Advertising Companies Accused of Deliberately Slowing Page-load Times For Profit 394
An anonymous reader writes: An industry insider has told Business Insider of his conviction that ad-serving companies deliberately prolong the 'auctioning' process for ad spots when a web-page loads. They do this to maximize revenue by allowing automated 'late-comers' to participate beyond the 100ms limit placed on the decision-making process. The unnamed source, a principal engineer at a global news company (whose identity and credentials were confirmed by Business Insider), concluded with the comment: "My entire team of devs and testers mostly used Adblock when developing sites, just because it was so painful otherwise." Publishers use 'daisy-chaining' to solicit bids from the most profitable placement providers down to the 'B-list' placements, and the longer the process is run, the more likely that the web-page will be shown with profitable advertising in place.
Now I won't feel guilty about using Adblock (Score:5, Funny)
Now I won't feel guilty about using Adblock. Oh, wait, I didn't feel guilty before I learned this.
Rotten Bastards.
Re:Now I won't feel guilty about using Adblock (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead of dragging my browsing speed down to tortoise level and asking me to like it while watching your adds,
try making me benefit, even subtly, from viewing your auditions to separate me from the paper in my wallet.
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That would, you know, require them to find something that actually benefits you. I do not think the advertising industry still has that skill. It seems to me they now rely fully on trying you to convince to buy products you do not need and (originally) did not want.
Re: Now I won't feel guilty about using Adblock (Score:5, Insightful)
Jesus Christ don't use AdBlock Pro. They do some pretty shifty shit to try and get paid to let ads around their filters on default configuration.
Use uBlock. Also use https everywhere. Fuck downgrade attacks.
You mean shifty shit like say right on their home page:
Unobtrusive ads aren't being blocked in order to support websites
And they also provide a checkbox right on the main options page that controls whether to Allow some non-intrusive advertising.
Re: Now I won't feel guilty about using Adblock (Score:5, Insightful)
Choosing whose ads you allow to run and whose you block is the reason why I use https://noscript.net/ [noscript.net] in preference to adblock, a bit more work but it lets me choose who ads to run and whose to block. So blocks for intrusive ads (Content first then ad), blocks for just hinting at blocking volume control (seriously how big an asshat are you), blocks for auto running videos (my choice not yours whether or not to watch the video), blocks for shitty product advertisements (be selective in whose products and services you will promote) and, blocks for supporting nasty web sites (don't support bad web sites with advertising revenue). Some of this stuff should be regulated and bad ads and ad agencies should be prosecuted.
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They need to make that available on Chrome. Well, I use Opera but I can steal Chrome extensions and install them just fine. In fact, I have an extension that lets me install Chrome extensions which is a bit recursive seeming. Anyhow, I am stuck using ScriptLite if I want to have anything that functions close to NoScript with my preferred browser. ScriptLite works but does not allow much in the way of specifics. You either whitelist a domain or you do not. So, I dumped it and installed the uMatrix extension
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I'm awaiting Operas return, hopefully once the kinks with the browser engine have been sorted out it'll b
Re: Now I won't feel guilty about using Adblock (Score:4, Insightful)
At least there's a checkbox to fix this brain damage but ABP has seriously undermined itself by taking payments from the very source that it exists to block.
Re: Now I won't feel guilty about using Adblock (Score:5, Informative)
Dear coward
Jesus Christ don't use AdBlock Pro. They do some pretty shifty shit to try and get paid to let ads around their filters on default configuration.
What "shifty shit" do "they" do. A current citation would be informative.
Nice that you include default. The first thing I do when I install it click on the radio button that disables the default "show acceptable ads". (second sentence [adblockplus.org])
Use uBlock.[...].
Interesting. You say that. A lot. Is that out of altruism?
Which uBlock [wikipedia.org] are you promoting? There are two. uBlock Origin (or uBlock) and uBlock.
I tried both uBlocks, and found they had a number of failings for my use case. I'll reassess my reasons for not using or recommending it if you show me which reasons are incorrect:-
Caveats: I use ABP in Iceweasel (Firefox) on Linux, all my boxen have >2GB of RAM. I add a lot of extra blocking to the standard filters (and some specifically for /.).
