6 ms·

This illustrates a problem that I wish more people would see. People, usually businesspeople, consider adding some craptastic thing such as intrusive ads, to m

This illustrates a problem that I wish more people would see. People, usually businesspeople, consider adding some craptastic thing such as intrusive ads, to make more money. Who doesn't like more money? They add the thing, and revenue goes up! What they don't see is the effect that comes when fewer people visit the site because they're too annoyed to come back over time. They see and take credit for the small increase, but of course they don't take credit for the gradual decline afterwards, a decline that often enough leaves the site making the same or less money than it did before the craptastic ads. If people and companies took the bigger picture in to account, they likely wouldn't do these things.

jjcm 2y ago
It's the classic question of "how much of our brand did we sell to achieve this bump in revenue?". Selling your brand is a very real thing, and I wish more people would take it into account. Brand health correlates with long term health.
xahrepap 2y ago
I’ve wondered about this wrt public transportation. They keep raising prices, making it less affordable for people. Eventually basically no one is riding, so they … raise prices. It seems needlessly expensive to me to run empty busses. I’d like to see if cheaper transportation can actually make more money.
- hendersonreed 2y ago
  I've had this thought about public transit quite often. We're all very familiar with induced demand when it comes to widening highways and other car-centric infrastructure. Why don't we try to induce demand on public transit? Make it cheaper, subsidize it like we subsidize roads/parking, add additional routes.
  - danudey 2y ago
    > Why don't we try to induce demand on public transit? Make it cheaper, subsidize it like we subsidize roads/parking, add additional routes. Good systems do; most systems don't, for lots of reasons. 1. Public transit is for poor people, and poor people don't fund re-election campaigns 2. Subsidizing public transit is spending the public's money, and the public has spent decades being told that "socialism" is going to take away their freedom and choice; in this case, the government is going to put more of YOUR tax dollars into public transit and then TAKE AWAY your cars. It becomes a vicious cycle: 1. Transit is under-funded (or the funding is maintained but not increased to match rising ridership and costs) 2. Service has to get cut in areas with low ridership (e.g. areas with a lot of retirement communities get cuts to route frequency) 3. People get mad because now their buses run less often so they have to leave earlier or later than they wanted to 4. Why are we paying these people when they're just giving us worse and worse service? In the end you wind up with a scenario where people are voting no to additional transit funding, and pointing to the direct results of under-funding as their explanation - look how bad service is, why would we give them more money? [0] [0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/transit-referendum-voters-say-no-to-new-metro-vancouver-tax-transit-improvements-1.3134857 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/transit-refe...
- greenchair 2y ago
  does public transport even work without heavy subsidies?
  - adrianN 2y ago
    No form of transport works without subsidies, except maybe walking.
  - Adverblessly 2y ago
    The way I heard it, trains in Japan aren't (state) subsidized, but rather they are real estate businesses where "subsidized" cheap traffic into and between train stations drives increased real estate value and thus commercial rents. If you think about it, the same could be said of state subsidized public transport, where increased economic activity due to improved traffic (getting people to/from jobs, shops and their homes) can increase tax revenue which can then be spent on public transport subsidies, turning them revenue positive. Of course whether most state subsidized systems actually live up to those aspirations is a bit more questionable.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
    Do public roads work without heavy subsidies? Something can just be a public good without delivering profit.
- russelg 2y ago
  A couple states in Australia have experimented with fee reductions for public transport. In Western Australia, right now public transport is free for all students, and is free on Sundays for everyone. They also capped the cost of cross-zone travel to 2 zones, i.e. you'll never pay more than $5ish for a ride. Furthermore, unlike a lot of places, the airport train does not have any extra fare. In Queensland, right now all public transport is capped at 50c. Not sure how long this will last, seems it's a bit of cost-of-living relief, and a bit of an election sweetener.
