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Comment by joaodlf | Hacker News Reader

Because they have bills and wages to pay. They more than likely have tried different methods of monetisation as well, it just didn't work as well.

Which is why this field is in dire need fir reinvention. It's terrible, but it works. The challenge is making it work, without being terrible.

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> Because they have bills and wages to pay.

That's a rationalization that works for all kinds of terrible things. It's never good enough to excuse the behavior.

It's a terrible product, a terrible experience, and nobody benefits from it except these companies and the people responsible for revenue at whatever publisher is infested with these ads.

I work at an ad supported site, we trialed these things and I'm sure that any of the journalists at places that have these things hate this crap as much as their users do but they don't have any say over its inclusion. It's some finance person, running the numbers.

So what should the "finance" person do? Stop thinking in a financial way? Pretty sure the journalists like having a job, too.

These ads are there because they work, savvy users might not like them, you don't, I don't. It's time for new players to step up and disrupt this market, but not if that means a loss for businesses. That's the challenge.

The "finance person" should start thinking beyond the current quarter, and recognize the long-term damage they're inflicting on their brand by associating it with shitty garbage content.

If you are forced to resort to these things to survive maybe you should do something else. Maybe these journalists should learn to code.

I'm a coder journalists. I could make a lot more outside of journalism but I believe in the mission as do the traditional journalists. We don't just like having jobs - we do it because our democracy and society wouldn't work as well without it. Sometimes there are trade offs made to pay the bills so we can do the work that matters. It's not ideal but the whole industry is just trying to keep their heads above water right now.

Grow a backbone?

We're not talking about whether the CTA button should be light blue or dark blue. We're talking about decision to unleash some of the worst garbage Internet has on unsuspecting and unwilling people. It hurts individuals, and drags down both the industry and the society at large. Someone in the company should be able to say "no" to that.

The author of the article described some of the consequences, strongly implying but stopping short of saying one thing out loud, so I'll say it here: chumboxes are unethical products, and showing chumboxes is unethical behaviour too.

(But yeah, I do understand competitive pressure. That's why I hope we eventually get around to killing Taboola and friends through regulatory means.)

> Grow a backbone?

No idea what this means from a business perspective.

Business is made of people. People are entities with conscience. Conscience, when applied, can be a market signal.

The issue is that the web-driven model of free content is unsustainable to the point these junk ads leading to junk sites are attractive to finance. The big issue is that the economics of journalistic and creative content aren't sustainable ethically any more.

I don't think anyone LIKES renting a storefront to a pawnshop, for example, but if they are the only ones who want to rent your location, you're screwed.

Essentially ethical business would wind up needing the journalism market to implode, ending up with a few state-subsidized outlets that could more or less survive with no advertising at all.

I don't have the solution but I don't think state-subsidized is it. It's a conflict of interest when the people you're trying to hold accountable are the ones writing your paycheck. Congress (usually the members unhappy with the coverage) is constantly trying to cut funding from NPR, and it's very difficult to budget and plan long term when you don't know if you will continue to be funded. Big advertisers do occasionally pull out over negative coverage, which is another reason diversified revenue streams are essential.

> I don't have the solution but I don't think state-subsidized is it. It's a conflict of interest when the people you're trying to hold accountable are the ones writing your paycheck.

The current alternative seems to be a combination of "that, but indirectly, through access to primary sources" and "your paycheck comes from turning everyone against everyone by saturating their attention with outrage-inducing content". Is that really better?

Nobody's asking why they're attractive to finance though. These ads pay for themselves on a cost-per-click level. It isn't views that makes the money off these ads, it's clicks. That means that people are clicking on them. What's more, people continually click on them, which implies that they are getting some sort of benefit from them.

>What's more, people continually click on them, which implies that they are getting some sort of benefit from them.

How do you go from "people exhibit this behaviour" to "this behaviour provides them some benefit"?

Most of the ads are hyper-targetted to psychological weaknesses we have in the same way that drugs hijack our reward pathways.

Heheheh I know we spend a lot of money trying to make that happen but from where I sit we're not that good at it yet, at least in the realm of native advertising.

I've had plenty of people say to me (and plenty of frugality pundits write) they had to get off of social media because they feel manipulated by their personal network into buying crap they don't need. I've never heard somebody say they need to opt out of Outbrain ads because of the same thing.

You dispense with "they provide a benefit" and instead land on "we're not great at being malicious yet".

