Is it worth supporting Firefox?
reddit.com
reddit.com
No. What's hurting your edit:employer's revenue is years of blinking GIFs, auto-play videos and misleading links thrown between paragraphs. That's the first reason why I started using ad-blockers 15 years ago. The privacy issue is a recent thing.
> We're doing a redesign now. Manager says that we should just discourage the users of Firefox (not optimizing for Firefox, and poor UI) from visiting our website as they bring a loss.
But that'd just bring chrome users who use ad-block.
> Edit: They are even going to approach google and ask them to introduce new API's that allow us to determine if browser really chrome or just chromium, so that we block chromium. And a DRM for website instead of only video DRM that exists, so that user cannot view source code, and no extension can block the ads. Other publishers are doing the same thing. Expect new DRM for HTML5 too.
Going to be fun :/.
I would disable my adblocker for sites that have ad campaigns not based on "gross obnoxiousness", privacy intrusions, and disregard for if an advertising party is serving up malware. I even miss advertising because I'm not exposed to things I might otherwise be interested in, but I won't accept it in the current form.
There was a medium post here a few days ago about the eponymous extension "Adblock". Adblock offered advertisers a paid program ("Acceptable Ads") where their ads would be vetted and whitelisted. The blog post focused on the ethical and legal quandry of double dipping income (users and advertisers) but what you're talking about isn't unheard of.
Maybe that model won't work for some reason, I'd like to see some publishers talking about it though! It's either full on the google/fb tracking train or expensive monthly paywall.
I for one, wouldn’t pay $20 for a month of Bloomberg, never mind $40. I won’t really miss them either. If Buzzfeed puts up a paywall... ok that’s fine, good even! Of course this assumes that people don’t just rapidly figure out ways to pirate content, and they will. Try to track me, I’ll use uMatrix. Try to paywall me, and I’ll remember how little you’re worth. The NYT and FT can paywall, and a few others are worth the money... most aren’t. How many sites would you be willing to pay for rather than just forget exist in a week?
There’s always piracy lurking in the background, waiting for companies to be venal or stupid enough to make the hassle of pirating less onerous than the legal option.
Google had the idea to monetize search based on the hypothesis that if people are searching then they're looking to buy something. That didn't really work out: conversion rates are super low, even for free stuff- apparently less than direct mail. So things got more and more intrusive. And spammy. It's time to stop. It's really really time to stop.
In which country?!?
I hardly see any regular TV because in 30m show, 20m are advertisements, and the remaining 10m have lots of product placements.
Instead, a computer ad costs you money for bandwidth, can be intrinsically annoying (e.g. playing sounds or manipulating the browser), and poses a direct risk of serious harm (malware, subscriptions, snooping/tracking, etc.).
Unfortunately, that may also prove to be a tragedy of the commons. If everyone blocks ads aggressively, ad-funded resources will need to find new business models or they won't be available any more.
There is no ad-block on _mobile_ chrome. Maybe they talk about mobile clients here?
Firefox Focus makes a great "default browser" for opening random links from apps, as it's always in incognito mode, very lightweight, and supports content blocking. Only real downside for me is that you are still contributing to webkit dominance, as it's chromium-based. Full fat Firefox on android is great too, though.
As a fully featured browser which supports extensions and has a good UI, Samsung's browser is astonishingly good and I believe open for anyone to use now, though again chromium-derived. I fear at this point the battle may be lost for alternate rendering engines on mobile, though.
I've yet to find a site so great that I'll disable security or switch browsers to use them. (Work is an exception; somehow there's always some crappy site with needy requirements. But that's my employer's browser/computer, and the sites aren't major publishers.)
So I hope your manager did their cost-benefit well. I don't know too many publishers in a position to be selective about their readers. But I suspect I know who you're talking about, and won't personally won't miss any of their properties.
GitHub is free, but definitely not open source (and has never pretended to be).
Yep, there are lots of major news websites I dont visit at all. I know they are going to have an annoying autoplay video.
I'll skip to the comment section.
If the site is supported by ad revenue and you actively refuse to permitany ad revenue is it really a loss to the publisher if you leave?
https://www.reddit.com/r/choosingbeggars would enjoy discussing that proposition.
