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Banner Ads Considered Harmful
- earthboundkid 5y agoPeople often talk about favorite TV ads. College kids will put pretty magazine ads on their dorm walls. We all sing radio jingles involuntarily. Has anyone ever enjoyed a banner ad?
- conception 5y agoYou never punched the monkey???
- technion 5y agoAll those years ago I would actually take helpdesk support calls from business users that wanted help punching the monkey from their work computers. People would put work on hold until I walked over to their desk and clicked it for them. I had a legal firm pay us to install bonzi buddy on all machines. It's amazing different the attitudes can be towards things tech people see as silly or scammy.
- zxcvbn4038 5y agoI once worked at a company that made learning management software for CEOs - basically those stupid HR click-thrus we all have to sit through. Problem was that CEOs at the time didn’t know how to use a scroll bar so if they encountered a screen with a scroll bar they either couldn’t continue or, after we moved the next button to the top of the screen, missed all of the content not on screen and couldn’t pass the tests. I could never figure out their issue. I encountered my first scroll bar on a Mac in a JC Penny way back when and had no issue with scrolling.
- astura 5y agoAfter 9/11 there were similar banner ads that showed up that were like "punch Osama Bin Laden." I always found them distasteful.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- TheManInThePub 5y ago> People often talk about favorite TV ads. College kids will put pretty magazine ads on their dorm walls. We all sing radio jingles involuntarily. Can I assume you are writing this from an American perspective (where advertising is everywhere, even to children) as doing such things is alien to me.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Tenoke 5y agoI've heard people from various European countries talk about favourite ads, I had favourite ads myself as a kid, and you can/could occasionally see people affectionately spoof ads in comedy/talk shows. This is definitely not just an American thing.
- bryanrasmussen 5y agoA favorite advertisement of the Danish people https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vosH4sRJgQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vosH4sRJgQA (Fillips Far)
- ocdtrekkie 5y agoI don't even speak the language this TV ad is in, and I love it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X21mJh6j9i4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X21mJh6j9i4 But yeah, I have fond memories of some American commercials that still get me: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9JxhTnWrKYs https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9JxhTnWrKYs
- AussieWog93 5y ago>Has anyone ever enjoyed a banner ad? What about Evony, my lord?
- erik_seaberg 5y agoThat game had 0% as much cleavage as the ad campaign. I don't see how that worked.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- petercooper 5y agoYes. My first ever YouTube video was about a banner ad on Slashdot that I enjoyed back in 2007: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCiAyTYBSJU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCiAyTYBSJU .. it's had over 100k views so I guess someone's enjoyed it :-D
- earthboundkid 5y agoWhoa, the British I'm a Mac ads were much cooler than the American ones. Still can't believe that PC dumped Queen Elizabeth II at the altar tho…
- tim333 5y agomac vs pc? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upGZHqhwg68 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upGZHqhwg68
- endgame 5y agoA lot of people make "one weird trick" jokes; does that count?
- icedistilled 5y ago>People often talk about favorite TV ads. College kids will put pretty magazine ads on their dorm walls. We all sing radio jingles involuntarily This must depend on the group or time. I don't recall people's dorms having magazine ads. Aside from the superbowl, any mention of a tv ad is extremely rare. I don't hear anyone sign radio jingles. Similarly, no one likes banner ads. Most of my friends are mid 30's rock climbers so maybe it's due to groups and ages.
- peteretep 5y agoIf you just skimmed this and didn't finish reading it, the surveys section is particularly interesting: https://www.gwern.net/Ads#they-just-dont-know https://www.gwern.net/Ads#they-just-dont-know
- alisonkisk 5y ago> As usual, I use Google Surveys I think that would have a huge systemic bias vis a vis ad nlocker knowledge.
- gwern 5y agoGS is a paywall, not an ad, so it afflicts the just and unjust alike, AFAIK.
- lw5 5y agoI'm wondering if it is possible a large portion of the survey takers were non-native English speakers that simply don't understand what 'ad' means in their own language.
- supernovae 5y agoWhen I served ads, It showed I had about 10k unique readers a month. When I stopped serving ads, It had over 50k unique readers a month. Google definitely rewards landing pages without ads and it turns out, over 70% of my readers used ad block and i was really always doing 50K more uniques a month but they were blocking analytics and other things (tag manager) so they were ghost readers anyway... without ads, google sends me a hell of a lot more traffic too
- avalys 5y agoWhat if you switch to Google Ads?
- supernovae 5y agoI was a google premium partner, they managed the ads...
