3 ms·

> I'll also contend that you get what you deserve if you block ads and don't pony up in some other way. I explicitly reject this idea. What did media do for c

> I'll also contend that you get what you deserve if you block ads and don't pony up in some other way. I explicitly reject this idea. What did media do for centuries? They had a brick and mortar sales operation that went out and sold advertisements, took in creative, and than ran those ads inline. For those not big enough to support this, there are agencies that will do the entire thing for you. This idea that we need to allow untrusted third parties to run code on our computer because poor website operators would just have no other way to make money is bogus. This is particularly true for journalists who should be extremely uncomfortable that google has full access to their articles and can manipulate them before they're shown to end users. In an ideal world, people would take and make 100% of the advertising money for themselves, and pennies-on-the-dollar advertising aggregators would have no reason to exist.

tootie 3y ago
We may get back there but the 2005-2020 era just ruined everything for a while. The game of monetizing eyeballs became too lucrative for too many low quality content farms. That has to unwind and consumers have to recognize value again. For now, whoever runs the most aggressive ads for the most people will get the most resources. For reference, I work at a smallish media company doing high quality news and content. We have a small and strapped sales team. They sell what they can but the buyers have the same conundrum. They aren't all looking for partners when they can just buy traffic at predictable prices and put their faith in brand safety tools. They want to maximize their efficiency of their ad spend and that usually doesn't involve looking for partners and relationships when they can just click a button and get more views. The result is that we've been hit by malicious ads more than once.

tootie 3y ago

We may get back there but the 2005-2020 era just ruined everything for a while. The game of monetizing eyeballs became too lucrative for too many low quality content farms. That has to unwind and consumers have to recognize value again. For now, whoever runs the most aggressive ads for the most people will get the most resources. For reference, I work at a smallish media company doing high quality news and content. We have a small and strapped sales team. They sell what they can but the buyers have the same conundrum. They aren't all looking for partners when they can just buy traffic at predictable prices and put their faith in brand safety tools. They want to maximize their efficiency of their ad spend and that usually doesn't involve looking for partners and relationships when they can just click a button and get more views. The result is that we've been hit by malicious ads more than once.