You can still see cases where publishers choose to not show stuff to anyone, but that's an artifact of imperfect ability of the publisher to discern between customers that would pay and the customer's that wouldn't -- they don't want to make a mistake to disincentivize someone able to pay from paying. You can see when they try and allow access from FB shares for example.
This makes it completely different from asking actual people for free work: person's price of time is expensive and it's rarely useful to give it away.
Yes, they probably should. It works in the retail world. Shop owners are usually happy to have non-paying customers in their store, and restaurant owners usually happy to have low-paying customers (i.e. they don't buy very much), to make sure their establishment "looks busy". Having a store or eatery with few or no customers is bad: it "looks dead" and can either scare away customers, or just not bring as many in. People are social creatures; when they see a lot of people in a place, they think that it must be popular for a reason, so having some customers brings in more customers, and some fraction of those customers will pay (or pay a lot more than the average), making the establishment profitable overall.
Internet publishers need to figure out a better business model if they one they have isn't profitable enough for them. Other businesses have long recognized that not all customers are equally profitable, and some aren't profitable at all, but they figured out how to make things work.
Until internet publishers reach that conclusion themselves, is it OK to force a different business model on them? To be clear, that "business model" is "I don't like the form of payment this business is asking for, so I'll take the merchandise for free instead."
When a business has high prices or a poor experience, it's customary to shop elsewhere, not to raid the store.
Do you mind if i hide all this shit while bying stuff on Amazon?
I use about 5 non-commercial services which may show ads (don't know whether they do or not and not gonna disable adblocker to check). I would happily pay 10€-15€ per month for this services, if there would be good save annonymes payment service. I don't want to send my utility bill to paypal or give away my credit card number. Maybe crypto would be a possibility.
If the store doesn't want to give merchandise away for free, then they should stop doing that. When I make an HTTP request, it's just that: a request. Their server can either respond with the page, or not (or a different page). It's my business what I do with the code that the server sends me.
>When a business has high prices or a poor experience, it's customary to shop elsewhere, not to raid the store.
Poor analogy. These websites aren't actually selling you stuff, they're giving away stuff for free, and hoping you'll look at the ads.
If I go into a store that's handing out free samples along with a stack of paper advertisements to look at, and I take some samples and decline to take the ads (or I promptly drop the ads into the trash can), that's the store's problem, not mine. I have no obligation to look at their ads. It's the business's responsibility to come up with a workable business model.
If, for a random example since it's the one coming to mind, Marco Arment runs with an ad blocker (which he almost certainly does because he developed an early one for iOS) do you want him linking your piece? Unless you are one of the biggest news sites, you probably do. You might even be happy even if he linked it entirely to savage it.
On the other hand, do you want me? Probably not, I don't have that much reach.
Problem is figuring out who you've got, and even whether they're likely to offer that.
However, it does appear impossible to criticize technical and/or business decisions without being accused of enslaving web developers.
Even now with an ad blocker many videos autoplay. I bounce immediately once I see a video being loaded.
I have serious doubts that it works out that way, but hey, they are free to use whatever signal they want for whatever purpose they choose. And we don't know their identity - who knows, perhaps running a low-pass filter on their audience's technical sophistication actually makes sense for them.
User Experience Tip: When I go to a site to read your article, I want to read your article. Not the pop up to subscribe to your newsletter. Not the side bar of related click bait articles. Not the ads you've sprinkled in every other paragraph. If you do this, your UI is already poor & not optimized. That's why people are using other tools to fix your UI.
This is so annoying. Especially on sites where I already subscribe.
And no, I don’t want to install your frakking app. I will NEVER install it, so please stop asking me on every visit.
User-hostile design pervades online media, and they wonder why people use ad blockers. Hell, ad blocking isn’t even enough. Most of the time, I end up manually hiding all the useless clutter on news sites to make them actually usable.
I mean noone, absolutely -noone-, foresaw this coming nor warned about the slippery slopes of letting stuff like this into the standard in the first place.
Nope. Absolutely noone. This was a genuine surprise to all of us.
Unlike EME, there's a far stronger argument of "the web has survived without this for 25 years" (and yes, for better or for worse, I consider a plugin with over 99% market penetration as part of the web), and I think that still holds weight.
For mobile, the only remaining options are silos.
Anyone told them yet that Chromium is open-source, so distributions can just flip that bit in the code?
