Hacker News Reader

Comment by bkanber | Hacker News Reader

This is fascinating. Business model: annoy people so much that they pay you to stop annoying them.

Everybody's been talking about the death of display ads, and it looks like Google's paying attention and trying to figure out how to marginalize the ad itself, but still take money on the transaction.

Eventually, Google could probably marginalize the ad so much that there are only a rare few display ads left online, and Google has cleverly tricked us into keeping that industry aloft, essentially paying to keep something we hate alive.

View on HN

The ads aren't there purely to annoy people, they're there to support the content you'd otherwise pay for. The idea of paying them instead of getting ads is also a way to support that content.

It can also be seen as acting like the mob. "It'd be a shame if your nice clean web page suddenly got ruined with ads. You know, we can keep that from happening for a price." No thanks. I'll continue to block ads and not be tracked and have my internet load faster.

Go for it, but you're only able to have your cake and eat it too because of people who view ads. If I were you, I'd keep quiet and encourage others to view ads, otherwise content creators will have to either quit or throw up paywalls.

This is a false dichotomy. There are other business models, and many people enjoy sharing things for free.

> otherwise content creators will have to either quit or throw up paywalls

There are other categories of content creators who don't expect payment.

For example I contribute data to Flightradar24. In return they provide me with an ad-less experience because, like forum websites, their very existence depends on user contributions.

Other people just run websites for fun and education and pay for it willingly out of their pocket. I had to step-up to a 200GB package from my ISP for that reason. No-one paid towards my costs and I don't expect anyone to do so.

ads stopped being pay-per-impression around 2001 or so. For actual money to flow, people need to click on ads. For the advertisers to want to spend money, people need to not just click on the ads but also convert (aka, go to the site and order something).

Why does this matter? If the total ad space expands, and therefore the number of ad views increases, people will still buy about the same amount of products they bought before, which means the total advertising revenue of all the sites will also still be the same.

What we'd need would be an ad blocker that allows us, at regular times, to go to a special page, get a list of all the ads, and click on some of them in a quiet moment where they don't interfere with site content. And of course all of these clicks would have to count as "organic" non-fraudulent clicks.

>ads stopped being pay-per-impression around 2001 or so.

Care to back that up with some proof. Cuz I have a pretty clear picture of ad spending and this is not true at all.

A clearer way to write this would be, pay-per-impression stopped being the default (or only) way of doing business sometime between 1999-2001. After a brief period where ads were predominantly text-based, ad inflation brought graphical ads and CPM back and nowadays can do CPC as well as CPM or CPA (cost per acquisition) links: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2472725?hl=en&ref_...

But don't let your clear picture of ad spending make you ignore the fundamental fact: there's no basic relation between ad views and advertising spending. More buzzfeeds mean that there will be more ads, but not more advertising dollars, and quality/expensive sites suffer just as heavily from the ad inflation driven by cheap content sites as they suffer from the 20-30% of people using ad blockers.

Practically all of the advertising on the internet is purchased on per impression basis. It falls into 2 categories:

1) Advertisers paying straight per mille i.e. mr. Proper, Coca-Cola, Lays, etc. Direct outcomes are secondary to them (at best). This is the ovewhelming majority of the display ad spend. Yes, you read that right. The majority of the online ad spend does not care about sales on a website.

2) CPC based ads (ala adwords). Although you are charged per click, this is primarily because it is easier to explain to you. At the end of the day, there are back end calculations in google (the most famous one being called "quality score"), which transform per-click to per-mille. The reason for that is as simple as supply and demand.

This is true for all publishers who sell on CPC. They calculate how much they make per 1000 impressions and calibrate the CPCs towards balanced equilibrium that will extract the most money out of the ad buyers. Publishers deal with visits and they need to know how much they make per visit.

I made my initial comment just to see where crybabies will go with their nonsense and couch expertise. Response as expected...

Your entire post was informative right up the last line, You'd demonstrated your point brilliantly then wrecked it.

> ads stopped being pay-per-impression around 2001 or so.

This is flatly false. CPM models are alive and well. You don't need to look any further than AdSense for proof of that.

But it's not your website. It's someone else's. Someone who created the content and pays to keep it online for you to consume.