Literally the top post from this comments section is someone highlighting adblocking software to get rid of the stuff.

I get that a job is a job, but don't drink the industry kool-aid.

Eh not quite. I said they must provide a benefit, otherwise people wouldn't click on the stuff. You said, "No they're being manipulated into clicking on the stuff." I responded with "Outbrain is not nearly as good at manipulating people as social networks."

To me that means there are other reasons people are clicking on the stuff and yeah I like to believe it's because they get some benefit from it (even if it's the same benefit they get from watching trashy tv or reading pulp fiction). I don't like to believe that because I think ads are awesome, I like to believe that because it feeds my belief that people do much of what they do out of free will. If we're puppets of corporations we're willing puppets of corporations and blaming ad networks won't change us.

It means having the courage to do the right thing for your users instead of the thing that maximizes profits in the short term.

This. traditionally, is where you explain to me that it's patently absurd to ask a businessperson to care about anything but profit, or even to suggest that they could.

You bet.

Taboola and Outbrain damage the legitimacy of our institutions. If the Washington Post is filled up with crap like that, it seems a little less strange to believe that vaccines cause autism, that every Trump scandal is politically motivated "fake news", the moon landings were faked, etc.

One page view at a time these ads are undermining our democracy.

I would love to see the demographic data of the people actually clicking these vile advertisements. Are these the same people who watch Jerry Springer type shows and read tabloids for the juicy gossip?

I wonder if this is having some sort of effect on people at a national level? What would you measure to see if this is effecting people negatively?

I wonder if my parents would fall prey to these scummy ads if I didn't maintain their adblockers...

This toxic clickbait needs to end.

Chumboxes cast a wide net. In the brief time I was trying out browsing without adblockers some time ago, I saw some entries I'd have clicked myself, if I didn't know that I'm dealing with the worst kind of garbage advertising. Given how random and unrelated the ads in a chumbox are, any person without developed anti-ad immune system is likely to find something in there at some point.

That's one of the many reasons why I consider it my civic duty to recommend uBlock Origin to everyone, and to install it on any computer I'm asked to do maintenance on.

While I appreciate the sentiment I assume you ask for permission before installing software on customer(?) machines?

    > ...time for new players to step up and 
    > disrupt this market, but not if that means
    > a loss for businesses. That's the challenge.

No, that's not the challenge. We've sadly reached the point where "loss of business" is on the table for people who care about ethics. If the only way a newspaper can stay afloat is by displaying junk from taboola/outbrain, perhaps it's time for them to close-up shop?

The "challenge" is to get more people to use adblockers, punish scammers ruthlessly, and demand that the journalism sites which are worth anything at all to screen the the ads they accept and perhaps even face consequences for displaying proven scammer ads.

Does that mean you're willing to pay for the journalism if it doesn't have ads? So far that model hasn't worked either. Or are you saying you would rather the reporting didn't exist than it be supported by ads you find distasteful? If that's the case, don't consume the news.

If I believe my work is a valuable service to my community, closing up shop is more than a "loss of business".

> Pretty sure the journalists like having a job, too.

If those shitty ads at the bottom of the page make the difference between surviving or folding, then I have a bit of sympathy for the truly desperate situation they are in.

However, that's not normally the case. Instead it means a small bump in revenue for no extra work and that's hard for somebody that only cares about this quarter's numbers to say no to no matter how healthy the profit numbers are.

The linked article -- and others I've read on this topic -- suggest that it's actually a big bump in revenue, which is the source of the problem. The article quoted Outbrain's deal with Time Magazine as bringing in $100M, and while that may be an outlier, it suggests that bringing in millions of dollars with these chumboxes isn't at all out of the question. If your magazine/news site has been seeing its revenue steadily decreasing over the past decade, you've been through two rounds of layoffs, and Taboola comes along and says, "Hey, we can help you bring in an extra five million a year"...

$100M sounds like a lot of money, but that's over 3 years.

So $33.3M per year or roughly $2.8 million per month. Time claims to see 65 million unique visitors per month so that works out to less than a nickle per unique user every month.

I'm paying Google Fi $10 / gigabyte for bandwidth on my phone. If the images and javascript in an Outbrain ad are more than 5 MB, then I'm paying more for the bandwidth than Time is getting to show me that. I wish I could just pay Time sixty cents per year and not have to see those ads.

