this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2024
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[–] EnderMB 14 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

Many moons ago I worked briefly on an ad prototype that aimed to replace banner ads, particularly those that sit in content with a single bottom overlay that would "smartly" unobstruct the viewing experience of the page. I was able to reduce a full page of horrible ads into a single box at the bottom of the page that could be closed whenever.

The idea fell completely flat for various reasons, but some off the top of my head:

  • We have x advertisers that NEED to be on this page - how can we possibly get x on the page with just one box?
  • I don't care if people use ad blockers, let them do their thing and we'll target those that are happy to see ads
  • If people can easily close them, the reflex to close will mean no ad is glanced.

The sad stat that came out was that obtrusive ads, the kind that used popups or automatically opened apps to download were VERY effective. I could prove that my ads were several times more effective than "normal" banner ads and popups, but when you could sell 10x the ads it didn't matter if they were 10x more effective.

My brief stint in advertising made me feel that for many years people didn't care about those that blocked ads because there was always more shit to optimise or grow into. That has stagnated, so now the likes of Google are targeting "market share" by getting those that block ads to look at ads again. It won't work, at all, but it feels like they've now optimised themselves into a hole.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

What they're "forgetting" is that those who block ads are more likely to say "fuck product X I'll never buy it because of this ad" if forced to see an ad. (Well, they don't care, they know, but they can still sell the "spot" so to speak because the advertisers themselves are dumb enough not know that it is just shooting themselves in the foot.)

[–] damnedfurry 4 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

those who block ads are more likely to say “fuck product X I’ll never buy it because of this ad” if forced to see an ad.

This demographic is much, much smaller than you probably assume it is--I mean 'statistically insignificant' small.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 hours ago

It very well may be bigger than you think, there's a reason all the adblock users use adblock, and I know multiple people who do the same thing, and even more that while they may not say "fuck your ad I'll buy your competitor," they will only buy the product if they were already going to buy it through their own independent research or word of mouth from trusted friends.

Honestly, I'm not sure I've ever met anyone that bought something from a popup or ad in the middle of a news article, maybe the first few "sponsored links" on google when they google the product anyway and were already looking for that amazon link, but that's about it.

[–] Buddahriffic 2 points 15 hours ago

It's ironic, they depend on perpetual growth, which means the more efficient they get at growing, the faster they outgrow their effective markets and then end up in a position where they need to further optimize optimal positions.

Sure, there's probably smaller optimizations they could make, but they don't just depend on growth but a certain % of growth.

Cornering markets is the beginning of the end for businesses in our growth obsessed system.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 15 hours ago

Panel #4: Me: "Your content is perfectly accessible without loading any turing-complete assets from your web server, thanks"

[–] [email protected] 69 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Advertisers abused the hell out of us back in the early days of the Internet and we haven't forgotten. Multiple Pop-ups, pop-unders and seizure-inducing banner ads.

If they simply stuck with small, basic, non-flashing banners, I could have handled it. But greed knows no limits with advertisers.

[–] Tattorack 4 points 13 hours ago

I certainly do lot miss the days when I'd go onto a website covered in ads for cheap, garbage MMOs... And then suddenly hear random music really fucking loudly. Scrambling to figure out where it's coming from I'd find 4 or 5 smaller windows has opened up behind my main browser window.

[–] Holyginz 2 points 17 hours ago

Honestly I wouldn't even mind some basic banner flashing, i.e. not neon fucking strobe and plastered over everything. I can understand them wanting to get a little bit of an eye catch. But not all of the ads can be like that and not with pop-ups and shit.

[–] yamanii 20 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Yep, they brought it upon themselves, I still remember as a kid falling for a "you are the visitor number 1 million" and getting a virus; and now we have porn and cults advertising on youtube, nothing changed.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (6 children)

It's legitimately embarrassing how many people can't seem to grasp that this isn't the "fuck you" they think it is.

They aren't shocked or upset, they're not panicking because you left, because it's all the same to them either way. You either access the site while blocking the ads and they get no income from your views, or you go away and they don't get income from your views. Exactly nothing has changed for them except now they don't have you pulling bandwidth.

The point is not to get YOU to turn your ad blocker off, the point is it will get SOME people to turn it off who aren't you. If you're not willing to turn it off, then what you do matters very little because they appreciate there's no way they're getting income from you ever.

It's got the same energy as "You expect me to pay admission to enter this theme park? Well now I'm not going in, don't you feel stupid?"

[–] x00z 6 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

You can't seem to grasp that we're not just single people. We're a force that also influences the non-tech people around us.