OK, then modify the statement, but use the same mobster voice: "It would be a shame if your browser got overloaded with pop-overs, malware and javascript trackers. You know, we can keep that from happening for a price."

I think it's BS to cast "people who respond to GET requests" as mobsters. If you want them to leave you alone just stop asking them for things.

Well yes, that's what an ad blocker does. But a lot of people believe ad blockers are unethical.

Pretend there is a Museum. It's free to the public with a suggested donation. You go there every weekend because of it's interesting collection of $thing. You never pay the suggested donation.

Is this ethical? It's not illegal. But that isn't the question.

Not a good analogy. If there was a donation mechanism, many people might choose to pay it. I contribute to several sites via Patreon, for instance.

But if every time you visit the museum someone follows you around talking in your ear about the products available in the gift shop, you might choose not to go, or (if the content is interesting enough) you might start wearing headphones or earplugs and go anyway.

I don't think Google generally has popovers and malware. And you probably get trackers anyway.

So a paywall, except it's intentionally obnoxious/dangerous to the very people it's trying to get to pay them money? I don't think this is a realistic thing to worry about.

It's not your browser, either.

As soon as their content hits my client though, they don't have any right to control what my client does with it.

That's not really relevant to this subthread, though.

They still have copyright on their content and how you use it.

> They still have copyright on their content

Certainly.

> and how you use it

Now that's an interesting question. I wonder if we'll start seeing people try to use explicit copyright licenses to say that your license is revoked if you use an ad blocker. Not sure what that'd look like.

More importantly, they're there to gather information about individual users so that the ad provider can sell that information..

I pay for Cable TV -- and its riddled with ads.

Recall back in the early 80s - the idea was to pay for TV so you wouldnt have ads...

> Google has cleverly tricked us into keeping that industry aloft, essentially paying to keep something we hate alive.

We hate content creators?

We hate shitty content creators (like Buzzfeed) who replicate content from other sources or even worse disguise ads with content (i.e. native advertising) . We also hate paying for the whole site just to read a couple of articles every now and then. How about a pay-by-article model with widespread adoption from the industry? I'd gladly go for it.

Lastly, we hate tracking. I can't overstate that. They kill profiling we kill ad blocking. Simple as that.

It sounds like when you're saying "we" you really mean "I."

Bingo. Most people don't even realize they are being tracked via ads. And if they did, they wouldn't care. Look at how many know about the NSA yet don't really care, and ad tracking is small potatoes compared to that.

Sure dude, I didn't proclaim my self public speaker of the HN community. It's just a way of saying. Jesus, some people in here are ready to dig up the hatchet first chance they get. Chill man, love and peace.

I mean, I think I'm pretty chill? I didn't mean to offend you if that's what happened, I was just pointing out that the distinction may be important in the context of this conversation.

If someone is proposing a solution for or discussing a problem that affects the entire Internet, it's important to realize that there are several parties who think differently, and in fact only a very small minority feel the same way you or me or the majority of HN does about things.

Well imho the context of this conversation and probably of every other conversation in HN is between technology savvy people. I think this is pretty clear, or isn’t? We talk about ourselves, not about the average user, unless otherwise stated. So in this context, with “we” I speak for those of us who understand the risks of profiling and for that reason choose to block ads.

I'm not proposing a solution, hell I wouldn't even consider that I know better than Google what should be done. I'm just stating a problem. Profiling is annoying. And as a user I don't think it works that well. When I visit a site for science fiction I'd prefer watching relative ads, not an ad about a pair of shoes I searched a week ago.

We certainly are a minority but an influencing one.

Tracking is weird. One hand it's gross and I don't like it. I think because who knows who is looking at what you're looking at. On the other hand, as a consumer I actually find the ads more valuable, and I sometimes buy items advertised to me. And as a content creator, they generate much more revenue.

I think there's a line that's often crossed. If there's no (or light) personalization, the ad shown will be relevant to the content it's next to, and maybe not relevant to me. If there's too much personalization, the ad shown will be relevant to me (or my browsing history), but not really relevant to the content it's next to. I would be less creeped out by personalization if the ads fit on the page; so when I view a news article about the Pope's visit, probably don't show me retargeting ads for a service provider whose API docs I was looking at yesterday; but if it's a technology site, then go ahead. Also take a lesson from Target; just because you can figure out I'm pregnant, don't make it obvious you know, put some deliberately mistargeted things in there too, so it looks more random.

