An audio message improved our conversion rate by more than 50% | Hacker News Reader

An audio message improved our conversion rate by more than 50%

genius.engineering

39 pointsehmorris21 comments

Well, the voice tells you that it is a 3 months free trial, the text tells you nothing.

Actually it is worse than that: The voice tells you what happens if you press the button, and the benefit to you (you will sign up to listen to 50 million songs, first 3 months are free), while the text on the button tells you something that is not going to happen (it says you will hear the whole song, but you won't hear music when clicking)

"NOTE: All the numbers in the description below (other than p-values) are for illustrative purposes only. The actual numbers are proprietary."

In other words: useless.

"Note: All the numbers in the description below... are for illustrative purposes only. The actual numbers are proprietary"

Good example of "track the exact thing you care about" and beware of misclicks by users!

Oof. That domain.

"Apple provided us with a workaround"

It's good to be an Apple partner.

"How we pivoted from being our own business to surviving as an ad platform for someone else's"

Given that my browser window is open, when I click on a link.

Then I see a cookie privacy notice; then I see a request to allow notification from website; then I see request to disclose location; then I see banner advertising; then I see subscribe to our newsletter popup; then I hear subscription trial message.

When I close the given browser tab, then I see a popup dialog confirming that I want to leave.

The web is getting sadder and sadder...

And then, this gem from the article:

> After all, you can close your eyes, but you can’t close your ears.

But think of all the free value!

I do like how they first keep stressing how much this is in the interest of the user (free value, great deal, etc etc) only to talk about "not subjecting the user to more advertising" in the last sentence of that paragraph.

Which narrative is it now?

Indeed, this is why my phone and mac volume meters are always set at the minimum, and I "opt-in" to audio by increasing the volume when I have the desire to listen to whatever the audio output is at that time.

Turn off JS and you see none of that. None.

Lord, I'm tired of people whining about the web and doing nothing, not disabling JS, not blocking ads via even a trivial hosts file, disabling cookies to prevent easy tracking, nothing. What's sadder than the web is people who can't be bothered to take any responsibility for how the web is presented to them.

Yes, I'm angry. I've even contacted website maintainers to pressure them over this. Ach, I have lost faith in people. They want nice things without doing any work for it.

Without Js, 90 percent of pages simply do not work

Autoplaying video is enough to make me close a tab immediately, even with Chrome's merciful mute-by-default setting. I understand that some amount of advertisement is required for the content to be free, but this attention warfare is disgusting.

Oh, and you forgot the survey that pops up before you've even read the article.

None of that nonsense if you browse with javascript disabled by default. It is a soothing experience.

Until you get hit with the classic

  <noscript>
  Javascript must be enabled to use this website.
  Please enable Javascript and reload the page. 
  </noscript>

I take that as a signal that I probably didn't care what was on the page anyway.

Not sure what you mean. There are no ads on the engineering blog, we don't have a newsletter, and we don't request location information or launch any confirmation dialogs.

If you're talking about a Genius song page, we still don't do anything you said except for showing ads, and playing the subscription message after you've listened to a 30s song preview.

I am sorry that you didn't get the joke. It is not about your website specifically, but web in general.

I see what you did as a dark pattern, it is going to inspire many internet marketers that only care about conversions, their funnels, and things to brag about to their peers. I bet the web will be invested with these things, resulting in a crappier user experience. But that doesn't matter right!? ...as long as the conversion rates are good. Sigh...

I didn't get the joke either. Until ehmorris responded, I assumed you were talking about the site this thread is about.

The web has always been sad. Pop ups, pop unders, blink tags, etc. All things old are new again (here’s looking at you, animated gif!).

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