Balance - I have no interest in support for Chrome. I'll happily trade a few extra MB of RAM usage, or a few microseconds of page load time for improvements in blocking. Not seeing ads, seeing relatively more content, customisability, exploit blocking, and decreased data transfer are high priorities for my use case.
For people that need something simple for Chrome to block some ads, and run an OS that chews up most of their RAM, and only want to block ads - uBlock Origin is probably the best choice.
Also use https everywhere.
I use NoScript - which makes HTTPS Everywhere redundant while giving me extra valuable features. I'd add FlashBlock to the minimal recommended extension - if someone has Fffflash installed.
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It was a good post until you wrote "boxen". After that, my filter turned the rest of the words into "blah blah I'm an idiot". Please don't do that again.
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It was a good post until you wrote "boxen". After that, my filter turned the rest of the words into "blah blah I'm an idiot". Please don't do that again.
The good news is your critical thinking badge is in the mail.
The bad news is you don't qualify for a consolation prize in the "not taking yourself too seriously" competition. But that's news you should be used to by now.
Ironically, given the MOD, the wisdom of Theophrastus is all greek to you, never-the-less I thankyou for your pointless contribution.
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APK
Fuck off APK. Once was enough of your damaged posts, beyond that it's just shilling for shit [youtube.com].
Why don't you go home and spend some quality time with Sex Conker, be the cow in his life.
If we wanted a brain dead multi-megabyte host file we'd make it ourselves - certainly wouldn't download one of yours everyday.
Now if only I had a filter for APK without having to browse at above 0 and miss some of the good posts....
Re:Now I won't feel guilty about using Adblock (Score:5, Informative)
Last time I did a reinstall and browsed a bit before installing ad-block(have to experience what the proles do occasionally, right?), I can best describe it as being driven to install it.
It wasn't just the annoyance of huge ads taking up 3/4 of their front page. It was the incredible load times as well. 100ms? Try a couple seconds on some of the pages I tried.
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I think that's 100ms per ad. With lots of ads, you'll easily get into the multi second range.
All of the ads on the page should be loaded in parallel by your browser, unless it's some sort of weird ad within an ad.
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Sequential loading, but also consider that many will delay the page showing until the ad is served or times out.
If the website is hitting 20 different ad servers & trackers, what are the odds that at least ONE of them is in a less than ideal routing location for your computer, not available, slow, or delayed?
I mean, blocking all the google, facebook, twitter, and such tracking & 'share this!' code sped up webpages quite well.
Why the hell would I want to share random posts on an internet forum, such
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Ad-ception... now I'm scared.
Re:Now I won't feel guilty about using Adblock (Score:4, Interesting)
I tend to blame slow ad servers more. With as many ad servers, tracking sites, and other crap revenue-generation webpages want to load on my computer, the odds that one of them is offline, slow, or frozen is fairly high. So I end up waiting for it to time out - until I block it and my computer doesn't even try.
Hell, one site I hit had FOUR auto-play videos on it - 2 of them the same ad that played at slightly different times, indicating that it wasn't even nice enough to pull it from the same location. Then it had the video about the article, AND a general news site feed.
The site was so horribly unusable that I could only conclude that the designers didn't view it without ad-blockers themselves.
Video ad duplication and isp quotas (Score:2)
I have three browsers two have ad block one does not and that gets little use. I use the non adblock for flash as flash can kill my linux desktop with a restart at a certain resolution.
So i get adverts in this use case, most of the adverts where repeated, and one was an infomercial for a water heater which ran to twenty minutes was relatively local to my location and it played about fifteen times in the hour of the flash thing. The next day i looked at the band width used was incredible and decided that i
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To not mention those funny ads that tried funny things like installing trojans, ransomware, bank keyloggers..
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Roadside signs (Score:5, Funny)
My eyeballs are mine to keep
Not for you to make a dime a peep
Do we fight them, or are we sheep?
Burma Shave
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Sure... now YOU are posting ads here... <grin/>
I bet you put a 3 second delay on it too!!!
Youtube (Score:5, Funny)
I clicked on a AD for a video on the YouTube homepage and you know what? It made me watch an AD before I could watch the AD I clicked on.