Google ads used to be valuable because they were based on the content of the site you were currently watching. Doubleclick (later bought by Google) and others already did the tracking thing and didn't get mileage out of it. Retargeting (i.e. following you around with ads for something that you may buy with a more than 3% chance because you actually searched for it) is the opposite of that, purely tracking-based and mostly annoying.

> We hate shitty content creators (like Buzzfeed) who replicate content from other sources or even worse disguise ads with content (i.e. native advertising)

So why on earth are you going to those sites?

> We also hate paying for the whole site just to read a couple of articles every now and then. How about a pay-by-article model with widespread adoption from the industry?

That's literally what this is.

So why on earth are you going to those sites?

I'm not. But 95% of web sites out there are replicating content one way or the other.

That's literally what this is.

No it's not. That's a different model and I have no objections against it. This is a model where Google decides to give money to sites, and that is any site that's running AdSense not just the ones with original content. My argument is about why some of us like to use ad blocking mechanisms.

No, it's the model where Google is giving money to the sites you visit, in proportion to the level you visit them. Since you claim not to visit the sites that are "shitty content creators", you're not going to be supporting them in any way. So what exactly is your real objection?

Contributor might not be the answer. But if nothing else, this is a great "put your money where your mouth is" experiment. Suddenly all the talk from adblock users about how they'd just love to micropay for content directly has been replaced with all manner of excuses.

There are literally thousands of ways to trick users to visit a site, from clickbaiting to rickrolling. Suddenly these methods pay out some real money.

What do you think the possible consequences of this are? Will that be a net positive or a net negative for content quality on the web?

My real objection is profiling. I've mentioned it in a half dozen comments in this thread. Why is it so hard to understand? And why on earth are you so aggressive?

And by the way, we're paying for content. It's called books, magazines, newspapers, kindle shorts, you name it. Half of the original content out there comes from established news agencies, and most of them don't even run AdSense.

And please, spare me with this false dilemma, we're either bombarded with ads or the web will cease to exist. I've been hearing that for more than a decade. Advertising evolves. Even if 80% of users adopted ad blocking technologies advertising would find a venue to reach users. It's doing that for decades.

In the messages in this subthread (the ones that are direct ancestors of my message) you mentioned more often how much you hate Buzzfeed-style sites than how much you hate tracking. You used having to pay for Buzzfeed as your main (only?) argument against Contributor. Maybe it's not your intended objection, but it is the one you were making.

If tracking is the actual hill to die on, I don't know how we'd possibly get to your stated optimal outcome of per-article micropayments. That is something that'll by necessity make it easier for you to be tracked. There will have to be a central micropayment platform (or a few ones), since the threshold for maintaining per-site wallets is going to be too high for users. You will also need to have a single persistent profile on that central site, rather than ephemeral profiles that can be wiped away just by clearing cookies or by browsing from an incognito window. You can't even block the HTTP requests that are passing your information about the article load to the central server, since that's exactly the request that's facilitating the micropayment you want to make.

So I don't know if it's a very consistent position.

(I did not make any claims about the web ceasing to exist, nor about the necessity of advertising. No idea why you're assigning those views to me.)

> it's the model where Google is giving money to the sites you visit, in proportion to the level you visit them

Is it, though? Perhaps a closer inspection of the payment model is in order. I found this:

> You’ll pay the market price for each ad space that shows a thank you message or pixel pattern. This price can vary a lot. The exact price is determined at the time of the Google ad auction.

Further details are here:

https://support.google.com/contributor/answer/6084026?vid=1-...

Essentially, you are bidding against a website's advertisers and paying the going rate for that ad slot. Not all content is equally valuable to advertisers. Consider the high cost for cancer targeted advertising compared to targeting an audience for, say, some form of generic cola beverage. The page with the cancer advertisement will receive a higher portion of your Contribute budget than the page with the cola advertisement (if it's replaced at all.. Google may decide they get more money with the cancer-related ad than with your Contribute bid).