That's why we need to educate users, just like we're doing now about Facebook. They need to understand that this is the worst scenario possible for the so-called "world-wide web".
I put up with this for years because I do believe that websites need a way to support themselves. But then a Forbes ad tried to download a virus.. and then I got another ad like it on WashingtonPost. These are big, dull websites.. the last place I would expect that.
I've been on the internet since the 90s. The ads have never been so aggressive (autoplay videos, in particular) or dangerous. I disabled adblock 6 months ago temporarily, and some sites are so loaded down with ads, my browser was unresponsive at points.
I now recommend everyone install ad block. I consider it similar to antivirus software in Windows. What else can I do? I really feel forced to do it. But they refuse to police themselves. It's gotten completely out of hand.
Long story short, it uses HTML5 and flash exploits to put a hundred popups of various porn shock images alongside blaring over the speakers "HEY EVERYBODY IM LOOKING AT GAY PORN"
Unless you: ban flash, ban popups, and ban Java; you are going to have a bad time, and necessitate in rebooting to get it to stop.
I consider it a good tool to check for client browser hardening. Just beware, if you do search for it, it's absolutely NSFW. (Will not provide links)
... and then popup blockers were invented.
Which is a good point -- advertisers abused a privilege (ability to open a window), and internet users adapted, their business model adapted, and they survived it just fine.
The same thing needs to happen again. I really feel it's the advertisers/websites that have once again abused a privilege. If they can't make money, they should look at themselves. No one signs up for internet service to check out the latest ad blockers. Users install them because they have to (just like why they installed popup blockers).
I don't know what you read, but blinking GIFs and misleading links are only on sketchy or adult-themed sites.
As for the auto-play videos, that was a direct response to the declining value of print ads. If they can get people to play the videos, they can sell video advertising.
So you are on board with Google's acceptable ads initiative then?
What I find frustrating is that people (in aggregate, not individually) keep moving goalposts. First, it's about annoying ads and how they will accept good ads. When presented with good ads, it becomes about tracking and how they will pay for the subscription. When subscription is available, how it is too heavy handed and they want something more flexible like micropayments. When you get micropayments, it is about how they introduce so much friction and mental overload.
I have came to realize that people (again, in aggregate and not individually) just want stuff as cheap as possible; other reasons just seem like excuses.
There are quite a lot of different people on the Earth with access to the internet and different perceptions of what ads are acceptable.
And the problem of all this wasn't just that the end product was ruined. It also played a significant role in the exodus of multiple skilled developers that were sick of toiling away at stuff that would end up ad- and tracker-riddled monstrosities. Just that struck me as reason enough to stop blindly doing all that.
This is where I fear EME is going.
Getting it in at all was the first step -- the sharp end of the lever.
My concerns regarding "locking up" the Web:
- Security. Ad networks continue to shovel exploits as well as a panopticon of data mining that gets sold off to dark patterns, commercial and governmental.
- History. We already have disappearing news and other content that is leaving increasing holes in the historical record. Who would have thought with this ever-increasing capacity to record and store "everything", we are becoming more blinded to recent events and public conversation.
(This goes for commercial media, as well. Seminal TV shows no longer available in their original format (music "rights"). Movies no longer so available (just leave it the fuck alone, Lucas). What happens when all you consume comes from central, centrally-controlled servers that can be "revised" at the behest of central authorities?)
- Usability. The other problem I have with ads et al., is that they do their utmost to grab all the attention. I find them too distracting to actually or effectively consume the content.
I remember back the the "early days" of the Web, most ads were static in appearance, and I actually clicked on a fair amount of them. Yes, given the nature of the Web, then, they were more technical. They also described things I was actually interested in. I'd read the article, notice an interesting ad along the way, and click it when I was done -- or maybe immediately, if it was of higher interest than what I was reading.
Now, ads do everything they can to make me look a them. I can't even pay adequate attention to the page, until I scroll them out of the viewport or otherwise obscure them.
That makes for a miserable user experience.
(And all too often, they play a game to "intrigue" me, instead of just telling me what they're about and why I'd be interested in that.)
Google and Facebooks of the world sell the idea that they can personalize ads better than content producers and so everyone relies on their trackers and javascripts to build content business online. Publishers should know their audience better than ad servers.