  - russelg 2y ago
    My point with this comment is that ridership increased with both initiatives. Build it and they will come, as they say.
- danudey 2y ago
  > It seems needlessly expensive to me to run empty buses. But there's the counterpoint: if you increase service on a route that isn't full already, then you 1. Create more frequent, more reliable transit for people 2. Run more buses emptier than you were before But if you don't increase service, then you have people complaining that service isn't frequent enough or reliable enough for them to use, regardless of the cost. In my old college town, I had a job that was on the other side of the city - not a huge distance, as it was a small town, and I'd often walk home from work. Still, I looked at my public transit options one day, and found that my only two choices were to arrive at work two hours early or four hours late. No amount of fare cutting would induce me to take the bus to work. The area I was traveling to was more of an office park type of area, so 90% of commuting wanted to arrive by 8-9 PM and leave by 4-5 PM and outside of those times there was almost no demand, so it makes perfect sense, but there are always examples like that that people will base their experience off of. (Side note: I lived in that town for several years, was a broke college student/broke minimum wage employee the entire time, and never once took the bus. In fact, I don't think I remember even seeing one.) Cutting fares entirely will help get more people onto transit, but that also leads to political pushback as people who drive instead of taking transit complain that non-drivers are getting subsidized! Ignoring the fact that fewer cars, trucks, and taxis on the road means a better driving experience for them.
zhobbs 2y ago
It's usually due to incentives and the time horizon you're optimizing for. If a manager is tasked with maximizing revenue over the next 12 months no matter what, then increasing the ad load is a lever you are probably going to pull. If your goal is to create an enduring product that will slowly grow revenue and be around forever, then you're probably not backed by VCs or private equity, or you have a cash machine (google search, etc). The reality is that some businesses shouldn't take VC money and shouldn't get so big. Maybe a wiki farm should just be a wiki farm profitably run by 5 friends or something.
- mattmanser 2y ago
  Google search has totally craptastic'd out. Same with Amazon, it's now just sponsored spam. I just don't get why they think it's a good idea.
  - manquer 2y ago
    They don’t have to care ? That is the problem of monopolies. There is no incentive to improve the product , there is every incentive to degrade quality because what are you going to do not shop at Amazon or not search with google ?
    - abustamam 2y ago
      Fortunately for there are competitors for Google now, like Perplexity[0], ddg, and that one I always see on hn that costs money but everyone is happy to pay because it's that good. They may not have the mindshare Google has, but if Google continues the enshittification of search, people will flock towards better things. Unfortunately, I can't think of a similar competitor to Amazon. Ebay? Walmart? [0] https://www.perplexity.ai/ https://www.perplexity.ai/
      - massysett 2y ago
        Amazon has many competitors. Grocery stores, warehouse clubs, apparel stores, home goods stores, the list goes on. I do shop at Amazon, but there are many goods that I could buy there but that I get elsewhere - food, cleaning supplies, clothes, home goods of all kinds, on and on. Some I get when I go grocery shopping each week, while others I get from other online sources. I don't intentionally avoid Amazon specifically; the reason is that shopping at Amazon is an unpleasant experience ridden with ads, no-name goods of unreliable quality, and sometimes unreliable shipping. I just don't think to get these things from Amazon, the same way I don't have to think about not going into a dirty old store with high prices. I just don't go there.
Rygian 2y ago
I think the technical term is enshittification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
sitkack 2y ago
They know what they are doing, they can burn an unpriced asset for short term gain, looks good on their balance sheet while they have screwed over the commons (their internal commons).
MetaWhirledPeas 2y ago