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I still haven't gone to the effort to block these on my TV. But normally it was 4 or 5 seconds before I could skip them, which was usually before you even knew what the ad was about. But the last week I've seen a few that refuse to let me skip the ads, AND the ads were entirely unrelated to the content as well. Screw em. Let youtube go back to being free with no one making money from them, hobbyists only with no youtube pros. Sorry PewDiePie, you need a real job.
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I still haven't gone to the effort to block these on my TV. But normally it was 4 or 5 seconds before I could skip them, which was usually before you even knew what the ad was about. But the last week I've seen a few that refuse to let me skip the ads, AND the ads were entirely unrelated to the content as well. Screw em. Let youtube go back to being free with no one making money from them, hobbyists only with no youtube pros. Sorry PewDiePie, you need a real job.
I have to say my favorite is when I brought up a trailer for a kids movie on YouTube and before that it played an advertisement for some horror movie. Yes you heard that right before watching a trailer for a kids movie they showed a movie that made my 5 year old scared because I couldn't skip it for 5 SECONDS.
Yo, dawg! (Score:2)
You can fill in the rest
I don't get it (Score:3)
Why don't publishers put the ads in a section of the page that can allow the rest of the page to load and render before the ad loads and renders?
E.g. Embed the ad in a sized Iframe.
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Why don't publishers put the ads in a section of the page that can allow the rest of the page to load and render before the ad loads and renders?
Because you could stop the loading once the content you wanted was rendered, thus skipping the ad.
So the pages are set up so the ad loads and renders first.
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The web site owners don't know about any of this, they have farmed out their design to third parties and after signing a contract to an ad provider/server they wash their hands of responsibility (as long as they get revenue). The third parties don't want this idea because then it would be too easy to block them, as in loss of revenue.
A simple proposition. (Score:2)
Ok. Everyone hates ads.
What is the alternate solution? Are you willing to pay for a subscription to every site you visit? Do you want more "native content" intermixed with all these articles?
Let's face it, hosting sites and entertainment on the Internet isn't free. Soulskill has to eat and put a roof over his head. Along with the rest of the Slashdot staff. And those colo costs are non-zero.
Which do you want? Your "free" ad-based internet? Or the worse solutions that are coming if sites continue to not be a
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Ok. That's a good solution for exactly one website.
Say, reddit develops an ad-blocking solution that you have to pay for.
How does that help slashdot stay in business?
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Get better content, do better at troll control and get more of us to subscribe.
Why are you a cheap jerk and not paying a subscription? http://slashdot.org/subscribe.... [slashdot.org]
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Ask that same question of the million other people who come here.
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Start with _this_ math - take your average page views per day, multiply it by $.001 to find how much websites are making per day by making your web browsing experience miserable. It's a piddly number _even_ for a lowly intern making minimum wage.
Then absolutely yes think about other ways a site can generate that kind of revenue, 'cause they need to use them. Patreon comes to mind for a start.
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Sure. Patreon is an option.
Maybe slashdot could generate enough money in the first year running a patreon campaign to cover its costs.
But what about year two?
Everyone already hates it when wikipedia runs their yearly donation campaign. And they have an order of magnitude more traffic than slashdot.
Then what are you going to do, limit slashdot content to those who have donated through patreon? What's the difference between that and a paywall?
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Would you pay?
Would you enter your credit card # (defaulting to the most common payment method in the US) for a $.02 transaction?
Would you hold money in a third party account that handles all those $.02 transactions?
Or, more likely, would you just resign yourself to enjoying a slashdot with an empty comments section? I can tell you one thing, with a nearly non-existent comment section, slashdot's operating costs would plummet. Thereby solving most of your advertising problem. :)
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I don't hate ads. I don't pay much attention to them, I don't find them to be useful or helpful in any way, and I don't click on them except by accident. But I totally understand the reason they're on the page. I get it. People hosting web sites need some income to pay the fees associated with that.
When your ads take so long to load that I navigate away from the page before it even loads, you lose ad impression money. When your ads are so intrusive that I stop going to your site, you lose ad impression
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One thing about advertising - all of my efforts to block advertising still allow some ads to come through. I do see an occassional advertisement.
Every single advertisement that I DO SEE is hosted on the server which is serving up the content that I am looking at. If you are hosting your own blog, on your own hardware, and you serve up an advertisement with each page, I WILL SEE that advertisement. I may or may not LOOK AT the ad, but it will load, and I will see it, at least peripherally.
