The New Yorker looking at better ads | Hacker News Reader

The New Yorker looking at better ads

newyorker.com

23 pointsJCB_K9 comments

But there is an ever-growing amount of good writing online, much of which suffers from its proximity to these low-rent neighbors.

I'm not entirely sure why good writing 'suffers more' from proximity to a direct-marketing campaign - acai berries, belly fat, whatever - than it would from, say, an ad for a Ford Focus or The King's Speech. Both offer an equivalent amount of visual distraction.

The author here doesn't understand that online advertising is fairly efficient - the 'get four auto insurance quotes' advertisements show up because more-familiar brand advertisements simply don't work well in those spots. People reading good writing online aren't particularly valuable to advertisers, so they get to see no-risk-to-the-advertiser cost-per-acquisition advertisements. Got to try and monetize somehow.

I suspect there's a certain bit of class snobbery here - the reader is engaged in something literary, so how dare he be subjected to an ad so déclassé, it belongs on a gossip site? Obviously he, a refined soul, deserves more tasteful commercial distractions!

There are two solutions here. The reader could be extensively and thoroughly tracked, so we know enough about him to show him an ad for that off-Broadway adaption of Silas Marner he's been jonesing for. But that approach is currently under attack from all parties - and besides, when people are tracked, the ads best suited for them are often less sophisticated than they'd anticipate.

I prefer the more direct solution: if you don't like the ads, pay for the content through some other means, and eliminate the need for advertising altogether.

It's not about visual distraction, it's about reputation and the reputation-by-assocation of the publication on who's website the ads appear. I trust car manufacturers and movie studios a lot more than the people behind those acai berry and belly fat ads, which to me, are as bad as spam about Viagra and Cialis.

According to the article, it's about 'protecting visual space for reading'. But now that I see this comment's been upvoted, I'm curious - if good writing does in fact 'suffer' when placed beside an advertisement you don't trust, why is that, and how exactly does the writing suffer?

You'd be capable of identifying good writing without any advertising alongside it. But when the exact same article is placed beside an acai berry ad, somehow the experience is worse. How come? Does having the acai berry ad there make you feel foolish somehow? Do you not want to be associated with it? Are you worried that someone might see you reading something alongside an acai berry ad? When you read the content, are you thinking of acai berries? These thoughts never enter my mind, but I could be atypical. Perhaps you're simply less likely to start the article, having seen the acai berries first?

If most people out there can't evaluate content independent of the advertising that supports it, that's got interesting implications for the online ad industry. Perhaps quality brands should start charging sites for the privilege of displaying their reputation-enhancing banners.

I don't think that the set of people who

A) want to read long form writing online, rather than in print,

B) but they don't use RSS, they don't use Readability, they're not using a mobile app, and they use the default website layout instead of the print stylesheets

C) and they're irritated or turned off by weird ads,

D) but they don't use an ad blocker

is a very large set, and I don't think it's growing any bigger.

I'm almost certain this is the majority of the people who read the New Yorker online. Among the HN crowd, you might be right (though I doubt it), but regular people just aren't aware of almost anything you listed.

It might be hard to believe, but there are millions of intelligent people out there who read long-form writing online but have almost no idea that websites are mutable. There's nothing wrong with that--they just have different priorities.

That does seem surprising to me. I can pretty much divide up my social circle into people who don't read, people who have print subscriptions to stuff like the New Yorker and Harper's and think that the Internet is mostly good for shopping, and people who have every writer in the universe in their RSS feed and never leave Google Reader.

I can see a lot of the same people in my social circle as well, but I'm not sure they're representative of the norm. I think as geeks who know what HTML and CSS are, own approximately a dozen devices that can access the web in some capacity, and don't think that Greasemonkey is a brand of motor oil or something, we have a tendency to form an everyone-must-be-just-like-me myopia. And even worse, we tend to (even subconsciously) assume that people who, say, don't know what the difference between a browser and Google must to be too stupid to read long-form content online. They're the ones reading MSN.

I'm not accusing you of doing this personally, it's just a recurring deficiency I see in tech communities (and I'm certainly not immune to it).

I'm reminded of the punchline of the old econ joke "we've already established what kind of woman you are, now we're just haggling over price." We always have to remember in web publishing, ads _are_ content. Your users _will_ judge you based on the ads you display (if they are not in the tiny minority who block them). And, rightfully so. Do you think Vogue would allow some crappy ad from T.J. Maxx between LV and Prada? Never. That (and their readership who pour over the ads to see what's hot) is why they have sky-high CPMs. It can be done online, too.

Today I learned there is a whole universe of bizarre ads on web pages that I have never seen, thanks to AdBlock. Seriously, I had no knowledge of the ads described in this article.

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