- sp332 5y agoWhy did the ones using analytics blockers show up when you took ads off the page?
- supernovae 5y agoNo idea. I switched to cloudflare analytics and i'm getting real numbers without screwing with my readers privacy anymore so i'm happy... Firefox does goofy stuff to tag manager, lots of ad block blockers block analytics too and no script and stuff too.
- einpoklum 5y ago> they were ghost readers anyway They were normal, prudent, readers. The rest of them were careless readers holding a large sign over the heads with their personal details...
- gkoberger 5y agohttps://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html https://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html
- patrakov 5y agoAn interesting question would be how much of this can be attributed to readers from China and other countries that block Google. It's a common problem on other sites that loading of something non-important is attempted from Google servers, but the page doesn't render (i.e. doesn't show anything) until that ill-fated request times out.
- yorwba 5y agoGoogle's ad and tracking domains are mostly exempt from the Great Firewall: www.googleanalytics.com is not blocked ( https://en.greatfire.org/https/www.googleanalytics.com https://en.greatfire.org/https/www.googleanalytics.com ) while googleads.g.doubleclick.net was apparently blocked for a while but is currently accessible ( https://en.greatfire.org/https/googleads.g.doubleclick.net https://en.greatfire.org/https/googleads.g.doubleclick.net ) EDIT: I just noticed that Gwern's article includes the URL of the ad script he embedded: pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js. That one's not blocked either ( https://en.greatfire.org/https/pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js https://en.greatfire.org/https/pagead2.googlesyndication.com... ) What tends to break sites is when they depend on ajax.googleapis.com, which has been blocked for years now ( https://en.greatfire.org/https/ajax.googleapis.com https://en.greatfire.org/https/ajax.googleapis.com )
- disabled 5y agoI have to say that I am lucky that I have a print-related disability, because I almost never need to go websites with ads. Services I get access to (no-ads): * 975,000+ books for $50/year (Bookshare.org) * 60,000+ professionally narrated audio books for free (US National Library Service) * 80,000+ volunteer narrated audio books for $135/year (LearningAlly.org) * Hundreds of Newspapers and Magazines for free (NFB Newsline) * 99% of the books posted on OpenLibrary.org for free (even books currently "borrowed") * Virtually all libraries for print-related disabilities around the world (sometimes free, sometimes paid) (I can get books in foreign languages easily) Additionally, I use the paid audio apps Blinkist, Audm, and Curio, which everyone has access to. I find them to be super helpful. Blinkist in particular is almost 100% of the time a YouTube and TED talk replacement for me.
- loloquwowndueo 5y agoIf you’re curious like I was about what a “print disability” is : A print disability is a difficulty or inability to read printed material due to a perceptual, physical or visual disability. And https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print_disability https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print_disability
- MaxBarraclough 5y agoI realise the irony here, but please link to non-mobile Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print_disability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print_disability
- jraby3 5y agoWhat an incredible list. Thanks for writing this out. I can’t wait to try some of these.
- simonebrunozzi 5y agoAmazing list. And, well, very apt username. Would you be able to describe your disability in more details? I am curious about it, and I would love to hear your personal perspective.
- inglor_cz 5y agoI never had ads on my Wordpress blog. It loads fast and does not track you (not even Jetpack is installed), only embedded YT videos probably do. Instead of trying to make money on ads, I simply ask readers to contribute to an open account, or buy some books of mine. It works well, does not annoy people and there is zero dependence on major ad providers that might drop you one day without explanation (because you published something that offended their sensibilities or for any other cryptic reason).
- cblconfederate 5y agoWhat we need is to raise the price of ads. Saturation causes desensitization anyway, ads will be more impressionable if they are more sparse. But as long as the online ads ecosystem is completely owned by one entity, there's not going to be a change.
- ddevault 5y agoAds considered harmful. Don't let random companies spy on and mindhack your readers. It devalues your reputation and is not a humane way to treat people.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago> mindhack Interesting, never thought about it from that perspective.
- ghoward 5y agoDon't know why you are getting downvoted. You and I may disagree on a lot of things, but this is one thing where I have come to see you are correct, and moreso over time.
- dec0dedab0de 5y agoI always liked the way http://dodiy.org/ http://dodiy.org/ does ads. When you're a sponsor the author of the site draws it by hand and its hosted directly on the site for however much time agreed. The drawing by hand part is obviously not for everyone, but the idea is that the ads fit the aesthetic of the site, sort of like a podcast host doing their own take on ad copy.