I see what you're saying, but the flip side is that in absolute terms rather than "revenue per unique user," over $30M a year is, well, over $30M a year. In 2016, Time Inc's net profit was under $20M a quarter -- that's not Time Magazine, that's the whole company. If you're in that position, bringing in another $7.5M a year for letting somebody put crappy ads at the bottom of your articles could be awfully tempting.

It is truly a desperate situation and we need every revenue stream we can ethically tolerate. If we could afford not to do it we would (also "no extra work" is not trivial - we'd rather spend our precious dollars on reporters than lead generation). Serving spammy sponsored content (which everybody understands to be such, it's not masquerading as journalism) is better than not reporting on the terrible thing a major advertiser did to the detriment of our community in order to keep that advertiser. Most daily newspapers are struggling to pay the bills - pretty much nobody but the giant national/international papers have "healthy profit numbers", even large-ish regional papers. Which is why you see so many doing massive layoffs to the point where the majority of the paper is wire stories. Or going digital-only or closing their doors. Print advertising used to be lucrative; we had a monopoly on eyeballs and ad space. Digital advertising is cheap and ubiquitous, and quality journalism takes time and money to produce but doesn't deliver nearly the kind of page views that tabloid-type stuff does. Most of our revenue still comes from print ads, but those are much cheaper now that there are other places to advertise and circulation keeps dropping. We don't like the chum either - it's a huge point of contention in the newsroom - but we can't do work that matters if we can't figure out how to fund it.

I wish I could upvote your comment more than once. We need to find new revenue models or else help remind readers that advertising does not (or at least should not) affect editorial except as a means to fund it. Like I said in another post, the chum at the bottom of a news story is no worse than the garbage in the back of pop-sci.

I would gladly pay for quality journalism, what is the cost of having your readers pay the salaries instead of these scummy ad networks? Are executives just trying to turn a big profit off journalism and extract maximum value from their readership via clickbait ads? I wish there was a simple solution for supporting our hard working journalist friends who truly love the job and are passionate about their craft.

I appreciate that, it's encouraging to hear. But the cost has proven to be more than the current market will bare. Or maybe we just haven't figured out how to ask people for money the right way, but attempts have been made. As one would expect, subscriptions go down every time the price goes up. And it's very hard to get people to pay for digital-only subscriptions at all, even with metering, paywalls or friendly suggestions to subscribe - people are used to getting information online for free, and there is a surplus of free commodity information to be had.

My paper tried having a separate site for subscribers with very few ads (an occasional shallow sponsor banner or sidebar spot with no junk ads), a clean, print-inspired design and a focus on hard news. We tried a paywall and then a meter (3 to 5 articles before paywall). Print subscribers had free access. We launched that in 2013 and iterated on it until it was deemed a failure and abandoned early this year. During that time we maintained a free, ad-supported site as well, because we couldn't afford to lose that revenue. That site continued to thrive with mostly wire/commodity content and "stubbed" versions of our bylined work (basically teasers) encouraging people to subscribe for the good stuff.

It's not about big profits these days, it's about keeping the lights on, the presses running and hopefully having enough left to invest in the future. Margins are tiny if they exist. The fat has been cut - optimizations have been optimized, consultants have been consulted. We've all been through rounds of layoffs, buyouts, hiring freezes, salary freezes, reorganizations, consolidations, etc. Our goal is to keep our staff the size it is now, which is less than half the size it was in 2006. The big conglomerates are getting by on economies of scale (which comes with its own tradeoffs - a shared copy desk may sound ok until you realize knowledge of a place is pretty relevant to accuracy for stuff like which neighborhood or part of town something happened in, or when the web team is maintaining 50+ sites so everyone needs to have the same templates/CMS and your editorial objectives/concerns might not be a priority or worth adding complexity to the system).

Honestly I don't see how the publicly traded operations can be successful long term - they are serving too many masters, the product is suffering and diminishing returns are inevitable. Investigative journalism is magnitudes more expensive than the low hanging fruit, so when your objective is profit over mission and you're squeezing pennies, something's got to give. But it's not just profit-focused papers struggling. Those of us who have the luxury of some budgetary flexibility have, for the most part, been profit neutral or running at a deficit for upwards of ten years; we've maxed out our revenue (and it's declining) so our only option is to cut costs. We're so lean at this point that anything else we cut is to the detriment of our product (see: chum). I'm not sure the way forward but I think our best bet for a sustainable future is non-profit, or in some instances private ownership by benevolent patrons/ civic-minded companies.