This is what is killing the business: content creators stopped caring about their audience.
Part of the problem is that Google and Facebook actually can know the audience better than the content creator. A content creator only knows that the reader is interested in, say, cooking. Facebook and Google know most everything the reader is interested in, and what sort of ads the reader actually interacts with. They can use all of that information to maximize the chance the reader will click on an ad.
The problem now is that because of how effective Google' and Facebook's ads are, a single click on an ad is basically worthless. Someone who's trying to sell a product isn't going to pay 100 times as much per click to use a smaller ad network, they're going to go with whoever can give them the most impact.
This is the idea that has powered online businesses in the last 10 years, but I'd argue that just because conceptually Google can know me better than NYTimes the raise in ad blockers has shown that the ad distribution ecosystem doesn't really know their users that well.
I must be living in a very different world from the one where "Google and Facebook ads are so effective" that no other strategy is possible.
As far as Google and Facebook pushing other advertising networks out of business, it's not that they're so effective that no other strategy is possible. It's more that they're effective enough, and so cheap that other networks can't compete.
The difference with targeted ads is only that users are more likely to click on them. It's driven the cost per click down, and made advertising dirt cheap.
In the old model of advertising, the gizmo maker put out an ad in a reputable publication, spending quite a bit of money to do so, and got a small number of high-quality leads. With targeted advertising, the gizmo maker blasts their ad out everywhere, and, for a small amount of money, gets a large number of medium-quality leads. Overall, I'd expect they'd get more sales with the targeted advertising, simply due to casting a wider net.
I give Google a tonne of data, they know everything I search for, they know where I live and where I shop, they know how long I spend in a shop before buying something through android pay, et cetera. My targeted ads are still just junk.
Ads for websites I've visited because I've done work for them, products I've already bought, and stuff that seems completely unrelated seems to make up 99% of it. I guess the first category works as a "let's remind people the things they've used exist" in a coke kind of way, but why have Google been able to trick people into believing that this is 'effective targeted advertising'?
Because there was nothing before Google (or if there was it was even worse shit than what G was peddling).
And the game is still that. G doesn't have to do much, just beat/buy the next one.
And that's how FB got them, sort of blindsided them by that one trick, Sergei and Larry now hate them! You won't believe which one! Google lost the walled garden social network game. Users spend a lot of time with other users instead with content directly, so the network effect dominated.
Also, you're probably not the lowest common denominator, you're not the target audience for the usual ads.
Compare this to a popular car review site I use, which seems to manage their own ads. You know what ad I'm shown when reading a review for a car? A deal on purchasing or leasing that car. This is something I'm highly likely to be interested in _now_, and if the deal is good- there's a decent chance I'll click on the ad.
When I'm reading a magazine, ads are often not just NOT an annoyance, but are actually part of the experience, because they're advertising things that are really interesting to the target audience of the magazine. There is a very small handful of websites where I will even glance at the ads not by accident, and none of these are using Google's ad network...
It's being done. The whole recommendation systems market/community is growing at an enormous rate.
There are a few basic types:
- new user (no cookie/session), lands on the main page: show the most popular stuff - new user, lands on a concrete product page: item to item recommendation (others who bought this also bought this) - user with active session: try to match to previous sessions, try to figure out what's next for this session (and optimize for time spent on site, or total cart value, or max clicks, or who knows)
And of course there are simple text based algorithms, like a full text search engine combined with scoring/ranking, and then there's the new fancy DNN stuff, and matrix factorization in between.
Ad blockers will block that as well. Ad blockers will even block regular old HTML text on the page if it looks like an ad.
I'm not saying you can't make ads completely indistinguishable from content but I also don't think that's the solution that we want either.
Is that a sustainable business model? Well, no. There's a direct donation on sites nowadays luckily.
Personally I only do it when my Mum asks me ;-) and never block native (siglent banner on eevblog)/regional relevant (small town website with static ads for local businesses) ones.
Of course if you have a purely tech oriented blog, or even better, one focused on a specific technology, then surely you can get decent results by partnering with one specific advertiser specific to that niche, but as soon as your audience gets more diverse, like the audience of your average run of the mill newspaper would be, you will be loosing out on a ton of ad revenue if you don't try to target your ads.
