 minutes you would need 630 people to get ads for 1% of the videos uploaded. The entire point of that complicated web is to eliminate the cost of all those people and move that 0.1% that you could actually do to closer to 80%. While it is true that we have given too much power to advertisers the solutions to the privacy problems that solve the advertisers requirements is hard (remember they are the only ones paying into the system so dropping their requirements won't happen). There have been some technical papers put forward but they are as complex as BitCoin is in order to actually allow for a small subset of the features the terrible leaky privacy of the modern web gives them for no effort.
- jrockway 7y ago
  > How does the advertiser know they're not being ripped off, reaching their target demo, etc. The same way print ads have worked for ... centuries?

dkraft 7y ago

How absurd would it be for M$ to make changes like this just to generate advertising revenue traffic?

djakjxnanjak 7y ago

The proportion of Google’s ad revenue coming from ads displayed on Google properties keeps growing.