When I use, repair or configure the computer of a friend or family member, it'll definitely get an adblocker.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 15 hours ago

Sneaky uBlock Origin installations where like 40% of the "work" in my computer repair years.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Well first it's not "fuck you", its "goodbye". And second it's not about "you", it's about "me" not visiting your site if I need to turn off adblock. End of the story, our path will not cross again. Ciao, aurevoir, hasta not luego.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I think the comment is about the last panel being a shocked pikachu type face.

The companies are not shocked that you no longer visit their page, that's their intention. "Generate revenue for us or leave"

P.S. genuine lol at hasta not luego, shouldn't it also be "aurevoir pas" or "aurevoir never" since that also essentially means see you again.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 17 hours ago

Lol, I'm french canadian and you're actually not wrong. Aurevoir litteraly means "see you again" but we dont really use it that way. "Adieu" would have been a better choice. It kind of mean "to God", meaning you dont intent to see someone ever again, or until you die at least.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 day ago

I completely get your point, and to an extent I agree, but I do think there's still an argument to be made.

For instance, if a theme park was charging an ungodly amount for admission, or maybe, say, charged you on a per-ride basis after you paid admission, slowly adding more and more charges to every activity until half your time was spent just handing over the money to do things, if everyone were to stop going in, the theme park would close down, because they did something that turned users away.

Websites have continually added more and more ads, to the point that reading a news article feels like reading 50% ads, and 50% content. If they never see any pushback, then they'll just keep heaping on more and more ads until it's physically impossible to cram any more in.

I feel like this is less of a dunk on the site by not using it in that moment, and more a justifiable way to show that you won't tolerate the rapidly enshittified landscape of digital advertising, and so these sites will never even have a chance of getting your business in the future.

If something like this happens enough, advertisers might start finding alternative ways to fund their content, (i.e. donation model, subscription, limited free articles then paywall) or ad networks might actually engage with user demands and make their systems less intrusive, or more private. (which can be seen to some degree with, for instance, Mozilla's acquisition of Anonym)

Even citing Google's own research, 63% of users use ad blockers because of too many ads, and 48% use it because of annoying ads. The majority of these sites that instantly hit you with a block are often using highly intrusive ads that keep popping up, getting in the way, and taking up way too much space. The exact thing we know makes users not want to come back. It's their fault users don't want to see their deliberately maliciously placed ads.

A lot of users (myself most definitely included) use ad blockers primarily for privacy reasons. Ad networks bundle massive amounts of surveillance technology with their ads, which isn't just intrusive, but it also slows down every single site you go to, across the entire internet. Refusing that practice increases the chance that sites more broadly could shift to more privacy-focused advertising methods.

Google recommends to "Treat your visitors with respect," but these sites that just instantly slap up an ad blocker removal request before you've even seen the content don't actually respect you, they just hope you're willing to sacrifice your privacy, and overwhelm yourself with ads, to see content you don't even know anything about yet. Why should I watch your ads and give up my privacy if you haven't given me good reason to even care about your content yet?

This is why sites with soft paywalls, those that say you have "x number of free articles remaining," or those that say "you've read x articles this month, would you consider supporting us?" get a higher rate of users disabling adblockers or paying than those that just slap these popups in your face the moment you open the site.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

Ignore the last panel and it makes way more sense. When the site demands I see their ads, I leave that site and look for that same content elsewhere. There’s never a time when I think “HA! Gotteem!” I just don’t engage with the site, and don’t care about it or who else does.

[–] Karjalan 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yes and no. Similar with apps, you can say "well if you're not paying/seeing adds then we lose nothing by you not visiting", but, depending on their growth stage, it's very hard to grow and get investors without a sizable audience.

Say you're a startup. If you have 10k people and you ignore ad blockers and people who don't play subscriptions. Then you start preventing people with ad blockers and no subscriptions from your platform and it drops to 1k... You lose investment pulling power.

The effect is amplified, or much worse, if you actually require user generated content as well

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[–] EnderMB -1 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

This is Lemmy, though. We're not the normal crowd, not even the normal tech crowd. We're the "Hacker News in '07 that laughed at Dropbox because you could just use curlftpfs and source control" crowd. As a general rule, if it's not about Linux or Star Trek lore this place knows nothing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 hours ago

You'd be surprised, there's plenty of people with niche interests here, it's just that if I made an AR builder's comm, or a reloading comm, or a vape juice mixing comm, there'll be 5 whole users if I'm lucky because lemmy is still small.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

ublocks' annoyance lists blocks most of these warnings and more.

i suggest you enable them as its sadly not on by default.