So while this is a cute idea, I doubt it is practical for any publication of noteworthy size.
What you say is being done. Mostly in form of "native advertising" these days. But those articles tend to be written with virality in mind, not necessarily usefulness.
In my opinion, most of the worst ads come from remnant space advertisement. A middle to upper management person discovers some unused white space while browsing the site and asks the marketing department to fill with something that makes money. Repeat until the site is completely plastered.
But because those ads bring in so little in isolation, it is not worth it to have your own sales people trying to sell them. That is why they get outsourced. The publishers I met back then, did not like Google/Facebook, because it their opinion they took to big a cut. But it is either that, or not monetizing the space at all.
Another big problem is, the advertisement agencies developers who build the things to be included in websites, tend to be junior/intern level under massive time pressure. Practically no QA and little to no thought put into consequences by any of the involved parties.
While I think this is a stupid rule, I can't deny that for my top 10 restaurants it's true.
Well... yeah... that's the point of what they're doing.
> Manager says that we should just discourage the users of Firefox (not optimizing for Firefox, and poor UI) from visiting our website as they bring a loss.
Does the power and bandwidth needed to have the server serve Firefox users cost more than Firefox users bring in over all?
Not to be dismissive, but this sounds like he's trolling. One thing is not actively supporting one browser because «it's at the bottom of the list» and another thing is actively trying to detect it.
Also I don't think he understands what obfuscated JS means, and is he seriously talking about having a 10MB JS file? Just for a major publisher? For comparison: NYT's home page is 1.6MB, the whole document. The thing that totally gives it's trolling away is the 10 years «safe thing».
One time he (or she) is against that, another time he acts cocky like saying they'll now sabotage opera too (after being told it has a built in ad blocker) or bringing up existing DRM in a tone that is less like being sad those ideas are getting into web and more like he wants the same in html.
It also starts reasonably with just focusing on chrome and then goes to asking google for a html drm, asking google to help sabotage chromium users, blocking firefox using obfuscated 10 mb js even though the site works well on ie8, vague threats of html drm coming soon to end ad blocking in an accusatory tone, saying they do all this to cut costs because each page they send is 3 megs and ff users are freeloaders, etc.
Plus the weird title ('should we support' vs. 'we sabotage'), going with this to reddit instead of anonymously tipping fsf, eff or mozilla off (if he's already willing to leak that info and the fact he works there, the latter could remain hidden if he tipped these orgs off), etc.
Edit: oh, and since css and images are loaded via js (on which he also comments by saying that people using no script 'ironically make their job easier') wouldn't that 10 mb one cause a flicker (fast internet) or a broken website for several seconds (slow internet) during at least the first load uncached load? And 2-3 megs of content for the few freeloading ff users is too much or can't be cdn'd but pushing that 10 meg js to everyone and taking up time of web devs and business-y people (for lobbying for drm at google or wherever) is fine and cheaper?
Anyone who thinks that ads can pay for publishing are fooling themselves into believing they are part of the top percentile of publishers for whom this works due to sheer impression volume.
In the Apple ecosystem there is Daring Fireball. John Gruber charges $6500 a week for one ad that appears on Monday on both the website and RSS Feed and a thank you post at the end of the week.
He also charges $5500 for three ads in each podcast.
It's different to the original post's comments. They are looking at a public audience with ad blockers.
Podcasts are a different affair altogether. I would love to see the numbers for those as I'm never in front of my computer when I listen to a podcast and I don't remember the ads long enough to followup even when I'm interested in the product.
Also, thanks for sharing that Gruber has a podcast!
It's not always about direct action, it's often about brand awareness. If you listen to a lot of podcasts, you'll know the first company you think about when you are in the market for:
- Mattresses
- Eyeglasses
- Creating a website quickly
- online backup
- shaving products.
- Mesh networking devices
It's an old joke that the definition of a podcast is "two or more white guys talking about tech sponsored by Squarespace".
Whether you act right then, when someone asks you to build them a website, your first thought is going to be to point them at SquareSpace.
Since the same sponsors keep buying ads on podcast and most of them have coupon codes to tell them where their customers came from, they have metrics that tell them the return on investment.
This is a good point and I would love to see the value of advertising on podcasts on the direct (custom links) and indirect (awareness) outcome.
