Pay Google to stop seeing ads
contributor.google.com
contributor.google.com
For the past 20 years, I've been hearing how ads will be less annoying once advertisers can target more effectively. I think the exact opposite has happened. Look at some shoes on Zappos and the next week or two they are going to follow you everywhere. For me, that's far more annoying than random untargeted ads.
But I do think legislation to make you be tracked less would be awesome, but it'd be fighting money.
Is it really? For me, targeted ads come up for either a) products I have already purchased or b) products I've looked at and then decided not to buy. I got my wife an espresso grinder for Christmas, ordered on Dec. 10, but AdSense is still showing me ads for grinders. There is exactly 0.00% chance of me buying another one.
Campaign B: Show 10,000 people who recently looked at espresso grinders some ads for them.
95% of the first group didn't know espresso grinders were a thing people bought. The remainder probably aren't actively shopping for one.
In the second group, some portion of the audience has already bought an espresso grinder, or decided they don't want one right now after all. But it's also guaranteed to include thousands of people actively shopping for one right now.
Which campaign do you think is going to result in more espresso grinders sold? The one that doesn't include you, or the one that does?
As a matter of interest, is someone who has previously purchased an espresso grinder more or less likely to buy one than someone who hasn't?
(If the ads in the first 12 hours are important, it makes little sense that they keep advertising for a whole month.)
Yes, this means they end up wasting ads on people who already purchased, but that is outweighed by the other portion of people who didnt already purchase the product.
For gifting espresso grinders, it's not unlikely that purchasers will buy it as a gift again for their parents, friends, etc.
When an ad impression leads to a sale of something, that's great for that user and the vendor. But how many megabytes of javascript was downloaded and executed by all the users that saw the ad and didn't buy anything? The burden on the rest of us to support those two parties seems excessive.
I work for a company uses these targeted ADs. 100% of the ADs I see are for what my company sells. Well 98%, sometimes I see ADs for services we are already using.
It would be cool if when I am reading an article about how do X, there was ADs for goods and services that help me do it. That would at least make me think about clicking. Instead, I only see my companies product, which is worse the useless.
My company is paying to advertise to itself. And if it is happening to us, it must be happening to others.
A few months ago, I was thinking about buying a new truck. I was sitting out on the deck with my iPad and Google'd the name of the local Dodge dealership, found a truck I liked, then Google'd some specs on it. A bit later, the girlfriend and I drove over to the dealership and I ended up driving a new truck home that day.
For roughly six weeks afterwards, everywhere I went on the web (on the iPad) I saw presented with ads about new trucks. The majority of the ads were for the specific dealership that I bought it from (that I had Google'd) and the others were mostly for other dealerships in the area. I got to where I'd click on them every time I saw them just because they annoyed me so much. At some point, the ads stopped because I haven't seen one in a while.
Can we expect our mothers to pay Google a monthy fee to view less adverts on webpages on the Internet? How will their ideas about what the internet-as-utility mean to them change? Will they consider the money they pay to their ISP as already covering this? Would not paying imply that they should be happy to see advertising? How would this model apply to other paid services? Should people pay more to their taxis to be able to shut off the in cab monitors showing ads? Should a monthly additional payment be made to their email client to stop spam? Would they consider it okay to not get advertisements sent to their postal mail by their utility companies if they paid some more?
Would we see a Facebook Premium account where for 10 dollars a month no ads are shown, or a Twitter premium account where no sponsored tweets are delivered?
Now think about this from the point of view of a company or marketeer. Wouldn't those consumers who could afford to pay extra to not see ads be worth more to you? Would they imply that they had more purchasing power?
[1] http://www.internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/
I imagine the FTC/DOJ might have something to say about that too.
Google could lead the industry to implement a protocol, whereby third-party adblockers could implement a subscription service by which the user bids on impressions the same way as advertisers do now. If the user wins, no ads are displayed and a micropayment is deducted from their balance.
The necessity to mediate payments would provide an opportunity for adblockers to generate per-user or per-transaction revenue, which would incentivize them to support the system.
