We're Enabling Display Ads on Select Stack Exchange Sites | Hacker News Reader

We're Enabling Display Ads on Select Stack Exchange Sites

meta.stackexchange.com

37 pointsingve39 comments

Do you stackexchange, do you. I have made lots of money by relying on great answers posted on your site, solicited by your code and app and hosted on your hardware.

I think anyone whose upset by this sort of move is living in la-la-land the rest of us know you have to make money. I'm surprised your not doing it on all sites and haven't done it sooner.

Literally no comments as of now here say it's a bad thing, nor any answers there, nor any comments.

If there's no visible opposition, why are so many people preemptively defending it?

Because for almost any other site this would be seen as a net negative. In this case, we've all (or very nearly all) benefited from stackoverflow in a meaningful and tangible (often monetary) way.

The preemptive defense will hopefully reduce any knee-jerk criticism over ads.

Because apps like Facebook have trained us to always expect fights and arguments based on how it selects what is visible in the news feed and in what order we see articles and comments.

You're close, but it's not just Facebook.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/

Why is there no talk of native advertising? They seem to be in a perfect position for it. I'm not going to disable my tracking blocker for any site, no matter how useful it is. No matter how relevant and ad is, or how tasteful it looks, if it's doing any tracking, it is distasteful.

Edit: Just realised I've been using the term "native advertising" incorrectly. I'm not talking about disguising it as part of the content, I mean hosting the ads themselves instead of dropping in an ad network script from a third-party.

Because the advertiser wants to track how many times the ad was seen, etc. Ad Servers / 3rd Parties provide the function of being an independent third party.

put it on a subdomain. foo.tld should use ads.foo.tld and point the DNS to the advertiser.

That way there's no cross-domain tracking via cookies and they can still track impressions.

This particular setup can/will leak cookies set on foo.tld to ads.foo.tld which leads to security concerns - only in your specific example though. If you were to use www.foo.tld and ads.foo.tld then you're good to go. While it is possible to carefully setup cookies that do not leak, its something you need to be careful of when recommending. That said, I do agree with your premise and wish native ad hosting like this happened much more often.

Reading material: http://erik.io/blog/2014/03/04/definitive-guide-to-cookie-do...

I'm well aware they want to, and usually do, do that, but they never should have been given that ability in the first place. SO is in a position to take that option off the table. I'm sure there are plenty of companies willing to give SO money to advertise their product with an image and a link, even if it means they have to trust SO to do what they agree to without being able to stick a nanny-cam in their website.

You can have as server tags in many native setups if the publisher supports it.

If they do ads like Daring Fireball does ads (no tracking, display only, same origin), I'll see them. Otherwise, I suspect they will get filtered out by my browser.

If every site that had ads did it like Stack Overflow I wouldn't mind ads.

There's a giant advert asking you to register, then there's one between the title and the question then there's another after the first answer. There's also sponsored jobs on the sidebar next to the whole lot.

Don't get me wrong I know businesses need to make money and I'm not saying they're bad people or anything but it's not exactly my first example of a site doing good adverts.

Granted, I'm not talking about what anonymous users see but what you see if you're logged in. Most social sites are obnoxious to use without an account so I almost give them a pass on that.

Stack Exchange sites are some of the only ones on my whitelist for my ad blocker and Privacy Badger.

They do ads the right way.

Still a nope for me. Adverts are a vector of malware and 0-day attacks. We already know that the advert companies aren't too keen in fixing these issues, either.

Lowering adblockers for a site means lowering my ability to protect against these attacks.

But SE manages their own ads, they've shown how to be responsible with ads. If that changes, then I will change it.

While, like any advertiser, they help you'll disable it - they openly stated they are impartial towards Ad Blockers as recent as February [0]. Personally, if what they say is true, that most advertisers are advertising for potential hires - then I'm a non-option to begin with so I'd be a waste of money to advertise to. My blocking saves them from having to serve the ads and get pointless ad impressions.

The fact they aren't begging and pleading me to disable my Ad Blocker means I don't care if they decided to show more ads. I won't see them - it doesn't impact me in the slightest. They need to make money, some portion of people will see the ads, those people (at this point) are probably technical enough to know they could block the ads if they wanted to but have elected not to for whatever reasons they may have.

So the people seeing the ads are people who don't mind/have chosen to see the ads and everyone else is not affected. Nothing to be upset over.

[0] https://stackoverflow.blog/2016/02/why-stack-overflow-doesnt...

It's great to see a HN thread with some appreciation for the need to allow content creators to develop aa sustainable revenue stream.

But it's sad that is has to be SO. Not, that they don't deserve it – but they merely need to support the technology. The content is created by users.