But maybe advertisers are happy enough if I remember their name when I eventually go looking for, say, eyeglasses and recognize their name in the search results.
- Eyeglasses (Warby Parker)
- Creating a website quickly (Squarespace)
- online backup (Backblaze)
- shaving products. (Dollar Shave Club)
- Mesh networking devices (Eero)
"Ad reinsertion". You're trying to bypass the user's self-determination on the web. Good luck, bozo.
> They are even going to approach google and ask them to introduce new API's that allow us to determine if browser really chrome or just chromium, so that we block chromium.
And now we see the real question: "Is there some way to lock our users into browsers that give more control to us than the users?"
They think that Adblock and Adblock Plus don't exist on Firefox, and that people who use uBlock Origin on Firefox will not use uBlock Origin on Chrome too if they were somehow forced to use Chrome.
Besides, wouldn't something like that itself get blocked?
Do you really want Google to dictate how the web works? I don't. When Microsoft did this we lost _years_ of meaningful improvements and just recently got the ability to vertically center in CSS.
I still fight the good fight every now and again on respecting standards, though I get sad when it seems even the standards compliant browsers implement 99.99% of various standards but then each differ on the leftover .01%, leading to shims or workarounds for everyone. It's definitely better than it once was though -- http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/ is one of my favorite sites.
It's even worse than that. The Internet grew in the hands of engineers who cared about functionality and compatibility first, then about profitability. About two decades ago the industry started turning tables (and later the smartphone boom helped to achieve that goal even more). Now every big player is looking to build its own proprietary environment to get the most users on so that they're forced to use that player resources; this is precisely the mindset the world wide web openness fought against. Sadly they're now fighting back: if yesterday a browser could help to surf 10 sites, today you need 10 apps, each one closed source and doing who knows what under the hood. And this monstrosity is slowly sneaking into the non mobile world hidden behind catchy buzzwords and fancy graphics. Using "the cloud" to store documents and important data seems so cool, but is not that different from going back to the 60s world of dumb terminals and big mainframes where the mainframe owner decided if, how and when the user could access to his/her own data. Both engineers and users are losing control and quite frankly I have no idea of what to do.
Tbh I sometimes wish there was a website which uses reddit’s API to display all articles/images using HN design. No clutter, minimal JS and no random scrolling when going back/reloading.
(It's named f6oclock because there was f5oclock but they made it suck...)
Edit: dug a little more, it's probably unrelated to your issue, but worth a check.
Good luck with that. You could render an article into a DRM'd video, and utterly destroy SEO, accessibility, readability, and the website's whole reputation.
"DRM for news articles" makes zero sense. Movie DRM works because HDCP decrypts the video on the display. ("works" - pirates got the private keys anyway :D) You can't DRM software on a general purpose computer. You can try, and it would be cracked soon. Even the best attempts (Denuvo) get cracked.
No, it doesn't. The movie is decrypted on the player, uncompressed, and encrypted again with HDCP for the display.
And after it is encrypted again "for" the display, the display decrypts it, closing the loop, and allowing the DRM to be at least more than trivially functional.
You can with SGX
(For disclosure, I work for Mozilla. But I wouldn't want us to control the Web, either: competition and open standards are key.)
Looks like their feature detection is based on user agent, and they are angry at Brave for using an user agent that resemble the one Chrome is using.
Esccalation has reached the nuclear phase.
Obviously, the benefit of having users is not only in the profit from ads, but rather from having your site be popular, recommended to friends, posted in links in discussions, training Google's algorithms by people clicking on their search results, having people willing to subscribe to future paid services or buy future products, etc.
But since those things aren't measurable in the short term, they get completely discounted by naive businesspeople, with bad results like this.
Some of the comments are helpful in building in a better business case, such as this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/8hha0r/is_it_worth_... . In summary /u/wedragon says that users have multiple environments and even multiple browsers. Damaging or disabling Firefox on the desktop may lose the profitable mobile side where the user may have Safari or Chrome.
How many websites are actually doing things that require a meaningful amount of extra effort to support Firefox if it already works in Chrome/Safari?
For most websites, cross-browser testing is almost an afterthought these days.
Most of my time involves fixing things for IE11 or mobile Safari, Firefox-only or Chrome-only issues are extremely rare.