> If people and companies took the bigger picture in to account, they likely wouldn't do these things. That's part of the issue. There are very real financial rewards for short term gain; meanwhile vision and legacy have been greatly devalued at both the personal and corporate level. How many CEOs do we honor for years of dedicated service and company growth? Respect is shown in the form of monetary compensation, and that's granted based on short term shareholder results. And it doesn't help that some companies succeed in spite of their brand tanking (FAANG, etc.). Why would you care about your brand if it doesn't seem to be affecting your bottom line? The brand at that point is for the shareholders first and foremost, and what's a terrible brand to many consumers can be a great brand to investors (Facebook).
taurath 2y ago
> If people and companies took the bigger picture in to account, they likely wouldn't do these things. Its important to denote that this decision occurs at the moment they decide to take someone else's money and promise them a return on their investment. The loss of control and need to produce a return on that investment (or often, to "show growth" to get the next round of investment in a never-ending game of musical chairs) is what produces mandates like massive ads and enshittification. Does Fandom need to own all wiki's? Do they need 300 employees? Do they need to own TVGuide, Metacritic, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs and a thousand different media publications? Hell no they don't, if their goal was to provide a useful service.
abustamam 2y ago
Unrelated but I put Forbes on a blocklist on my Google News feed because they almost intentionally epitomize the enshittification of the web. I can only imagine the horrors of browsing Forbes without an ad blocker, but even with an ad blocker, Forbes does some weird shit with my browser history. On Android, if I swipe, I either do a browser Go Back action, or if nothing to go back to, exit the browser. On Forbes, swiping takes me... Right to the page I was already on. I check my history stack, there's like five Forbes records. If I find the article interesting enough to share, I'd copy the URL... But for some reason, the URL is not even for the article I'm reading. It's for some totally unrelated article. How do I get the URL of the article I'm reading? This isn't rhetorical, I really want to know!! Anyway, Forbes somehow went from a pretty decent source of news in my parents' generation, to some case study in how not to design a news site.
- danudey 2y ago
  I've seen some interesting articles lately on Forbes' transition from news site to content farm. I couldn't find the one I originally read, but this one seems to be covering the same bases. https://www.nearmedia.co/big-brand-problem-forbes-content-farm-social-to-store/ https://www.nearmedia.co/big-brand-problem-forbes-content-fa... Edit: I think this is the article I originally read, but I'm not 100% certain. https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/ https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/
lobsterthief 2y ago
I’ve worked in media and digital advertising and, on multiple occasions, actually implemented ads on sites. The proper way to do it is to A/B test different ad SDK configurations (refresh rate, delay to initialization, etc) and measure the impact on various user engagement metrics (time on page, session duration, etc). These metrics can sort of tell you how people are reacting to the ads, though it isn’t perfect obviously. At the very least, it will let you know how violently people are reacting to the ad experience, which is also a good indicator for how it will impact SEO. Or course there’s an inverse relationship between ad revenue and user experience: with a very light ad experience you basically make nothing, with a very heavy experience you will make a lot in the short term but in the long term you will lose users, traffic, and ultimately money. If you do things right, you can strike a balance at least. I’ve also managed websites that hired some outside firm who worked on a revshare basis to come in and load ads on the site, and they didn’t do this kind of testing, and though initial revenue was high their traffic ultimately tanked in a matter of months. A big problem I’ve seen is you find a nice balance between revenue and UX and then that becomes the new baseline/control that future people start testing against. So slowly over time it’s a death by a thousand cuts. Turns out a lot of business people are bad at business. It’s hard to even explain how these metrics work to less technical people and it takes a special company to just trust the engineers and turn down the short-term revenue.