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How about this:
Advertisers go back to a few small unobtrusive static ads on each page. People didn't hate ads nearly as much before the ads got so obnoxious and headache inducing, Static ads load more quickly too. One reason that more and more people started using ad-blockers is that the ads got too obnoxious, headache-inducing, and too distracting from the page content that they want to see.
Unfortunately, there is now a core of folks like me who will not ever go back to not using ad-blockers. The ads
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True. And then it starts to become a compounding problem.
Your favorite sites start to run ads to cover their escalating costs.
The users semi-revolt, so they run adblocker.
As the site see their revenue go down, they either a) run more ads to make up for it, or b) go out of business.
For most sites (unless you really love those listicle content mills), that's the tragedy. For others, well most of them have chosen A.
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You left out the third option that will become a standard and that's to stall you out if you are using any kind of ad blocker.
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Headache inducing? Let's not forget people who are subject to epileptic seizures. I remember some of those pages that stabbed into my brain painfully. If I were an epileptic, I'm sure that some of them would have triggered a seizure. Think of MySpace as a prime example of the crap I'm talking about.
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I try not to think of MySpace at all . . .
Re:A simple proposition. (Score:5, Insightful)
You can put ads on a site without being a jerk about it. Make them small, non-animated, silent, and keep them out of the way of the content. Only a small minority of people tend to object to advertisements like that. It's when you start actively shoving them in people's faces, animating them, making them play video or sound, interspersing them misleadingly throughout the content, creating pop ups or pop-unders, and all that other sort of nonsense... that's when people get irritated enough to install ad-blockers.
This isn't a binary choice. Advertisement works just fine as long as it's kept to a reasonable level of non-annoyance. But time after time after time, we see that they just can't resist pushing things a bit too far and in turn pushing people to the point of taking action
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Exactly.
Supporting anecdotes:
There are a number of sites I have whitelisted for quite a while now (webcomics, mostly). Only very recently did I notice a slightly more annoying one on one of those sites. Usually, I am completely fine with all their ads. And that is just because they are web-ads like they used to be, long long ago. Present, but not fucking annoying and in your face.
There is one website which I value that detects adblockers and approximately weekly flashes a message about how I'm hurting them
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I dont hate ads, I hate being annoyed by ads. The only ads I see are the ones that are passive enough to get past adblock. This I dont really mind as they're almost always not interfering with the content.
When ads become more important than displaying the content people went there for is when people start to turn off, or in the case of the internet they start to use an adblocker. This is in response to advertising becoming more and more painful for the end user.
What is the alternate solution?
Few are suggestin
Bitcoin Microtransactions (Score:3)
Microtransactions were once suggested as a solution to this problem, but credit card transaction fees destroy the profitability unless these are collected regularly and then charged in bulk. Some startup could sell NetBux, so a $0.05 microtransaction could be transferred free deducting from a $5 balance; credit card companies would only get a cut for that single $5 purchase. However, unless every browser manufacturer integrates NetBux support, it's dead in the water. Since everyone and their grandma would w
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Get your mom to start using BitCoin then report back. :)
Or your granddad.
That's only mostly tongue in cheek.
That's the hurdle.
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Or, you know, less content. It's not as if we're all sitting around wishing there was more stuff on the internet to read, right?
We pay a monthly subscription for our online daily newspaper. I occasionally pay for things such as printed anthologies of online comics I follow, buy books by authors whose blogs and articles I read. I subscribe to
Re: A simple proposition. (Score:2)
The solution is not to rely on advertising as your primary means of financing your business. Unless you're Google, advertising is an EXPENSE designed to promote something else you wish to sell. Yanno, kind of like R&D. It's a necessary evil to get your product from concept to purchased commodity.
Trying to profit / survive on advertising alone means you seriously suck at anything other than advertising and don't deserve to be in business to begin with.
If we use Cable TV as an example, even when we pai
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Ads that people hate do not generate revenue. The whole model is fundamentally broken.
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Slashdot sels no product. Sells no service. And wouldn't get enough donations to cover its costs. So they deserve to die?