It's always some weird rendering bug that mysteriously vanishes with the old null transform trick.
Remember, the way ads work today is that the web site is delivered to your browser, and then ad networks' Javscript comes in and mangles the page to insert ads wherever the ad network pleases.
In the days of paper, editors laid out where the ads went in newspapers and magazines. There weren't obnoxious blinking ads that would move the text around while you were reading it. Now, publishers hand control over where ads go to the advertisers themselves. The publishers are in denial about the problem they created.
No, instead newspapers went for screaming headlines (big text, celebrities in bikinis) and ads went for whatever caught the attention most.
Don't idealize newspapers or newspaper ads, they're in the exact same market and were trying to optimize for maximum exposure and revenue just as much as websites are.
I've never understood this. There are a lot of magazines that clearly spend considerable resources making their printed page look exactly how they want. Then when they publish that same content online, they apparently don't care at all about the presentation.
Matthew Butterick's great article Bomb in the Garden makes this point very well. It's from 5 years ago but I think it is more relevant today than ever.
Your revenue model is dying and you are trying to save it by making the web even worse. Its a race to the bottom.
That doesn't look to be the case. While the "net native" generation is more likely to turn to digital content than other media, studies show that computer literacy, in the sense of understanding the basic workings of a computer, is on the decline.
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/8hhss1/is_it_worth...
I could live with advertising if it were unobtrusive, useful, and didn't try to track me. Very little advertising is like that, so I block it. Yep, that means marginal sites will die. I can live with that.
It is still possible to sell magazines and other media. No one was promised that the web would be a perfect was to sell media. If it's only a good way to exchange information (for free), that is not a bad thing.
I don't think it is a tragedy if sites collapse that cannot find a viable way to serve me. I don't give a rat's ass about serving advertisers.
e.g. a browser with 1 user that generates $100 vs a browser with 1K users that generate $1 on average. Your manager would optimize for the former?
It is worth it, there's still a lot of traffic, but it's a different model and elegant, interactive browser experiences aren't the target.
Minutes spent, repeat, and quality traffic continues to move toward native apps. GDPR and ad-blocking represent increasing risk + decreasing revenue with the status-quo media web experience.
So the status-quo is becoming prioritizing search engines, social scrapers, and a well-designed URL funnel that pushes traffic toward your native app where you can still monetize with display ads, reliably autoplay video with client-side video ads, and push notifications that result in actual traffic.
There are strategies for monetizing on the web (server-side ad stitching, integrated marketing, pay-gates, hell - just buy traffic to your site that you know doesn't have ad-blockers) but sometimes it's counterintuitive to funneling traffic to native.
Ultimately it requires investment in Product/Creative/UX/Dev to define and sell-through a vision/strategy for web to decision-makers when those decision-makers are seeing numbers that suggest even the investment to define the web strategy is a poor investment - let alone investment in developing and maintaining it.
So, I guess their conversation goes:
> We block Firefox (but don't know that we do so)
> We don't see many Firefox users
> Why do we optimise for Firefox?
It's mildly frustrating that they block users for dumb reasons. (Again, I'm not blocking ads). But it's only a mild frustration - there are a gajillion places to get news that are better than Atlantic.
Here's an example of a non-skeezy ad provider which would not cause me to turn my ad-blocker back on. https://www.buysellads.com
Firefox user: "It's hopelessly broken"
In the current setup with third part tracking cookies, the ad network sees individual users. If you route everything through the content providers servers, then the ad network may have to work a lot harder to figure out who is who. And the ad networks have no incentive to do so (at the moment)
But yeah, I don't get why things like ads and analytics aren't served via the host server.
Sometimes it's the only way to do the right thing is in spite of management.
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/8hhss1/is_it_worth...
[1] Not ads. Just scripts and other potentially dangerous stuff but since most ads use scripts I generally block ads.
This is exactly why we need Firefox and other browsers, so that Google can't dictate what the web has to look like. They'd like to ideally introduce a tracking id in everything you ever do everywhere, it's up to us to stop them.
Anyway, no matter what kind of mechanism is introduced, there will be an equal and proportionate response to mitigate it within a week. You can't force people to watch ads they don't care about, and that's it. The sooner you accept it, the smaller losses you'll incur.