jjcm 2y ago

It's the classic question of "how much of our brand did we sell to achieve this bump in revenue?". Selling your brand is a very real thing, and I wish more people would take it into account. Brand health correlates with long term health.

xahrepap 2y ago

I’ve wondered about this wrt public transportation. They keep raising prices, making it less affordable for people. Eventually basically no one is riding, so they … raise prices. It seems needlessly expensive to me to run empty busses. I’d like to see if cheaper transportation can actually make more money.

hendersonreed 2y ago
I've had this thought about public transit quite often. We're all very familiar with induced demand when it comes to widening highways and other car-centric infrastructure. Why don't we try to induce demand on public transit? Make it cheaper, subsidize it like we subsidize roads/parking, add additional routes.
- danudey 2y ago
  > Why don't we try to induce demand on public transit? Make it cheaper, subsidize it like we subsidize roads/parking, add additional routes. Good systems do; most systems don't, for lots of reasons. 1. Public transit is for poor people, and poor people don't fund re-election campaigns 2. Subsidizing public transit is spending the public's money, and the public has spent decades being told that "socialism" is going to take away their freedom and choice; in this case, the government is going to put more of YOUR tax dollars into public transit and then TAKE AWAY your cars. It becomes a vicious cycle: 1. Transit is under-funded (or the funding is maintained but not increased to match rising ridership and costs) 2. Service has to get cut in areas with low ridership (e.g. areas with a lot of retirement communities get cuts to route frequency) 3. People get mad because now their buses run less often so they have to leave earlier or later than they wanted to 4. Why are we paying these people when they're just giving us worse and worse service? In the end you wind up with a scenario where people are voting no to additional transit funding, and pointing to the direct results of under-funding as their explanation - look how bad service is, why would we give them more money? [0] [0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/transit-referendum-voters-say-no-to-new-metro-vancouver-tax-transit-improvements-1.3134857 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/transit-refe...
greenchair 2y ago
does public transport even work without heavy subsidies?
- adrianN 2y ago
  No form of transport works without subsidies, except maybe walking.
- Adverblessly 2y ago
  The way I heard it, trains in Japan aren't (state) subsidized, but rather they are real estate businesses where "subsidized" cheap traffic into and between train stations drives increased real estate value and thus commercial rents. If you think about it, the same could be said of state subsidized public transport, where increased economic activity due to improved traffic (getting people to/from jobs, shops and their homes) can increase tax revenue which can then be spent on public transport subsidies, turning them revenue positive. Of course whether most state subsidized systems actually live up to those aspirations is a bit more questionable.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
  Do public roads work without heavy subsidies? Something can just be a public good without delivering profit.
russelg 2y ago
A couple states in Australia have experimented with fee reductions for public transport. In Western Australia, right now public transport is free for all students, and is free on Sundays for everyone. They also capped the cost of cross-zone travel to 2 zones, i.e. you'll never pay more than $5ish for a ride. Furthermore, unlike a lot of places, the airport train does not have any extra fare. In Queensland, right now all public transport is capped at 50c. Not sure how long this will last, seems it's a bit of cost-of-living relief, and a bit of an election sweetener.
- russelg 2y ago
  My point with this comment is that ridership increased with both initiatives. Build it and they will come, as they say.
danudey 2y ago
> It seems needlessly expensive to me to run empty buses. But there's the counterpoint: if you increase service on a route that isn't full already, then you 1. Create more frequent, more reliable transit for people 2. Run more buses emptier than you were before But if you don't increase service, then you have people complaining that service isn't frequent enough or reliable enough for them to use, regardless of the cost. In my old college town, I had a job that was on the other side of the city - not a huge distance, as it was a small town, and I'd often walk home from work. Still, I looked at my public transit options one day, and found that my only two choices were to arrive at work two hours early or four hours late. No amount of fare cutting would induce me to take the bus to work. The area I was traveling to was more of an office park type of area, so 90% of commuting wanted to arrive by 8-9 PM and leave by 4-5 PM and outside of those times there was almost no demand, so it makes perfect sense, but there are always examples like that that people will base their experience off of. (Side note: I lived in that town for several years, was a broke college student/broke minimum wage employee the entire time, and never once took the bus. In fact, I don't think I remember even seeing one.) Cutting fares entirely will help get more people onto transit, but that also leads to political pushback as people who drive instead of taking transit complain that non-drivers are getting subsidized! Ignoring the fact that fewer cars, trucks, and taxis on the road means a better driving experience for them.

zhobbs 2y ago

It's usually due to incentives and the time horizon you're optimizing for. If a manager is tasked with maximizing revenue over the next 12 months no matter what, then increasing the ad load is a lever you are probably going to pull. If your goal is to create an enduring product that will slowly grow revenue and be around forever, then you're probably not backed by VCs or private equity, or you have a cash machine (google search, etc). The reality is that some businesses shouldn't take VC money and shouldn't get so big. Maybe a wiki farm should just be a wiki farm profitably run by 5 friends or something.

mattmanser 2y ago
Google search has totally craptastic'd out. Same with Amazon, it's now just sponsored spam. I just don't get why they think it's a good idea.
- manquer 2y ago
  They don’t have to care ? That is the problem of monopolies. There is no incentive to improve the product , there is every incentive to degrade quality because what are you going to do not shop at Amazon or not search with google ?
  - abustamam 2y ago
    Fortunately for there are competitors for Google now, like Perplexity[0], ddg, and that one I always see on hn that costs money but everyone is happy to pay because it's that good. They may not have the mindshare Google has, but if Google continues the enshittification of search, people will flock towards better things. Unfortunately, I can't think of a similar competitor to Amazon. Ebay? Walmart? [0] https://www.perplexity.ai/ https://www.perplexity.ai/
    - massysett 2y ago
      Amazon has many competitors. Grocery stores, warehouse clubs, apparel stores, home goods stores, the list goes on. I do shop at Amazon, but there are many goods that I could buy there but that I get elsewhere - food, cleaning supplies, clothes, home goods of all kinds, on and on. Some I get when I go grocery shopping each week, while others I get from other online sources. I don't intentionally avoid Amazon specifically; the reason is that shopping at Amazon is an unpleasant experience ridden with ads, no-name goods of unreliable quality, and sometimes unreliable shipping. I just don't think to get these things from Amazon, the same way I don't have to think about not going into a dirty old store with high prices. I just don't go there.