You are right, but this is a miscalculation in the long run. Any operation allowing these ads risk damaging their reputation.

Selling cigarettes works. Selling cigarettes to children works. Come to think of it, putting children to work in factories works. Dumping pollution in drinking water sources works.

Lots of things work. Of course "Finance People" are supposed to say no, because they are finance PEOPLE, not finance algorithms.

> Selling cigarettes to children works.

No, it doesn't work at all. That's illegal.

>Come to think of it, putting children to work in factories works. Dumping pollution in drinking water sources works.

Nope. That's illegal too..

>Lots of things work.

If you're making a list of things that are illegal, you're going to need a bigger comment box.

There is no need to needlessly take things to the extreme when it was very obvious that what we're talking about is in no way shape or form comparable to exploiting children.

They weren't always illegal.

Precisely. Thank you.

Okay?

Comparing click-bait ads to child exploitation still makes no sense. It is incredibly insensitive to draw any kind of analogy between the two.

Maybe they could take a gut check and realize that we might be faced with the grim reality that in the era of twitter and instant news via social media, we don't need these old establishment media orgs anymore. The fact that they all have to result to these tactics of hosting (and producing) click bait articles, as well as their numerous other dark patterns they employ on their sites, paywalls, etc, should show to their board or leadership that maybe the demand for their product just isn't there anymore. There's nothing that says "CNN", "NYT", et all need to be legacy multi-century businesses. It's how it goes in this country. How many businesses from 100 years ago are around today? Nothing wrong with it, it's just the circle of business life.

The commodity information you get from social media is not the same thing as investigative reporting that takes months of research, public records requests, shoe leather reporting, data analysis and interviews to uncover corruption in government, abuses of power, regulatory loopholes etc. Twitter does not fill the role of the forth estate and society would not be better off without it. It's easy to take it for granted when you get all of the benefits without bearing any of the costs.

My question is then, has society dumbed down so much from the ADD nature of the internet and ubiquitous computing, that traditional long-form sources of news media are no longer relevant for the ways people choose to consume them? e.g. news channels posting bite sized stories via snapchat stories feed, etc.

It's still relevant. Lots of people still want the traditional long form, it's just that the old business model for delivering it doesn't work anymore, and people (reasonably) don't understand why they should pay for something that used to be free. And yes, snapchat (etc) stories are an interesting delivery channel, and we're trying that too (although again, how to monetize that).

Also how is a paywall a "dark pattern"? If you don't care to consume the content, don't subscribe, it's very straightforward. And there is demand. People want the product they just don't want to pay for it, because the internet. If you want the content but don't want a paywall you don't get to complain about which ads are subsidizing your access.

> It's never good enough to excuse the behavior.

The behavior of click-bait ads isn't terrible in a way that should cause someone to question their own ethics. You may disagree. So what? You aren't going to fix the human condition by drawing a line in the sand, nor would it be moral to do so. The price of skepticism is uncertainty and the price of certainty is extortion (in terms of clicks and attention).

I worked on the Ask Toolbar and it definitely caused me to question my ethics. I felt like shit about it because I wasn't creating something I was proud of, something that other people I knew and cared about would think well of. I quit that job and moved on to something better.

I would not include such bad behavior from some bad actors as part of the "human condition" but outliers on the fringe because I believe most people want to be good and do good things, but apparently not these assholes.

> I would not include such bad behavior from some bad actors as part of the "human condition"

It is. You take the good with the bad. There's not a lot of evidence this is "bad" within that spectrum. It's very subjective, since I never had to question my ethics when working in advertising. There are things I will do and things I won't, but I don't champion the eradication of those things I won't do.

"rationalization that works for all kinds of terrible things?" This isn't a concentration camp, it's ads at the bottom of a page that you can choose to ignore, either by literally ignoring them or installing an ad blocker.

I work for an advertiser and believe it or not I know people who directly benefited from some of the ads. There's bad ads, even "terrible" ads, but in the end they're just ads.

The reason most monetisation models don't work is because the vast majority of content produced by these outlets is not worth anything. Hence why no monetisation strategy can part anyone with their money. There's nothing to reinvent.

The shit quality of Taboola ads made reenable my adblock on one of the only website where I had disabled it. I couldn't just support a website that put such crap before my eyes.

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