The Guardian, Bloomberg, The Washington Post usually get the "it's my browser and I block what I want – and that's everything" treatment. Although they're arguably more important than even Stack Overflow, what with some quality news being necessary for a democracy.

Note that this is no change to stack overflow, which has had these ads for a while. Just adding them to some other popular sites so they can sell relevant ads instead of using placeholders on those sites.

Had anyone here recently used stack overflow when not logged in? Last I checked there already were huge, animated banner ads only when logged out, as opposed to more tasteful ads only when logged in. I recall Jeff and Joel discussing this approach long ago on their podcast.

I know this is talking about some of the longer tail sites, but I wonder if that same approach will be taken and which ads will show up.

There seems to be no way to donate to them, why?

Probably because accepting donations as a company is non-trivial?

Is that true? Can't you sell "overpriced" T-shirts or whatever and treat that profit as the "donation"?

Then have to design and print t-shirts, manage inventory and so on, track earnings, etc. Even when you can outsource that, it might not be worth the headspace for them.

Can you sell fake t-shirts? Or some sort of other non-tangible good?

Something I've seen on other sites, like GameDev.net, is that you can buy a membership, which for all intents and purposes is a donation, since it doesn't really get you much besides an extra tag next to your name.

Reddit Gold is pretty much this, it does grant a handful of convenient features, but is primarily a way of supporting the site and recognizing particularly good posts.

I don't know how successful it is from a financial perspective, but it seems like a model that could be applied to almost any community/discussion oriented sites.

Might not move the needle relative to their other options like jobs, ads, etc. Companies that could have, but don't seem to have, used "enhanced membership" or donations or similar for making money: Facebook (and Instagram, etc), Twitter, Hacker News, etc. I'd say there's something to take from that.

> fake t-shirts

For a while a popular way around PayPal's restrictions was for sites selling services that were in violation of PayPal's ToS to go through an intermediary site for donations/credits. So you would buy a crappy e-book for $20 or so, or maybe a couple of mp3s for $5 each and forward the receipt to have the equivalent credits added to your account.

Pretty clever as the ecommerce sites themselves had full plausible deniability -- there was no obvious link between the PayPal merchants and the (most likely anonymous) people running the service.

How about "Buy a thank you email"...

Shell out credit card, get email.

Sell receipt emails :-D

I might start doing that...

Fun story: the German parody party "Die PARTEI" ("the party", where PARTEI is also a backronym for a bunch of populist buzzwords) is under investigation because they pulled a supposedly legal scam that worked in a similar way.

They had a public campaign asking the public to "buy money", selling a hundred Euros (and two post cards) for the small price of exactly a hundred and five Euros -- effectively selling postcards for €2.50 a piece with a transaction overhead of another €100 in expenses and income.

Due to the way German public funding of political parties works (the public funding was based on revenue rather than profits) this meant they were granted funding that was hugely disproportional to the actual profits. Why it's supposed to be based on revenue or profit in the first place I don't fully understand but let's just say the authorities were displeased.

However they have a good case: they did the entire scam out in the open and had legal counsel that greenlit the campaign. It's definitely violating the spirit of the law but they may be able to make a good case that they were trying to showcase the absurdity of the law rather than simply exploit it for their own benefit -- also nobody interfered at any point and they documented everything from start to finish.

If they lose in court, however, not only would they have to pay back the money they were given (€72k) but they would also have to pay a massive fine (€384k) which would bankrupt the party instantly. Considering the party's satirical nature this would be pretty disappointing.

Stack Exchange actually had a shop at some point, with t-shirts, mugs and similar stuff. They shut it down at some point because it was simply far more trouble than it is worth.

Or more likely because if you are a VC funded company there's a certain expectation that you should build a scalable revenue stream beyond donations from passionate users.

Not only are donations significantly less reliable than other methods, they tend to basically amount to nothing compared to other income.

At least at the "single dev" level, I don't think I've gotten more than $20 in my lifetime through donations, whereas making a previously free app paid netted me a few thousand.

People just don't pay for stuff they don't need to, and to be honest I don't blame them.

It would probably cost more to set up than they'd gain.

And you'd have to deal with people who think they are entitled to veto any changes to the site because they gave you two bucks once.

You donate by contributing content to their sites. How (or if) they monetize this is up to them.

As a user, I feel obliged to help others out and I make an extra effort to answer some questions when I ask one, or when I find a particularly useful answer that helps me with anything work related. This adds value to the site and again, how they monetize is up to them.

What utter, patronising shit. 'Keep Joel caffeinated'? At least have the balls to explain how you're selling out, and don't piss on your users' heads and tell them it's raining.

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