I'm not arguing that advertising in the second coming. I despise most of it as much as everyone else. But, it is an accepted social structure that allows for the social contract between a content provider and the general public to stay intact. Because people generally don't want to pay for anything. And running these things isn't free.
Again, offer up another solution.
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"But, it is an accepted social structure"
Accepted by whom?
I'm not even going to attempt to guess what percentage of us refuse to accept it. But, there are those of us who simply DO NOT accept that we must watch meaningless advertisements before we can get to the page contents.
If the advertisers COULD successfully target my interests, I might actually look at an ad now and then - before I did a search for that product, to compare it to other similar products. Then, when I've compared them, I often go to Eb
Re:A simple proposition. (Score:5, Insightful)
Accepted by people everywhere. (Except BBC viewers, but I'll get to that.)
Technically advertising has been around since Survival of the Fittest became the order of the day. So, about the second day after the first amoeba crawled out of the oceanic ooze. But, more relevant to the issue at hand, it's been accepted ever since the inception of mass media. You can draw your line in history where ever you want. Go back as far as ancient Rome. Advertising has been there. "Come see men almost get eaten by lions! Enjoy food while you're there!"
But you probably want a more modern example. Then ever since the dawn of radio. Pumping 1000 W into the air wasn't cheap (the power of the first FM radio station.) Neither is pumping 100,000 W (modern FM station broadcast levels). Again, not to mention staffing and building maintenance, etc. But, in order to get wide adoption, they had to get people to listen. Many people felt that they shouldn't have to continue to pay after shelling out $100 (NOT inflation adjusted) for a radio. So they experimented with various revenue models, because even then, content wasn't free. So, the broadcasters entered into implied contract with the public. You get the content for "free", all you have to do is give up a little bit of attention in exchange.
And it worked fairly well for a period of time. TV came around, and all was good. Newspapers. Whatever other media used a similar model.
The BBC used a slightly different model where people had to pay a monthly license fee for every TV they owned. That license fee went straight to the BBC which paid for the content they saw. There were steep fees if you got caught watching TV without having paid your license fee. (Americans see it as a tax, which it essentially was.) And it worked for a while, until the advent of cable and satellite TV. Then the model came crumbling down.
And I don't know if you remember the early days of the internet (I do, check my slashdot ID#). Many other revenue models were tried. Ultimately, people, as always, are reluctant to pay for content. So, the advertising showed up, and we get to enjoy our content for "free". You just have to exchange some attention. And most people are happy with it.
Side note: Most people's discontent with online advertising is because Flash... blows. Well, that's changing. Within the next year, HTML5 ads are going to become the de facto standard, which will probably break AdBlock, at least for a little while. But, it ought to reduce the resource load. And for a brief shining moment, ads will become less annoying. Until they're not anymore.
As for your targeted marketing, there's a few issues at stake. Many people are creeped right the fuck out when ads get too targeted at them. Target already knows when women are pregnant, even before they do. It scares people enough to receive the mailer. Imagine having a "pregnant" cookie in your browser. It would become inescapable. (I don't want to get into a long discussion about cookies and privacy and what not. Regardless of how it's set, the advertisers would know.) So there's a careful balance that the advertisers deliberately strike between providing relevant ads and being too creepy. Again, be careful what you wish for.
As for your Fluke and circuit puller problems. Running ads targeted like that is expensive. Most of your Fluke vendors aren't exactly rolling in the dough. And they're trying to sell you on a product you're going to buy once a decade. It's not financially feasible for them to do highly targeted marketing. So, instead, you'll be stuck with Amazon's terrible retargeted ads (that are carefully designed to not freak you out too much.) since Amazon knows you'll probably buy something else to cover the costs of running the ads (plus, they get a mass discount due to the sheer volume of ads they run and they have an automated system to generate them that your Fluke vendor can't afford.)
You're not rewarding gross incompetence so much as you are dealing with uncanny valley of what consumers are comfor
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Slashdot sels no product. Sells no service. And wouldn't get enough donations to cover its costs. So they deserve to die?
They used to sell a service where you could subscribe to Slashdot [slashdot.org] for some nominal fee per 1,000 page loads. The fact that they quit selling this service is their own problem, the scaffolding is all there. It just needs to be turned back on and made worth the investment.
Because people generally don't want to pay for anything. And running these things isn't free.