The added revenue would enable adblockers to devote sufficient time to blacklist maintenance for revenue-generating customers, further strengthening the pressure on sites that don't participate in the system, and providing added value to participating users.
I suspect this system may not work, because the auction mechanism would be vulnerable to manipulation by the advertisers, or because the price to the user would not be commesurate with the perceived benefit. But it is plausible, and would be legal.
These ads wouldn't exist in the first place if it wasn't for Google.
With money as a motivator, we have ended up with a lot of keyword-spammy poor quality content.
A whole lot of the sites I spend most time with are ad supported. It's not clear to me why less money == more quality, in your eyes.
There would be a hell of ablot less of those if there were no ad revenue(as ads are loaded when you enter they authors dobt care if you read those spammy articles, just load the damn page).
I would like to velieve this is true, but im not sure it would be(in the case of getting well written articles without ads).
I would pay Google to use search, if it came to this, because I find immense and irreplaceable value in Google Search that no other company seems to be able to replicate.
But paying anyone to not see ads on websites? That's absurd. I'll use adblocking while I can, and when/if those websites find a way to reliably block adblocking-using visitors, I'll just stop visiting.
The main way Google changed things was AdSense, which for a while at least replaced horrible "punch the monkey" type ads with text ads.
Unfortunately text ads don't seem to be so popular these days.
Meanwhile, websites will code around this and display more ads from other sources, and reap the rewards of getting paid by Google for not showing Google ads.
No thanks, I'll keep using Adblock.
It looks like as an average case, looking to spend $25 or above should get one 100% AdSense free Internet. But that option isn't there. Given how much value a typical power user gains from Google and the content websites combined, $25 a month is a bargain.
Ads can be ignored easily enough, especially with a blocker. Why pay for a service that you can get with an ad blocker?
What's needed is a Spotify premium-style model, where a monthly subscription is paid by the user, which is distributed to the content producers. (Or perhaps a tiered or capped system, where payment is tied to amount of content consumed). Such a system would also enforce better content being produced, with linkbait and sites designed for users to erroneously click on ads becoming non-viable.
Single-source subscriptions (like a newspaper would be) don't make sense for the internet. Distribution costs are negligible compared to print, and ease of accessing content is not tied to geography.
Remember flattr? IIRC it failed because a lack of adoption and because micropayments are expensive (fuck banks for this one).
Bank payments may be better now too, with more competition and greater use of non-traditional currency (ie Bitcoin).
So, going forward, it will be in Google's interest to make ads ever more annoying and creepy so that people are pushed into paying to end the pain. That is not a world in which I want to live.
How about this: Google pays me for watching their annoying ads. Given that I have the upper hand on the tech front (adblockers) and am the one buying the products, shouldn't I be the one being paid?
If not, why should we give Google money to take potential income from smaller companies?
https://support.google.com/contributor/answer/6084026?hl=en&...
Some people use blocking software that I know like blocking software so they can block all the other terrible ads that come from other ad providers. Those other ads are really intrusive. So, if some of the funds are going to the contributors of a site. Why not have another plan meant for blocking higher amount of ads.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2013/11/07/a-twitte...
I don't have adblocker/ublock/etc installed because I dislike adsense or adwords. I can ignore them just fine, but every blue moon I'll find something worth clicking.
It's for 99.999999% of the other ads that drive me insane. Or did I completely miss something?
If this is popular, it will probably increase ad revenue, so more sites are likely to want to show Google ads, which means people not paying into this scheme will see even more ads as a result.
Right now sites are being paid by advertisers. Under this scheme they're being paid by users. It doesn't say they're being paid more (or less), so I don't see why this would have any effect on whether sites use ads or not.
But under YouTube Red, revenue for creators went up. I would imagine the same thing would happen here.
This system is great because it's a) seamless (you just get one bill a month), b) based on usage (you visited these pages) and c) is a market (the price you pay is based on competitive rates that advertisers would otherwise be willing to pay).
I would imagine its that cost.
That is how much their being paid by the advertisers to keep the information open(as opposed via a paywall).
Im not sure how everyone else sees it, but thats my impression.