So, it doesn't seem to distribute your money in proportion to your level of visits. If you visit a single site more frequently than others, then sure, that site may get a larger number of bites at your budget, but if the value of that space is very low then the total sum you provide to this content creator could be less than what you give to the owner of the click-bait link you followed once and forgot about.

Well, I'm just one person, but: I pay for my email on Fastmail, I buy all the games (largely indie) I play through HumbleBundles or Steam, I donate to streamers on Twitch, I buy print copies & merch direct from comic artists I found online, and I buy music from bandcamp. I'm planning on supporting a number of artists on Patreon as well. I go meet those creators at cons and form a personal connection. Those are the content creators I want to keep alive.

I run an adblocker and I do put my money where my mouth is.

If there was any news or essay site that put out consistently high-quality content, I'd pay for that too. But as it is I'm happy for mass media and sites with vacuous pseudo-intellectual articles like Quartz, Medium and Nautilus to die out.

I don't know who this "we" is. But certainly a significant portion of the young adult demographic loves Buzzfeed and their like.

Well good for them. I'm not starting a crusade against Buzzfeed and similar sites. But when I can I advise people to block ads to avoid been tracked.

I'll join elorant. There, there's a "we".

But I'd go a step further than "BuzzFeed". Any of the "[something] via [somesite]" web sites are in the offending category. They literally make money from the content of others by (sometimes) rewording the original title and giving it a slightly more clickbait title so that their 'via' "articles" look more inviting. Often, this is a chain of evil. I do not want to support that chain, even if it is just for the one visit. I would like to support the original writer, but none of the reworders. Now, the sad part is, there is only a very small list of real content creators.

> We hate shitty content creators (like Buzzfeed)

So because there are bad content creators, that means the good ones should not get paid?

I'm not quite following your logic.

> Lastly, we hate tracking. I can't overstate that. They kill profiling we kill ad blocking. Simple as that.

As a nerdy guy, I'd much rather see video game ads than tampon ads. I get the ideological argument against targeted advertising, but the practical arguments for it are pretty compelling, too.

You don't need to be tracked for this to happen though. If ad networks placed video game-related ads on video game-related websites and tampon-related ads on tampon-related websites, then users of both sites would get ad content relevant to their interests.

Consider contexts like news websites, though, with broadly-applicable audiences. Specialty or niche sites do just fine with site-derived advertising targets. Other things do much less well.

There's also the fact that targeted ads result in better CPMs for publishers (since they'll result in better returns-per-view for advertisers), which means that they don't have to deploy as many of them to meet revenue expectations.

If I want content from content creators, I pay for it.

Ads is the old print way of getting paid.

Now, just restrict access and require a subscription. Have trial periods.

Why are you so focused on ads when it 1. Doesn't make sense if users can just block it and 2. There are better options for me to pay content creators?

If you aren't interested in my 'preference' you lose out. The customer is just trying to have a normal relationship here... Abusive forced ads are not normal... IMHO.

> Now, just restrict access and require a subscription. Have trial periods.

You realize that this has been tried and widely deemed a failure, right? Paywalls are a problem because they actively drive your audience away to next-best alternatives.

> Ads is the old print way of getting paid.

> Now, just restrict access and require a subscription. Have trial periods.

Actually, subscriptions + trial periods was also a print way of getting paid. For much the same reasons as it doesn't work for most mass content on the web, it didn't work well as the primary source of income for mass print publications (though there were publications for which it replaced ads, for the most part, it just served to provide a paid circulation number which demonstrated to advertisers the size of the audience that was dedicated enough to a publication that they were willing to pay something for it, so it was a proxy measure for effective ad reach.)

Relevant SMBC: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2490

You're absolutely right. This is essentially a business example of the Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis dialectic.

i actually view it more like the standard age old pricing model for goods with massive supply. "Content" is drastically higher in supply than demand, you are simply paying your market price for content. Ads would of course exist, but largely yahoo and early portals acted as print media companies selling advertising instead of content because 1) it was a new dist model, 2) there was nothing close to the ecomnerce and payment tools.

So basically, you are just paying for the goods you use, you set your price and this is beneficial to companies because the marginal cost of serving a webpage is almost nothing so if you opt to pay anything it is profit.

Unfortunately, taking time to pay for something has more friction than just not paying for it as well as being cheaper.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com