Our next stewards should revisit the freemium/subscription model. I used to pay $5 a month for TotalFark, now I spend around $3 a month for reddit gold, lots of people pay $10+ for Something Awful, but I never saw any compelling reason to bu
Re:A simple proposition. (Score:4, Informative)
Back when slashdot tried that, people were against paying for subscriptions to websites.
Maybe it's viable to revisit it now. Times have changed.
It would be interesting to see what perks they can make. Especially when the readership plummets as soon as the subscription goes live.
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I subscribed to Slashdot right up until their subscription system broke.
My second official act as the new owner of Slashdot (after tearing out the videos and replacing them with fish tanks) will be making sure that goddamn sub
airlines (Score:2)
After some major disasters, airline disaster begged the governments to regulate them so that users could trust them again. Otherwise in "free market" there is no way new airlines can be blocked from taking some risks with users' safety for saving a few bucks and thus scare users into avoiding ALL airlines.
Advertisers know there are bad apples in the lot, their own brethren. They don't do anything to protect the user. So they are distrusted. So Adblock.
If they want to get back into users' trust, it is their
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Then why are you here? :)
Another solution (Score:2)
is quite simple.
bought advertisements, targeted for the site, bought from the site.
not involving the ad network middlemen. the problem with them in the first place is that any friggin site can have ad network ads in the first place and as result there's no CURATION whatsoever and quality of content doesn't really matter(only getting the viewer to the page matters! if the content is worse than the ad then that's a plus for the publisher too.. ).
the cancer of the modern internet is quite simply the ad network
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If a site sells no product, sells no service, or gives something away for "free" that is so bad they get no donations, then they deserve to die.
If such sites really offer nothing of value, people won't come back and the site will die anyways. If people stay on the site, then it has value so why should it die ?
As for donations, appeal to donations *is* advertising. Just look at Wikipedia's last campaign : it even had flashy banners and popup overlays. So much that I wrote a custom filter in adblock to remove them.
Is there any evidence that web ads work? (Score:4, Interesting)
I mean the ones served "in passing". It just seems so counter-intuitive that someone would open a page to read an article or see pics and then ignore that thing and go read or watch the ad and click on it and remember any of it, let alone actually buy something.
I don't have AdBlock in one of the four browsers I run (Sandboxied Chrome -- the others are Sandboxied FF with no flash, non-Sandboxied FF with Noscript, and non-Sandboxied Chrome that I only use for 3-4 sites), and don't remember seeing anything remotely relevant or interesting, except for a couple of youtube ads, or ads for goods I already found and bought on Amazon. And I have clicked on an ad and bought something a number of times when I was searching for the item on Google, in the mindset of wanting to buy. Though I often end up going to Amazon and buying the item there.
Facebook in that sense seems the worst, no one is in a mindset to buy, they are just looking to score a bit of interesting info or pic from "friends". Imagine watching porn and seeing an ad on the side for 15% off for iphone cases. Well you most likely wouldn't even see the ad.
Anyway that's one datapoint. The 1st google search on "do web ads work" gives this ("A Dangerous Question: Does Internet Advertising Work at All?") http://www.theatlantic.com/bus... [theatlantic.com]. Prob. another case where Betteridge's law holds.
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Wrong mindset. Click-throughs or direct conversions to sale are very bad measures. Nice if it happens, but it shouldn't be the purpose of an ad. How often do you think newspaper ads get clicked on? I think they more often get a coffee mug put on top of them. Yet considering so many ads are bought in news papers, they do seem to be worth the cost.
Same for web ads. It's the impressions that count. It's that people get to see your logo, get to see your product, so that later when they're in the shop they go fo
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Too long to load a page, just lost a sale (Score:2)
Whenever a site takes an overly long time to load or is add loaded I go to their competotors web site which seems to be quicker loading. Also many ad rotator providers have become 0-day security risk so I just block them by default.
Advertising industry "shoot-own-foot" (Score:2)
If the page loads slow, the user will go. Elsewhere.
This is good news. I sincerely hope it triggers a fevered rush by advertisers to outdo each other in slowing down page loads.
One of the rare occasions I've found a compelling reason to endorse stupid.
Ad Blockers (Score:2)
If you're not using an ad blocker in 2015, you're an idiot. It really is that simple.