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[–] SkunkWorkz 29 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (4 children)

The ads when I disable the ad blocker

broken image logo

Pi-Hole will block it anyway

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 day ago

Love when sites think you're a captive audience. Bye sucka!!!

[–] pathief 35 points 1 day ago (8 children)

I often wonder how news websites are supposed to survive. People (myself included) want unbiased news websites without paywalls and ads.

How are they supposed to pay their staff?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

The news sites that we have today are an inversion of what they should be. As a journalist, you wield tremendous power that is entrusted to you. Being able to set the narrative for millions of others is a privilege and, in fact, something that journalists should be paying to enjoy (e.g. footing the bill for web hosting).

[–] pathief 1 points 13 hours ago

I don't agree with this take that people should pay to work. Journalist have family to feed as well.

[–] CheeseNoodle 18 points 1 day ago

I'm fine with ads when they don't take up half my screen or try and shift the page to to trick me into clicking on them, should a stuck with sidebar adds.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago (3 children)

News sites are in need of a paradigm shift.

I think we might get to a system where summaries of news are free, but indepth articles and videos are paid.

Oh and I believe that news sites should scrap subscription only models, I should be able to pay 1-2EUR for a single article that I want to read, with no risk of the payment being a subscription.

Obviously subscriptions models should still be an alternative if the users want it.

[–] TehWorld 2 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

It's nigh impossible to get many users to read past the headline. A summary is what 98% of people would actually want (and a good news story really is just a summary anyway) so the pay-through-rate would be so close to zero that I can't see this model working.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 15 hours ago

That is a fair point, which just makes me wonder what else new services can offer that people will pay for....

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

If your website is a business, you need to have a business model. If your business model isn't sustainable, because it relies on not annoying visitors too much, maybe look for a better one.

Btw, most newspages have adapted some 10 years ago already, showing the important news for free and additional details with paid account. A lot have the balance off tho.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago (2 children)

The honest answer are general fees like they are used for public broadcasters. It’s not a perfect system either and it requires significant effort to keep things neutral, but overall it seems to have the best results if you compare the quality of the outcome.

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[–] [email protected] 182 points 2 days ago (11 children)

Basically how I browse the internet these days .... if I have to click on a bunch of stuff, sign up, register, accept a bunch of notifications, cookies, blah, blah, blah ... all because I want to read 200 words on your dumb site ... I'm not even going to bother with your site, skip and find a different source that is easier.

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[–] nobleshift 79 points 2 days ago (5 children)

Have you tried rawdoggin the WWW anytime in the last decade? Unusable.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago

It really depends on:

  1. How intrusive the ads are
  2. If there is other invasive tracking
  3. How "corporate" the website is (SEO garbage AI spam vs genuine indie blogger)
  4. The quality of the article

But for some reason, 75% of the time I decide to willingly turn off my ad blocker, there's nothing to block.

[–] UncleGrandPa 7 points 1 day ago

Imagine if Newspapers were originally run like web site news

If you wanted to read A paper, you would have had to buy a year's subscription

[–] [email protected] 48 points 2 days ago (8 children)

Someday soon my "adblocker" might be a personal AI that reads the spam-ridden website on a virtual display in memory, identifies the actual content while pretending to look at whatever ads the site demands, and then passes the information I'm actually looking for along to me. Good luck captchaing that.

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[–] linearchaos 37 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I will try to unblock ads on a new site one time. I want to see the whole article on one page, No click-through gallery of 27 different takes. There can be ads in the borders and margins. And maybe if I'm feeling generous one in the middle of the content. I don't want to see an unrelated pop-up video I don't want to see every paragraph separated by another ad.

If they can't play nice I block the ads, If I can't, by default, see the content without the ads, I'll find the article on another service. Everyone's literally just copying the same content back and forth with different wording.

If I can't see the content, and I can't find it on another service, I'll generally use bypass paywalls clean. If I can't see it through that I don't see it.

I'm not giving in for this b******* ads all over the place scenario. You can't even read a recipe page nowadays without an ad blocker.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago

You can say "bullshit" here, lemmy isn't so concerned with making everything child friendly to appease advertisers like tiktok or youtube.

[–] Aneb 24 points 2 days ago (12 children)

Umm I was reading the comments, does nobody else go into the page's HTML and delete the "pay now" popup. Usually deleting the code works for me. Let me know if you have a way that works for you!

[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Depends, some pages don't actually load the full content. Removing the paywall pop-up doesn't really work then.

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