Rygian 2y ago

I think the technical term is enshittification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

sitkack 2y ago

They know what they are doing, they can burn an unpriced asset for short term gain, looks good on their balance sheet while they have screwed over the commons (their internal commons).

MetaWhirledPeas 2y ago

> If people and companies took the bigger picture in to account, they likely wouldn't do these things. That's part of the issue. There are very real financial rewards for short term gain; meanwhile vision and legacy have been greatly devalued at both the personal and corporate level. How many CEOs do we honor for years of dedicated service and company growth? Respect is shown in the form of monetary compensation, and that's granted based on short term shareholder results. And it doesn't help that some companies succeed in spite of their brand tanking (FAANG, etc.). Why would you care about your brand if it doesn't seem to be affecting your bottom line? The brand at that point is for the shareholders first and foremost, and what's a terrible brand to many consumers can be a great brand to investors (Facebook).

taurath 2y ago

> If people and companies took the bigger picture in to account, they likely wouldn't do these things. Its important to denote that this decision occurs at the moment they decide to take someone else's money and promise them a return on their investment. The loss of control and need to produce a return on that investment (or often, to "show growth" to get the next round of investment in a never-ending game of musical chairs) is what produces mandates like massive ads and enshittification. Does Fandom need to own all wiki's? Do they need 300 employees? Do they need to own TVGuide, Metacritic, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs and a thousand different media publications? Hell no they don't, if their goal was to provide a useful service.

abustamam 2y ago

Unrelated but I put Forbes on a blocklist on my Google News feed because they almost intentionally epitomize the enshittification of the web. I can only imagine the horrors of browsing Forbes without an ad blocker, but even with an ad blocker, Forbes does some weird shit with my browser history. On Android, if I swipe, I either do a browser Go Back action, or if nothing to go back to, exit the browser. On Forbes, swiping takes me... Right to the page I was already on. I check my history stack, there's like five Forbes records. If I find the article interesting enough to share, I'd copy the URL... But for some reason, the URL is not even for the article I'm reading. It's for some totally unrelated article. How do I get the URL of the article I'm reading? This isn't rhetorical, I really want to know!! Anyway, Forbes somehow went from a pretty decent source of news in my parents' generation, to some case study in how not to design a news site.

danudey 2y ago
I've seen some interesting articles lately on Forbes' transition from news site to content farm. I couldn't find the one I originally read, but this one seems to be covering the same bases. https://www.nearmedia.co/big-brand-problem-forbes-content-farm-social-to-store/ https://www.nearmedia.co/big-brand-problem-forbes-content-fa... Edit: I think this is the article I originally read, but I'm not 100% certain. https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/ https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/

lobsterthief 2y ago

I’ve worked in media and digital advertising and, on multiple occasions, actually implemented ads on sites. The proper way to do it is to A/B test different ad SDK configurations (refresh rate, delay to initialization, etc) and measure the impact on various user engagement metrics (time on page, session duration, etc). These metrics can sort of tell you how people are reacting to the ads, though it isn’t perfect obviously. At the very least, it will let you know how violently people are reacting to the ad experience, which is also a good indicator for how it will impact SEO. Or course there’s an inverse relationship between ad revenue and user experience: with a very light ad experience you basically make nothing, with a very heavy experience you will make a lot in the short term but in the long term you will lose users, traffic, and ultimately money. If you do things right, you can strike a balance at least. I’ve also managed websites that hired some outside firm who worked on a revshare basis to come in and load ads on the site, and they didn’t do this kind of testing, and though initial revenue was high their traffic ultimately tanked in a matter of months. A big problem I’ve seen is you find a nice balance between revenue and UX and then that becomes the new baseline/control that future people start testing against. So slowly over time it’s a death by a thousand cuts. Turns out a lot of business people are bad at business. It’s hard to even explain how these metrics work to less technical people and it takes a special company to just trust the engineers and turn down the short-term revenue.