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What is with the current trend of Profit=evil? (Score:2)
While tragic, I'm sure the unemployed were comforted in knowing that their (former) company wasn't profiting off of anyone.
Advertising (Score:3)
First off, let me clarify: I can actually see the value of good advertising, and there are adverts that I have enjoyed in the past, mostly the ones that manage to be humorous. A good example in UK is the a chain of opticians called Specsavers; they are not actually particularly good, in my view, but the adverts are fabulous. Another one is for a roadside assistance provider (RAC? Blue Flag?) where a guy fills up with the wrong fuel and has a nightmare fantasy about his girlfriend writing a song called 'Piggy Eyes'. Heady stuff.
But the industry should pull their socks up and police their own ranks, because 90% or more is utter, vile crap, that only serves to drive people away from the products they advertise. Or failing that, governments should do it for them, harshly and draconically. It isn't just about protecting consumers, it is about protecting legitimate businesses and their legitimate advertising as well.
So, does he have evidence? (Score:2)
Frankly, "his conviction" that they do this isn't really all that damning. Does he have any actual, you know, PROOF that this is true?
Disclaimer: I use AdBlock, and never see this stuff anyway....
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A society as diverse and populated as ours would crumble without a universal way to settle accounts. How would Walmart pay its Chinese suppliers? It is no accident all major empires in written and remembered history evolved past the barter system.
All that and money is how we keep score.
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Imagine if all the effort and resources put into advertising were instead redirected to productive purposes.
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Imagine if all the effort and resources put into advertising were instead redirected to productive purposes.
You mean more productive like popups from every website saying "Support our site! Now that all internet Advertising has been banned, you have to pay us 17 cents for every page you view".
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I'd be good with that. Give everyone an incentive to never go to web sites again, or at least stop browsing mindlessly and instead pay attention to what they are doing. Not a bad thing. Society has functioned without web sites, and it will again (and pretty soon too as it's all moving to phones/tablets now anyway).
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I'd be good with that. Give everyone an incentive to never go to web sites again, or at least stop browsing mindlessly and instead pay attention to what they are doing. Not a bad thing. Society has functioned without web sites, and it will again (and pretty soon too as it's all moving to phones/tablets now anyway).
Yet you visited Slashdot long enough to not only click through to this article, but also post 7 comments.
For someone so keen on seeing the death of the web, you sure use it alot. Or when you said "Give everyone..." did you just mean "everyone else", because your rules don't apply to yourself?
Society has functioned without web sites, and it will again (and pretty soon too as it's all moving to phones/tablets now anyway
In what way do you envision phones and tablets making the web go away? I browse the web on my tablet and phone much more than on my computer.
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Slashdot has said that I can opt out of ads. Which I don't bother doing since I have adblock, but... If it starts charing $0.17 a page, then I'll stop visiting. Other useful sites I may stick around with $0.17 a page (and it has to be per page, not per third party script/gif).
People cut the cord from cable companies which used to be considered unthinkable. So I think people will be able to wean themselves away from fluff web sites too.
But think of it this way, I'm already paying over $50/month to get on
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Communism?
You'll end up with most people spending most of their time working their niche talents while a few benefit from doing nothing but "lead"
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And - how does that differ from life in the US? Most people . . . niche talents . . . few doing nothing but leading. Especially now that young adults find it necessary to work two or more part time jobs to support themselves, most people do spend most of their time working their niche talents.
Re:There we go again (Score:4, Funny)
I actually thought that was his sig.
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My response to sites that ask me to disable ad-block is to point them to ad-block approved ads. I don't mind those.
I think the advertisers are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The metrics show that their ads have lousy response rates, so they make them more obtrusive, which increases their click-through rates, yes. But then those buying the advertising eventually look at 'completion rates', and find that the obtrusive ads have lower completion rates - IE somebody actually buying the product/service
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Right, and human organ traffickers are stuck between a rock and hard place too but it's not my responsibility to help them out. So if advertisers can't make money without cheating then maybe they need to find a new career, and it's not our responsibility to put up with their tricks.
