Things That Are Trying To Kill Display Ads
adbeat.com
adbeat.com
So for me, I try very hard not to click on any online ads. It has come to the point where I consider a product dubious, if it appears in online ads - the exact contrary from what ads try to achieve.
The only way out of this I can see is, if web sites stop just using random ad networks, but get active in the selection and placement of ads on their sites. Large publications should run their ad departments - like any printed magazines and newspapers always did - and place selected ads in the content and also host them themselves. Smaller sites might require the help of ad providers to make a living, but I see them also in the responsibiltiy of selecting the ad provider to ensure only acceptable ads on their site. This might mean that some sites are not profitable any more, but far too many sites exist which are basically serving ads and no real content of their own.
To make me accept online ads again, the people doing the advertising first of all have to regain my trust.
The industry is pretending that they did not notice that trend, but that will come to bite them sooner or later.
The longer they delay the U turn, the less reversible this idea gets in minds of Internet users
I have bought Tile, and Amazon Products and I have used Clarfai in projects.
If the ads are that useful I will click them.
The facts are sobering: 86% of consumers
suffer from banner blindness and only 14%
of users are able to recall the last display
ad they saw.
No for real, I think banner blindness is an automatic attempt to solve the real problem: intrusive unwanted and even dangerous ads.
Seriously, the moment an ad pops up, I'm looking for the close button. I don't pay any attention to the advertiser and if I do, it's usually an automatic negative impression.
It's a numbers game. While the industry buys and sells impressions, only a tiny percentage of people actually buy things. Why in the world can't THE TYPE OF PERSON that tolerates online advertising be their target, instead of the rest of us innocents?
You ever take a taxi or Uber and have the radio blaring, including commercials (which last many minutes at a time, sometimes a huge percentage of the ride)? I have, in fact most of my car rides. THAT is the type of person that tolerates ads.
If the entire ad experience were opt-in, maybe they could charge higher for impressions. Those impressions would actually matter, because the chances of trying to forcefeed and forcibly distract a concentrating nerd reading a news or tech article and the latter getting annoyed would be much smaller.
* https://www.amazon.com/Pre-Suasion-Revolutionary-Way-Influen...
Your brain is automatically filtering stuff out because if it didn't you'd go crazy. Just imagine remembering everyone's face you saw on your commute or every conversation you had at that party last week.
There are a few services that help track IPs that view and click ads on a global basis. They are backed by ML algos that can determine with a high rate of accuracy whether it's fraud or not.
Using some of the reputable services, the advertiser can go back to the network and request refunds due to the fraudulent clicks.
So if you did do this, you'd only be hurting the smaller players who rely on ads to fund their ventures.
An article I read sometimes last week made an unflattering, but rather astute comparison that a site which relies on ad networks for their income is like a streetwalker - selling out integrity integrity for money, competing with or against shady people (the scammy porn sites, the automated link-farms with Markov-generated pseudo content, etc.). And if one has to "interact" with sites like that, it is smart to use protection (adblock&friends).
I wish I could find the article. I'm quite certain it was linked here on HN one or two weeks ago.
Actual investigative work like the kind of stuff Shane Bauer has done would still have legs on subscription/donor based platforms.
QFT. Journalism has been awful at least for decades.
> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
- Michael Chrichton
In a complex world, the very idea of generalist journalists is broken.
I think it would be tough to argue that modern institutional journalism is somehow worse than that of, say, the World War 2 era.
Crichton's "amnesia effect" is a vivid example of how people get this wrong. Are newspapers wrong about Palestine? Quite often. But it's not for the same reason that they're wrong about show business. Show business is a specialized beat with specialized reporters and not every newspaper has someone dedicated to it. Everyone understands that about reporting Palestine, but fewer people understand that about show business, and so Crichton sounds incisive when really he's just making a banal observation: different journalism outlets are strong on different topics.
Ultimately I think the next newspaper will probably come from Google, and be AI.
[fn:1] Old newspapers may be excepted, as they have a long time to deal with this. I assume that buying ads in NYT can't change their editorial stances, but they are an exception.
[fn:2] HN, reddit, facebook, twitter, etc.
Wouldn't some kind of syndication service work, where you subscribe to a custom bundle out of selection of available news sites, and the sites then get revenue based on how many readers included them in their subscription?
From here, my impression is that nearly all of them are completely unwilling to change anything at all. Even their layout they can't bother to adapt for the web.
Ah, yeah, we suffer from banner blindness. It's such a bad thing for those consumers, they don't care about our useless ads anymore!
And don't get me started on "welcome ads" aka "click the tiny near-invisible X in the corner to close the damn thing, and if you miss you'll get taken to some horrible site which will eat half your monthly mobile data".
Secondly, it seems click fraud still has some growth potential. I've used AdNauseam before, but perhaps there are more efficient ways out there?
It is the greed of a few in our industry that has made the lives of everyone else pretty miserable.
The moment I read this a huge banner obscuring 80% of the page popped up inviting me to "join banner ad network" or somesuch.
I couldn't care less about "unethical obstruction" by AdBlock as long as advertisers feel that they can freely obstruct me.
1. Banner Blindness?
2. Ad Blockers?
3. Fraudulent Impressions?
I think the title is more like:
Three Arbitrary Sections in a Blog Article Regarding the Difficulties Faced by Digital AdvertisersBut, I recently trialled a subscription to The Times (UK) and found they were still deploying banner ads almost to the same degree as non-subscription alternatives.
So, maybe, they are going to be sticking around for a while yet?
That is what fraud and malware are doing to the web ad industry. And they don't mind doing that.
So, the reason that ad blockers are killing the ad industry lies in the industry itself. There is not enough self regulations on spam, malicious sites, fraud, etc. For emails, we have filters that remove the majority of spams, but for ads, there is only ad blockers that remove ads indiscriminately. If ad platforms cannot find a way to remove the majority of those, the industry is simply doomed.
It's simple. Would you prefer something with or without distraction if you had the power to choose?
Ad industry is doomed. Except if they find a way or other to regain the power to force the bundling. For example by declaring ad blockers unlawful.
Finally, someone who gets it...
I also wonder how the listed stats on how well people remember the last banner ad they saw compares to magazine, newspaper, and TV ads. And how the numbers change with different layouts and approaches. I'm sure there are people in the industry who have numbers on this, and they must not show what I think they show. But the direction web advertising is going is not a healthy direction for anyone involved. I feel like a major change in the CW around the current approach to online ads has to happen.
Ad blockers would be easily thwarted if publishers hosted the ad content themselves. There's obviously a question of potential impression-count fraud to be addressed, but magazines and newspapers and TV and radio broadcasters have all solved their own versions of these problems. But it's not like the current system of ad networks that are filled with literal scams and thousands or millions of fake websites serving fake ads to fake clients via fake web searches are exactly fraud-free. I think the software engineers who've created the current broken system did too good a job of selling their cleverness, and we've got a bunch of wrongheaded metrics and approaches that are feeding a vicious cycle. How do we break out? I have no idea. But the answer has to come from the publishers and the companies looking to advertise. Podcasting seems to have found a far healthier balance. And maybe we're just in the golden age and the money ultimately won't be there in the long run, but regardless, the web is long past its own golden age.
seriously?? that's surely impossible?