Also better if users learn to just stop going to web sites that they don't need to. If a site bombards you with ads, then rather than just turn on adblock there, just leave the site permanently and with prejudice. If it's your
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Advertisers will do whatever they can to increase their revenue, that's why we've had pop-ups, drive by installs, ads that sprea
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Normally they're looking at 'fantasy'. They're paying more than they want for the number of responses they get.
Like I was trying to point out earlier, paper, magazine, television, and radio ad responses are harder to measure than computer ad 'click-through'. Some of the examinations I've seen has the experts pointing out that there is reason to believe that the 'estimated' response for traditional media advertising has been vastly over-estimated.
Basically, they were backtracking to try to figure out why c
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there is reason to believe that the 'estimated' response for traditional media advertising has been vastly over-estimated.
That would explain the massive amount of junk mail still being sent out. I don't know anyone who opens the big thick envelope of ads that we get every Tuesday, or who has ever even leafed through the ten page advertising flyer that comes on Tuesday and Friday. The local bird-cage-liner newspaper claims a circulation of 40,000, but most of those never make it any further into the house
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I think the advertisers are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The metrics show that their ads have lousy response rates, so they make them more obtrusive, which increases their click-through rates, yes. But then those buying the advertising eventually look at 'completion rates', and find that the obtrusive ads have lower completion rates - IE somebody actually buying the product/service, signing up, whatever. Most of the increase is from a higher mis-click rate where the user is hitting close or back as quickly as they can.
While it's true that I tend to click on the obtrusive ads much more than the low-key unobtrusive ones, that's only because I'm trying to click on the f'ing tiny little close button (which is even harder to hit on a tablet or phone). Then when I click on the add because I missed the close button by a pixel or two and the advertiser's page loads, I'm pissed off at whatever they are advertising, so I can't imagine that my click was worth paying for.
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Like I said - higher mis-click rate. Making the close buttons tiny only pisses users off more, but ad servers 'encourage' that because they're paid more by the click, as you say. But that just pisses users off. I think the ad people are 'okay' with it because hunting for the close button helps.
Oh, and I've seen a number on my phone lately where they put the close button on the left side, not the right where you expect it.
Re: Industry 2nd opinion (Score:5, Informative)
I used to work for a company that, in a roundabout way, presented advertising to consumers. And, I mean...yeah, of course they waited longer than 100ms for everyone to get their bids in.
What many people don't consider is that while the primary ad presenter is getting bids, many of those buyers are doing an auction to their own list of buyers, and some of those do auctions too, etc., etc. So a lot of those buyers would take longer than the time limit we wanted to come back to us, but they were usually some of our biggest buyers. The ones that didn't actually buy many ads would get discontinued, because we didn't want to slow down load time for someone that never actually won the bid. But the big buyers, we would generally loosen the time constraints.
The wording of the summary and article make it sound like the advertisers are cackling and holding up their pinky finger, smiting the populace with longer load times for the monies. The reality is that they aren't thinking about your load times at all, most of the time. You are the product. Load times really only entered the minds of business leaders when traffic volume was dropping.
Re:"industry insider" (Score:4, Funny)
Don't you feel stupid wearing that tinfoil hat?
Not if you cock it at a jaunty angle.
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Then don't you feel jaunty and stupid at the same time? Although with enough jaunty then you might not care anymore.
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Don't you feel stupid wearing that tinfoil hat?
Not if you cock it at a jaunty angle.
Then you leave the critical 'side' of your head vulnerable to a well-aimed 'jaunty' attack while your defences are down.
Ensure your tinfoil covers down to neck level at *all* times.
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I see things sort of analoguous to shaving microseconds off of financial transactions. There's someone in the middle making money without being either producer or consumer and providing no real world value of any sort. Sort of like leeches but not as cuddly.
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Somebody is trying to push his crappy product really hard. With Slashdot postings that are Ads. Pretty ironic.
I seem to have invited the insane in.... (Score:2)
My apologies for that.
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I'm trying to figure out how exactly he knows when to jump in with his verbal diarrhea. I suspect he's got some web searches for "adblock" and "apk", among other things. He clearly takes this all very seriously, keeping tabs on his various anonymous posts so he can jump in with his super clever "you still can't prove me wrong" and if you really rustle his jimmies he'll stalk you and post about how you're a troll and shit. Which is pretty amusing, since his constant crapfloods and shit posts are classic t
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